The reasons to not vote for a disastrous Romney presidency keep piling up, and conservatives are some of the most persuasive voices offering them. Just look at this American Conservative roundup of right-wingers, most of whom will not be voting for Romney and have very little to say about him that's positive (bit.ly/YnrZb8).
But I don't need that confab of conservative sanity, because I've got my own reasons. Start with the simple fact that Romney is a duplicitous swindler (bit.ly/SwYfXy) who doesn't understand how disaster funding or prevention works to calamitous end - Dan Bosley and John Barrett III even say so (huff.to/SvIFMJ), and Chris Christie seems to agree (nyr.kr/SksHCJ). And his policies will lead to disaster in public health areas, as they did with this meningitis outbreak (nyr.kr/SksHCJ).
Further, it's been found that Romney used his religion to siphon money away and avoid paying taxes for a decade (bloom.bg/Uh9eC3), as fellow Mormon Harry Reid alleged.
And modern Romney knowingly spreads malicious lies to scare auto industry workers and grab votes (bit.ly/QUl85P) despite the protest of the company he's maligning.
Oh, it just goes on and on.
Willard
Since I can't hide my loathing for Willard, I have decided to back a calm, intelligent African-American who exhibits a socially liberal side with some moderately conservative tones in other areas, who is well-respected despite some troubles, and who is well-spoken, with some great foreign policy experience.
I speak, of course, of Colin Powell.
Oh, I see he's endorsing Obama. OK, well, if I must.
It seems such a long time ago when Republicans were hyped up for Colin Powell.
Could that even happen anymore? Since Bush and through the filter of Palin, I don't know that the sobered Republicans who begged for Powell to run even exist anymore.
What the hell happened to the Republicans?
Powell, at least, fits the bill of what a president should be, as I and millions of other American kids were taught in the 1960s and 1970s. But the days of exceptional men leading the nation are probably long gone - Nixon saw to that - and we have to settle for unexceptional men who won't screw too much up.
Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton were uninspiring, and each did their measure of things I didn't support, but they fell short of breaking the world. Then came George W.
Bush, who figured out how to do that.
Obama was a return to normalcy after the Bush years.
Not greatness, but certainly normalcy. He was like the men who came before W.
Some of his original supporters have mistaken a return to normalcy as a bid to greatness, but the desperation after the W years raised expectations. Largely, Obama's presidency has been taken up by strange accusations. Republicans have tried hard to paint him as a socialist, Muslim, un-American devil, but we know that's not true. Like those before W., he's just another guy in charge of the country who can steward it along without ruining much.
His bad luck was to come along after a presidency that indulged in a scorched earth policy. Not all the fires have been put out, and certainly Obama is not so dynamic that he's capable of extinguishing them overnight.
But the post W. world we live in is not just Obama's; it's a collaboration between him and his rowdy accusers - the Republican Party - and it's a road map of what's to come, sadly.
Only in that manipulated circumstance could someone like Romney even remotely seem like an acceptable alternative option. Could Obama save the country in the next four years? Maybe. More than likely, he won't make it any worse. That puts him far ahead of Romney, whose pathological personality, elitism, financial duplicity and slight of hand in policy matters would surely make him the worst person to sit in the Oval Office since good ol' Nixon himself.
Sadly, there's no Colin Powell to save us anymore - he can endorse, but he can't lead - and the Republicans have sold their souls to a destructive darkness. Under Obama, we are forced to fight for a shadow of our former normalcy instead of any possible golden age. And despite the lies of the Republicans, that may be all we can hope for any more.
John Seven is the Transcript's arts and entertainment editor.
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