Season's Greetings

In Lieu of a Greetings Card*

Often the truth we sadly miss

As we see only what we know.

Nor each occasion could reveal

The gravity of what we feel,

On things we dare and dare not do.

Yet, though in vain, let me express

One simple thought, one sincere wish:

That may with love and peaceful bliss

Replete you find the Holidays!

 

And may the seasons thereafter

Be seasoned with mirth and laughter.

The rare occasioned somber sky

May not but serve to amplify

The happiness of days gone by,

And glories of unyielding prime,

And promises of days that lie

Uncharted in the blue abyss

And daunting vagaries of Time!

 

May each grief find sweet redress;

Alien to fears, much less to tears,

May triumphs and exploits increase

All through the fast succeeding years!

 

H A P P Y   H O L I D A Y S !!

Merry Christmas & AHappy New Year to you ALL!!!

=<+>=

*I have circulated this piece every year from way back when I first wrote it in 1980.  This year, though I’m slowing down in the uptick, I don’t find sufficient reason to stop doing it this year.  So wherever you are and whatever you are into, may all your endeavors be rewarded with the bounty you deserve both materially and spiritually.

Incidentally, this piece is also on page 170 of my book released by FriesenPress last year, 09/2011.  C.f., http://www.flirtingwithmisadventures.com/orderthebook.htm

A Plenary Reckoning

It is practically impossible to beat Santa Claus.  People are not going to vote against Santa Claus, especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus.~~Rush Limbaugh

“. . . the Republican Party, like today’s transfer-payment state, is endangered by tardiness in recognizing that demography is destiny.”

~~George Will

 

Immediately after Fox News called the re-election of President Obama as a done deal, I turned off the TV and went to sleep.  I soon found that sleep was hard to come by.  So I got out of bed and posted the following on my Facebook wall:

 

Obama won re-election.  Dyslexia prevailed over sanity one more time. I'm afraid the worst is yet to come.

 

It’s difficult to lick my wounds when I’ve not even been in the trenches.  So they are dancing on the streets.  They don’t even know it’s a funeral dance they are indulging in.  I guess it will be “Pilipinas here I come” for me just as soon as I can afford to renew my passport.

 

Earlier before the election, I confided to a few people whose opinion I value with the utmost respect, my speculation of relocating outside the U.S. should Pres. Obama win re-election.  The main reason has been that I really do not enjoy four more years of looking at President Obama’s face on TV, or elsewhere in the media.  I don’t cherish living the next four years aware of being consumed by the obsession to violate one of the Ten Commandments.

 

Two of the most logical destinations for such a move were Krakow, Poland, the city where my wife was born and raised.  It’s a very beautiful city exceedingly rich in cultural traditions.  It has more catholic churches than bars and night clubs.  She counts Copernicus amongst her favorite sons.  It however has the misfortune of being landlocked.  I have never lived more than an hour from the sea cost in my entire life.  I’m not about to start now.

 

The second option is the Philippines, the place I nostalgically refer to as “the old country.”  In particular, the southern part of Surigao del Norte province in the island of Mindanao where my parents bequeathed me a small parcel of land with specific instructions not to sell it off to anyone outside of the family blood line.  The parcel itself may not be promising as a farmland.  But it has some real possibilities as a gateway to some economic mineral deposits.  The main drawback is that my wife is allergic to tropical mosquitoes and she cannot stand the sight of pacific-size cockroaches, ever so abundant in the locale.  Moreover, she has innate difficulty in handling tropical humidity.

 

So unless I’m ready, willing, and eager to break up my family, which I am most definitely not, relocation should be out of the question.

 

Besides, after more than a week of consternation over losing the election, I have gotten hold of my senses to realize that the America I had signed in for had most definitely changed in demographics.  People of my temperament have been consigned to the edges of the statistical Bell Curve.  Ergo, now more than ever, my America needs me to fight for her rightful restoration from the likes of Barack Hussein Obama, the most egregious and despicable occupant of the Oval Office, throughout history immemorial.

 

The point is, this last best hope of man on earth is worth fighting for and I’m here to stay to give it my all.  May the force be with us till we prevail over this most vile incarnation of the devil.

