There are times when I find that being right is not a pleasant experience. The current sorry state of our national leadership — or more correctly, the lack thereof — is just one such example.

In my real-world employment, I deal with examining computer-controlled mechanical system failures and devising means to correct and prevent them. I'm a firm believer in the validity of Murphy's Law and the many corollaries as a direct consequence of experience. But the negative side of this experience involves automatically creating worst-case scenarios for just about everything one becomes involved with. It's an ingrained habit that doesn't shake easily. It drives Mrs. R nuts!

It was worst-case scenario thinking which caused me not to vote for Barack Obama even though I agreed with much that he discussed during his campaign. Worst-case cogitation suggested that he was talking merely to win the election. It screamed that he didn't really mean what he said, and there was reason to so claim. His Senate voting record often went against what he had previously said he would do, and frankly I was surprised that this fact didn't come up more prominently during the campaign.

Based on how his presidency is now going, in hindsight his Senate record was an accurate predictor. Obama regularly does something different from what he said he would. As a nation we should have seen this mess coming, but we chose not to look. We chose instead to believe in snake-oil nostrums of hope over harsh and unforgiving reality. The only problem is that when things get tough, as they now have, hope is a poor strategy to follow for corrective action. You never get the machine repaired and running this way.

This doesn't mean that John McCain would have been a better choice. He freely admitted during the campaign that he was not very educated in economics, and his involvement with Charles Keating and the Lincoln Savings scandal didn't speak well of his integrity. Crashing five very expensive and taxpayer-funded fighter-bombers doesn't demonstrate responsible stewardship of the national property either. I doubt that our economy would be doing very well under his administration. It would likely now be much worse.

And just to conclude this portion of my personal political expose, each of the announced candidates for president in 2008 went through a similar examination and I determined that they were inadequate for the job at hand. The only option I had remaining was to write-in Ron Paul as a protest against the sorry state of American leadership, as he at least had a record of being against the grossly expensive and unproductive Terror War Against Terror and a firm belief in fiscal responsibility. He was all I had left even if I found him a bit extreme in most other areas.

Article Author: Realist

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