The Patriot Post Chronicle 10-24-2012

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 10-24-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Straw Man of the Left

October 24, 2012

The Foundation

"If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?" --John Adams

Editorial Exegesis

"There were hits and misses and mishaps in the three presidential debates, but what is most important is that voters now know Mitt Romney. ... The media for many long months allowed the Obama campaign to define Mitt Romney. They obsessed last summer over his tax returns, let an Obama aide suggest Romney might be a felon, and paid scant attention when an Obama super PAC outrageously said Romney caused the wife of a laid-off steel plant worker to die of cancer. Now that Americans have seen the Democratic and Republican nominees for president side by side on three occasions ... they can better decide who Mitt Romney is. What they saw was not a monster or extremist but someone ready and able to lead as soon as the voters give him the job. Of all the things Romney said in the debates, what may end up going into the voting booths in the minds of Americans are the phrases, 'I've done it before, I'll do it again ... I've done it my entire life.' He was referring to 'leadership in Washington that will actually bring people together and get the job done' because he did it with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature as governor of Massachusetts. And he was referring to doing 'what it takes to balance budgets,' as he did in running and helping start up and fixing businesses -- more than 150 of them. A presidential debate is not a boxing match, with three judges deciding the winner based on punches landed. ... After seeing him for so long, side by side with the president and unfiltered by the media, voters now know the truth: Mitt Romney can bring competence back to the Oval Office." --Investor's Business Daily1

Editor's Note: View the full transcript2 of Monday night's foreign policy debate.

Upright

"The mantle of ... leadership for promoting the principles of peace has fallen to America. We didn't ask for it, but it's an honor that we have it. But for us to be able to promote those principles of peace requires us to be strong, and that begins with a strong economy here at home, and unfortunately, the economy is not stronger. ... We have to stand by our principles. And if we're strong in each of those things, American influence will grow. But unfortunately, in nowhere in the world is America's influence greater today than it was four years ago." --Mitt Romney

"From the very beginning, the president, in his campaign some four years ago, said he'd meet with all the world's worst actors in his first year. ... And then the president began what I've called an apology tour of going to -- to various nations in the Middle East and -- and criticizing America. I think they looked at that and saw weakness. ... Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators." --Mitt Romney

"This nation is the hope of the earth. We've been blessed by having a nation that's free and prosperous thanks to the contributions of the Greatest Generation. They've held a torch for the world to see, the torch of freedom and hope and opportunity. Now it's our turn to take that torch. I'm convinced we'll do it." --Mitt Romney

"Speaking as the son of a Marine Corps officer and the brother of a Navy officer, I think Obama's 'horses and bayonets' wisecrack wasn't his biggest miscalculation. All that did was lose him the military vote in the Norfolk area and thus, most likely, the state of Virginia. Rather, it was the weird way he kept conflating the war-fighting purpose of the military with 'taking care' of the veterans after they come home. Military personnel deeply resent the implication, so earnestly peddled by the bed-wetting civilians at the New York Times, among others, that returning vets are just a PTSD psycho hair-trigger away from going postal. They're soldiers, Mr. President, not crybabies." --columnist Michael Walsh

"DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz seems to reside in a different reality than the rest of us. After the debate [Monday] night she said: 'What I was surprised about ... during the entire section of the debate on the Middle East, Mitt Romney didn't bring up Israel once and I think it just shows he isn't committed to Israel as he says he is and has really only used the issue as a political opportunity.' The only problem for Wasserman Schultz is that a mere glance at the transcript of last night's debate shows that Romney mentioned Israel eleven times. ... Debbie Wasserman Schultz's attempt to spin the president's abysmal record on Israel is unbecoming, and let us hope that Florida's Jewish community will take note of Mitt Romney's actual statements in the debate in their state." --National Review's Nathaniel Botwinick

Insight

"Every time that we try to lift a problem from our own shoulders, and shift that problem to the hands of the government, to the same extent we are sacrificing the liberties of our people." --President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Demo-gogues

From Barack Obama's debate performance Monday night: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years. But, Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s." --Barack Obama ("So he's Reagan, Eisenhower and Coolidge all rolled into one? Sounds way too good to be true, but one can only hope." --WSJ columnist James Taranto)

Juvenile: "First of all, the sequester is not something that I proposed. It's something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen. ... [Gov. Romney] mentioned ... that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of 'Battleship' where we're counting ships." --BO

Yes he did: "Nothing Governor Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing. This has been probably the biggest whopper that's been told during the course of this campaign, and every fact-checker and every reporter who's looked at it, Governor, has said this is not true." --BO

Class warfare: "We've got to make sure that we reduce our deficit. Unfortunately, Governor Romney's plan doesn't do it. We've got to do it in a responsible way, by cutting out spending we don't need but also asking the wealthiest to pay a little bit more." --BO

Back to the same old line: "What we can't do is go back to the same policies that got us into such difficulty in the first place. And that's why we have to move forward and not go back." --BO

And again: "You know, over the last four years, we've made real progress digging our way out of policies that gave us two prolonged wars, record deficits and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And Governor Romney wants to take us back to those policies." --BO

Don't worry about him: "Michelle and I will be fine no matter what happens [in the election]." --Barack Obama