Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama

Recently, it struck me that I have reason to be thankful Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Many conservatives have argued at length over the last 35 months that Americans elected the wrong candidate back in November of 2008.

I am not so sure about that.

That statement, however, is made for very different reasons than our more illustrious right-wing mouthpieces would have their viewers or listeners believe.

I am diametrically opposed to the vast majority of his party’s initiatives as well as his core ideology of redistribution as well as philosophy of social justice. Obama’s pace of spending in 2 3/4 years of governance has alarmingly accelerated the United States’ advance toward fiscal insolvency beyond anything perpetrated by George W. Bush and congressional Republicans.

On the other hand, there is no denying that if Senator John McCain had been elected, instead of recklessly hitting the gas pedal on irresponsible spending he would have sought to maintain what was then the status quo: the incremental march toward an all-encompassing, all-consuming federal government that swells to unsustainable proportions.

Most likely, if we had President McCain instead of President Obama, government’s bloat would have continued its creep toward the brink of fiscal collapse just slowly enough so that when Americans finally awoke to the need to reverse course it – in all probability – would be too late to do so.

Personally, there are additional reasons I am thankful events went the way they did three years ago.

If McCain were our president I’d likely still be in my Republican partisan intellectual slumber.

I’d still be embracing intellectually lazy talking points instead of researching constitutional arguments.

I would not have been motivated to research the Libertarian Party.

The idea of making a run for Congress two years ago would have been utterly ridiculous to me.

And, I wouldn’t be chair of a newly-formed county-level political party.

For society as a whole, in addition to the continuation of the incremental advance toward total statism (and being met with only token resistance), renewed interest in understanding the Constitution wouldn’t have arisen.

The Tea Party movement would not be the prominent force it is today.

We would not be discussing Progressivism and contrasting it against Free Market Liberalism (reference F.A. Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom).

So, thank you again, President Obama.

Thank you for beating Senator John McCain by employing a hokey, ill-defined campaign slogan. Thank you for setting the stage for millions of people to realize how positively ludicrous it is to vote for a candidate based on nothing more than an artfully meaningless catch-phrase such as “Hope & Change.”

Thank you for being so arrogant in your pursuit of redistributive legislation.

Thank you for being so disingenuous in your arguments and dismissive of those who disagree with you.

Thank you for buying into the “Astroturf” rhetoric by your fellow leftists and then being so smug toward the Tea Party during its early days.

Thank you – for awakening again the Sleeping Giant.