Choosing A President: The Crap Shoot or The Educated Guess.

I was born in 1952, so I have good bit of history to work from when it comes to in choosing a worthy a president.  Harry S. Truman was in office when I was born, but he obviously made little impression on me at the time.  However, my study of history suggests that he was a pretty decent president and a worthy office-holder, though he was a horrible businessman in his youth and only came to political office through the patronage of the corrupt Missouri Democratic political machine in power at the time in Kansas City. He later showed personal integrity by turning on the hometown rascals who went to jail.  He only came to the presidency because he was considered harmless by the Democrat party and they had no idea that the eternal president, FDR, would soon be sleeping in the dirt. Truman, to his credit had a sign on his desk that said, “The Buck Stops Here”.  Unlike some presidents before and after, this was not in reference to the dollar bill, but to the political art of passing the “buck” or skirting responsibility.  He was wont to take the responsibility for his decisions and their good or bad results, as with his decision to drop the atomic bombs to end the war with Japan.  Speculation is still being weighed on that decision, but Harry did not shy away from it.  Granted, that may not be as gutsy a decision, as some would have you believe, as when our current president had to make the gut-wrenching decision of whether or not to give the go-ahead to snuff Bin laden.  Yeah, I know, I know it would have been gutsier not to give the order and have the word get out that he could have. Any self-respecting moron would have that decision easily, and probably just as soon as he knew Bin Laden was there and not several weeks after the fact. As the Bard said, “These are the days that try men’s souls”. It makes laugh.  Truman would have ordered it the very moment he knew where the little rabbit was.

Ike Eisenhower was the president I remember first.  He was a pretty good one for all intents and purposes.  He had a healthy reputation as an intelligent warrior and had the respect of most of the free world.  He was as economically conservative as he knew how to be. Eisenhower appointed chief justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court and the Warren Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson in the Brown v. The Board of Education decision.  Eisenhower ordered federal troops—the first time federal troops were called in to protect American blacks since the reconstruction period—into Little Rock to support desegregation in schools, much to the dismay of the majority of southern Democrats.  That was back when Democrats were perceived, and rightly so, as the party who wanted to keep minorities from voting and sitting in the back of the proverbial buss.  Eisenhower pushed of the Civil Rights acts of 1957 and 1960, which could not have happened with a Democrat majority in Congress, without the Republican members being whole-heartedly behind it. All in all, Ike was a pretty good president for his time and helped make the United States a more equitable place to live.

I remember looking at a newspaper in 1960, which showed pictures of all of the men, both Republican and Democrat, who were vying for the presidency. I saw a picture of a nice-looking young guy named John F. Kennedy and thing to myself, “he is my choice.” Why did I think that? you might ask.  Well, the answer is simple: I was a dumb 10-year-old kid and he was a nice-looking young guy.  That’s all that is need for many of our voters in this country, especially in today’s world:  A ten-year-old mentality and a nice-looking young person who they can vote for. It also helps if they think they are cool.  Kennedy would never have gotten my vote today. He was a terrible womanizer, even compared with Bill Clinton who purportedly idolized Kennedy.  He was, of course, assassinated in his third year, so we don’t have too much that was known about him by the general public, so he holds a mythical position in many Americans’ minds. He was good on taxes, having pushed to cut taxes which resulted in increased revenue—it always does—and he stood up to the Soviets when they tried to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, in retaliation for the placement of our missiles in Turkey. However, his handling of the Bay of Pigs affair in Cuba before that was a total embarrassment.  It was Kennedy though who began America’s space exploration in earnest, pledging to land a man on the moon within a decade. That was also pretty bold, since we had not even out a man in orbit yet.

 Lyndon Johnson was a mixed bag of probable good intensions and out-and-out mistakes. While Senate Majority Leader during the Eisenhower administration, he had helped push through the two Civil Rights bills against the will of the majority of the Democrat party and with likely good motives tried to expand on helping Black Americans with Great Society and War on Poverty agendas. I would argue that the public broadcasting segment of the Great Society program was not a very good idea. Billions of dollars have been spent propping up an institution which has become nothing more than a government-paid source of liberal propaganda.  Then again, maybe it was a good idea, from liberal democrat perspective.  The War on Poverty gave us a government welfare program run amuck.  The war on poverty, in my opinion, has almost single-handedly destroyed the black family. It has also contributed significantly to many of the poor’s belief that government owes them a living and has created a reliable voting block for the Democrats. Again, though a bad idea for the country, this was probably a good idea for liberal Democrats. Then there was Johnson’s decision to escalate American presence in the Viet Nam war and micro-manage the effort, not allowing American forces to just win the blasted thing.

