Over the last 11 years, my predictions have been both eerily prescient and ludicrously inaccurate. While I did correctly foresee the financial crisis, the global economic depression and the collapse of the housing market, my ability to anticipate election results was reliably poor. Unfortunately, the one area where my expectations seldom went unfulfilled was the way in which the federal government continued to expand its intervention into the U.S. economy and the lives of America’s citizens almost unchecked by resistance on the part of the people or their elected representatives.

Given that my primary goal in writing this column was to convince the American people to aggressively defend their God-given, Constitution-guaranteed liberties, I have to conclude that the most honest way to describe it is 11 years of unmitigated failure. I’m not ashamed of that, nor do I consider the effort wasted. But, at the end of the day, American freedom has been yielded.

That failure, however, is not why I am ending this column. This will be my last column because everything has its season, and I am no longer the youthful firebrand with an active interest in U.S. politics that I once was. H.L. Mencken once wrote, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” I find that I no longer have any interest in the fate of a people who are quite clearly content to choose between the likes of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on the right and Barack Obama on the left.

Democracy has spoken. The die is cast. There is little more to say, except wait and watch as events play themselves out.

Let me be clear and assure everyone that I have joined neither the IMF nor a revolutionary militia. I have simply reached a point in my life where I wish to focus my writing on novels such as “A Throne of Bones” rather than political commentary. And I am deeply appreciative of Joseph and Elizabeth Farah, WND and the commentary editors for permitting me to write so freely on these pages for so long.

I leave WND with one last prediction and a reminder of a promise. The prediction: The times ahead will be difficult, much harder than most of us presently imagine. All empires fall in time, and the days of the imperial U.S. are numbered. As the global economy continues to contract, as secession fever spreads from Belgium, Catalonia, and Scotland to the American South and West, the bipartisan ruling faction will react as elites always do, by attempting to tighten their grasp over the populace, by trying to disarm and enslave them.

But Americans are the heirs of Lexington and Concord. Rebellion is in our blood. Independence is our birthright. Our fathers were the original revolutionaries. And one day, our sons and daughters will be free again.

Satan and his minions rule this fallen world. But we who are in, but not of, it always have the unquenchable hope that the true King of Kings will return and set things right again. Don’t put your faith in gold or guns, still less in governments, but in Jesus Christ. We have no king but Jesus, who came to set captives free.

The promise: “If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”

May God bless and keep you all.

Most of us are having smaller and less luxurious Christmas celebrations this season. We are buying fewer and less expensive presents for each other. What has been a vague feeling of uncertainty has given way to the sober realization that we are facing more than an economic bump in the road; many are beginning to recognize that the decades-long party has ended, and the consequential hangover is just beginning.

I hope that we will not be returning to those harder times when a child was delighted to receive the simple gift of an orange on Christmas morning, but the future will be what it will be and only God can be expected to know what it will hold.

The problems we face are daunting, and they are far beyond the ability of one man to solve. It has taken the combined efforts of millions, past and present, to create them, and they will not be easily surmounted. Because man is fallen and foolish, we, our fathers, our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers have left a legacy of financial debt, moral decadence and national decline to our children. This is not the first time a great nation has done so, nor will it be the last.

Jesus Christ was born amidst the still-glowing ashes of the Roman Republic; Augustus had only recently established the Empire a few decades before his birth. He gave light to a world lost in pagan darkness, and centuries later his followers preserved civilization and knowledge as the Empire crumbled in the West. Over time, Christian monarchies gave way to Christian democracies as Christendom achieved new heights of freedom, knowledge, wealth and technological advancement unprecedented in the history of man.

But Christendom, in Europe and America alike, has gradually turned away from Jesus Christ and returned to the pagan darkness from which it emerged more than 1,000 years ago. The blessings it realized from its Christian virtues are gradually fading away; post-Christian America is already less free and less wealthy than it was before, and it is only a matter of time before its knowledge and technology begins to fade away as well.

The political idol of democracy cannot restore hope, because that false god is, at least in part, the architect of post-Christian decline. It doesn’t matter if Democrats are in office or if Republicans hold power; as we have already seen, the nation’s decline proceeds regardless of who presides over it. New hope will only come from national repentance and a return to the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Our Founding Fathers knew this. John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In abandoning biblical morality and the Christian faith, Americans have rendered their Constitution irrelevant and invalid. Those who deny truth do not hesitate to torture law in the service of their lies.

