A Bridge Too Far

How far away from our core principles are we willing to go to vote for a political candidate? Nobody is perfect and thus no candidate or voter will perfectly match up. We make allowances. We create bridges of acceptance and toleration for minor differences not only to keep the peace with those who share our core principles, but to maintain and advance those beliefs through the minefield of the presidential election process and to arrive on the other side with an elected official who will best represent us and lead the nation the way it should be lead. That said, how far is too far?

Sadly, we have become so accustom to misleading and flat out lying politicians and their self serving ads that their deceptions are shrugged off as politics as usual. That apathy results in much of the mind-numbed public accepting any candidate as long as they are a part of the party for whom they are accustomed to voting. Anybody not going along with the growing list of objectionable missteps, election year conversions, and embarrassing reversals are chided to “take one for the team” in the name of victory at any cost. It’s like our election process has become one big football game. It doesn’t matter how dirty the game is played so long as the home team wins. Well, that is just wrong and I’ve about had enough of it.

From a host of 9 or 10 Republican primary candidates that were running all at the same time last fall, we are now down to two. Regardless of how gracefully or shamefully the others bowed out of the race, we are left with Romney, the guy the press has constantly lavished positive and unending headlines for and Paul, the invisible man. The establishment of the Republican Party wants Romney because he is just like they are; vapid and malleable. Beyond the establishment of the Republican Party, most conservatives in general are scared to death of Paul because of his naivety (or just willful ignorance) of the existential threat of jihadist Islam and the suicidal foreign policy that would result in a Paul administration.

I will not be voting for the Marxist currently occupying the Whitehouse, so I find myself reduced to considering either a candidate whose public persona is eerily similar to a life-like Ken doll (perfect hair and all) that can be dressed up and bent into any form any time or someone whose worldview says that we are the bad guys, that 911 was our own fault, and the bomb vested Islamic jihadists are only blowing themselves up for Allah because of us. Not wanting to be beheaded, dismembered, or generally blown to smithereens by a not-so-friendly Muslim Brotherhood representative, I find myself left with the Ken-doll candidate. Good grief. Boy do I ever miss Ronald Reagan now.

So just what are the bridges of acceptance and tolerance I’m going to have to build to vote for Romney. Well, they are many and they are long.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room is health care of course. He says he would repeal Obamacare. Sounds great! Why wouldn’t he do the same for Massachusetts? You see, despite his insistence that it is wrong on a national level he sees no problem at all forcing a government program like that on people at the state level which means he really has no appreciation at all for the basic freedoms and more importantly restrictions on government on which our nation was founded. He has simply made an economic and political calculation in a federal race. Accepting this would mean accepting a bridge to a place I do not want to go with a candidate I do not agree with or trust.

Romney promotes himself as the businessman extraordinaire and he certainly does have credentials to show for that. However, while he is out talking about how he would cut spending and reduce the size of government in our personal lives, he supports government subsidies for things that the pop culture and junk science says we should have. One very good example is Ethanol. He has publically stated that he supports subsidizing ethanol to help reduce green house gasses and fight allegedly man-made global warming. Bridge number two is up in flames, carbon emissions and all.

Romney is no friend of the gun owner. Oh he has (laughably) said that he was a hunter and tried to court gun owners, but it’s a bit insulting coming from a governor who was proud to have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation for his freedom hampered MA citizens. Ask him about what the second amendment has to say about that and I doubt the words “shall not be infringed” would be on his lips. It’s getting harder to see how I’m going to cross the political river to vote for the Mitt man but until recently I had kept my sights set on that distant shore just knowing I was going to be able to get there on that bridge of justification and sacrifice for the team.

There are other reasons, but a couple of weeks ago something rather quietly came and went without much attention at all. Romney hired someone who is openly homosexual to be his top spokesman for national security and foreign policy and when that … stuff hit the fan, the official spokesman suddenly was not given any opportunity to speak. He resigned because of it and Romney’s response was that he wished he would have stayed. Mr. flip flop who is adamant that marriage is between a man and a woman sees no problem accepting and elevating an openly homosexual person (who is a vocal supporter for same sex marriage of course) to the highest levels of his campaign, muting him when people found out what was not hidden, and then lamenting the loss.

Mr. Romney, this is a bridge too far. You have no principles that extend any further than the nearest popular opinion. However better you would certainly be as an alternative to the Marxist we have now, I can not in good conscience continue to fall on my moral sword. It enables the Republican Party to keep forcing candidates like you down our throats and what is far worse is that it is an abandonment of the moral system on which our nation was founded and blessed to prosper.

God removed his protection on our once-moral nation on 9-11-01. In 2008-2009 a second blow came with the biggest loss of our economic stability since the Great Depression. What did we do with those warnings? Since then our presidents have created tyrannical departments (think TSA and DHS) that get away with violating several of the first ten amendments on a daily basis. We’ve spent more money in the last 3 years than the previous 200+ plunging us into an irreversible dept spiral. If that weren’t enough defiance of God’s clear warnings, the current occupant of the white house calls the Koran “holy”, the Bible unfit for guidance on running a country, and our founding constitution flawed. The bridge for that correction does not cross a river of accepting the loss of our most sacred freedoms, generational government imposed debt, and end-stage moral decay. That bridge leads to perdition and that is not a road I am going to travel any more.