Richard Milhous Nixon once stood in front of television and proclaimed to America, “I am not a crook!”  It turns out that he pretty much was a crook. You can argue that he was no different than many other politicians, that he just got caught. You can also argue that he personally didn’t do anything wrong, that he didn’t personally know about break-ins and all that, that he was trying to protect his friends and supporters. That all might be true, but the truth remains that he lied to the American people.  Some might also argue that even though he was a “crook” he was a pretty good president—I wouldn’t  necessarily—that he was a genius on foreign policy, that he was good because he supported  OSHA and Affirmative Action—I wouldn’t, necessarily .  For me, he was not the Devil, as he was for many on the left, but a weak man who tried to be pragmatic and probably never should have been president. When Ford and Carter were vying for my vote in 1976, I voted 3rd party.   I didn’t like the idea that Ford had pardoned Nixon—the law is the law in my mind—and figured the fix was in when Ford was chosen to fill Agnew’s place when he resign—a certain crook—and I didn’t want another less-than-honest president any longer than necessary. And, Carter was a clear idiot. Everything Carter did was a mistake when he became president: Department of Education, price controls, giving the Panama Canal away, not going to and getting the hostages in Iran and kicking handing their butts to them. I know I’m leaving stuff out, but this blog is going to be pretty long as it is. I had been for Reagan during the 76’ election and I was very disappointed that he didn’t get the nomination. As it turned out, I later changed my mind about Ford. He was just a less-than-bright politician in my mind, but I think he may have been right about pardoning Nixon. But, I never, ever, had a reason to change my mind about Carter. The only dimmer bulb that close to the Presidency in the past century, who always seems to have the wrong opinion about anything might be Biden.  Let me say here that I will never cast a protest vote for a third party again.

I guess I have already given you my thoughts on Ford and Carter, so I needn’t go there.  Reagan was a breath of fresh air for me and you can go to an earlier blog of mine on this site to get my flesh-out on the Great Communicator.  George H. W. Bush was a very good man and a pretty decent president. He was great in creating a coalition and going after Iraq and pushing them out of Kuwait, but he should have gone into Bagdad and turned it over to non-thugs.  He also had a hard time sticking to his guns and worried too much about trying to get along with the left side of politics. Trusting them to keep their word on cutting spending, if he would agree to raising taxes, along with that crazy man from Texas, Ross Perot, siphoning off conservative votes, cost him his re-election.  I think I already said that protest votes for a 3rd party are not a good idea. Ross helped Clinton again four years later. What a dolt.

William Jefferson Clinton stood before the television cameras and declared to America, “I never had sex with that woman…I never lied…I never lied…I never asked anyone to lie…not a single time!”  It turns out that he was right about the “single time” part.  He actually did all of those things multiple times.  Then, he perjured himself in a legal proceeding and apparent suborned perjury.  He was impeached by the House and found not guilty by the Senate. If I could have, I would have voted against every Senator, Republican or Democrat who voted not guilty. The idea that perjury is okay, if it is about sex, is pathetic and appalling to me.  Some will argue—liberal Democrats—that he was a good steward of the economy.  That may be the case, but he tried to sneak an Obama-like health care system through, that would have hurt us as much as then as one we one that was forced on us a couple years ago when Obama had undefeatable control of both houses of congress. Lucky for us that we Republicans were able to gain control of the House of Representatives and forced Clinton to sign welfare changes that cut those particular expenditures in half. If unchecked, we don’t know what kind of steward of the economy he might have been.  We also had a peace dividend and Clinton took the opportunity to cut military spending, creating the impression—there was a huge bubble in cyber investments at the time—that we were more in the black than we were.  Yes, you could argue that he was a very good steward of the economy, but then you would also have to argue that the Republicans and Newt Gingrich were too.  But the president will generally get the credit, for the good and the bad. By the way, I have not changed my mind about the Senate finding Clinton not guilty, not even a little bit.  If a man will cheat on his wife and break a covenant before God, he will most certainly be able to be tempted to cheat on his country and break his oath of office.  Case in point, perjury: To save yourself from public embarrassment. 

