Most important, it is exposing the raw financial power facilitating the party’s increasingly unsound political and economic approach to domestic and global affairs, not to mention rational thinking and science. The billionaires who are keeping Gingrich and Santorum in the race appear to be clueless regarding the manner in which their largesse is making the case that genuine public support is inferior to deep-pocket egotists, where the Republican Party is concerned.

One might also note that Gingrich and Santorum are also largely clueless regarding the values and aspirations of citizens outside the so-called “red state” arenas where dogma, anti-intellectualism, hostility to the ascendant colored majority and geopolitical belligerence are depressingly common.

Mitt Romney is the most balanced of all the Republican candidates, and this is one of the many reasons why most members of the party are hoping for the emergence of a viable alternative. In response, Romney is doubling down on ignorance, trying to prove, it seems, that he can pander to the lowest common denominator of intelligence shared by Republican voters in much the same manner as his frequently daffy competitors.

Moreover, Romney didn’t help his never-to-be-successful effort to appear to appear to be a somewhat normal Joe yesterday with his quip about his wife’s Cadillacs. He can wear ripped jeans all he wants, but no one is fooled by that act–because everything about him oozes country club snobbery. Romney also suffers because virtually no one believes he believes half the stuff he says.

As far as I am concerned, Ron Paul is more a curiosity than a serious candidate. However well he eventually does in the Republican primaries, he has absolutely no chance of significantly expanding his support beyond the Libertarian fringe. Thus, he is suspended in the same strange political universe inhabited by failed characters such as Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann.

The key point to be grasped is that the Republican Party’s candidates are saddled with numerous liabilities, not the least being the fact they are currently advocating policies and priorities that can’t be expected to engender notable support from mainstream voters.

Given this, it becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, or underestimate, the fact that President Obama has set an extremely high standard of excellence across a broad range of important criteria necessary for doing the job well. Moreover, his overall competence is probably at the root of his rising popularity in public opinion polls. Obama is also benefiting handsomely from the improving economy, the impending conclusion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, decreasing unemployment, and increased public confidence in the current direction in which the nation is headed.

Republican Party power is represented these days at the highest level in the U.S. Congress. But that august institution is currently being awarded abysmally low rankings in popularity. As a matter of fact, the level of public support for Congress is the lowest in living memory. This, too, reflects positively on the President.

Like most everyone else, I am strongly opposed to some of Obama’s policies. And more often that I want to be, I am so irritated with him that some days I don’t want to see his face, or hear his voice. Nonetheless, whenever I take the big picture into consideration, and carefully weigh all alternatives, including the current cast of candidates seeking the office under the Republican banner, he looks like a man who is going to prove difficult to impossible to beat in the November 2012 election.

Republican recognition of this particular fact is at the root of their growing panic regarding the prospects of sending Romney, Santorum, Gingrich or Paul against Obama in the upcoming election. Their palpable anxiety is apparent in their growing concern about which of the four might prove to be capable of besting Obama in the critically important debates that will largely decide the election’s outcome.

Their concern is justified. Barring some major, unforeseen circumstance, the upcoming election is Obama’s to lose. The prospect of this occurring seems to decrease with each day’s passing, largely due to the fact that he has set a particularly high bar regarded minimally acceptable performance that each of the four remaining Republican candidates is going to find it extremely difficult to match.

Like much of the rest of the world, I watched with bated breath last week as Tea Party activists in the U.S. House of Representatives held the government hostage over the debt ceiling issue. It was a riveting drama, and my sense is that we are going to experience more of the same.

Now that the extremists know they can control the national agenda via threats to bring the entire system down, it is highly unlikely they will relent and pursue their retrograde political agenda in a more balanced and responsible manner.

My most important concerns about this new set of Washington gangsters focus on the anti-intellectual, don’t-try-to-confuse-me-with-facts dimension of their worldview and rhetoric. In a classic sense, they are “barbarians” intent on destroying traditions, programs and institutions they barely understand. Moreover, some of them appear to have an uneasy relationship with sanity.

