 A TWILIGHT AUTUMN: The 2012 Election and Beyond Filed by Pauly Fongemie, September 12, 2012 The labrador retriever [actually original to Newfoundland and not Labrador] is the most popular breed of dog in America trained to recover game that has been shot, that is, mortally wounded. In this task it knows no equal. The retriever also makes a wonderful companion because of its disposition and keen intelligence; the dog has a natural dignity if we can speak of dignity as an attribute of the canine. I have raised various breeds, mostly labs, and found this to be true as matters go. One's friendship with a lab is at heart an adventure, especially on long walks in the crisp autumn. He takes his mistress for the walk, and not the other way around, although he certainly knows she is in command and is content with the arrangement. It is a friendship of trust that is merited and great devotion, including Catholic devotion, always at one's feet for the daily Rosary. No matter where the labrador is in the house at the time, when he hears "Time for the Rosary" he makes haste to be a part of the ritual, gracefully reclining --- he does not sprawl --- and remaining quiet as if in awe. Always. Others have told me of different kinds of dogs they have known who have done this as well. I am sure this is true, but it is the sporting dog, the active dog, that one would least presume to behave this way, without specifically training it to do so. Labs just sort of train themselves to be somewhat human in this regard, as if they had a spiritual nature. They may not have a human intellect and soul, but they are savvy, wiser in their own way than some people I have known. One cannot always say the same about the Republican Party, at least the moribund establishment that is in control. I was once again painfully reminded about this the other day. One of my heroines, Miss Laura Ingraham, of talk radio, is of the opinion that if the GOP cannot retrieve a victory given the abysmal Obama record and all the ostensible blunders of his, that the Republicans ought to disband and start anew from the beginning. Sarah Palin, never one to back down from the necessary role of rebel [Going Rogue] in the face of the perversity of the inner circle, agreed. Mrs. Palin was decidedly not invited to speak at the Republican Convention, although John McCain was. The powers that be are still smarting from its well-deserved loss in 2008 and like all contrarians, blaming the rout on an innocent person, here, Sarah Palin. She followed the dictates of the GOP handlers, to the loss of our country and somewhat to her reputation. The GOP elites are so blind it is almost astonishing. Meanwhile, our only local talk radio station is no longer airing the Laura Ingraham show unfortunately, so I am dependent on other sources, mainly FOX News, for her awaited appearances. The occasion the other evening was the O'Reilly Factor, where she was a guest via satellite. He asked Sarah Palin [Ibid] what Romney needed to do to counter the sorry poll numbers [see more about the polls infra], the public perception of him and his platform. When he was asking her this he threw in some hot-button terms, such as socialist. You are probably saying to yourself, well, so what, is this not accurate? How can this be hot-button and or controversial? Oh, but of course it is precisely the right word and by this time ought not be debatable or controversial at all, if things were as they used to be! Do you not see, reader, that O'Reilly is as contrary in his clouded, conflicted mind as the GOP establishment is? Let me explain. Ever since the 2008 campaign Bill O'Reilly was adamant that Barack Obama was not a socialist, although an ideologue of left-leaning sensibilities, which in the practical sense is essentially the same thing, minus a degree or two, given the nature of the trajectory of liberalism as it truly is. No matter the evidence otherwise clearly marking him as a diehard socialist, the "Factor" refuted the claim as invalid. Now, here he is advocating or suggesting strongly that the term socialist ought to be used. Which is it? Hmmm? This is the sort of thing he does so constantly it is a staple in his arsenal of reputed hard-hitting analysis. The same broadcast included a look at Caroline Kennedy's apostate address to the Democratic Convention, a disgrace and scandal for someone asserting her Catholicism. He was rightly indignant that she had no moral right to do this, etc. Amen! One of the remarks that he included in his denunciation was that she can't pick and choose here, [life issues] in so many words. Yet, this is Mr. O'Reilly's stance for himself. I have lost track of how many times he has stated that he decides for himself what he will choose to accept about Church teaching, one of the most flagrant examples being about homosexuality and exceptions to abortion. He even refers to the growing child in the womb as "potential life". Is this not exactly the same thing that Ms. Kennedy does? The only answer comporting with reason is YES! The clouding of the American mind, cut off from utter dependency on Almighty God as it were, is to be expected, the only reasonable thing under the circumstances. Still today it appears to be the economy, stupid. As a whole we Americans, pundit and non-pundit alike are operating under the premise that the economy is up to us through leadership to fix. But who is to wisely know? Oh, naturally enough Romney is no socialist in comparison to Obama but he, too, is conflicted, without realizing it I am certain. Obama is not so conflicted. The only error he makes is his assessment of the reaction of the people on a common sense level. He is not inept, but aims to do exactly what he does, and in this he is very successful: he has managed to turn a crippled nation into a paralyzed one on life-support. He wants the down sizing; it is in his political and social DNA, inherited from his father's beliefs and some of his mother's and those who influenced him after they were gone. This is what Rush Limbaugh meant when he said he wanted him to fail, fail to install his vision of America. Obama simply does not know anything else and is resistant to the truth. So, accordingly, Romney could not do any more harm and might even help. But here lies the conundrum. How is one to assess Mitt Romney? After all he has proclaimed himself proudly pro-life, then says he is for exceptions to abortion, which undercuts the pro-life principle. If the baby in the womb is a child, a human person, which he is, and entirely innocent, then how can one permit his murder under the guise of a right in one case and not the other? This is arbitrary at best and heinous at worst and cannot stand rationally and morally. He emphatically says he will repeal Obamacare, then says he wants to retain parts of the bill. Very much in line with the US House which voted to repeal Obamacare, but then its contrarian head, Speaker Boehner, says they might vote to fund it anyway. How's that again!! Which is it exactly? Given Romney's Massachusetts record, more questions remain than answers. And so forth. I know less about Romney today than I did last week and the week before. I am truly