When George W. Bush came along, it was obvious to me that there was some regret by many on the right for turning his father out of office and getting the Perjurer-in-Chief.  After the 2000 election was finally put to bed and the antics of Gore and the demented left, I felt happy that we dodged the Gore bullet. After the attack on 9-11, I was ecstatic that we had dodged the Gore bullet.  I was exuberant, when we dodged the John (I am reporting for service) Kerry bullet.  George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, had to rebuild a military which had been decimated by liberal Democrats before them. He also cut taxes, as Kennedy and Reagan did before him with the same results: increased revenues. But having to rebuild a military at the same time as fighting a war against Muslim terrorists cost us a lot of money. Couple that with the housing bubble created by cheap and unprotected loans to thousands upon thousands of home-buyers buying more home than they could afford, thanks to the work of Frank and Dodd and their cronies in the loaning institutions, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and economic trouble came a-knocking. Of course the Left declared it was Bush’s and Wall Street’s fault.  I buy some of that. The Bush administration tried to draw in the reins on Freddie and company, but Frank and Dodd, “there is no problem there, besides its racist to not give a loan to someone because they can’t afford it”.  Bush should have stood his ground and not worried about being called racist. They would have done that no matter what he did.

Then, we elected a man named Barack Hussein "" The Buck Stops With everyone Else, Especially George W. Bush" Obama.  It was a perfect storm for the advent of maybe the most polarizing president in the last one hundred years. The huge housing bubble finally burst a couple of months before the 2008 election, the stock market was in shambles and there was huge scare that the banking institutions would tumble. And, the other western economies were on the verge of collapse. The country was at a time and place in history when a black man or a woman of any ethnicity might be elected.  Enter the ten-year-old voting mentality and a nice looking young black man (technically half black), Barack Hussein Obama.  The liberal media was not interested in Obama’s past or what his philosophical beliefs were. He was a black “liberal’ who was not Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Sheila Jackson Lee or any of the other liberal blacks who had un-coverable faults which would turn off mainstream voters.  Of course if they looked too closely, they would find out some interesting facts which might put people off, such as: His father and mother were avowed communists; his grandparents were avowed socialists; his mentor in Hawaii, Frank Davis, was an avowed communist; he attended a black liberation theology church (very socialistic , if not communistic in its theology) presided over by Jeremiah Wright, who has repeatedly disparaged America in his sermons for the twenty years that Obama attended the church; he was close friends with communists and domestic terrorists, Bill  Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn—he says they were just people in his neighborhood but he opened his campaign in their home; Tony Resko, the slumlord real estate buddy who got Obama his property for his home in Chicago at a sweetheart price and is currently cooling his heels in the pen for fraud and bribery along with his other buddy, Rod Blagoiavich, who thought it was a workable deal to ask Obama to pay him for appointing a US Senator of Obama’s choice; and many more that could also be added.  The point is that the media did not want to look too closely at Obama for fear that what they found and then report on it might hurt Obama’s chances of being the first “Black President”. Obama was touted as very intelligent, if not the most intelligent man to live in the White House.  There is actually not that much that substantiates that belief.  All of his college records, including applications, have been sealed, with a lot of money invested that they stay that way. Obama has admitted that he was a doper and slacker in high school and Occidental College, so one might ask how was he able to get into Brown, an Ivy League school, when even really good students in the tops of their classes find it extremely hard to get in. Even his major papers have been sealed. We know that he was President of Harvard Law Review and that might suggest that he had some smarts, but we are unable to see his writings. Why would he not be proud to let the world know what he was capable of?  A skeptical and questioning mind like mine might think there is something there that he would rather we not know.  And, given some silly things he has said on the campaign trail about the number of states there are in the country and his perplexity over the pronunciation of the word “corpsman”, I’m rather doubtful of his intellect. Then you have to consider his ideas about building the economy by spending money and borrowing 40cents of every dollar doing it. What can I say? He is still a mystery man. We now have a federal deficit of nearly $17 trillion and climbing, and he is doubling down on Keynesian economic philosophy, which has always turned out badly when inflicted on an unsuspecting populace.  I have blogged plenty on Obama’s deficiencies, in various posts the last three years, so you can look for those on this site to gather more of my opinions on the man, and I’ll leave it at that.

