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Presidential race boils down to one issue
Published: Sunday, August 19, 2012

THERE’S really only one issue in the 2012 presidential race; all the rest is trivia. That one issue is: Do you want to be in control of your life, or do you want government to control your life?

If you want to keep control over your life, then do not re-elect Barack Obama to a second term in the White House. Hold tight to your liberty.

If, however, you want your life defined, channeled and limited by Obama’s “we can’t wait” executive orders and the bureaucratic rules of government agencies, then Obama is your guy. But if he is re-elected, by the end of his second term in 2016, you won’t be living in the United States anymore. At least not the United States that gave your grandparents, parents and you the liberty to rise to the level of your dreams and talents.

The America of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” is one where if you’re successful, “you didn’t build that” success, and you are wrong if you want to keep your hard-earned income for your family and donate it to charitable causes as you see fit.

Obama’s America will be a place where other people who are less talented or less hard-working will have a government-backed claim on your income in this new era of “redistribution of wealth.”

This government will know how to spend your money better than you do, so more and more of your income will be taken from you in taxes, or penalties, or whatever they call it. Just don’t call it yours. It’s your job to feed the ever-growing government with your money, so that the bureaucrats and the politicians can spread it to whomever they see fit, however they decide, because, of course, they know better than you.

This won’t all happen overnight. Slow and steady is the preferred way of conducting their form of revolution. Each step will be cheered along as being perfectly reasonable, and the “American” thing to do. But one day you will suddenly realize that being American isn’t what it used to be back in 2012, and there’s no path back to home.

Being “American” will have become pretty much an unappealing gray, mush of mediocrity and few choices.

The Obama-like mindset that puts the state over the individual in an attempt to perfect society is a pernicious sickness that leads to the death of such societies: witness, the Soviet Union, which died 20 years ago, after three quarters of a century of oppressing and murdering its own population in the name of the state.

During that same period of world history, the United States of America grew strong and took its place at the head of the free world. America’s rise to superpower was fueled by men and families of vision, with the freedom to transform their dreams into reality, unhindered by suffocating, and punishing government regulations and red tape. It was a place where ordinary hard-working people could earn a paycheck, keep most of it to use as they saw fit, and give their children an even better standard of living.
That’s the America that Obama has vowed to “fundamentally transform” — and that’s the heart of this 2012 election.

Obama never said what he meant by “transform” in 2008, and now in 2012 it’s clear from his record that by “transform” he means “destroy.”

Destroy by ramping up the national debt to economy crushing proportions. Destroy by killing Americans’ ability to grow a business, buy a home, educate a family, save for a good retirement.

Destroy by sidelining Congress and dictating economically stifling environmental regulations and other business-choking rules. The longtime landmark electric power plant on Lake Erie’s shore in Avon Lake is to be shut down because Obama regulations make it a losing proposition to operate.

Destroy by infecting the world’s best medical system with ruinously expensive Obamacare. It will drive doctors out of practice while dumping millions of additional people into a system of Byzantine complexity without accountability. It will fail massively in its original goal of providing health care to all.

Destroy by abusing the Constitution to dictate by presidential executive orders and by executive agency rules: think of the order halting deportation of illegal aliens who arrived as children; think of the contraception coverage mandate violating religious rights issued by Obama appointee and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Destroy by slashing our military budget and leaving us with a dangerously weakened national security capability. History shows that evil leaders among the world’s nations are emboldened when they sense weakness. Obama aims to please Russian dictator Vladimir Putin with his “flexibility” after he is re-elected. Putin’s courts just threw a three-girl punk rock band into prison for two years for a brief protest against Putin’s co-opting of the Russian Orthodox Church. In response, a third-string Washington flunky noted that the White House was “disappointed” by the prison sentences. Putin spits on Obama and on liberty, and he is emboldened.

Obama hoodwinked the nation in 2008, and he thinks he can do it again in 2012 by buying votes with government benefits and the lure of medical care. The more government owns your life, the more repressive it becomes; that’s a given that flows from human nature. Control, when left unchecked, is a one-way street to tighter and tighter control over your life.

That’s what the Nov. 6 election is all about: Do you want to be in control of your life, or do you want government to control your life?

Tom Skoch is editor of The Morning Journal and www.MorningJournal.com, where his Tell the Editor blog appears. He is on Twitter as MJ_Tom_Skoch and can be contacted by e-mail at tskoch@morningjournal.com.

http://morningjournal.com/articles/2012 … =fullstory

Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Aug 19, 2012 8:17 am