I am also concerned with their hostile attitude toward government. However many times Ronald Reagan alleged “government is the problem,” the truth of the matter is that government most certainly is not the source of the most important problems facing this nation. I suspect this truth is most apparent to those who have spent significant time living abroad.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize what one’s government is and isn’t without living abroad. This is largely due to the fact that living under the authority and auspices of another government provides one with a kind comparative perspective that few Tea Party extremists possess. As a result, many of them are intent on destroying the one institution most crucial to all of our long-term best interests.

In addition to destroying government as we know it, bringing down Obama and making him a one-term president is a primary objective of Tea Party gangsters. They have a right to vehemently hate the black guy, and I recommend that they take their best shot regarding their effort to hurt him and his supporters.

But they do not have the right to destroy the nation’s economy, and the crucially important social safety net developed over generations via the sweat and toil of people committed to each other and the common good.

Nonetheless, minus organized pushback on a massive scale by those who reject the Tea party’s “let’s burn down the house” assault, the gangsters may well get their way via shakedown tactics virtually identical to the ones they used to roll the national government last week.

Now that the decision has been publicly announced, we are left to ponder the ramifications for Afghanistan, the United States, and our tarnished, deeply confused, hero in the Oval Office, who will travel to Oslo, Norway in a few days to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.  If he maintains his current trajectory, he will end up giving peaceniks a bad name.

Such irony.

The president’s decision will inevitably produce a rise in the number of Afghans being killed as a result of the war in their star-crossed nation. Furthermore, events associated with the troop increase will motivate more young men and women in the region to join the fight against the foreign invaders. For reasons that should not be that difficult to comprehend, the troop increase will also have the counterproductive impact of undermining morale among Afghan police and military units, who will have to bear the stigma of helping foreigners kill their relatives. The net result is that the people of Afghanistan are headed for much harder times.

They deserve better.

The president’s decision provides a different, but no less momentous, set of problems for U.S. citizens.  More of us will experience dismemberment and violent death, more families will be destroyed, more money that we really don’t have will be spent, we will be less safe, and our tattered stature in the world will continue its precipitous decline.

As far as the president is concerned, it pains me to say it, but the raw, unavoidable truth is that last night Barack Obama threw his presidency under the proverbial bus. Several factors are responsible: hubris, insufficient understanding of history and culture, personal insecurities, insufficient common sense, and imperial fantasies of the sort that have run erstwhile great powers to ground on more occasions than need to be specifically addressed here.

However this unnecessary, violent travesty works out over the tortured years immediately ahead, from this point forward President Barack Obama will be a wounded duck; a gifted, talented man, who was swept into office before he was ready for the job by the buoyant, joyous dreams of a generation hungering for change. All is not lost. But we need acknowledge that last night our hero came up tragically short. My heart is heavy today.

We deserve better.

Obama is apparently a good egg. He has high hopes, and he is off to a relatively good start. He is a gifted speaker, and positively eloquent when he takes off on an inspired riff about some positively wonderful ideal. But we are still getting used to him as president. We are still, as it were, taking his measure, watching, questioning, comparing, critiquing. That’s what we do with new presidents.

But Barack Hussein Obama is vastly different from each of his predecessors in the oval office. As a result, it is taking us longer to adjust to his being in office than is normally the case. However much we seek to evade, deny, and move beyond, our unavoidable reality is that his race is largely responsible for the unusual complexity of the process of getting everyone comfortable with him as the nation’s preeminent leader. This is largely due to the fact that Obama’s election means that from this time forward everything involving race in the United States will be different. Thus, we are engaged in major social and psychological transformations. The Nobel Peace Price Committee has vastly complicated the process.

