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Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Feb5

I was deeply disappointed by this long, engaging, insidious apologia for assisted suicide, or “mercy killing” as the euphemism goes. I saw this title on so very many end-of-the-year favorites lists, and I thought it sounded engaging. It was. The characters were appealing, and Louisa Clark’s project to make her quadriplegic “patient”, Will Traynor, take an interest in life, kept me turning the pages to see what would happen.

I didn’t want easy answers. I know people who live in chronic pain, and I know people who deal with severe disability every day of their lives. It’s not easy, and their problems should not be trivialized by an unearned and unexamined happily-ever-after ending to a novel. However, (SPOILER: I’m not at all reluctant to write spoilers for a novel that engages in blatant propaganda), the ending to this novel trivializes life itself, and its ending makes the lives of disabled people and people who are in pain seem cheap and worthless.

Serendipitously, I saw a tweet today that connected me to this blog post quoting Marilyn Golden, Senior Policy Analyst with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, at a disability rights group blog called Not Dead Yet. These are some reasons she gives to be concerned about laws being proposed in in such far-flung places as Scotland, New Hampshire, and New Mexico—and about the legalization of assisted suicide that is already in effect in Washington state and in Oregon:

Deadly mix: Assisted suicide is a deadly mix with our profit-driven healthcare system. At $300, assisted suicide will be the cheapest treatment. Assisted suicide saves insurance companies money—even with full implementation of the greatly-needed Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).
Abuse: Abuse of people with disabilities, and elder abuse, are rising. Not every family is a supportive family! Where assisted suicide is legal, such as in Oregon, an heir or abusive caregiver may steer someone towards assisted suicide, witness the request, pick up the lethal dose, and even give the drug—no witnesses are required at the death, so who would know?
Mistakes: Diagnoses of terminal illness are too often wrong, leading people to give up on treatment and lose good years of their lives, where assisted suicide is legal.
Careless: Where assisted suicide is legal, no psychological evaluation is required or even recommended. People with a history of depression and suicide attempts have received the lethal drugs.
Burden: Financial and emotional pressures can also make people choose death.
Unnecessary: Everyone already has the legal right to refuse treatment and get full palliative care, including, if dying in pain, pain-relieving palliative sedation.
No true safeguards: Where assisted suicide is legal, the safeguards are hollow, with no enforcement or investigation authority.
Our quality of life underrated: Society often underrates people with disabilities’ quality of life. Will doctors & nurses fully explore our concerns and fight for our full lives? Will we get suicide prevention or suicide assistance?

Of course, in Me Before You, all of the family are motivated by pure concern for the quadriplegic Will. Will himself makes a completely autonomous and carefully considered decision to kill himself, and no one is allowed to really argue that he is in no condition to make such a decision. One character, Will’s caregiver’s mother, is outspoken and unshaken in her opposition to “mercy killing”, but she is a peripheral character and the only one who is not finally recruited and convinced by Will’s suffering and his determination to support him in his decision to end his life.

A book that showed both (or many) sides of this issue, even if it ended in the same way, would have been worth reading. As it is, Ms. Moyes has used her admittedly fine writing talent to propagandize for death, and I think it’s a pity.

Not recommended.

Rainbow Rowell and the World with No Rules

Jan8

I plead guilty. I am a prude, a moralist, a prig. And I am so tired of living in world without rules. I am so tired of reading about a world without rules, watching movies and TV shows in which there is nothing that is off limits (except rules themselves). Yes, I know we need grace; I need grace the way I need air, food, and water. I survive and live by the grace of God. But we also need Law. Boundaries. Some sort of framework to live by, to measure by, something besides my own emotions and my own weakness. Something to which to apply the grace that God so freely offers.

And what has this rant to do with the latest, greatest, most popular YA fiction author of 2013 (if I am to judge by all the 2013 best-of lists that include one or both of the books she published this past year)? Rainbow Rowell is the author of Eleanor and Park, a high school love story, and Fangirl, a freshman year in college love story. I read Eleanor and Park first, and I’ll admit I liked it. The lady knows how to tell a story and especially how to create characters that shine. Eleanor is a fat girl with a dysfunctional family. Park is a Korean American boy with a fully functional family, but he lives life at the mercy of school bullies and of his own insecurities about being short and small and sort of geeky (or nerdy, I can never remember the difference). The slow build-up to romance between the two outsiders was fun to read and well-written. Then, wham! The two sixteen year olds did whatever it was they did in the backseat of a car (I skimmed). Oh, why did we have to have that part? Why couldn’t Park just say that he thought Eleanor was beautiful but he respected her and didn’t want to take advantage of her vulnerability, or something? I got a little tired, but as I said, I skimmed.

