You see, as the Enlightenment fades, so will its diamond shaped social structure – dominated by a large and vigorous middle class.  That pattern fostered vibrancy and creativity, but also brittle flightiness.  The kitschy culture and fickle habits that infested your forever-adolescent America. … That kind of social order is unstable.  Too dependent on high levels of education, civility, confidence, and shared sense of purpose.  As in ancient Athens and Florence, it’s simple to incite the bourgeoisie to bicker over trivial matters.  Just get them overreacting to one exaggerated threat, while ignoring others. … As Plato taught, stable governance requires a broad base that narrows steeply to a small but superqualified ruling class, born and raised for leadership.  The mode that postagricultural civilizations adopt, ninety-nine percent of the time.  Even under so-called Soviet Communism, power soon consolidated in a few hundred families of the nomenklatura caste – a classic feudal society, despite all its superficial egalitarian rhetoric.  [from a conversation in David Brin’s Existence (2012)]

George Rebane

Barack Hussein Obama now owns the title of being the most inexperienced, ineffective, secretive, ideological, and divisive leader America has had in the last hundred years, perhaps ever.  He also promises to go forward as our most destructive President if the looming disasters – in defense, healthcare, entitlements, and taxes – of January 2013 come to pass.  But let’s bring our focus to the here and now in how the man is conducting his desperate campaign for re-election.

•    He does everything to avoid disclosing, discussing, and debating his record as President; all for the obvious reasons as outlined in these pages over his term of office.
•    He has revealed his talents for chronic and pathological lying about what his administration has done to alleviate this recession, and more recently to shift focus to a fabricated record of Romney at Bain and governing Massachusetts.  Even the prestigious Annenberg Foundation (supports journalism education) has called out his lies.  (see also 8aug12 update below)
•    He counts heavily on the independents and the ignorant to believe his economic theories which begin and end with the thesis that tax rates don’t affect economic behavior.  But they do affect voting behavior, hence the reprise of keeping the Bush tax cuts for one year after the election.
•    He accepts responsibility for nothing, and takes credit for everything.
•    He legislates in the dark of night and in lame duck sessions laws that reveal themselves bit by piece for doing the opposite from the advertized.
•    He hides the congressionally requested records of his Justice Department, and rogue agencies like the EPA.
•    He hides his record and writings when he was teaching Constitutional law at Harvard.
•    He hides his scholastic records in toto – no one knows how he got into his schools and what he did during his academic years save some photos of him in high school doing drugs.
•    He continues to hide the records of his birth.  Sheriff Arpaio’s investigation reveals that Hawaii’s Attorney General’s office even refuses “to verify that the PDF of Obama’s birth certificate released by the White House is in fact an exact copy of the document released to the President’s attorneys.” 
•    He instead doubles down on Marxist rhetoric to claim that the nation’s creative entrepreneurs and private sector did not build their companies and create the wealth that continues to sustain America.  It was all done by the broad based proletariat collective.
•    He is in every sense of the word our first post-American president who sees his presidency as a stepping stone to higher office.

And he is also the most beguiling politician to come along since Ronald Reagan charmed America.  Except that Reagan charmed those who worked to build up the country, and Obama charms those who cannot consume the country fast enough.

Against this we have the Republicans’ Mitt Romney who appears to be running the most ineffective campaign since McGovern, and miraculously still continues to poll about even with Obama.  Romney is not taking the battle to the ground that he can dominate, but is keeping to Obama’s back alleys where Romney has neither the experience nor the stomach for the fight.

Romney fashions further anchors for himself to drag around by not releasing his tax returns, thereby giving Obama even more ammunition to detract the emotionally challenged electorate with charges of ‘offshore investments’ and ‘Swiss bank accounts’.  Romney should know that if there’s a ‘bomb’ in his tax records, he should detonate it sooner than later, especially if it’s big enough to blow him out of this election.  There is no reasonable basis for holding it back, and every reason to release it and then demand reciprocity from Obama’s racist dirtbag Attorney General.

In a fight between a clever and beguiling weasel and an inept hare in the headlights, the weasel wins.

[8aug12 update]  One of Obama's long time whoppers is his claim, here on video, that his father was a WW2 veteran.  At under ten years of age, this would have made him one of the youngest soldiers in the conflict.  Somehow the lamestream again missed that one.  H/T to RR reader.