United States

I’ve been at a loss of words this week, a highly unusual state of being for me, yet, here I am.

There is a question going around and around in my head that I can’t seem to answer…where do we go from here?

A whole lot of people that I know just look at me and wonder why I am incapable of letting this whole election go, after all, there will be another election in just a few years. That’s where we disagree…every ounce of instinctual fiber in my body is telling that’s just not the case. There will be other elections, but they will be all but meaningless.

We have finally tipped the scales.

There are a million arguments as to why Mitt Romney lost the election, but everything boils down to one simple fact…we have become a nation of freeloaders, squatters and sluts. A majority of the people of the nation have lost all respect for every principle that we once held high, and entitlement has replaced endeavor as our prevailing common behavior. As a people, we have given free rein to our collective id, and where morals and tradition once reigned we now have drives and impulses ruling. Above it all, the libido stands and demands constitutional authentication.

My good friend Ed L. maintains a great blog where I often go to gain a different perspective on things; his is sort of one of those clean, well lighted places where people can go and see news and current events from a cerebral conservative point of view. Ed is my Jiminy Cricket, my best friend, and my proof reader (I seldom, if ever, have found reason to proof anything he writes), and today, he’s chosen to feature work from another one of his friends, who agreed to be published only with the promise of remaining anonymous.

There is something incredibly poignant about this piece, something that cries of our loss of innocence as a nation, something that says that our best days are past us.

Dennis Miller said it best on election night when he tweeted: “America is now De Niro in Raging Bull – sitting in the Copacabana looking in that make-up mirror: old and bloated and living on past dreams.”

You can read Ed’s comments on the piece over at Vox Clamantis in Deserto (his blog), but you can read “Jungle King” right here.

And “Jungle King” deserves to be read.

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…the more the stay the same. Doesn’t this remind you of ‘Hope and Change‘?

“Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions and laughed delightedly at his licentiousness and thought it very superior of him to acquire vast amounts of gold illicitly. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the ‘new, wonderful good society’ which shall now be Rome’s, interpreted to mean ‘more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.’ Julius was always an ambitious villain, but he is only one man.” –Marcus Tullius Cicero (attributed, may be apocryphal)

(H/T Sister of Pitbull)

Here’s a Saturday morning salve for all of you sweating this most important presidential election of our lifetimes: Michael Barone, political statistician extraordinaire, says Romney will beat Obama handily.

Fundamentals usually prevail in American elections. That’s bad news for Barack Obama. True, Americans want to think well of their presidents and many think it would be bad if Americans were perceived as rejecting the first black president.

But it’s also true that most voters oppose Obama’s major policies and consider unsatisfactory the very sluggish economic recovery — Friday’s jobs report showed an unemployment uptick.

Also, both national and target state polls show that independents, voters who don’t identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans, break for Romney.

That might not matter if Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 39 to 32 percent, as they did in the 2008 exit poll. But just about every indicator suggests that Republicans are more enthusiastic about voting — and about their candidate — than they were in 2008, and Democrats are less so.

That’s been apparent in early or absentee voting, in which Democrats trail their 2008 numbers in target states Virginia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada.

The Obama campaign strategy, from the beginning, has recognized these handicaps, running barrages of early anti-Romney ads in states that Obama carried narrowly. But other states, not so heavily barraged, have come into contention.

Which candidate will get the electoral votes of the target states? I’ll go out on a limb and predict them, in ascending order of 2008 Obama percentages — fully aware that I’m likely to get some wrong. […]