I'll say this much...

If this isn't the most important election in the last 100 years, then it is certainly the most entertaining one we've had since I started watching them.

The hyperbole is so outrageous on both sides of the card that it almost makes the whole thing look ridiculous.  One side is promising that another four years of the current leadership will "destroy" America as we know it, while the other keeps making the claim that a change in leadership will "return" America to some imaginary Dark Age of the 1980s, when blacks were "in chains" and had no opportunity to make their lot better and the poor were used exclusively for the footstools of the super-rich.

Just look at the headlines... forget the articles, just the headlines... and see the verbiage employed to catch the attention of the public.  An article I read this morning headlined the "Top 10 Biggest Lies" Paul Ryan has made since his pick as running mate to Romney.  #5 on that list is the LIE that one of Ryan's favorite bands is  "Rage Against the Machine", which is a LIE because Ryan is part of the machine they are raging against.  Seriously?  Where is the logic in that?  Another article I read this morning said that at no point in our nation's history have we faced an "ideological crisis" the likes of the one we now find ourselves in, with a Progressive President systematically dismantling the country and leading it into a socialist model that puts government first and foremost in every respect.  Really?  This is the greatest ideological crisis in our history?  The "slave vs free" ideologies didn't take the nation into a four year civil war that destroyed 40% of the nation's infrastructure and killed or wounded more than one million Americans?  Progressives like FDR and Truman didn't utilize "statist" agendas and policies to win a world war and the Korean conflict, while watching the nation "boom" through one of its most expansive economic periods ever... so much so that every President for the next four decades followed their example?

I hear Glenn Beck and Mark Levin "promise" that the USA will not survive another four years of Obama, should he win in November, and I recall back to the days when the same was promised of the Clinton Administration as Bob Dole tried to rest the reigns from the "liberal elitists" running the show.  I hear Arriana Huffington compare Paul Ryan to the Nazi regime in 1933, as she quotes Goebbels:  "If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth."

As I see it, the truth is nowhere near either of those extremes.  Liberals in 1994 "promised" that the Pay-As-You-Go" Act would take 25 years to end deficit spending, and it took less than five.  They said it would bankrupt the government and increase poverty and unemployment, and it did neither.  No matter how BIG the debt load is right now (and it is at its biggest, ever), most of that debt is "imaginary" at best.  We only owe the debt if we spend the money over the course of the next 13 years, so reducing spending in the next four years will dramatically reduce what is "owed" long-term.

I also don't see Obama "destroying" America.  His vision for the nation is not mine, and I disagree with almost every portion of his political platform... but he is NOT re-writing or dismantling the Constitution any more than Bush did, or Johnson did, or Wilson did, or Lincoln did, or Jefferson did, or Washington did.  He is pushing an agenda for the country that he feels will work... and if it doesn't, then he'll be voted out of office and probably take the Senate majority with him.

Paul Ryan does not oppose abortion in the case of rape or incest, he opposes the use of Federal funds to pay for those procedures.  Yes, he is pro-life to the core, and I am sure that he DOES, morally, oppose abortion of any kind... but he can't refuse someone the "right" to choose simply because he disagrees with the choice, as long as the choice is legal.  In that sense, he and I are on the EXACT same page.

Obama has stated that he will not enforce in-place laws and regulations concerning illegal immigration and the detention and deportation of said illegals, and I feel this is wrong.  However, he is not doing something that has never been done before, is he?  Disregarding established laws is a habit that many Presidents have taken up, going all the way back to Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act and following all the way up to George W. Bush (who also didn't enforce established immigration policy).  This list of Presidents includes some GOP favorites, with Ronald Reagan topping the list.

The blame lies with us, though... not the campaigns or the press.  We, the voting public, have become so immune to the hyperbole and exaggeration that it is simply accepted... even expected.  If we really cared, we wouldn't allow it.  We'd demand answers, not fluff.  We'd ask questions about policy and agendas that mattered, not what music is on a candidate's iPod.

Sad, isn't it?