This is a posting of personal experience. Not a distillation of other news circulating about - but based on my own direct observation, and opinions of same.

I joined the US Air Force in August of 1979 - the last part of the Carter Presidency. My reasons for joining weren’t political, or with a determination for service, but quite simply because I was consumed by the thrill of aviation. Plain and simple. And the Air Force offered the best path to satisfy that ‘itch’.

By a series of seemingly unlikely, and totally unplanned and unforeseen (on my part, at any rate) opportunities, I did end up becoming a “flyer” - as something called an Airborne Cryptologic Linguist*. Thus, for over 20 years, including just over 6000 flight hours I logged doing that rather interesting job, I was in a rather unique position to gain an appreciation of just exactly how and what a complete and utter royally f*cked up mess it was that Jimmy Carter left in his single-term wake. Quite often, I found myself with a front row, skybox seat as historic events unfolded, sometimes quite literally all around me.

This kept me earnestly employed the vast majority of my career; dealing with the disasters that Carter, with the help of a left-liberal-controlled Congress, created - only several of which evolved into the most significant foreign affairs, and potentially existential challenges we STILL face as a nation to this very day. The bad judgement, bad decisions, and mis-guided actions are still haunting us. The sheer neglect, active mis-management, and active dismemberment of our own defenses took the better part of Ronald Reagan’s term (and beyond) to fix, creating lingering and significant challenges to what I think of as a ‘re-professionalization’ of our military, as it struggled to re-learn and re-acquire the ‘corporate knowledge’ destroyed during Carter’s watch. Not to mention the (so far, to my now somewhat dated knowledge) irrevocable damage inflicted on our foreign intelligence capabilities, thank you Senator Church, you complete moron.

At this point, you may be wondering - ok, so what’s the point of thrashing Jimmy Carter?

The point is this. To the ear of someone that lived up close and personal to the results that grew out of the last time this kind of horse sh*t was shoveled around, a lot of the things I hear Barack Obama saying sound disturbingly familiar. Except Obama doesn’t simply sound like Carter - he sounds like Carter on steroids. In a bad way. A really, really bad way.

If this man, Barack Obama, becomes President of the United States of America, historians many generations in the future will likely remark upon his administration as maybe not the end, but the point that decline became inevitable for the country - the marked beginning of the end. Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will find themselves at least as impotent and irrelevant to world and human affairs as Europe is often characterized today, possibly more so.

For some, that vision of the future may not seem such a bad thing.

But to folks that don’t like the sound of their continued and extended family’s fate being determined by the future counterparts of men like the faceless Chinese Politburo, Hugo Chavez, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad, or Vladimir Putin - with little hope of any realistic choice except submission, or figurative, possibly literal, annihilation, the prospect of an Obama presidency is, and should be, profoundly and deeply disturbing.

America made this tremendous mistake once before. I sincerely hope we do not repeat it this November the 4th. I’ve got grave doubts that the country could recover, this time around. And while I do have hope that the nation could survive, and recover better than ever before - the risks involved are best avoided altogether, and easily can be, simply by not electing Barack Obama.

In other respects, don’t even get me started about how utterly idiotic I think it is to seriously entertain economic policies with a proven track record of failure over the past century as being the prescription for us today, no matter how schwarmy the latest way of describing them may be. Planning to do something that’s a known way to fail is just plain stupid, and conning people into going along with it is absolutely deplorable.

But what really puts the icing on this pile of dung being passed off as a wedding cake, to me, at any rate, is that it will all go down in an increasingly toxic atmosphere of deliberately racially divisive attitudes and actions. The cavalier use of the ‘race card’ in lieu of a frank discussion of policies and topics, their impacts and outcomes, has been a smoke screen concealing really bad decisions on the national level for too long. The last thing we need is anyone willing to stoke those fires, whatever their claimed rationale for doing so may be. Because the record so far is that it’s been the excuse to implement quite a number of things on the verge of turning around and biting us right in the ass, if if they haven’t already blown up in our faces. The record is that many of the programs peddled under the banner of ‘fixing’ ‘unfair’ racial results usually end up causing more harm to people they’re supposedly helping, in the long run - while usually inflicting some degree of pain on everyone else at the same time. Also, simply screaming racism at every turn actually makes it harder to highlight when actual, utterly deplorable racism is occurring - because just like in the story, when false cries of wolf abound, others begin to just ignore it completely.

If you’re really intent upon avoiding or fixing the mistakes of the past, choose wisely this election day, my fellow citizens. Choose wisely. We’re only going to get one chance at this. Let’s get it right.

* (Side anecdote - after describing in explicit detail what it was that the folks I worked with did during the liberation of Kuwait, in a formal, face to face, post-Desert Storm after action “Warrior Series” briefing to then Air Force Chief of Staff, now Obama advisor Merrill McPeak, in his personal briefing room next to his office in the Pentagon, his response was “you guys can really do all that stuff? Wow!” We’d very basically just described how the Air War had been run, pointing out how our contribution integrated with the overall effort - the kind of ‘inside baseball’ stuff that almost every other senior and flag officer we’d briefed to that point and afterwards were at least passingly familiar. That’s when I realized the man was a vapid idiot, an opinion shared privately by a number of people that dealt with him, and his many idiosyncrasies, on a daily basis.)