The wheel has turned. The dark has risen. Winter has come. But the mystery of Christmas confounds the wisdom of the world. The Word became flesh and came to dwell amongst us. Now, as always, the story of the child in the manger offers hope to the hopeless. It offers light in the darkness. Though the holiday lights this Christmas may be a little dimmed, the Light of Jesus Christ, Man’s Lord and Savior, only shines the brighter.

Merry Christmas, and may God bless us, every one.

Postscript: As a little Christmas gift to readers, I am giving away copies of my recently published novella, “A Magic Broken,” for free on Amazon Dec. 24 and Dec. 25.

The television is full of weeping parents and pictures of angelic children. Facebook is afire with solipsistic women attempting to co-opt the tragedy for their own emotional gratification. Politicians wipe away fake tears and thunder about the need for “meaningful action.” Psychologists blather about the killer’s motivation and wonder if his murderous rage stemmed from inadequate toilet-training, psychotropic medications or his parent’s divorce. Conspiracy theorists note inconsistencies in the news stories and mark the suicide that always seems to be accompanied by reports of a second gunman.

We know the drill. This isn’t our first rodeo.

Americans who value freedom know that they cannot permit ignorant comments from the overly emotional about how “we must do something” to stand unchallenged. The political elite that seeks to disarm the American people is getting increasingly desperate, seeing how public support for gun rights has consistently grown in keeping with the federal government’s assertion of its right to fly armed drones over their heads and assassinate them at will. They are alarmed by the way in which all of their attempts to emotionally manipulate the American people into submitting to a blatantly unconstitutional disarmament have not only failed, but backfired.

The ruling elite is presently embarking upon a full-court press for gun control, the likes of which have not been seen since George W. Bush’s administration used the 2008 financial crisis to ram TARP down the throats of an unwilling American people and bail out his friends on Wall Street. But it isn’t working. It isn’t working because we know the drill.

That is why your liberal friends are complaining that this isn’t the time to politicize the tragedy. That is why the left is whining that they are tired of hearing “guns don’t kill people, crazy autistic male nerds on medication kill people.” They are whining and complaining because they are learning, to their horror, that even their appeals to the emotions generated by the deaths of lovely little schoolchildren are falling on experienced-deafened ears. They’ve been waiting years for this opportunity, and now they’re learning that their best shot is futile.

Don’t give them an inch. Cut them no slack. Punch back twice as hard. When they bring the knife of emotional blackmail to the argument, draw your .50 caliber Desert Eagle of facts, logic and history and blow them away without mercy.

Ask them this: If guns, and not people, kill people, why don’t they first disarm the more heavily armed government and police people before trying to disarm the public?

Ask them this: How does it make any sense to disarm the public and leave the government armed when over the last 100 years, governments around the world, including the U.S. federal government, have killed vastly more people in time of peace than all of the private murders in the world combined?

Ask them this: 800,000 law enforcement officers have killed 525 unarmed citizens with guns so far this year. Approximately 310 million private citizens killed an estimated 10,500 of their fellow citizens with guns over the same period of time. Given that a law enforcement officer is 19.4 times more likely to shoot and kill an unarmed American than a private citizen, if you genuinely care about reducing gun deaths, why aren’t you calling for the disarmament of law enforcement?

A free people must be an armed people. Without private arms, there is no freedom. America’s Founding Fathers didn’t fight to preserve the freedom of the press, for the emanations and penumbras of a woman’s right to choose or even for the right to vote. They fought to prevent their own government from disarming them. The Battles of Lexington and Concord took place because government troops under the command of Lt. Col. Francis Smith were ordered to destroy the weapons being stored at Concord.

That famous phrase, “The British are coming,” meant that the British government was coming for American guns. Americans didn’t give them up then. Americans will not give them up now. No, Americans will never give them up; he who surrenders his unalienable right to arms also gives up his right to call himself an American.

The fact that these propagandist attacks on traditional culture and Christianity are made in the name of a false and nonexistent realism merely adds insulting their intelligence to the long list of the entertainment industry’s crimes against the American people.