Fighting for the National Soul

If you don't mend your principles you will go to the devil.

~~F.A. Hayek, 13-Oct-73

Fourth Wincott Memorial Lecture:

Economic Freedom and Representative Government

Vying for occupancy of the Oval Office has always been a matter of ideology.  When operating at the helm, the direction to which you stir the ship of state depends primarily on your vision of what tomorrow brings or should bring.  Gov. Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate confirmed that conservatism will be the ideological anchor in a Romney presidency.

As seemingly illustrated in the 1972 movie, “The Ruling Class,” [C.f., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069198/] the decadence of the ruling elite is a leading indicator of the national polity’s decline and degradation, making its claim to hegemony over any aspect of civilization untenable.  Or worse yet, it can be the unmistakable precursor to the polity’s eventual collapse. 

Thus, for instance, Pres. Obama’s flying off to Las Vegas for a fundraiser in the immediate aftermath of the sacking of Benghazi, was to be charitable about it, the moral equivalent of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome was burning.  At least in the case of Nero, what the Emperor flaunted about was only criminal malicious negligence for the welfare of the citizens of Rome. 

In the case of Pres. Obama and the Benghazi tragedy, the President added insult to injury when he perpetrated the lie, especially at the memorial service reception for Ambassador Stevens and the other casualties, that it was all caused by an obscure internet video deemed, by the Islamic mob, offensive to the religious sensitivities of Islamic Jihadists. 

The President chose to dishonor the dead in order to cover up the total collapse of the Obama Doctrine in foreign relations, which essentially consists of an apologetic appeasement of our enemies and an unconditional rapprochement with the Islamic world, in particular, and all adversaries, in general, both foreign and domestic.  For make no mistake about it: home grown al Qaeda cells have flourished during President Obama’s watch.  They were just veiled and wrapped in the Regime’s delusional euphemisms.

Beyond foreign affairs, an entire spectrum of policy formulations that define the Obama Regime can best be characterized as a Kabuki dance paradigm of governance, encapsulated in the following excerpts from the [Dance of] Heaven and Earth Affinity:

Gone are the worries,

Troubles of olden days,

All, all forgotten;

While in their place flows great joy,

Joy that o'erwhelms with its bounty.

 

For which some historical perspective may be in order.  In its heyday, around the rare half of the Ashikaga Shogunate (1338-1573) of Imperial Japan, the art form of the Kabuki dance emerged as a conveniently effective vehicle for socio-political satire deployed by the lower classes vis-à-vis the powers that be, as an acceptable avenue to express a parody subtly critical of the extant mores in any feudal military regime. 

 

Subtle was the crucially operative modifier.  In a feudal regime the personal well-being of anybody outside the privileged and ruling classes was nothing but ordinarily expendable, as a matter of protocol.

 

Deployed by the underlings against the powers that be, a parody may prove as an effective tool for redress of grievances against the economic-political power structure.  But when used by the power elite, especially those at the helms of government against the governed, it conveys contempt and mockery of the welfare and aspirations of the governed.

 

The self-professed undocumented pundit and unassimilated foreigner, Mark Steyn, opined three years ago, on President Obama’s over dramatized indignation at AIG executives:

The first two months of the Age of the Hopeychange have been an eye-opener.  I expected it to be ideologically distasteful to me, but I didn’t expect it to be so inept. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama’s executive skills.  But I assumed he’d have folks around him who could take care of details like governing, while he pranced around as the smiley-face hopeychange frontman.  But the bench is still empty save for a handful of mediocrities.  And the  disconnect between the smoothly scripted mush and what’s actually happening makes the telepromptered cool look even more ridiculous.

There was nothing subtle about the Benghazi-Las Vegas confluence and sequence of events.  Rather, it was a blatant, unbridled, in-your-face show of contempt for the well-being and sensibilities of the governed.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the re-election of Pres. Obama would ensure the decline and collapse for America.  Re-electing Pres. Obama would be properly interpreted by the power elite as an electoral mandate for the philosophical underpinnings of the agenda Pres. Obama espoused during his first term, viz., the fundamental transformation of the mode of governance from a government by the people and for the people to a government by the elite and for the hoi polloi. 