Then, I read Fangirl, different plot, different age group, similar characters. There’s a girl, Cath, with a dysfunctional family who’s closed off and vulnerable at the same time. There’s a guy, Levi, from a Baptist family, who’s sweet and caring and giving to the point of saccharinity. But Ms. Rowell reins in the sweet so that Levi is just that, adorable and no more. Fangirl feels for a while as if it could be about the consequences of living without any moral framework. In fact, Cath’s twin sister, Wren, messes up big time because no one has ever told her what the rules are or expected her to live by any rules at all (absent mother, mentally ill father). But Levi and Cath get along just fine without any reference to religion or morality or . . . anything. All that stuff is so . . . old-fashioned. Levi mentions that his mom is involved in church and attends a “prayer circle”, but that whole world is dismissed lightly and quickly as parental quirkiness. Cath’s and Wren’s dad tries to make some rules for Wren, the out of control daughter, but the whole stern parent thing comes out of nowhere. I can’t imagine any eighteen year old who has been as neglected as Wren and Cath have been listening to the lecture Wren’s dad gives or adhering to his sudden burst of regulations and injunctions.

So we come back to a world without authority. Without a moral framework. Why is it wrong for one of the characters in the novel to plagiarize? Because Cath doesn’t like it? Why is OK for Cath and her roommate to badmouth and make fun of all the freshmen in the cafeteria? Because it makes them feel better about themselves and because they’re witty when they do it? Why is it wrong for Wren to get drunk every weekend and drink herself into oblivion? Because it feels bad? Why is it right for Cath and Levi to make out in his bedroom? Because it feels good? Why do I want to read details of these make-out sessions? Because . . . I can’t really think of any good reasons. (I skimmed . . . again.)

I agree with this essay by Shannon Hale, in which she argues that YA novels should be written for teen readers, not adults who just want the teenagers in the books to hurry up and grow up. I’m not advocating for the teens in this book to grow up already and have their worldview and ethics all figured out. I just want them to have something, preferably Christianity, but something, to push against, to wrestle with, and possibly to grow into. All they have in these books is empty air and secularist posing. It’s sad and it makes me tired, no matter how good the writing may be. And I fear for our kids who are going to be even more jaded and exhausted with the shadow boxing and with the vacuum of virtue and moral standards before they ever get to be adults.

This post is not so much a review of the books as it is a reflection on the world we live in. Read the books and see what you think. I will admit that I will be thinking about Eleanor and Park and Cath and Levi and Wren for a long time. I would be praying for them if they were real people. I’m saddened to think that they probably are real people.

Links and Thinks: June 26, 2013

Jun26

Booked: Reading My Way Back to Faith by Jessica Griffith.

“Reading is a form of prayer; I know. Divine reading, lectio divina, is a way of communion with God in scripture, the Living Word. But is it wrong that I’ve had more profound experiences of God’s presence reading Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Kristin Lavransdatter, and my children’s copies of Frog and Toad?”

Welcome to the Mental Ward by Anthony Esolen.

Perhaps it is sex that has driven us mad. I think rather it must be boredom. We are so bored, we not only cannot be bothered to remember what our opponents say. We cannot be bothered to remember what we ourselves say.

Sex Without Bodies by Andy Crouch.

Marriage, which has always been “unequal,” yoking together two very different kinds of bodies, must now be “equal,” measured only by the sincerity of one’s love and commitment. To insist on the importance of bodies is to challenge the sovereign self, to suggest that our ethical options are limited by something we did not choose.
There is one other consistent position that Christians can hold, though we will hold it at great social cost, at least for the foreseeable future: that bodies matter. Indeed, that both male and female bodies are of ultimate value and dignity—not a small thing given the continuing denigration of women around the world.”

How I Changed my Mind about Abortion by Julia Herrington.