It is not only the film and television industries that are the problem. Fiction, particularly fantasy fiction, a literary genre that was created and defined by devout religious men such as George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, has been defiled and all but ruined by devout feminists and evangelical atheists, by authors who are more than willing to sacrifice historical verisimilitude, literary quality and history itself on their ideological altars.

I’m far from the only one to notice that the decline into moral nihilism and ahistorical irreligion has had a profoundly negative effect on the quality of fantasy fiction. One is not sure whether one should laugh hysterically or weep at the claim by E.L. James, the author of the bestselling “50 Shades of Grey,” that “The Lord of the Rings” is lauded because it was written by a man, while “Twilight” and her own work of fantasy porn are derided because they were written by women.

But it is one thing to criticize and complain about an issue, however legitimate; it is another to do something about it. In writing “A Throne of Bones,” I had two objectives of modest ambition. The first was to write a better epic fantasy than George R. R. Martin, or at least a better one than “A Dance with Dragons” turned out to be. The second is to demonstrate that by relying upon historical verisimilitude, conventional literary archetypes and traditional patterns of human behavior instead of modern secular ideologies and the current assumptions of the cultural zeitgeist, an author can expect to produce a work of literary quality that is observably superior to the vast quantity of sewage being published today.

Hence “A Throne of Bones,” an 850-page novel that is the first in the series, “Arts of Dark and Light.” It is available for $4.99 in ebook format or $34.99 in hardcover. In writing it, I attempted to apply the lessons I learned in reading Tolkien, Erikson, Martin, Abercrombie, Bakker, Abraham, Zelazny and others.

It is not for me to say whether I have been successful in this endeavor, but for the readers. Here are a few excerpts from various Amazon reviewers:

• “There are beautiful moments, there is clever dialogue, there is deep mystery. It took some level of genius to write it. I recommend you read it.”
• “The author of this fantasy novel claims that he was inspired to write by the desire to do better than George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Dance with Dragons.’ He has certainly succeeded!”
• “Vox does an excellent job of piquing your interest and then taking developments in way you don’t expect. … This is not a book for children; there is graphic violence and unflinching presentation of evil. Yet neither is glorified, and though the world is realistically portrayed with few truly good men, there is no moral ambivalence here either.”
• “I sometimes thought I was reading a Tolkien book, and sometimes I thought perhaps G. R. R. Martin had finally bothered to finish his latest installment. Mr. Day’s story is in the mold of both, but his writing style and vision are decidedly his own, and they are both very, very good.”

When the culture loses its way and devolves into degradation, intellectual relativism and moral barbarism, as has happened time and time again throughout the course of history, it is the responsibility of those who maintain the old ways to show the pathway out. Christians and conservatives cannot simply retreat from cultural pollution because the poisoned smog will always follow them and their children. Like all evils, the amoral culture of human degradation must be confronted and conquered; it cannot be ignored.

In Great Britain, the Scottish National Party has all but eliminated the Conservative Party north of the border and seats nearly twice as many members as the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament. As for the United Kingdom herself, the United Kingdom Independence Party, derided by British Prime Minister David Cameron as a collection of “loonies, fruitcakes and closet racists,” just handed the Tories their Eton-educated heads in three by-elections that serve as a likely harbinger of political upheaval to come; UKIP has already effectively replaced the Liberal Democrats as the United Kingdom’s fourth most influential political party after the Conservatives, Labour, and the Scottish National Party.

Whether it is politically sensible for the prime minister to attack the only party defending British sovereignty against the technocratic fascists of the European Union will, in time, become clear. But it does point to the way in which the ridicule of the major political parties and mainstream media is manifestly impotent when it comes to defeating a growing desire for secession and self-determination in a democratic society.

There can be little doubt that Cameron’s opinion of UKIP is but a pale shadow of the U.S. bifactional ruling party’s hatred and contempt for white Americans who still hold to traditional values, believe in their constitutional liberties and derive their sense of identity from historical America. They mock the secessionist petitioners in Texas and other states, celebrate the infestation of even the smallest American heartland towns by African, Asian and Aztec cultures, and engage in ruthless doublethink as they worship at the altar of a false and entirely nonexistent equality.

And yet, they are afraid and they threaten every American who dares to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. Why? Because they know time, history and socionomics are not on their side.

