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Disappointment & Disheartenment Over The Election — Guest Post
EconomicNoise.com
Tom Lester provides the following guest post:
Several months ago I predicted Romney would win the presidential race with 55% of the popular vote. I anticipated that people who had voted for Obama in 2008 would come to their senses and analyze Obama’s lack of a record and intransigent ideology and correct their previous error in judgment. But obviously people find it difficult to acknowledge mistakes, always looking to deflect blame elsewhere. Had the farm been on the block it would be under new ownership – and may even be in jeopardy during the next four years.
One needs only to look at the Office of Management and Budget’s numbers to see the foreboding catastrophe. Means-tested entitlement spending was about $10 billion in 1970, growing over nine-fold to $95.7 billion in 1990, and another almost six-fold for 2011 as it rose to $569.4 billion. While the true problem is this spending, the Republican pundits will now attempt to discern what went wrong, what should have been done differently and how to appeal in the future to the masses of unconcerned, uninformed citizenry. It’s a pessimistically futile effort because the America that made this country great has little or no chance of recovery with Obama at the helm.
I’m greatly in favor of giving people second chances to make amends and correct their mistakes. In favor, except with the Presidency. The highest office in the land can, with one flourish of the pen, create massive problems in this country that will never be corrected, and, at best, only yield mild attempts at correction hobbled-together with unwarranted and further ludicrous legislation and regulation.
The murder of four Americans in Benghazi still greatly troubles me. The attempts at misdirection by the Administration and State Department seem clearly to have been a stall tactic to postpone answering accurately the unanswered questions surrounding the attack until after the election. The media played its role never pressing the questions, apparently wanting the situation to cool to the last page of news that might jeopardize the president’s re-election. Let’s hope the Congress will not be so kind and considerate.
A further prognostication on my part, possibly unwarranted owing to my poor score on the election. Congress will vigorously pursue Benghazi and we’ll see some of the same tactics employed by Nixon during the Watergate fiasco. The strategy will be to again stall testimony to avoid it being labeled, like Watergate, a presidential cover up, awaiting another crisis to present itself and capture the headlines. Invariably some heads may roll to absolve the president of any guilt or collusion. But quickly the crisis will take center stage and the crisis may be real, like the national debt and sequestration, or manufactured for some unexpected and unanticipated event.
The headlines in my newspaper, the liberal Arizona Republic, proclaimed OBAMA REACHES OUT TO DIVIDED NATION. Obama in his re-election victory speech talked about reaching across the aisle to solve problems and of the need for finding common ground. The words ring hollow in light of the Obama campaign attempts with its negative ads to label Romney as a murderer, woman hater, rich uncaring capitalist and incompetent Governor. I expect Obama will make some mild attempts to appear to find mutual agreement but quickly abandon the charade and revert to his blame game of Republican intransigence. He wants higher taxes and any resistance by Republicans will fill the airwaves of supportive media with his speeches and complaints of those bad guys and their inability to compromise.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, writing in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, about he and Lyndon Johnson’s management of the Vietnam War, said, “We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.” It was an apology that few government leaders seldom make. In Fog of War, an Oscar-winning 2003 documentary, he said, “I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors.” Although a formal apology was never issued for his role in the quagmire, he made clear his blunders cost the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. Will Obama eventually feel the heavy burden of his role for the havoc he wrought on this country or what now appears to be complicity in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi?
I am likely at the age where Obama’s grand scheme of America will have little impact on me personally but I am saddened by its effect on our grandchildren and future American generations. One day they will perhaps be puzzled why we allowed such a departure from principles expressed by the Founding Fathers and embodied in the Constitution. I suppose we must forgive McNamara as well as the people for not only their 2008 ill-guided choice but as well this one on November 6. Will our grandchildren be so forgiving of our own complicity? I am reminded of another lamentation of long ago: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Tom Lester
You may contact Mr. Lester: [email protected]