confused and mistrustful. I cannot vote for the most pro-abortion President in the history of this country, one who favors rewriting the natural law definition of marriage among other atrocities, under any circumstance. But by voting for Romney, will I not be sending a signal to the GOP establishment which always gives us this sort of candidate of late, that I will go along while holding my nose? Again, yes. It is time to stop the partying. We have been too long at the fair. And perhaps the Party also. This leaves me with a write-in under the electoral college rules in Maine where Obama is so far ahead of Romney that my single vote or thousands just like me matter not at all, because our vote is not added to the vote nationwide as it would in the usual form of general election. Essentially the GOP has managed to disenfranchise us. This Independent resents it and will no longer consent to any such thing as the lesser evil. I am voting my conscience. Before I leave this portion of my column, I state for the record that Romney acquitted himself admirably when grilled by the media in re his response to the administration's early inexcusable, deplorable one about the mayhem and planned execution of our ambassador in Libya and the assault on the embassy in Egypt. The press and company did not know that an open mike was nearby, and while waiting for Romney to appear for the press conference, some of them got together and orchestrated their responses to his; blatant bias to paint him in a corner so that whatever he answered he would be depicted in a bad light. I know people who honestly do not believe the major media to be corrupt, but if this does not convince them, nothing will, save a command from God Himself, if at that. Their blindness is self-willed at this point, whatever their motives as individual citizens. Romney came across as a man of conviction and strength, acting more presidential than our President who went to Vegas to campaign of all things absurd, but so Baraccian. However, just when I think I see the man who is Romney, he escapes me supra. Now for the matter of the polls before I conclude. One of my college majors was in public administration [the other being philosophy]; we had courses in statistics, sampling and polling. The polls are used in two ways. The first is the more traditionally recognized one of sampling the population to discover trends in thought, attitudes and or behavior, and the intensity. If the goal is the outcome of an election there are two ways to sample, likely voters and those registered to vote, not always mutually inclusive. Generally speaking likely voters have more intensity, not unexpected. The sample ought to be representative of the population as much as possible, so that the percentage of Independents, Democrats and Republicans, one example, are proportionate. The other reason for polling is to effect an outcome or create a bandwagon effect, so the poll is rigged in some way, that is deliberately weighting the poll to favor a party, for instance. This is because human psychology tells us without any doubt that most people prefer to be on the winning side and will change their allegiance if they think it is useless to back a candidate who appears to be losing. We know that some of the current pollsters are doing exactly this, over sampling Democrats. Thus, the larger spread in favor of President Obama is suspect. The more honest polls still give Obama a slight edge of a point or two in some battleground states. These are most likely accurate, which brings us back to Laura Ingraham's opinion about the GOP's efforts which include Romney handlers, advisors and his own insider membership which bears influence on his approach. A part of this is political naiveté, despite all his experience. Of course to give him credit, it almost does not matter because the major media, still powerful with all too many Americans, by my own recent internal polling, is in the tank for Obama, period! But why the clouding of the mind so widespread? People want to talk the economy almost exclusively, the Tea Party wants to talk the economy almost exclusively. The only one who appears reluctant to do so is Obama, whose record in this matter speaks for itself and does not favor him at all. This is ironic when you think that if it weren't for the spending mistakes of Bush and related economic realities Obama would not have won the election even with all the race baiting on his part and the ineptness of the GOP. Obama took swift advantage of the economic decline. Now he wants us to look the other way, as if to have it both ways. Almost no one is interested anymore in what God thinks or wants as expressed though the natural law. We have waived any grace we might have merited a generation or more ago. The barbarity, the very enormity of the abortion culture, the millions of slaughtered babies has earned us the anger of God because there was simply no excuse for the endurance of Roe v Wade at all. Because we prefer abortion to the social battle it takes to rid it from our land, God is punishing us through that which we care most about, not the natural law surely, but our wallets. The failures of politics in this regard are merely the proximate means of God's chastisement. Ultimately He is allowing us to continue in our blindness so that no matter what we do, it is too little too late. We are no longer on our knees in obedience to Him as King over every nation, as the Supreme Law-giver. So He is bringing us to our knees our way through the economy. Do you not see, my dear people, that until we once more enshrine the sanctity of life from conception to natural death through the law in recognition of the supremacy of the natural law over all man-made law, will there be an upturn worth the noting for any length of time? Unfortunately, ever so sadly, most of us no longer want to know this anymore. This is our fault. When people are resistant to the truth, they elect either charlatans who harbor tyrannical schemes in their hearts, or well-intended bunglers and or those who do not have the light of Christ with conviction enough to act upon it and select those who do also to assist him or her. We had our chance with Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, but the GOP made sure that would not be possible with their behind the scenes finagling in IOWA and elsewhere. And we the people consented. Time for another party .... if this, too, is not too late .... Obama speaks of the Arab spring; more like the winter of the West, in particular the US. In the timeline of human events it is past autumn, it is literally the twilight, the eve before the dead of winter. It is not surprising that the infidel Muslim is on the rise; as heretical as he is as an abomination as he is in his blasphemy, he is at least certain in his convictions and is not afraid to act upon them. The Muslim world does not endorse and provide abortion and all its attendant ills, whatever kind of other murder its more radical elements promote and accomplish. So, ironically God is allowing the Muslim ascendancy to be another instrument of our decline and fall ...
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