Is the secession of several American states truly unthinkable? Is the breakup of the United States of America really outside the boundaries of historically reasonable possibility?

Some would point to the amount of time that has passed since the Civil War, when the question was last considered. It has been 147 years since Americans attempted to exert their right to self-determination and leave the United States. However, it has been 305 years since the Scottish Parliament passed the Union with England Act in 1707, and even if Scotland does not vote to break up the Union in the referendum tentatively scheduled for 2014, the fact that the Scottish people are seriously considering an exit from a Union that is twice as old as the forcible one imposed by Abraham Lincoln should suffice to prove that the age of the U.S. does not render a potential breakup theoretically or practically impossible.

This is especially true given that the English people and the Scottish people have far more in common than Americans do with the tens of millions of post-1965 immigrants from various non-European nations around the world, or their urban enablers. The fact that the future citizens of Aztlán are presently content to continue collecting tribute in the form of state and federal largesse does not mean that they will refrain from exerting the political muscle that their growing demographic weight provides them once the contracting economy brings the gravy train to an end.

It also seems unlikely that the millions of Americans who have moved away from declining school systems, who have retreated from an increasingly vibrant communities, and who have fled from high-tax jurisdictions will continue to retreat as the people who destroyed their schools, their communities and their state budgets attempt to follow them.

They will not because they cannot. The frontiers are closed. There is nowhere else to go.

And so, just as the Catalonians are learning to put their differences aside and show a united front to the central government in Spain, as the Scottish Tories and Labour voters have united together in pursuit of a free and independent Scotland, and as Britons of the working-class left and the libertarian right are realizing that a sovereign Britain is more important than any of the many issues that divide them, Americans will eventually do the same. This is why it doesn’t matter if one considers the birth of an American Independence Party to be desirable or not; it is inevitable.

We work because someone pays us money to work. We don’t go downtown because what used to be a central shopping gallery full of middle-class people has become a place where Hispanic gangs congregate. We practice economic selection, acting in ways that will allow us to keep what we have and to earn more when it is possible. Politicians and bureaucrats generally refuse to recognize this, which is why they utilize static revenue models that are not only reliably wrong, but predictably overestimate the amount of tax income that will be received.

There is considerable debate about the precise point at which the Laffer Curve provides maximum tax revenues, but as a general rule, if a tax increase causes a reduction in tax revenue, it is safe to assume that the rate has been set on the wrong side of the curve.

And yet somehow, what people understand about tax revenue, they often fail to understand about freedom. Only Paul Krugman believes that setting tax rates to 100 percent will provide the government with 100 percent of the taxable income from which the $899 billion in tax revenues received were calculated in 2010. Most people realize that at a tax rate of 100 percent, the total tax revenue received would probably be a lot less than the $899 billion presently received with much lower rates, because if all of everyone’s income is paid to the government, there will be very little income. Very few people would bother to work anymore.

However, most people think that the more human behavior is legally permitted, the more free everyone will be. But this is obviously nonsensical, as the freedom to develop and forcibly administer the bubonic plague to strangers on the street would undeniably result in a considerable net reduction of freedom for everyone who is infected by the plague. So, various political philosophers have proposed some form of the old aphorism: “my rights end where your rights begin.” Unfortunately, like all aphorisms, this general statement is of very limited utility in practice.

Does my right to permit whomever I want to stay in my house end where your right to sleep wherever you want begins? Probably not, so long as my house is not also a hotel. But it doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this column, where various arbitrary lines must be drawn, the point is that it is an observable fact that some lines must be drawn, some limitations on someone’s freedom must be observed, and those lines are, in most cases, going to be arbitrary to some degree.

This is where the concept of the Laffer Curve comes in handy. I suggest that just as there is an elasticity of taxable income, there is an elasticity of human freedom. My observation is that the amount of actual human liberty tends to change in response to changes in the scope of legally permissible human behavior.

Let us take, as an extreme example, the right to reside freely throughout the U.S. Reducing that freedom for Americans would appear, at first glance, to be a severe and obvious restriction on human freedom. And yet, as those who reside in states near California very well know, the freedoms they enjoy on a practical basis are being reduced as a direct result as the “Californication” of their cities, counties and states by the 225,000 Californians who flee the increasingly bankrupt state every year and then drive up prices and vote to impose California-like government policies on their new neighbors. Their freedom is being observably limited by the general freedom of residence. Is the net freedom a positive or a negative? And what if the annual California exodus rises from 225,000 annually to 22.5 million?