That brings me to Mitt Romney. The Left would tell you that he is an unscrupulous businessman who hasn’t bothered to paid taxes for ten years prior to running for president this time around, tough he ran four years ago for president and ran for governor of Massachusetts before that and Senator of Massachusetts before that. He would have to be pretty stupid to do that with all the red flags that would show be hoisted up for the IRS to ignore. They would also have you believe that because he headed up his company, Bain Capital until 1999, when he left to pursue other non-business activities, that he was somehow responsible for a woman’s death of cancer seven years after the fact.  It was alleged by Obama’s administration employees that he caused the steel company, for whom her husband worked for, to go bankrupt, leaving him and his wife without  “HEALTH INSURANCE”!  As I have pointed out anyone who will listen, the CEO of Bain at the time of the closure was an Obama bundler and the guy was offered a buyout which he refused and that his wife had her own health insurance through her job for two years after he lost his job.  Meanwhile, our current president is bankrupting us.  We know what the Left thinks they can convince the uninformed of Mitt Romney, so let us look at Mitt Romney’s unsealed records. Part of the following was forwarded to me in an email and I think the substance is worth looking at:

Willard Mitt Romney

He was born March 12, 1947 and is 65 years old. I think he would provide a birth certificate, the first time asked.

His Father: George W. Romney was born American citizens in Mexico in a Mormon community. He was only a high school graduate, but worked his way to be the head of American Motors and is credited with turn that company around in troubled times and saving it from bankruptcy. His popularity as a good and honest businessman led to his being elected Governor of the State of Michigan.

Mitt was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan

He is Married to Ann Romney since 1969; they five children.

Education:
B.A. from Brigham Young University,

J.D. and M.B.A. from Harvard University

Religion:
Mormon - The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints

Working Background:

After high school, he spent 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary at his own expense—Mormon missionaries and lay clergy receive no compensation for their labors.

After going to both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School simultaneously, he passed the Michigan bar exam, but never worked as an attorney.

In 1984, he co-founded Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm, one of the largest such firms in the United States.

In 1994, he ran for Senator of Massachusetts and lost to Ted Kennedy.

He was President and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. He was asked to take over the enterprise when it had fallen into deep financial mire and serious allegations of bribery to the international Olympic Committee.

In 2002, he was elected Governor of the State of Massachusetts where he eliminated a 1.5 billion deficit.

Some Interesting Facts about Romney;

Bain Capital, starting with one small office supply store in Massachusetts, turned it into Staples; now over 2,000 stores employing 90,000 people.

Bain Capital also worked to perform the same kinds of business miracles again and again, with companies like Domino's, Sealy, Brookstone, Weather Channel, Burger King, Warner Music Group, Dollarama, Home Depot Supply, and many others.

He was an unpaid volunteer campaign worker for his dad's gubernatorial campaign one year.

He was an unpaid intern in his dad's governor's office for eight years.

He was an unpaid bishop and stake president of his church for ten years.  These callings are more than the equivalent of part-time jobs.

He was an unpaid President of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee for three years.

He took no salary and was the unpaid Governor of Massachusetts for four years.

He gave his entire inheritance from his father to charity!  This would seem an unlikely action for the money-grubbing scoundrel the Left would like for us to believe him.

Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest self-made men in our country but has given more back to its citizens in terms of money, service and time than most men.

And in 2011 Mitt Romney gave over $4 million to charity, almost 19% of his income.... Just for comparison purposes, Obama gave 1% and Joe Biden gave $300 or .0013%. Obama and Biden are wealthy men in their right. You would think that they would shy away from comparing tax returns with Romney, but it’s clear that they are counting more on the ignorant not being able to differentiate between tax percentages for the income tax they pay for their income from their “Jobs” and the percentage of income Mitt pays from his investment—he no longer works at a job and thus only pays taxes on investment income. That is called CAPITAL GAINS TAX! It is assumed that money invested has already been taxed once and should be only taxed again, if there is a return on that investment, at a lesser rate than regular income (from a job) to encourage investment, which helps grow the economy and creates more jobs—this tidbit of understanding is lost on a lot of Democrat voters.

Mitt Romney is Trustworthy—nobody who has worked closely with him has found fault with him, except perhaps an imaginary friend of Harry Reid, which is more than can be said for Harry Reid.

He will show us his birth certificate, the first time asked.

He will show us his high school and college transcripts.

He will show us his law degree.

He will show us his draft notice.

He will show us his medical records.

He will show us enough of his income tax records as is reasonable. Two years has been sufficient for most others running for president.

He will show us he has nothing to hide.

Mitt Romney's background, experience and trustworthiness show him to be a great leader and an excellent citizen for President of the United States.

We now find ourselves at place where we can make an important decision about our country’s future. It is time to make educated choices. We tried the uneducated choice four years ago and it has left us teetering on a precipice of disaster. We need to catch our balance, step back and change course.  If there are enough of us who can leave our ten-year-old selves behind and use common sense, we might be able to do that. If there should be any suspicion cast on anyone, it should not be on Mitt Romney. We could not do much better at this point in time, and we could continue to do much worse, as history has shown us. And we can pray that it is not too late.