Shoot, Yes, I'm Concerned

"Concerned" is really too mild a word.  But it'll do to hang this post on.

Look, the Republicans lost the White House.  I'll keep it brief.

I'm amazed.  As I tweeted the night of the loss, if Republicans can't beat a president this bad, you have to consider that they might well be pretty much spent as a political force.

The president inherited a situation that was bad, but survivable, and promptly made it worse.  Not only that, he and his party--I hate to use this overworked phrase, but it fits so well--rammed Obamacare down the nation's throat.  They passed other nightmarish legislation, like Dodd-Frank.  And there is probably more on the way.

Going into election day, I thought there was no way the American electorate would reward him with a second term.  I didn't think anyone who voted for McCain would vote for Obama, and furthermore, I thought that many who'd supported Obama the first time would never do it again, and lastly, I thought that many conservatives who sat out the last election rather than vote for "Amnesty John" would vote for Romney this time.

Not that Romney was a great candidate.  I said during the primaries that we could do a lot better.  But surely, I thought, any idiot could see that he would be far preferable to Barack Obama.

Well, apparently I was wrong.  By now, if you've been paying attention, you know the gruesome reality: the total turnout was (upon my last news reading) down by some fourteen million votes.  Obama was about ten million votes under his 2008 totals, and, to my complete and utter shock, Romney was about four million votes below what McCain got.

The difference between Obama and Romney in the popular vote was, last time I looked, about 2.5 million.  One has to consider the possibility that if the other four million who'd voted McCain had shown up this year, Romney would've won.

What the heck happened to them?  I don't know.

I do know that there's a lot of mischief already poised and ready to launch with the new year, and more on the way.  Just how bad it can get, nobody really knows.  I do know we can't go on borrowing and spending this way forever, nor, despite the President's rhetoric, can we tax our way out of it.  There simply isn't enough money, not if you took all the income of the top earners, to do it.  Sooner or later, a fiscal catastrophe is going to occur.  It may be very near.

And I don't want to think about what the President meant when he told Vladimir Putin's right-hand-man that he'd have a lot more flexibility after his re-election.

I know it's true, as Ann Coulter pointed out, that it's very difficult to upset a sitting president, and it's also true that the party out of the White House typically picks up BIG gains in the mid-terms, especially in a situation like we're going to have in 2014.  And it's also true that lame-duck presidents often have a harder time getting things done than they would like.  And it's certainly possible that the Benghazi affair has yet to be fully plumbed, and the bitter harvest from Obamacare and other Democratic foolishness will soon kick in, and a lot of people will realize what they've done by not voting, or voting the wrong way.

But I fear that the damage inflicted over the next few years will be permanent, or at least years-long.  I now have utterly no confidence in my ability to stay employed, though I'm certainly working to enhance my employability.  I really question what's going to happen to my country, my liberty, and my children.

But I'm not going to remain static.  I'm going to do everything I can to cope, to improve, and to aid my country and my children.  And I hope that you do the same.