I’m not saying California should be walled off from its neighboring states or that Texas should issue bounties as part of a catch-and-release-in-California program, although it is a tragedy that the framers of the Constitution didn’t possess enough forethought to deny all residents of high-tax states moving to low-tax states the right to vote in their new state of residence. I am merely pointing out that there must always be a point at which more theoretical freedom in law means less actual freedom in action. Contrary to what many anarchists, libertarians and liberals believe, maximizing human freedom of action is more of a complex curve than a simple linear progression.

1. The state polls, with their seemingly absurd +11 and +7 Democrat weightings, were nevertheless correct.
2. The Hispanic vote continues to grow at the rate of one percent of the electorate every four years and is increasingly inclined toward the Democratic Party.
3. The libertarian element that once voted Republican and now rightly refuses to support moderate Republicans of the Dole/Bush/McCain/Romney variety has grown considerably.

Eight years ago, I wrote a column about “the continued stink of an extinct republic as it decomposes into dictatorial empire” titled, “You can’t fix a corpse.” It was readily apparent, even then, that the constitutional nation, founded upon the revolutionary tradition of the rights of Englishmen, was already dead. So why does it feel as if something important has changed as a result of the recent presidential election? Why is there a sense of significant and lasting change for the worse in the political wind due to the re-election of Barack Obama?

The reason is that the re-election of Obama – combined with the manner in which it occurred – has finally extinguished the last embers of hope in the hearts of millions of true Americans. Even many of those who refused to vote for Romney on principle because of his proven liberal track record nevertheless saw him as operating within the limits of traditional American political ideology. They might have seen him as a potentially disastrous president, and been skeptical that he would even begin to address the cataclysmic problems facing the nation, but they saw him as someone who was genuinely concerned about the fate of the United States and the American population within it.

Americans don’t despair now because the president is a Democrat or because blacks disproportionately supported him. That was equally true when Clinton ran for office. The reason they are reeling with shock and horror is that they have finally come to understand that the melting pot is a myth, that the grand story of immigration they swallowed as children is a monstrous falsehood, and that there are now two very different nations living within the boundaries of what they had previously believed was a single country.

The uncomfortable fact of the matter is that post-1965 immigrants are not, and never will be, Americans in the constitutional or revolutionary sense. It doesn’t matter if they are Catholic mestizos, Christian Asians or Muslim Arabs. It is not a matter of religion or race, but rather of centuries-old cultural traditions in which a dominant central government is considered a basic fact of life and a potential resource to be exploited, not a dangerous servant best viewed with suspicion and kept under constant restraint. This can be seen in the 2012 exit polls: Asians voted 73 percent for Obama’s big government message, Hispanics 71 percent, Muslims 85 percent and blacks 96 percent.

But it doesn’t matter if we look at the recent exit polls or at the historical governments in Mexico, Japan and the Middle East. The conclusion remains the same. The overwhelming majority of people from those cultures and traditions neither understand nor desire limited government. Over the last half-century, the federal government has elected itself a new people, and just as the Indians were supplanted by the European colonists, the descendants of those European colonists are now being replaced and deprived of self-governance by colonists from the Third World. And while it is certainly the democratic right of those colonists to demand increasingly big and intrusive government, it is arguably worth noting that the limited government they reject is exactly what the ancestors of traditional America fought a bloody revolution to establish.

I have no doubt that many will be outraged by this historical perspective and decry it with angry howls of “raciss!” That’s fine; it is the childish level of discourse on which such people operate. I expect nothing less. But to the sincere immigration proponent capable of rational thought, who sincerely believes that post-1965 immigration has somehow been beneficial to American society, I would merely ask this question: Why do you believe a simple geographic change is sufficient to completely change an individual’s cultural traditions and political ideologies?

Being an American emigrant, I am more aware than most of how little a change in location affects one’s cultural traditions and political values. I have been a European three times longer than the average green-card holder needs to become a U.S. citizen and acquire the right to vote in U.S. elections. And yet, are not my views and perspectives still recognizably American? If you would still consider me to be fundamentally American, then how can you possibly consider immigrants from Mexico, Malaysia or Somalia, even immigrants possessing U.S. citizenship and the right to vote, anything but Mexicans, Malaysians and Somalis?