“. . . abortion actually oppresses women. Procedurally what abortion requires is the silencing of a woman’s body and the unmitigated dismissing of her gender. We’ve accepted abortion as a right that celebrates a woman’s ownership of her body. But the procedure necessarily requires that a woman deny her gender by silencing and disallowing a natural and distinguishing result of womanhood. In every other facet of feminism, we celebrate a woman’s body, we honor her identity as a female. But abortion ignores her femininity . . .”

Sunday Salon: Links and Thinks: June 9, 2013

Jun8

Albert Mohler’s Books for a Summer Season: Some Recommended Reading

'sunset on George R. Brown' photo (c) 2012, Steve - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

I didn’t know until I saw Mr. Mohler’s tweet that the Southern Baptist Convention is meeting in Houston this week. Welcome, Baptists!

“Praying for the city of Houston tonight. 4th largest in nation. May the #SBC13 be a Gospel blessing to this city.”

Adult/Teen Summer Reading at Redeemed Reader. This read-along looks like fun!

A Handmade Hobbit Hole, Bag End from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. Take a look at this dollhouse/hobbit home; it’s quite impressive.

Peggy Noonan on government surveillance and data gathering “There is no way a government in the age of metadata, with the growing capacity to listen, trace, tap, track and read, will not eventually, and even in time systematically, use that power wrongly, maliciously, illegally and in areas for which the intelligence gathering was never intended. People are right to fear that the government’s surveillance power will be abused. It will be.”

All I can say is have they read Orwell’s 1984? No, I mean really, have they read it, or have they read these books by Cory Doctorow? Or any of the dozens, nay, hundreds of dystopian novels that have been all the rage in YA fiction for the past several years? Don’t they know that the systematic invasion of everyone’s privacy by the government will come back to bite them in the you-know-what?

How to Discourage Artists in the Church by Phillip Ryken. The church needs artists and needs to affirm artists. If some of the items in Mr. Ryken’s list of “ways to discourage artistic giftedness” make you think of something that your church is doing wrong, maybe you can help to create change in this very important area.

Links and Thinks: June 4, 2013

Jun4

'Book Exchange' photo (c) 2012, oatsy40 - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/Telephone booth transformed into a library. What a wonderfully British idea! I wish I had a telephone booth to metamorphose into a little library.

June 4th is Aesop’s Day.

Also, on June 4, 1989, approximately 300-800 Chinese students and others died. Do you know what happened on this date?

Paris Books for Kids. Chapter books set in Paris, and picture books set in Paris. I love lists like this one. In fact, I’d really like to publish a follow-up to my Picture Book Preschool curriculum, called Picture Book Around the World.

Traditional Marriage Movement Sweeps through France. Who would have thought? “Their mouths overflow with the words ‘equality of man and woman.’ But why should marriage not be a place of equality, too, so that a child will be raised by man and woman? What a strange idea!”

The Gosnell Horror: What Now?

Apr17

People are becoming aware of what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did to cruelly and callously murder possibly hundreds of babies in Philadelphia and what he did in providing sub-standard, dangerous, and horribly unsanitary “health care” for abortion-seeking women. If you don’t know about this doctor and his criminal actions, here are some links to help you to become informed about this unspeakable case and the the ongoing trial that is taking place now in Philadelphia:

Who Is Kermit Gosnell?

3801 Lancaster: A Documentary about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his Shop of Horrors.

The Grand Jury report on Dr. Gosnell

That’s what happened for years at Dr. Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia. And here are some implications and conclusions that I draw from the horror that was Dr Gosnell and his accomplices:

1. The media–newspapers, television, and other outlets– cannot be trusted to tell the truth about abortion.

John Fund at National Review Online:

Indeed, the silence had been stunning since the Gosnell trial began back on March 18. No mention of the story at all on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, or MSNBC, and no front-page stories in any major paper. National Review, the Weekly Standard, Breitbart.com, and Michelle Malkin, on the other hand, provided early and consistent coverage.

Conservative, liberal, or in-between, please do not depend on one or two sources that agree with your point of view for all of your news and opinions. First of all, reporters are just as fallible as the rest of us. They have their own blind spots, and sometimes they actually make choices that are just wrong, such as the choice not to cover this trial in all its horror and with all of its disturbing implications. If I only listen to or read conservative news sources, I am just as likely to miss important issues and news and viewpoints that will inform my decisions and add information to back up or negate my opinions. If you only listen to or read the mainstream media, you are only getting a slanted, and partial picture of the range of opinion and news that is making our world.

