I Still Don't Get It. Help Me Understand WHY You Would Vote for Mitt.

I have yet to have one of my Republican or conservative-leaning friends accept my challenge to explain to me WHY they support Mitt Romney, a proven liar, whose entire economic plan has been debunked not only by economic analysts who say his math doesn't add up, but now by the Congressional Research Service, which debunks its entire premise. I repeat the challenge here, three days before the election -- please explain why you support him.

I will throw a little detail into my challenge.

1) Explain how you justify the absolute lies he has been telling in the last two weeks about Jeep moving production to China. This has been definitely debunked by Chrysler itself, whose top executives have expressly called Romney a liar over this, and by the CEO of General Motors, who called Romney's actions "cynical politics at their worst."

2) Explain how you justify Romney's flagrant lie about Obama "gutting welfare reform." This has been thoroughly debunked and proven to be a total lie, and yet Romney continues to run ads repeating it.

3) Explain how you justify his support of a Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage. This is a key one, and the one that will take the most courage for you to answer, as I find support for this beyond objectionable, and 100% intolerable on every level.

4) Explain how you justify his attacks on President Obama for "throwing Israel under the bus," when both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'artez have ringingly endorsed him as being good for Israel, and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has definitively stated that the Obama administration has been far and away the most supportive American administration in history - a claim that can be backed up  by the material evidence of support provided.

5) Explain your acceptance of his seemingly magical claim that the economy will get better JUST by the fact of his election? Explain also how you can agree that Obama has made the economy worse (a claim Romney has made over and over again) when he halted the worst economic downturn in 80 years within one year, and has produced over 30 months of consecutive job gains, including over a half million in the last three months alone. Don't try to tell me that the unemployment rate was 7.8% when he took office and 7.9% now - what's important is that in those first few months of Obama's administration, long before his policies could take effect, the unemployment rate had soared well above 10%.

6) Explain how Romney can claim that Obama's policies have "failed," when not only are they succeeding on every economic metric (employment, consumer confidence, housing prices, the stock market rebound, etc), but they have done so in spite of unprecedented obstruction from Congress, including failure to pass Obama's jobs act that would have put over a million additional people back to work.

7) Explain how you believe that Romney will balance the budget and work in a bipartisan way, when no Republican since Eisenhower has balanced the budget, but Bill Clinton did so year after year, enacting some of the same taxation policies that Obama wants to enact now.  

8) Explain how you think that Romney will be better for job creation, when his own record as Governor of Massachusetts was a colossal failure on this metric, plunging the state to 47th in the nation on job creation.

9) Explain how you believe his attempted tack to the middle, after going all out during the primaries to appease the far-right wing of his party, saying, for instance, that he would be happy to sign a bill that would ban ALL abortions, including in cases of rape or incest. You have to believe one thing or another here - either that he was telling the truth the first time, and really is that radical, or that, now that he says something quite different, he's a shameless liar and panderer.

10) And finally, explain to me how you can justify his speech at the infamous fund-raiser in Boca Raton, where he referred to 47% of Americans who he says see themselves as "victims," who are unwilling to accept responsibility for their own lives. Do you realize who those 47% really are? They're senior citizens who paid into Social Security and Medicare their entire working lives, and are now collecting those payments - not government handouts, but payments of the insurance plans into which they paid for years. They're veterans who receive the benefits they have earned and that they well deserve for putting their lives on the line for our country. They're active military personnel. They're the working poor, who may work two or three jobs to take care of their families, but still don't earn enough to meet the minimum requirement for paying federal income tax but pay many other forms of taxation and do their part to the best of their ability. Then explain how, for weeks after that video became public, Romney defended his statements, saying they may have been inelegantly stated but that he stood by the content, then after he TANKED in the polls, largely because of the video, he turned around and recanted, saying he didn't mean to say that at all. Again, please explain how you can fail to call him a liar for this.

I could burden you with dozens more specific questions, but I seriously doubt that any of you will rise even to this challenge, so I will not waste additional space on them. As a matter of fact, I'll be satisfied if you simply answer the basic question - why do you support this lying sack of bat crap? I know that's a bit like asking "just when did you stop beating your wife," but the question is clear and I really want to know, because for the life of me, I simply cannot understand how anybody I care about or respect could support such a truly awful man, with such a wholly incorrect vision for America, and one that would specifically discriminate against me. Help me.

Leadership and the Role of Government

One of the greatest tests of Leadership with a capital L is how somebody who bears the awesome responsibility of leading a nation deals with the most challenging events to befall that nation. What we've seen this week in President Obama's handling of the catastrophic event that was Hurricane Sandy is nothing less than a perfect object lesson in what that kind of Leadership means.

Clearly, there's more to leadership (I've made my point with the upper case L, so I'll revert now to lower case) than just saying the right things at the right times, though that is clearly important as well. What really defines that leadership though, is a combination of action, attitude, preparation, and having the wisdom to put mechanisms in place that can respond effectively and efficiently to this manner of event long before the event actually occurs. That wisdom is directly related to how one views the role of the federal government, and it's due to the fundamental difference in the way Democrats and Republicans tend to view that role that we've seen such a gulf between the way President Obama has handled Hurricane Sandy and the way George W. Bush handled Hurricane Katrina.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the way the GOP has veered sharply away from its traditional conservative values is the way it has developed utter and total disdain for government. That disdain has led Republican leaders consciously to make decisions that will make government LESS effective, so that they can say "see, government doesn't work, we need to hand everything over to the private sector." How else to explain George Bush's inexplicable decision to put FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the hands of Michael Brown, aka "Brownie," a man who had zero experience in emergency management? Brown's last position before taking over FEMA was as "Judges and Stewards Commission" for the International Arabian Horses Association. Yes, you read that correctly. How would this experience prepare him for managing such a complex and vital service of the federal government? The answer, of course, is that it wouldn't, and it didn't, and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, as we all know, was a total and absolute failure.

In what must go down as one of the greatest displays of chutzpah of all time, Brown this week criticized the Obama administration for "responding too quickly" to Hurricane Sandy. In the GOP's upside-down view of the world, efficiency and preparation are clearly bad things.

And whom did President Obama appoint to the very same position? The gentleman's name is Craig Fugate. Prior to taking the reins at FEMA, Fugate was Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, a position that he held for eight years, and to which he was appointed by Jeb Bush and then re-confirmed by Charlie Crist. Florida, as we know, has regular emergencies due to its location in prime hurricane territory, and Fugate's reputation and record of accomplishment there were stellar.

What would happen, then, in a Romney administration? Romney is on record as saying that emergency management should be left to the states, and to the extent possible, to the private sector. While there is some truth to the former, in that states already do take the lead in emergency response, FEMA and the federal government are a vital component in any large-scale disaster, and when that component is anything short of top-notch, the consequences can be dire. In spite of how Romney has tried to do his shuffle-to-the-center dance, the budget direction that he and Paul Ryan are trying to push on the country would by necessity entail huge cuts in FEMA's budget. More to the point, his anti-government, privatize everything mentality, would no doubt result in a return to the pathetic federal emergency response we saw under Bush, and away from the prompt, efficient, calm leadership we have seen under President Obama.