More importantly, why would you expect them to place any value on things foreign to them such as the U.S. Constitution or the ideological values of America’s Founding Fathers? Are they learning it in the public schools? Are they learning it from the mainstream media? Are they even encountering it anywhere?

The 2012 presidential election was not significant because it signaled the end of America. That was already readily apparent eight years ago. But it was significant because it made it clear to everyone how, when and why constitutional America met its end.

There is no need to point out the many technical problems with the polls or the intrinsic flaws and poor performance of various statistical models. Many others have gone into considerable detail doing that. I will simply note that I see no legitimate reason to abandon the conclusion that I reached long before Mitt Romney was nominated the Republican candidate for president, which is that Romney will be the next president of the United States. I do not support the man, and I do not believe he will preside in a manner that is beneficial to the country, the economy or the world; I am simply observing that the patterns of party enthusiasm still appear to be much more akin to 2010 than 2008.

It is always futile to pretend any precision in matters of human behavior. But it is also fun. So, in the spirit of the electoral season, I suggest that Romney will win 305 electoral votes to Obama’s 233. I also expect that he’ll have a margin of victory in the popular vote between three and four percent. It won’t be a landslide, but it also won’t be as close as those who expect Obama to win assume a Romney upset would have to be.

Now, is it possible that I’ve completely misjudged the mood of the electorate while being overly cynical about the professionalism of the mainstream media? Absolutely. If so, we’ll enjoy the benefit of another four years of the most incompetent, most unintentionally tragicomic administration since President Carter’s one term. But I’m not concerned about that. We already know what sort of president Obama will make, which is to say an absentee one. A country can do worse.

What concerns me is the possibility that Romney may not, as so many Republicans assume he must be, the lesser evil. I understand why many conservatives, and even some libertarians, are voting for him. Obama is not clearly going to fix the economy, address the growing national debt or arrest the national decline, so Mitt Romney represents the hope of a change in that regard. The problem is that Romney has shown absolutely no sign of even the smallest interest in addressing the core problems the United States is presently facing. He isn’t going to stop the aging of the Baby Boomers, he isn’t going to stop the Federal Reserve’s insane credit creation, he isn’t going to stop Third World immigration, he isn’t going to stop free trade, and he isn’t going to stop the use of the American military as an unpaid global police force.

I’m not attempting to convince anyone not to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama at this point. I trust I’ve made my position clear in previous columns, and I will not be voting for either man. My only objective is to remind you that the president is just one man, and although he is a powerful totem as the representative of the hopes and dreams of millions of individuals voting for him, he cannot successfully arm-wrestle the invisible hand of the global economic forces.

And remember, just as it took Nixon to go to China and Obama to openly assassinate American citizens, as president, Mitt Romney’s signature policies are likely to be those that go against basic Republican principles.

As the details of the large-scale attacks on the American diplomatic compound and the CIA annex gradually leak out into the press, it appears that two of the four fallen Americans, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, died fighting in a manner no less valorous than Sgt. 1st Class Shugart and Master Sgt. Gordon. While there have been no reliable reports to substantiate the claim as yet, it has been rumored that the two ex-SEALs accounted for even more jihadists than the brave snipers of Mogadishu. If the rumors subsequently turn out to be true, the Battle of Benghazi would merit its place in military history alongside “Blackhawk Down,” the Alamo and other courageous American last stands.

And it would also merit considerable outrage on the part of the SEALs’ families, as well as the American military and the American public. In addition to the remarkable – and to be honest, not very credible – enemy body count, there are also reports, which are laid out in a wiki-timeline of the attack, that the two men requested military support at least three times and were repeatedly denied. It is reported that although the fighting at the annex went on for four hours, six hours and 20 minutes after the attack on the diplomatic mission began, no assistance was provided despite two Special Ops teams and an entire airbase full of jets and helicopters only two hours away. Even worse, the request for military support was denied, despite two surveillance drones that were patrolling the area and providing live information that was available to the White House.

