- It's Not Obama's Fault

I'm only going to say this once. The truth of the matter is, this credit downgrade is not Obama's fault. He's just the guy who's been left holding the bag. He hasn't done anything to improve the situation, but neither (really) has anyone else we've elected before 2010.

Nor is it the fault of who the Democrats still blame for every ill wind since the Pleistocene era, that evil super villain George W. Bush. Bush spent money like water, as has Obama. But neither of them was deviating much from the longer trend. That's simply the way things have been done in Washington for more then a generation.

In reality this is our fault. We elected these useless hacks. We encouraged them to pick everyone else's pockets, and we let them get away with treating socialism as a moral imperative. There was already plenty of evidence that they were economic illiterates long before we elected them. So we are who is to blame. Only us.

And here's the thing, if we don't change our ways now, I believe it's entirely possible that the republic is finished. Either we turn our backs on the old way of doing things in Washington which is so effectively epitomized (almost caricatured) by Obama, or we may very well see the end of the United States. If we are so wedded to our socialist fantasies that we can re-elect someone like him, who has more than demonstrated that he's completely divorced from economic reality, then we deserve to be finished.

The path the left would have us take leads only to the rioting we're seeing in Athens, and eventual default. Nowhere else. There isn't any real 'third way'. We can't even afford to elect a Republican who isn't absolutely dedicated to economic liberty. The things we need to do will be too difficult for anyone who is going to worry about his standing in the polls. It requires a man, and a congress, who can allow the NYTimes and the liberal press to call them horrid villains every day, and still do what must be done. In a word, they need to be Tea Partiers.

If we don't, then my 11 year old daughter may very well graduate from college in another country, even if she never leaves NJ.