You lost the presidency, you lost seats in the Senate and the House. Your party is leaderless and soul searching.

Hopefully the House gop will adopt a posture of constructive engagement and compromise. If we spend the next two years dealing with more gop attempts to prolong the recession and default on the national debt you guys are going to get murdered in 2014.

The minority has said that if they don’t get their way they will not play. They don’t understand they lost the election and that the country is more important than either party. For them it’s “me, me, me and then some more for me”.

If Obama is smart he’ll ignore most of them, let them pledge to block anything he does, pick off the easy ones and move ahead any way he can. Conservatives have announced they want no part of the process except to be obstructionist.

And they are the ones to think they can export “democracy” to other countries. They don’t know what it is.

So did Eisenhower. We don’t know how Clinton or Nixon would have done without major third party candidates in the mix for one or both elections.

2)The primary function of government is not to ensure that the minority gets to keep the wealth it has extorted from the majority. The primary purpose of government is to protect the weak from the strong.

3) Anything less than an unlimited franchise
for all adults is totally unnacceptable. This is not Heinleinland, or Gentlemen of Property Only 1800s Virginia. Everybody over 18 votes on my planet, not just the the nice folks in Mayberry RFD.

The only “positive feedback loop” I see is the one you favor: the more you have, the more you are entitled to, and the more you get.

But then, I don’t believe reality is something people need “dictated” to them, by majority rule or anything else.

I’ve learned a lot from this past election. Like this:

1) We have abandoned the idea of a strictly limited government. The Federal government’s power is now essentially unrestricted.

2) By budget, the primary function of our government now is wealth redistribution from a minority to a majority.

3) We have unlimited franchise.

You don’t see any problems with this setup? A classic positive feedback loop?

We weren’t voting for “truth” this election. We were voting for loot.

That is what we mean by democracy, not that it must provide us with only what you believe to be true. It is why you are not a democrat, with a lower case “d”. You are a fanatic. You actually are convinced you have the key to knowledge and that no one else does. I cannot think of a better description or definition of a fanatic than that.

Not only do you actually believe that my way of say, administering a health care system (to select just one example) leads inevitably to a brutal collectivist dictatorship, but that this ludicrous conclusion must also be obvious to our hypothetical alien visitor.

You are totally incapable of visualizing how totally absurd you appear to others. That may be Objectivism, but it is not objectivity.

You are a fanatic, Tom, and it will be your downfall, just as it was for your party this year.
You want engineering certainty, scientific precision? There it is. Its as good as you’re going to get in any free human community. Freedom is not what you want, its what we can agree to.

Smiley has many faces, but they are all inscrutable.