Competition by voluntarily owned free enterprises will give room to an infrastructure of commerce and industry controlled by the government through a cabal of functionaries chosen by crony enterprise czars who derive their power from executive orders and bureaucracy-created Regulatory Commissions.  Free-market based capitalism will be replaced by a market mechanism based on command-and-control system with all the ideological trappings of central planning and life-boat economics.
 

It shall be tantamount to kissing the proverbial American Dream good bye, forevermore.  It is the moral equivalent of mortgaging the National Soul to the devil himself.

Downsizing American Expectations (5)~~Benghazi Tragedy, Redux

Kucinich: Do you know how many shoulder-fired ground-to-air missiles which can shot down commercial airlines are unaccounted for in Libya?

 

Nordstrom: The number is extremely fluid.  We understand it is between 10 and 20,000.

~~Congressional Hearings on Benghazi

 

I to the world am like a drop of water

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself: . . .

~~Shakespeare (Duke Solinus), The Comedy of Errors

Except for the fact that fluidity and numbers don’t properly belong to the same sentence, Nordstrom’s reply to Kucinich represents the most honest assessment of the Libya debacle, particularly as applies to the tragedy in Benghazi.  Numbers were invented as tools to facilitate counting discreet entities.  Fluidity is the traditional semaphore for a continuum, ordinarily impervious to counting.

Just like the water drop that is lost amongst the uncountable non-drops in the ocean, the false narrative of an obscure YouTube video deemed offensive to the tender sensibilities of Islam to have caused the sacking of the Benghazi consulate and the deaths of four Americans almost became indistinct from the tsunami of lies that the Obama Regime has perpetrated on the American people for more than forty-five months.

“Almost” is the operative modifier.  As Victor Davis Hanson most astutely and succinctly emphasized, [http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson101012.html]

In the past, hostage-taking, sniper shootings, or plane crashes accounted for the deaths of our ambassadors. The notion of an American ambassador trapped nearly alone for hours before succumbing to smoke inhalation, while helpless under sustained armed assault, cries out for explanation.

Unfortunately, events have a stubborn habit of defying precedents. Their unfolding inconveniently did not conform to the calculatingly planned and architected political propaganda template.  The Obama re-election campaign which has become synonymous with the Obama Administration, scrambled to retrofit the narrative into the template.  To wit, Victor Hanson continues,

An election-mode administration apparently was deeply invested in the post-convention narrative of Middle East calm — brought about by the end of bin Laden, the new reset diplomacy of a popular and cool-headed Barack Obama, the dismantling of al Qaeda by Predator-drone assassinations, and a US-shepherded Arab Spring.

It is obvious to everyone other than the most ardent of Pres. Obama’s acolytes that the Benghazi debacle was the tragic result of the Obama regime’s clumsy and incompetent attempt to sustain the delusional narrative that peace and harmony are at hand between the West and the Muslim world simply as a direct consequence to Pres. Obama’s being in the Oval Office.  Worse than that, the ensuing cover up violated every protocol of decency and due diligence expected in public service.

There is evidence aplenty that the White House deliberately misled the public in an attempt to maintain a semblance of consistency in its narrative.  No amount of feigned indignation and rehearsed affected petulance on the part of the President should mitigate the public outrage that he so richly deserves, unbridled by the constraints of civility.

It has become most urgently incumbent on Gov. Romney to bring up, front and center, the Libya debacle on Monday night’s debate.  Undoubtedly the subterfuge that Bob Schieffer may bring into the mix to continue the non-Fox-Media’s protective cocoon around the Obama campaign may prove formidable.  But it should be a measure of Gov. Romney’s bona fides for the Oval Office to expose the Benghazi tragedy in all its naked grotesqueness.

President Obama needs to lose his job over this.  Else the country is not fit to survive in a world when astute leadership is in dire demand.

As I warned earlier elsewhere [c.f., p.230 or see the entire chapter 14 with live hyperlinks sourcing at http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/asumen/2010/11222010.htm],

The Barbarians are not just at the gates. They are already at the helms of power and wrecking havoc on our patrimony, flushing our posterity down the drain of indebtedness, and bankruptcy of the fiscal, moral, and intellectual genre.