The key point to be understood is that Barack Obama is a new experience every day of the week for every one of us. Given that, if we had our druthers, we would have preferred to have had more time to get used to him before having to make the adjustment to seeing, and relating to, him as one of the world’s most highly regarded leaders. Up until now, this nation’s citizens have largely concentrated on what his election means to us. But his selection for the Nobel Peace Prize redefines our paradigm.

If nothing else, President Obama’s being honored in such an undeniably auspicious manner by prestigious foreigners is forcing us to acknowledge that he is as important to the rest of the world as he is to us. Moreover, we are also being forced to acknowledge that he is more honored, and more widely respected and accepted in much of the rest of the world, than he is here in the United States by his own countrymen and women.

Maybe most important, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has essentially called out the people of this nation regarding the matter of war. Needless to say, it is unseemly indeed for a recipient of the “peace prize” to be vigorously pursuing two wars. One might also reasonably argue that it is equally unseemly for the people led by a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to be clamoring, as far too many of us are, for more military spending, more troops for combat, and more interminable killing on foreign battlefields.

Having been called out in a marvelously diplomatic manner regarding our outsized propensity to engage in bloody imperial episodes of the sort currently underway in Iraq and Afghanistan, my hope is that we will respond by forging peace in each setting as soon as possible. Only by doing so, will we justify the honor recently bestowed on the gentleman we elected to lead our government, and thereby ratify our long deferred dreams and aspirations for peaceful coexistence. In any event, however the situation develops, I should like to note that we are already deeply indebted to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for btilliantly nudging us in the proper direction.

For better or worse, we, the people of the United States, are currently doing democracy as well as we possibly can. It is not perfect, but it seems to be working. The stakes are high, and the political maneuvers muscular. Some kind of bill will likely be passed in the name of health care reform, but the contents have not been codified.

The situation is fluid, and no particular coalition of partisans, including the one containing the President and all his supporters, can assume victory is theirs. As I watch the historic drama unfold, I can’t shake the escalating feeling that the dialogue is being conducted at too high a pitch.

People need to calm down. We also need to moderate our tone and behavior. Everyone needs to be more courteous. This can be accomplished without any faction losing face or advantage.

Having said that, I want to put my words into action by being more courteous myself. For example, I don’t intend from this point forward to be accusing anyone else of being an “avatar” of any sort. Moreover, from this point forward, I intend to devote more time and attention to understanding the opinions being expressed by those with whom I disagree.

In keeping with that practice, I take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge that Conservative participants in the health care reform debate are exercising a vitally important function. Given their ferocious opposition, they are forcing the Obama administration, and its supporters, to produce better ideas, more coherent proposals and better budget strategies.

Most important, Conservatives have raised several points that need to be taken more seriously by proponents of reform. This is particularly the case regarding a question repeatedly raised by Conservatives: what is the proper role of government regarding individual end of life decision-making. Like many of the Liberals and Progressives who have publicly commented on the matter since Conservatives began getting into everyone’s face with the question, I initially rejected this line of opposition as ridiculous, and somehow or another, intellectually underhanded. But after devoting close attention to the point Conservatives have been making, in sometimes clumsy and crude ways, I have come to believe that this issue needs to be addressed.

Decisions passed into law in the name of health care reform are going to fundamentally influence the character of life in this society. Moreover, any significant mistakes made now will almost certainly become institutionalized in ways that could end up harming us for decades. Given this, it does not take genius to understand why it makes sense for us to calm down and carefully articulate the proper role of government in regard to this aspect of life.

I suspect we will eventually come to understand that the establishment of a quasi-nationalized system of health care will also require the establishment of strong safeguards which ensure that citizens rights are protected as scrupulously as possible, separate and apart from budgetary considerations.

For now, I want to salute the august Conservatives who have done all or us a favor by forcing us to look more closely as this critically important issue.

In my next blog entry, I will address some of the most important negative ramifications of mishandling this matter.

In the interim, and in passing, I should like to note that this democracy stuff really is a lot like making sausage…