But especially, do not continue to trust the mainstream media to tell you the truth about abortion. Many journalists will continue to try to use the Jedi mind trick and tell you to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” You and I have a responsibility to know what evils are being perpetrated in our own communities in the name of “choice” and “women’s rights.” If you have turned your head and pretended not to know that abortion is the gruesome and unjustified killing of a human being, then the Gosnell case is a wake-up call.

2. A person’s a person no matter how small. The 20-30 week old babies that Dr. Gosnell killed by snipping their spinal cords with scissors had exactly the same humanity as the baby boy in the video embedded below:

Abortion advocates and supporters of a “woman’s right to choose” must face the question: why did baby Samuel get the care he needed to live while hundreds of babies at Gosnell’s clinic, thousands around the nation, are instead being burned with saline, injected with poison, or “snipped” after being born alive? What makes a person a person? Is it really logical or morally defensible to say that a baby, inside the womb or outside, only becomes a person deserving of life, liberty and medical care when the mother says, “I choose you to be a real person”?

Abortion advocates in reference to the Gosnell case are saying essentially that what Dr. Gosnell did would have been perfectly fine if only he had done it in cleaner surroundings. This logic is untenable and unpardonable. A baby who is three inches inside the birth canal or three days less than the legal age for being protected from an abortion is no less a person than Baby Samuel or any other wanted baby located inside the mother’s womb.

3. We have no idea how many facilities like Gosnell’s are still operating in the United States.

In an egregious example of twisted and backwards logic, abortion advocates are arguing that too much regulation of abortion clinics caused women to seek abortions from Dr. Gosnell, and so therefore abortion clinics in general should receive less regulation and less scrutiny instead of more. They say that women “are forced” to go to doctors like Gosnell because of the lack of availability of cheap, safe abortions elsewhere.

There were and still are multiple abortion clinics and hospitals that do abortions in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s practice went on for over twenty years, without inspections for most of that time, while abortion was legal and available in Philadelphia. Gosnell’s horrors didn’t happen because abortion was over-regulated or because abortion clinics were held to high medical standards. And most of what Gosnell did should not happen to babies or women anywhere, no matter how sanitary the facility is where the “snipping” takes place.

I found these articles in a cursory Google search:

Planned Parenthood clinic closed down in Wilmington, Delaware for alleged Gosnell-like conditions

New Jersey: Health Department Curiously Absent from Abortion Clinics

Muskegon abortion clinic had no routine inspections

There are many more examples. And I could not find anything that told me which states have regulations in place for abortion clinics or how often those standards are upheld if they have been enacted into law. I did find this page at the National Abortion Federation website in which we are told that “abortion is very safe” and “abortion is already regulated.” NAF opposes what they call TRAP laws because they “discourage health care providers from offering abortion care and can make provision very burdensome and/or expensive for smaller providers.”

Would that someone had “discouraged” Dr. Gosnell a long time ago.

Disturbing, Grotesque, Horrific: God Have Mercy

Apr13

WARNING: The following quotes and observations are disturbing, grotesque, horrific, and any other really bad adjective you want to use to describe mass murder and the ignorance and hard-hearted elective apathy that allowed it and continues to ignore the pain of women and children. If you are an adult American, you should read about the Kermit Gosnell murder trial and the awful acts that are alleged to have taken place at Mr. Gosnell’s “clinic” in Philadelphia.

JD Mullane: Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing seven born-alive babies and causing the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an immigrant from Nepal who had sought an abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. The clinic was busy, doing brisk cash business.

Trevin Wax: “The Gosnell case involves gruesome details about living, viable babies having their spinal cords “snipped” outside the womb.”

Kirsten Powers: “Regardless of such quibbles, about whether Gosnell was killing the infants one second after they left the womb instead of partially inside or completely inside the womb — as in a routine late-term abortion — is merely a matter of geography. That one is murder and the other is a legal procedure is morally irreconcilable.”

Conor Friedersdorf: “It is also a story about a place where, according to the grand jury, women were sent to give birth into toilets; where a doctor casually spread gonorrhea and chlamydiae to unsuspecting women through the reuse of cheap, disposable instruments; an office where a 15-year-old administered anesthesia; an office where former workers admit to playing games when giving patients powerful narcotics; an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers.”