In any political campaign impeccable timing is a premium commodity.  The tragedy in Benghazi, replete with treasonous intrigues and chicanery, has presented Gov. Romney with a perfect opportunity in the next debate to dismantle, piece by piece, the moral bankruptcy of the Obama doctrine of appeasement in the face of a relentless and dangerous enemy.

Given this promise of a political campaign bonanza, President Obama’s reelection can only mean one thing.  Namely, an American populace overwhelmed and vanquished by a deluge of mendacity.  For such stupidity, we should all go down in history as a veritable disgrace to the human race.

Downsizing American Expectations (4)~~Debating the Campaign Debates

The debate Wednesday was a “reset” of the presidential campaign.

~~ Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R,N.H.), Fox News Sunday

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

~~ Seneca

Luck is not always the residue of design, and Romney was lucky that the first debate concerned the economy . . . America can be . . . a society in which markets — the voluntary collaboration of creative individuals — allocate opportunity.

~~George Will, Romney hits a trifecta in Denver

 

If the debate can become an inflection point, a launching pad for the rest of the race, it won't be merely the end of the beginning of the general election campaign. It could become the beginning of the end of the failed Obama presidency. 

~~William Kristol, The Beginning of the End?

It is common knowledge that a politician would promise anything and everything just to secure the electorates’ votes.  A joke very popular in Philippine college campuses in the sixties I deem most appropriate to illustrate this popular belief.

 

The narrative goes: a politician in the campaign stomp pompously promised, “if I’m elected I’ll build you the most magnificent bridge you have ever seen in your lifetime.”  To which a heckler interjected: “but we don’t have any river hereabouts.”  Whereat the politician retorted, “I’ll build you an equally splendid river to go with it, you impertinent dolt.”

Unfortunately, “we the people” are more often than not taken in by every two-bit politician’s subterfuge and machinations.  Else, if such were not the case, no career politician would ever prosper on the taxpayers’ dime and retire from politics far wealthier than when he/she first entered the arena.  And there would have been far more politicians who would manage to earn the grade into being recognized and remembered as honorable statesmen, and/or stateswomen as the case may be.

Dictionary.com suggests that the labels politician and statesman may be deemed synonymous and interchangeable.  I strongly beg to disagree.  The simplest difference between the two is the statesman happens to be a politician with a conscience.  The statesman approaches governance and policy formulation with principled moorings.  On the other hand, the politician’s reckonings don’t go beyond expedience and leverage for future and more lucrative political gains.

 

Secondly, a statesman has the ability and intellectual fortitude to reach out for that much needed honorable compromise with the opposition to get one’s agenda implemented.  Pres. Obama bullied, bribed, and squandered the people’s money to get ObamaCare passed in Congress without a single vote from the opposition.

 

Colby Hall of mediaite.com, showcasing Pres. Obama’s statesmanship  skills, chronicled thus:

 

Mr. Obama had this to say about the GOP joining Democratic efforts for reform: “They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” One can only imagine the imagery this comment will conjure for all parties involved.

 

The one factoid that was missed, nay, deliberately avoided noticing by everybody in pundit-land with the notable exceptions of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump was that Pres. Obama is a fraud.  He was built up by the media in 2008 as the “Manchurian Candidate,” and the nation had swallowed the goodies hook, line and sinker.

 

Contrary to the media narrative, I assert, contend and maintain that Barack Hussein Obama has been the dumbest individual to have disgraced the Oval Office.  Here is the compelling bill of circumstantial particulars:

 

1.           He is reduced to an incoherent blob when deprived of his teleprompter as demonstrated in last Wednesday’s debate;

2.           He spent reported $millions on a horde of lawyers to keep his college records~~transcripts, theses, term papers, etc. sealed off from the public;

3.           He is unique in being the President of Harvard Law Review without a single article, scholarly or otherwise, attributed to his by-line;

4.           He has never passed a budget in his first term because he could not persuade a single vote in Congress to support his agenda.

These are not hallmarks of leadership.  These are hallmarks of a loafer and a dolt.  He fiddled and hob-nobbed with celebrities in Las Vegas and Hollywood on campaign fund raising stomps while our sovereign territories were crushed and burnt in the four corners of the globe throughout the Islamic world.  How low can a President get before you recognize the symptoms and come forth with the proper diagnosis of the disease?

