Glenn Beck said that America needs a twelve step program. Every good twelve step program begins with admitting our problem. I figured with everyone jumping on Obama about his remarks regarding small town Americans, I should come clean and just admit the truth.

I AM bitter.

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I cling to my religion just as I cling to my right to keep and bear arms because it's people like me who are always ready and have defended this country, its people and its ideas from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I do have a distinct antipathy for people who are not like me. Not immigrants, as Sen. Obama boldly insists. At least most immigrants, legal and illegal, know what it means to work hard and struggle every day. They don't have time to try to impose their ideology on anyone. My antipathy is largely reserved for those like the good senator and his followers who see me and people like me as a threat. We stand in the way of the Utopian order they wish to create. "Utopia" is what they mean when Sen. Obama and his followers hi-jack the phrase "a more perfect Union".

It is people like me in small town America, clinging to our religion and guns, who struggled bitterly against the "utopias" and "perfect unions", the tyrannies, of the twentieth century. Wherein these utopias, men discarded their faith and clung, instead, to the religion of the state; exchanging the eternal moral compass solely for the rationale of man. An exchange that often included the loss of compassion, sympathy, empathy and even humanity and the gain of mass graves.

Pardon me if I keep my religion and gun to insure that we do not lose those same necessities.

I am bitter about our government. Not because it has forgotten about me, but because it doesn't. I am bitter about its continuing intrusion into my life, its continuing dip into my pocket book, in order to continually expand its power and control often in the name of some "greater good". I own an extreme antipathy towards those who seek to expand that power in order to inflict their ideas and their control on me or, worse and often, to expand their own power, control and wealth.

I admit to a deep suspicion of any wealthy persons who provide monetary and material support to any expansionist Utopians like Sen. Obama. I suspect they hold a similar suspicion and antipathy towards people like me because we are the last obstacle to their desired social order. In fact, all of the power of wealth and connections is decidedly mitigated by a free thinking, free citizen with a gun and a distinct morality separate from the rationale of the state.

I do hold some antipathy, though mostly sincere pity, for those in our citizenry who have decided that an insincere, demagogic, condescending Utopian will somehow save our "national soul". The means to our salvation is not through a single man nor some collectivist, automaton, Utopian union where equality means there is no right or wrong, no good or evil. In fact, I am certain we do not need any salvation as a nation and certainly no savior beyond the One I already have.

I AM bitter and sometimes full of antipathy. But, to quote a certain senator, I have the audacity of hope. I have hope for a long and bright future for this nation because I know there are other people like me who have faith, values and insist on maintaining our every freedom. I know, because Sen. Obama was kind enough to mention them to his friends in San Francisco.

I have hope that our nation and ideas will continue to exist because young men and women continue to volunteer to serve and defend our nation and freedom around the world.

I have hope because every morning, when I wake up, I see the sun rise over our nation one more day, it's one more day of freedom in this nation and one less day of tyranny here and around the world.

I have hope because as long as we have freedom to create, to think, to speak, to be who we want to be our nation has and always will find a way to turn around, to come back from even the worst adversities.

In 2004, after Democrats lost the last election, I wrote them an open letter explaining why their candidate did not get elected and with twenty lessons from a one time democrat voter in Missouri. I note in this campaign that they have tried to learn some of those lessons about a single message and a plan that can be articulated in five bullet points or less, though, no one has yet to indicate exactly what those plans entail beyond the bullet points. Apparently, the ability to "change" to a winning strategy and a winning candidate is highly improbable, if not impossible.

Still, they forget some of the most important lessons of all and continue to make the same mistake over and over again. Namely that it is gun toting, bible carrying "mid-westerners" who most often decide the presidential election and we have a distinct antipathy towards condescending elitists who think they should lecture us about or tend to denigrate us for those things that do, in fact, make us mid-western. We are the ones that Sen. Obama has been waiting for. We are the ones that can keep him from being elected. Yes, we can!

In closing, I would like to convey to Sen. Obama my audacity of hope that some day the democrat party will actually figure out that it is supposed to be "democrat" and not "elitist, socialists" who talk about helping the poor man on one hand and robs him blind with the other while condescendingly lecturing him about his ways.

Believe me, it takes a lot of audacity to hope for that outcome.

Yours,
A one time Democrat