Summations Only

From the posts here you'd think that Obama would be winning with 100% of the vote.(Didn't Saddam do that?)It would help if folks here realized that there are legitimate differences of opinion.

I'm merely reacting to the posts here that imply that all right thinking people will of course be voting for Obama.You folks don't realize how you sound--you're off in your own echo chambers so much that you don't realize that about half the country doesn't share your opinions.You folks need to get out more.

And you folks also need to listen to how you sound.I hear this same kind of thing a lot in academia, where it is assumed that all right thinking people share the same opinion, and that opinion is the far left.If you aren't aware of how glaring it sounds for political statements--almost universally far left--to be thrown into casual academic discourse, you should be.

The opening post, "Do the right thing" -- as if there were only one choice. That's not a centrist opinion.If that's isn't an example of the far left I don't know what is.There was no "Vote for Obama because he has done... or will do..."It was "Do the right thing" as in no other choices are permitted among "right thinking" folks.Really, you folks need to stop thinking that your opinions are the only ones out there, and the only ones that are correct. It gets really old after about 45 years or so.

Don't play coy. The "right thing" was understood from the beginning as reelecting Obama.That is the prevailing attitude by many here and in many in other places. If you folks didn't assume that all "right thinking" people would feel the same way you would be a lot more tolerable.There was no "I am voting for Obama because of..." That would invite a discussion, and possibly promote a counter opinion of "I am voting for Romney because of..." A productive discussion might follow.But for far too many of you there is no justifiable counter opinion. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just beyond the pale.The attitude you folks convey is getting real old.But of course you can't see the water in which you swim.

You have made a very good post.Let me respond to your post and perhaps to many others all at once.I am not thrilled with the outcome of the election, but it is what it is and I'll live with it.There are many things on the right I am not thrilled with--the socons particularly. What I prefer might be best referred to as rational libertarianism, perhaps a very minor choice now-a-days.But there comes a point where the electorate can't continue to vote for bread and circuses. As Margaret Thatcher is reported to have said, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."And a more detailed quote from Heinlein:

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

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‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invaderthe barbarians enter Rome.

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Robert A. Heinlein

Now I guess we'll see what the next four years will bring.