Mark Steyn: “This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers.”

Andrew McCarthy: “Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers,. . . described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the ‘Women’s Medical Society’ on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies — perhaps hundreds of them — were willfully mutilated after being born alive.”

Finally, this video is called 3801 Lancaster:

“He was respected. This was not a back-alley operation.”

“He was running a . . . late-term abortion clinic.”

I know this is mostly a book blog, but just as I would have been morally culpable to have lived in Hitler’s Germany and to have been silent as Jews were being rounded up and killed, I cannot be silent when we as a nation continue to murder our own children. The killing of newborn and pre-born babies happens every day in abortion “clinics” around the nation. Some of them are just cleaner and more law-abiding, a bit more “humane”, than Gosnell’s torture chamber.

Pray for the women, the people who worked at that abortion mill, Dr. Gosnell, the journalists who covered the story and those who ignored it, and for all of us. May this horror be a turning point that will touch hearts and change minds and bring us to repentance.

Bad Religion by Ross Douthat

Feb24

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written a useful, compact history of the progression of Christian thought and heresy from the rise of modernism in the 1920’s (and again in the 1960’s)to the post-WW II revival of Christian neo-orthodoxy to the dissolution of church-going, especially in the mainline Protestant churches, in the 1960’s and 70’s, to the rise of evangelicalism to the present day lapse into mostly-heresy. Of course, these are trends not absolute descriptions of every Christian or every denomination.

I say it’s useful even though Douthat paints with a broad brush, and he admits that “a different set of emphases and shadings could yield a very different portrait of American Christianity at midcentury.” This caveat extends to the entire book. Douthat makes statements such as “the message of Christianity itself seemed to have suddenly lost its credibility” (in the 1970’s) or we are a nation “where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends.” I read these sorts of categorical statements, and at first I agree, but then I think of all sorts of exceptions and conditions and stipulations.

Maybe this book is the sort of nonfiction polemic which is best reviewed by my giving you a chapter-by-chapter summary of the major theses of Douthat’s argument, and then you can judge for yourself whether or not the book would be useful for you to read.

Part 1 of the book is history, a brief overview of the fluctuations in faith and practice of orthodox Christianity in the twentieth century and the twenty-first.

Chapter One: The Lost World. This chapter begins with the conversion to Catholicism of poet W.H. Auden and continues with Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and Martin Luther King, Jr. as emblematic of the post-war return to Christianity and neoorthodoxy. Christian churches had the potential to become “the salt of the earth, a light to the nations, and a place where even modern man could find a home.”

Chapter Two: The Locust Years. The 1960’s and 70’s brought continued growth for conservative churches but but a crisis for mainline Protestant chuches and for Catholic parishes in the United States. “The culture of mainline Protestantism simply disintegrated,” and Catholics lost in terms of mass attendance, priestly and other vocations, and participation in almost every aspect of parish life. Douthat argues that political polarization, the sexual revolution, globalization and resulting religious universalism, and America’s ever-growing wealth combined to cause the decline in the credibility and eventually practice of the traditional, orthodox Christian message.

Chapter Three: Accomodation. Many churches and denominations responded to the challenges of the 60’s and 70 with an accomodationist message: “seek to forge a new Christianity more consonant with the spirit of the age, one better adapted to the trends that were undercutting orthodoxy.” The accomodationists, Catholic and Protestant, lost members, but didn’t simply disappear.

Chapter Four: Resistance. Other churches chose a different path: resistance to forces of modernism, sexual and materialistic hedonism, and moral relativism. Eventually, Catholics and Evangelicals found themselves as co-belligerents in resisting the “spirit of the age” and defending traditional Christian beliefs. As Evangelicalism grew, evangelicals re-engaged in politics and public life; Catholics moved away from adapting to the secular culture to the “tireless proselytization” and “moral arguments” of Pope John Paul II. However, the resistance wasn’t enough to stem the tide of heresy.

So, Part 2 of the book is entitled The Age of Heresy.

Chapter Five: Lost in the Gospels. Liberal, Dan Brown/Bart Ehrman/Eileen Pagels pseudo-Christian pseudo-scholarship encourages Americans to invent their own religion in which “no account of Christian origins is more authoritative than any other, ‘cafeteria’ Christianity is more intellectually serious than the orthodox attempt to grapple with the entire New Testament buffet, and the only Jesus who really matters is the one you invent for yourself.”

