The beat goes on

"Great comfort in small blessings" department:

I yield to nobody in my conviction that Barack Obama's presidency has been a disaster for the Republic. Last week, in this space, I even suggested that some of his offenses rose to the level of impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors."

Yet, try as I might, I can't convince myself that the 2012 election is a "hinge of history," and it's "game over" for liberty unless he's defeated. If Obama wins, the fight goes on; if he loses, don't pop the champagne corks just yet.

Consider that, since FDR, few second-term presidents have been capable of great mischief. Obama may have done most of the real damage he's capable of already.

[. . .]

As others have observed, our government has become a runaway train—and presidential elections increasingly look like a struggle to determine who gets to sit in front and pretend he's driving.

The point is to derail this juggernaut, and no single election can do that. Whatever happens in November, the work will have to go on.

But even if he has "done most of the real damage" already, it still has to be undone, and that would be little easier with a Republican president and Congress. There's even less comfort in this article than I first thought -- he's right about the runaway train aspect. Everybody's getting so worked up over Paul Ryan's "draconian" budget proposal, yet that proposal is "weak tea."

Here we are, years into a governmental deficit situation that shows no sign of ending. How is it that Ryan and the Republican leadership cannot even dream of balancing a budget over 10 years' time? All of the discussion of reforming entitlements and the tax code and everything else is really great and necessary - I mean that sincerely - but when you cannot envision a way of reducing government spending after a decade-plus of an unrestrained spending binge, then you are not serious about cutting government. If Milton Friedman was right that spending is the proper measure of the government's size and scope in everybody's life, then the establishment GOP is signaling what we knew all along: They are simply an echo of the Democratic Party.

Sorry to link to two articles at the same site, but if you're talking about the need to tame monstrous government, it's hard to do better than Reason.