 

Contrary to liberal media spin, the debater who showed up last Wednesday night was the real unadulterated Barack Hussein Obama, a.k.a. Barry Soetoro, liberated from the protective cocoon of the Kool-Aid drinkers in the non-Fox media.  Sans the teleprompter, the Lord of the Realm proved to be indisputably as bare as the instant he was born, regardless of whether or not it was on United States territory.

 

The ultimate measure of a politician’s potential to evolve into a statesman is the way he handles the fallout of any debacle.  So far Pres. Obama has failed miserably this putrescence test, respecting last Wednesday’s debate.  Not only has he indulged ad nauseam in Argumentum ad hominem, as behooves a Chicago rabble rouser, he also had deployed the entire Democratic Party machine to foment at its basest abyss the politics of personal destruction.

Undoubtedly, this demeans the dignity of the Presidency as an institution.  Above and beyond that, it diminishes the pride and glory of history that has been the Idea of the United States of America. 

 

Considering that there are still two debates scheduled, for the sake of civility and to recalibrate his bearings, I beseech the President to heed the counsel of William Shakespeare in, Henry IV, Part II, to wit:

“Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Recalibration is absolutely necessary for the President shall be circumscribed by Agatha Reed’s standards for fairness in the movie “Goodbye, My Fancy” to “never play fair unless you respect the person you are dealing with.”  Ergo, as he continues to scornfully demonstrate his contempt for Gov. Romney in the campaign trail, his endless pontification on fairness would be reduced to an hideous exhibition of hypocrisy, putridly repugnant to a populace hungry for leadership.

 [Next~~ Downsizing American Expectations (5):

The Campaign Debates Part 2]

 

{Below catalogues remarks some in Pundit-Land has recorded for posterity on the first Presidential Debate as reflected in my short reading list}

 

 “. . . Political operatives say they hate oppo because they hate to lower the tone of the national discourse. The truth is, oppo is bad for business. The press goes into full Lascivious Puritan mode, spreads the dirt and then tries to nail the provider. When everyone knows a strategist won dirty, he becomes controversial . . .”

~~Peggy Noonan, Romney Deflates the President

 

“. . . Mr. Obama has skated by with platitudes, lies, misrepresentations and "cool," while the nation we love, still "the last best hope of earth," seemed to be sliding toward the drain.

“. . . Obama seems to be identifying a problem, except that his description is false. And if it were true, why did Obama do nothing about it when his party controlled both houses of Congress?”

~~Mona Charen, The Best Presidential Debate Performance

 

“America is not prospering economically. No matter what Obama says he's done, the facts are that personal income is down, good jobs are hard to get, the debt is north of $16 trillion, and everybody who has health insurance is paying higher premiums. And don't even ask about gas prices.”

~~Bill O’Reilly, The Debate Report Card

 

“It was the biggest rout since Agincourt. . . . With a remarkable display of confidence, knowledge and nerve, Mitt Romney won the first 2012 debate going away.

“Romney didn’t just demonstrate authoritative command of a myriad of domestic issues. He was nervy about it, taking the president on frontally, not just relentlessly attacking, but answering every charge leveled against him — with a three-point rebuttal.”

~~Charles Krauthammer, Romney by two touchdowns

 

“As the president makes his case for four more years, he does so without emphasizing what he has accomplished or what he intends to do. Instead, he concentrates on the culture of personal celebrity.

 

“When backed into a corner, as in Wednesday’s debate with Republican challenger Mitt Romney, he defaults to class warfare.

 

“If Obama wins re-election, he may claim a mandate to advance a class-based, redistributionist agenda — because that is exactly what he has run on.”

~~Salena Zito, Americans Still Believe In Our Unique Destiny

 

“The problem for Obama is not that his performance was disastrous, but rather that it was his normal workmanlike coasting. But this time, and for the first time, he was pitted against a skilled debater who had both the better argument and the better intellectual artillery to deliver it. . . . For Obama to win the next debate, Romney will have to be uncharacteristically bad, Obama will have to be uncharacteristically good, and the moderator will not only have to be engaged but also unashamedly hyper-partisan. All of the above can happen, but it is unlikely.”

