Will Romney and the GOP, and the media voices that support them, argue strongly enough against Obama and the Democrats, and their mainstream media toadies?

Ernest S. Christian writes this fairly strong argument at Investor’s Business Daily:

In the year 2008 …  Americans were duped into electing a president quite different from the illusion for which they voted.

The real Barack Obama is a steely-eyed autocrat, dedicated to expanding his power at the expense of our liberty, still a bit of a Marxist, alternately hostile to or agnostic about capitalism, and intent on transforming America into a government-controlled society composed of obedient automatons.

“A bit of a Marxist” is weak. He is a Marxist born and bred, forever unremittingly hostile to capitalism.  

The lights of personal and economic freedom in America are starting to flicker. If Obama gets a second term, they will go out. As Charles Krauthammer said, Obama “will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return.”

Upon arrival, we will sink into a new dark age of absurdities designed by Obama. Centuries of American law and civilization will be turned upside down. The sacred will be defiled, the repugnant exalted, the Constitution inverted. Instead of protecting us, it will be used to exploit and enslave us.

We’re not moved to preserve the “sacred” if the word denotes religious things. But we’re happy to use the word in a secular sense and say, for instance, that freedom is “sacred”.

Our rights to speech, religion and property, and to privacy in our persons and homes, will be transformed. They will become Obama’s rights to take our property, tell us what to say …  what medical care we may receive and how long we are permitted to live.

Swarms of bureaucrats will tell us how to raise and educate our children, what they shall be taught, what job they (and we) are to work at, the wages we receive, what to do with the money, and if we are allowed to “own” a business, whom to hire and fire, what to produce and sell, and how much profit (if any) we are permitted to make. 

Is this apocalyptic prognosis overstated?

We don’t think it is.

The writer goes on to deplore Obama’s attack on the Catholic Church “on matters of conscience”, and how he is “hectoring Christianity out of the public square “. We do not advocate government interference with religious observance, or approve of it. We think religious belief should be argued out of existence.

The attack ends more strongly:

The stalwart Ronald Reagan forced Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and freed the world from the scourge of old-style Soviet authoritarianism. But here they go again. Barack Obama — the new-style authoritarian — is now ensconced in the White House, transmitting secret messages to Vladimir Putin and directing the final assault on President Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”

Obama is already bombarding America with deadly deficits, exploding debts and debilitating regulations. The economy is badly wounded. Millions of jobs have been obliterated. There is “Obama money” and make-work for those who collaborate — but hard times for everyone else. That’s the way Obama’s “protection racket” works.

He has cruelly targeted the old and sick, threatening them with the emotional and medical horrors of ObamaCare. He has stolen the future from the young. Already facing a lifetime of high unemployment, high taxes and slow growth, they will stare in horror as a re-elected Obama tramples underfoot the last vestiges of the American Dream.

Barack Obama will not throw dissidents into torture chambers or send trainloads of us off to gulags in Siberia. He won’t need to. He will use federal rules and regulations to break us, forcing us to do and say whatever he wishes. No scars, no screams of agony, only the crushed spirits and shame of people bound head to foot in red tape and groveling for crumbs.

But how will the 50% of voters be made to see this? And even if they did see it and believe it, how many would then vote  against it?

While we’re delighted that the tax deal Obama has had to reach with the congressional Republicans infuriates his leftist base, we don’t like much else about it.

True, it would extend the present rates (what the left calls “the Bush tax cuts”), but only for two years. And – very bad – it would revive the wholly unjustifiable and positively iniquitous inheritance tax, at 35 percent on estates worth more than $5 million. It would also pay the unemployed to stay unemployed for an extra year. A further $700 billion would be added to the ever-rising national debt. Obama and the Democrats still believe that high taxes and high government spending will repair the economy. But as Winston Churchill said: “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”

What particularly irks the mean, envious left is, of course, that Obama has broken his vow to end “the Bush-era tax cuts” that benefit “the rich”. The Democrats were reluctantly willing to let the present rates be extended for “the middle class”, but not for “millionaires and billionaires”. But on that point the Republicans stood firm: no tax increases for anybody. Obama gave in, apparently because he feared a stalemate.

We regret that the Republicans did not play more on Obama’s fear of stalemate to negotiate all that they wanted, including and especially no inheritance tax.

If only they had the feisty fighting spirit of this article by two optimists, Ernest S. Christian and Gary A Robbins, in Investor’s Business Daily:

The new-style, newly empowered Republicans in Congress should follow the advice given by Winston Churchill in 1941 to the graduating class of the Harrow School:

“Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Superb legislators like soon-to-be Speaker of the House John Boehner have no reason to make Faustian bargains with Barack Obama and the menagerie of union-made pols whose destructive policies so thoroughly still dominate the Democratic Party. Neither do Republican wise men in the Senate like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch.

Republicans do not need the approval of gauzy-minded pundits at the Washington Post and the New York Times who are stuck in a 1932-65 time warp. The left-wing think tanks that once dominated thought in Washington are now intellectually bankrupt. Why listen to the architects of a failed federal government now so large, dumb and clumsy that it does more harm than good?

Ultra-bright young Republicans in the House and Senate — such as Mike Pence, Marco Rubio, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan — must not sacrifice the clarity of their new ideas on the phony altar of “bipartisan” compromise. They and their pro-individual, pro-prosperity, small-government policies are what the voters want and America needs. Why not have the best, instead of some diluted version?

These young Republican leaders are by intellect and character far better equipped to be president of the United States than the present incumbent. They are at the cutting edge of a reawakening in America that demands intellectual competence and moral integrity in public affairs. …

Congressman Dave Camp, soon-to-be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, understands taxes. He and Ryan know that the present tax code — largely designed and built by Democrats — does at least $2 of damage to the private economy for every $1 of tax revenue collected. And they know that raising job-killing taxes, stifling business capital investment and running up the debt are not the ways to restore prosperity to America.

In our daydreams some conservative leader in power one day makes the revolutionary proposal that people who reach the point of earning – say – over $2 million a year start paying a lower rate of income tax than anybody else. It would a terrific incentive to grow rich!

We also dream of the abolition of income tax. And sales taxes too. As Winston Churchill also said: ‘There’s no such thing as a good tax.”

But dreams aside, we’d be glad enough of a low flat rate for everybody.