While a considerable amount of information has yet to come out, what happened in Benghazi obviously flies in the face of the Obama administration’s initial attempts to blame an immigrant Egyptian filmmaker for nonexistent protests that, being nonexistent, quite clearly had absolutely nothing to do with the Libyan attacks on the two American compounds. The Obama administration hasn’t even begun to come clean on its responsibility for the military’s failure to respond to the attacks; the filmmaker supposedly responsible for the film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is still in federal custody.

Now the Navy admiral in command of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Middle East has been replaced due to an investigation into “an accusation of inappropriate leadership judgment,” there are rumors that Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been fired, and the CIA has put out an official statement declaring, “No one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need.” The situation fairly reeks of a desperate White House attempting to cover whatever responsibility for the debacle.

It is certainly still possible that the commander in chief was blameless in the entire affair, but that appears unlikely considering the amount of provable untruths that his administration has put forth with regard to it. This is why a public congressional investigation into the Benghazi attacks is required now, not after the election, so that the American people can take the facts of the matter into account while they are deciding if Barack Obama merits a second term.

Obama himself should welcome such an inquiry. Otherwise, he may one day find himself facing the families of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, and being told something very similar to what Herbert Shughart, the father of Randy Shughart, told Bill Clinton after refusing to shake his hand.

“You are not fit to be president of the United States. The blame for my son’s death rests with the White House and with you. You are not fit to command.”

None of these dire warnings are true. This presidential election is no more important than the one four years ago, or the one four years before that. The differences between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are mostly superficial, and their policy positions on 90 out of 100 issues are substantially the same.

So settle down. If the world is going to end, it isn’t going to do so on the basis of either man being elected to the White House. If the economy is going to crash, it will do so regardless of who wins the election. If the nation is going to decline and fall, it will do so no matter who is nominally in charge of the country.

Now, I was incorrect about my outlandish prediction that Obama would retire rather than face the possibility of only his second-ever electoral defeat. But I was correct to notice his lack of interest in winning a second term. Throughout what has passed for his campaign, Obama’s detachment has been so readily apparent that even the mainstream media have finally noticed it. He clearly wants nothing more than to move gracefully on to the next stage of his career, which will consist of traveling around the world being paid to hear how wonderful he is, only this time without the pressure of actually having to do anything.

The enthusiasm gap that matters does not concern Democratic voter turnout versus Republican voter turnout, but rather Obama’s marked lack of enthusiasm for a second term in comparison with Mitt Romney’s desperate need to seek his father’s approval.

For months, people have been saying that Obama is a certain winner. Nate Silver, the petty god of the poll-watchers, is on record as calculating that Obama has more than an 80 percent chance of winning the election. However, those odds have dropped to 65 percent, and Silver is now publicly waffling even on that two-thirds probability. This is because the national polls are now showing Romney ahead, in one case, as much as seven points ahead of Obama.

The response of Silver and others who are still insisting that Obama is a sure thing is their quadrennial rediscovery of the Electoral College. They claim that the national polls no longer matter; what is more relevant is the state polls, specifically, the state polls in the so-called “swing states” where the outcome is still potentially in doubt. Everyone knows Obama will win California and Massachusetts, just as Romney is going to win Utah and Texas.

What these unlikely champions of the states tend to forget, however, is that the national polls have a pretty good track record of predicting the actual winner, even if they seldom get the actual winning percentage right. This is because the polls, both state and national, are much less precise than the pollsters like to pretend, they are really only useful indicators of the public’s general mood concerning the two candidates. The fact that two people happen to both live in Pennsylvania does not mean that they are any more likely to think alike, or vote alike, than one person in Hollywood and another in Manhattan.

Now, is it possible that I’m wrong and we will witness an Obama landslide of Reaganesque proportions? Certainly. And in that case, I will readily acknowledge the superiority of the 538-style methodology to my pattern recognition-based approach. But given how much movement has been seen in the national polls in the last two weeks alone, and how the odds reported by the statistical models keep changing, I think it is remarkably unwise to assign any serious significance to the expressed opinions of a few thousand people residing in several of the swing states.

It all comes down to four simple facts, in my opinion. Mitt Romney wants to be president, and no one truly knows what sort of president he will be. Barack Obama doesn’t want to be president anymore, and everyone now knows he will never be the sort of president they hoped he would become. That is why Mitt Romney will win on Election Day.