The Endorsement

Because everyone's really dying to see who I'm voting for -- I'm sure I can pull at least as many votes as the vagina video.

Seriously... here are the real reasons to vote, and vote for Mitt Romney.  I'll stick to five of them, to keep it simple.

1.  Competence/Experience.  Seriously, this should be a baseline qualification for any job, and leader of the Free World requires it.  Liberals spent 8 years complaining that W. couldn't put his pants on without help, and then they proceeded to foist Captain Zero on the country in 2008.  We are talking about a single-term U.S. Senator with a background in the state legislature that featured very little legislating, little private-sector experience, and no executive experience outside of running the Harvard Law Review.  His best argument to counter this point during the 2008 campaign was that he was running a terrific campaign.  As we can see from the last four years, campaigning is not governing.  Hell, in his first important decision, he picked Joe Biden as his VP.  I could have thrown a dart at a board featuring the names of all the House members and Senators in 2008, and stood a 2-in-3 chance of getting someone smarter and better equipped to lead the country, and we're talking about a group that includes 200+ people who voted to put Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker's chair.

By contrast, Romney has run state government, the Olympics, Bain Capital, and two Presidential campaigns.  Bain was a raging success.  So was the turnaround of the Olympics.  His single term in Massachusetts was far more successful than Obama's single term as President.  Obama did run a successful campaign for President in 2008, so he has that on Romney.  And that's it.  And I would argue that Romney's campaign this year is nearly as impressive than Obama's 2008 campaign, because the world's not busy kissing Mitt's ass, and most of his own party wanted someone else in the job, and he overcame those handicaps.

2. Ideology.  I'm a conservative, and Mitt is not severely conservative enough for me. 

But he's not a raging liberal ideologue pretending to be a moderate.  Obama is easily the most liberal President of my lifetime, and that's saying something in a world where I lived through Jimmy Carter.  The accelerated unrestrained growth of government and the lack of any care for what he is doing to our fiscal future is reckless, but the lack of regard for religious liberty and free speech is even more alarming, if that's possible. To claim he is a conservative, as some have done, is basically an attempt to whitewash his record and convince Americans that their personal affection for him is in part derived by the fact that he really isn't way out on the left-wing tree.  The only reason he hasn't gone completely off the deep end is that he needed to get re-elected.  If re-elected, as he told Vladimir Putin, he'll have more flexibility.

Thanks, but no thanks.

3.  Partisan rancor.  Perhaps this is a permanent fixture in Washington, and our society... but Obama has made little to no attempt to use the enormous reservoir of goodwill he built up in 2008 to bridge the partisan divide.  And please -- stop with the "they started it!" BS.  Obama didn't have the experience or ability to convince people on the other side to follow his lead, because he sucks as a leader (more on that in a moment).

Frankly, I don't give a shit about bi-partisanship, since plenty of bi-partisan legislation ends up being lousy crap.  But Obama promised people something different.  Romney is doing the same now, and I have no clue if he can actually deliver.  But he does have a track record of actually doing it.  Obama has none.

4.  Leadership.  On nearly every important issue, Obama has punted when it called for real leadership.  He punted the stimulus to Reid and Pelosi, producing a wasted trillion-dollar boondoggle.  He failed to find a single GOP vote for Obamacare, in a world where Senators like Collins and Snowe happily vote for "moderate" legislation.  He couldn't forge any compromise within his own party to produce anything on energy or immigration, and governs largely by executive order edict.  And don't even get me started on his inability to address the debt and deficit.  Total failure and abdication of leadership on that issue would represent an improvement -- Obama's ignorance of it has been borderline criminal. 

As for foreign policy, his conduct on Benghazi, his fake destined-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, his unwillingness to lift his voice (let alone a finger) during the Green Revolution, the lack of any results from his selling out allies like Poland for a "reset" with Russia, and his "leading from behind" in Libya (including the ignorance of the War Powers Act, even if its unconstitutional).. is there anything really admirable here?

Yes, he gave the order to kill bin Laden... and promptly watched his administration leak every detail of the operation imaginable, to help burnish his image.  Perhaps the reason Biden finds the call so gutsy is because it's out of character for O.

Romney?  He is, without a doubt, a leader.  From running Bain to running Massachusetts, he has been a definitive executive who's shown an ability to take charge and accomplish goals.  He made an out-of-the-box call on his VP pick in taking Paul Ryan, perhaps the most substantively smart elected guy in Washington.  And he's run a campaign that has been the equivalent of the tortoise in Aesop's fable.  Note that the tortoise won that race, against significant odds.

5.  The cult of personality.  I'm sick of President Celebrity -- I could handle it with Clinton only because it was accompanied with actual accomplishments, whether I liked him or not.  Obama is an empty vessel -- he's a big-budget Hollywood movie with a formulaic plot, no character development of any significance, and a lot of special effects that ultimately mean nothing.  He might as well hire George Lucas as his campaign manager.

And as we all know, sequels for such movies just rock. 

That's it for the endorsement.  And now, assuming I can stomach writing while watching the Eagles look like crap again, I may issue a prediction.  But no matter what, allow me to encourage all seven people reading this to go vote.  It's your civic duty, or so we're told.  It would be good if you placed an informed vote, but we're not requiring that.