~~Victor Davis Hanson,

The Problem Last Night Was Not Just Obama

 

“Sans teleprompter, he repeated the talking points of his television ads and, when Romney responded sharply, he had nothing to fall back on.

We saw the president who found it fitting to jet off to campaign in Las Vegas the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

. . .

Obama will surely perform better in his next two debates. Romney may not perform as well. But the first numbers suggest the firewall may be crumbling. We'll see if it holds.”

~~Michael Barone, Romney's Debate

Win Opens Cracks in Obama Firewall

Downsizing American Expectations (3): The Fallacy of Exit Strategy

 

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. . . . if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

~~Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

~~Sir Winston Churchill,

Address to the House of Commons on May 13, 1940

 

Back when one of the most urgent national questions was whether to surge or not to surge our troop commitment in Afghanistan, President Obama publicly agonized over the issue of how to fulfill a campaign promise.  To wit, the “bad war” that was Iraq must end; the “good war” that was Afghanistan must be sustained.

 

Like the good Nobel Peace Prize Laureate that he is, he summarily withdrew from Iraq without leaving any vestiges of our investment in blood, lives and material resources that we could subsequently leverage to influence the next unfolding of events.  To add injury to insult, he deployed to Afghanistan a troop surge that was 33% the size of what the field commanders requested.  Simultaneously, he made the announcement to withdraw not only for the “surge” on a date-certain timetable, but also for the entire contingent.

 

In so doing, our deployment in Afghanistan was deprived of the element of surprise so valued by Sun Tzu for winning wars (emphasis added):

 

In conflict, direct confrontation will lead to engagement and surprise will lead to victory. . . . Those who are skilled in producing surprises will win.

Above and beyond that, he ceded an undue advantage to the enemy who got the luxury of waiting out the announced schedule for withdrawal.  As Clint Eastwood astutely observed,

I think you've mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, "Why are you giving the date out now?  Why don't you just bring them home tomorrow morning?"

Recognizing the folly of the exercise, back then I commented in passing [c.f., p. 264 in chapter 20],

It is noteworthy that this same dysfunction allowed the elevation of BHO to the Oval Office to become the Ditherer-in-chief and make America the laughing stock of the world, not to mention the de facto betrayal of our troops who are holding forth in Afghanistan.

What was not sufficiently emphasized then was the basic fallacy integral to the template of war engagement adopted by the American policy-making establishment.  The conventional wisdom which evolved from the Vietnam debacle mandated that any commitment of forces abroad must be governed by a well-defined strategic objective, supported by some definite tactical missions necessary to attain the objectives, and an even more obsessively streamlined exit strategy.

Purged from the template was the notion of victory.  So we effectively went to war more obsessed with how to disengage from, than with how to prevail over the enemy.  With any kind of enemy, the mindset is faulty at best.  But when and where we are at war with the soldiers of the Quran, as we now are, Sir Winston Churchill had it on the money: “without victory there is no survival.”  The only acceptable exit strategy is total and complete victory.

 

That President Barack Hussein Obama has effectively vanished “victory” from the national lexicon except as pertains to his re-election campaign is yet an incontrovertible evidence of his immeasurable contempt for the intelligence and good sense of the American people.  Can the country really survive four more years of his medicine?   

In the movie, The Edge, Charles Morse, the character played by Anthony Hopkins, volunteered the statistics that a majority of people stranded in the wilds die of embarrassment.  They are embarrassed that they have put themselves into such a predicament that their very survival is at stake.  As a result, they forget to use the only faculty, viz., thinking, that could ensure their survival.   

Similarly, should President Obama get re-elected, the nation shall die of embarrassment that they can be so gullible.  In their reluctance to admit that they made a fool of themselves by electing him four years ago, they double down on their mistake and ignore the wise admonition of Clint Eastwood, to wit:

Whether you are a Democrat or Republican or whether you're libertarian or whatever, you are the best. And we should not ever forget that. And when somebody does not do the job, we got to let him go.

So beware America, the sanity you save shall definitely be your own.  It behooves to find a viable Exit Strategy from your own cognitive dissonance.

 

{Next: Downsizing American Expectations (4):

Debating the Campaign Debates}