Historic elections require recollection

This election has been coming for four years. It began Nov. 5, 2008, and the reason it has not ended is because one disgruntled political party has incessantly insulted the president elect in every way a person can be insulted.

Since Barack Obama took office, members of the Republican Party have given utterly false and purposefully misleading testimony about the first black president, and soon our country will vote to decide if we believe these lies.

He has been called a fascist, racist, Marxist, communist and a socialist. People have claimed he was elected because of voter fraud, yet could offer no instances where ballots had been doctored. Some questioned the legitimacy of his citizenship, demanded to see his birth certificate and were not satisfied with the one that was presented.

People have compared him to the likes of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Adolf Hitler, men who were personally responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

Where any of these comparisons accurate? No, they were not.

Media personalities said Obama would socialize our economy and kill what remained of the free market in the United States.

They said he would form government panels that would decide whether seniors would live or die, and have warned us of his many ulterior motives that they cannot show us because of how secretive they are.

Were any of those claims true? No, they were not, but that did not stop those flights of fancy from being adopted and recited by the GOP for short stretches of time before being discredited, disowned and denied.

On occasion, they even attacked parts of his agenda.

The Affordable Healthcare Act of 2010 has proved more distasteful to conservatives than a teenage girl on birth control burning the New Testament, and they were vehemently opposed to the president’s repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allowed gay men and women to serve openly in the our military.

In fact, conservatives think that the president is inept in all matters that concern the military, but this columnist cannot claim to be surprised

All of this incoherent babble is symptomatic of a concerted public relations effort to create enough static and manufactured outrage to blur the image of their last two-term president.

Why would they want do that? Because the last Republican president was a monumental failure in matters of both foreign and domestic affairs, and if anyone would like to dispute that fact I am more than eager to read and publish your objections. He used our armed forces as his only means of achieving international goals and presided over the most delayed, disjointed and disastrously misguided hurricane response effort in modern history.

Obama was elected largely because of the public’s concern over two foreign wars that had no visible ends and no proposed exit strategy. These wars were in full swing when Obama was sworn in, and as president he has already ended our involvement in one of them.

I believe he will end the other in 2014.

Mitt Romney says he favors that same deadline, but has also opposed it before. He favors increases in defense spending that favor ideals rather than facts, and when he speaks about ending a war, memories of his predecessor convince me I can’t believe a word he says.

Under Obama’s leadership America has the chance for its first peacetime years since I was 11.

Remember peace?

Neither do I, but the thought makes my mouth water.

Obama is a better candidate than his vague alternative and he’s already brought troops home.

Let’s give him the chance to bring back the rest.