As IF Times

link Romney energizes campaign with feisty debate performance | Fox News.

By now, the media is all a-twitter about the big collapse.  No, not the Ryder Cup, that’s another story.  We’re referring of course to last evening’s first Presidential debate.  As we skim through the expected comments by pundits in the aftermath of the great debate, the most striking tone that emerges is the surprise at how well Mitt did versus the relatively flat performance of Barack.

This is amusing because Romney did not do anything different than he has been over this entire campaign and really, since he started public life.  It has been the reporting of it and the perception that has been exposed.   There were no surprise policy positions offered at the debate, nothing that hadn’t been pooh-poohed by the media for months.  For anyone who has been paying attention to the content and not the editorials of his positions, what he offered has been there for everyone to consider for at least the past year.

What changed was the stark juxtaposition of Romney’s pragmatic positions versus the ideological ramblings of Obama’s, laid bare for everyone to see, stripped of spin or embellishment.  It’s akin to the old chestnut about how the young man at 25 years of age, is amazed at how smart his once clueless father became over the past 10 years of their lives.

What I find truly amusing, actually alarming, are the comments by the so-called independents who admitted to being swayed by last night’s debate.  It truly illustrates the shallowness of most of the voting public.  It also shows the residual power and influence of the general media which, though subtle can greatly influence opinions by steadily offering a concocted version of events.

Despite inarguably having the greatest access to education and information in the history of mankind, the ability of people to think independently is overwhelmed by an American Idol culture in which groupthink is rampant.  Many people think that popularity equals legitimacy.  It is a particularly unique trait of humans to do things that are actually detrimental to their own survival, something that you would never observe in the animal world, with the obvious exception of lemmings.

Conservatives shouldn’t take too much joy in last night’s debates as far as swaying the hard core liberals.  We know that even if the liberal candidate were found to have bodies stuffed in a freezer in his house, he’d still get the liberal vote. In the 2010 elections, Californians had the choice of candidate A, a person with renowned business skills who ran a multi-billion dollar enterprise employing thousands and who spent their own money on their campaign; versus candidate B.  This candidate was a relic from the past who essentially had no plan but was a darling of the entertainment community.  Californians were faced with crippling debt loads, massive flight from the state because of taxes and regulation and in dire need of proven fiscal management expertise.  Sure enough, the B team won.

link Randy Newman writes new satirical, political song – Yahoo! News.

It’s difficult to refute an argument about a topic if the rebuttals have no reference to basic logic.  Liberals love to demonstrate how enlightened they are by taking the sides of issues that have little logical foundation.  If one reads the argument of the artiste Randy Newman, one will get that he is trying to prove how enlightened and non racist he is.  Yet the thrust of his argument is that the President should be embraced BECAUSE he is black, not for any particular aspect of ability.   What if that same logic were  applied to his music business?  Why don’t we all buy music that’s performed by black artists regardless of their quality?  Hey wait a minute….

In our modern American Idol culture, popularity is the same thing as being legitimate.  If there weren’t sane people in the world, (a shrinking contingent to be sure ), George Clooney or Brad Pitt would be elected to lead the country.  It makes very little difference to most that neither one of those talented individuals have any genuine grounding in economics or geopolitics.  Oh sure, they may look good on TV and probably even smell nice.  However , it should not shock most people that the opinions of folks like those are considerably less illuminating than your average first year economics student. In an increasingly dumbed down society in which David Letterman is considered a source of real information, people farm out their critical thinking and merely adopt what they hear in the pop media and from pop artists as fact.  As if people who live in fantasy can give advice on reality.  An artiste like Newman may think it’s logical to support someone solely because of their ‘minority’ status, but it’s the very racism he’s trying to parody.

If we are going to appoint people solely because of their membership in a favored constituency, why don’t we elect more female leaders? They do represent more than half of the population and it would only be appropriate in an enlightened, modern society.  I recommend Kim Kardashian.  She appears to be popular.  Some may perhaps argue that a Hilary Clinton would be eligible; they had that chance.  But as we recall, the DNC thought that it was more important to install someone with no real life experience but who happened to be a person of color, than it was to embrace someone with a lifetime of political experience.  Any racism or sexism there is incidental.  Now if Hilary looked less like Hilary and more like Kim, who knows?

Like most people, when I get my car fixed, I want the guy who knows what he’s doing, not the grad student who has University credits for studying engine theory or because he belonged to a favored minority.    I’d bet  that even the socially sensitive Randy Newman doesn’t specifically ask for the black mechanic, nor would he write satirical songs about it.  We keep hearing that racism is the great issue of our society.  For people like Newman at least, it must be,  they find it everywhere.  Sort of like lawyers and lawsuits.  Americans have the largest numbers of lawyers per capita in the world.   Coincidently, they are the most litigious nation as well….lawbreakers are everywhere.  As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.