Chapter Six: Pray and Grow Rich. Joel Osteen, Kenneth Hagin, and others preach a Jesus who may not say crudely “name it and claim it” but who still “seems less like a savior than like a college buddy with really good stock tips, which are more or less guaranteed to pay off for any Christian bold enough to act on them.” I think Mr. Douthat goes a little off-course when he associates financial counselors like Larry Burkett and pastors such as Rick Warren, who Douthat admits have criticized the prosperity teaching of the Word-Faith movement, with that same heretical theology. It’s always tempting to tie everything into your thesis and make the chapter balance.

Chapter Seven: The God Within. “The message of Eat, Pray, Love (by Elizabeth Gilbert) is the same gospel preached by a cavalcade of contemporary gurus, teachers, and would-be holy men and women: Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, Paulo Coelho and James Redfield, Neale Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson. It’s the insight offered by just about every spiritual authority ever given a platform in Oprah Winfrey’s media empire.” God exists, if He exists, inside our own hearts and minds and souls, a subset of Me.

Chapter Eight: The City on a Hill. Of course, it’s not just the New-Age liberals who have succumbed to heresy or to heretical tendencies. “A version of (American) exceptionalism is entirely compatible with Christian orthodoxy. . . Christianity makes room for particular loves and loyalties, but not for myths of national innocence or fantasies about building the kingdom of heaven on earth.” When Christians begin to go along with the slogan “my country, right or wrong” or worse, believe that America can do no wrong, they are in danger of placing a kingdom of this world before the kingdom of our Lord.

The final, brief section of Mr. Douthat’s book is a conclusion called The Recovery of Christianity. He suggests some possible sources and models for renewal: the emerging church movement, the neo-monastic movement, church growth in the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and societal and financial catastrophe that may vindicate and make relevant again the Christian message.

I have serious doubts that any of those four events and movements will be the catalyst that God uses for revival. However, as Mr Douthat writes, “the kind of faith that should animate such a (Christian) renaissance can be lived out Christian by Christian, congregation by congregation, day by day, without regard to whether it succeeds in changing the American way of religion as a whole.” God is responsible for revival; I am responsible to live an obedient life before Him daily.

I’ve given a broad overview of a book that has much specific food for thought, challenging, even convicting, words of warning, and a few practical ideas about “how we then should live.” Recommended for all Christians, especially those who are involved in and thinking about political and cultural engagement.

Why I’ll Hold My Nose and Vote for Romney

Oct4

Average gasoline price per gallon in January, 2009 when Obama took office: $1.85

Average gasoline price per gallon in October, 2012: $3.80

Income tax our family paid for 2008: $3909.00
Income tax our family paid for 2011: $9631.00

Our income went up a little, but almost all of the increase was absorbed by increased taxes. More than all of the increase in income was absorbed by increased taxes and increased prices, especially for food and gasoline.

Add to those personal stats these national statistics, and you will see that Mr. Obama had his chance to “fix the economy”, and he and his party cohorts have only made things much, much worse.

National debt as of January 2009: $10.6 trillion
National debt as of October 2012: $16.2 trillion
Do you have any idea how much a trillion dollars is? I certainly can’t even conceive of that amount of money. Do you suppose that all our politicians are laboring under the same difficulty? They can’t wrap their tiny, finite minds around the difference between a billion and a trillion, so they just keep spending money that we don’t have and can’t pay back once we’ve borrowed it.

U.S. Budget deficit (Deficit: The amount by which the government’s total budget outlays exceeds its total receipts for a fiscal year.):
Budget deficit in 2007, under GWB: $161 billion
Budget deficit in 2008 under GWB: $459 billion
Budget deficit in 2009, budget inherited from GWB: $1.4 trillion
Budget deficit in 2012 under BHO: 1.3 trillion
Budget deficit in 2011 under BHO: 1.3 trillion
Budget deficit in 2012 under BHO: $1.33 trillion

How can any responsible adult vote for the continuation of such reckless madness? We have entered Wonderland, and voting for Obama is like voting for the Mad Hatter for President. Maybe Romney is the March Hare and won’t do any better, but surely it makes sense to give him a chance rather than stick with the craziness that we have now.