Jay Ambrose

Homegrown or foreign-directed, it was terrorism — a coordinated act meant to kill, maim, confuse and frighten at a major American event — that we saw at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

In the movie “Flight,” something major goes wrong with a passenger jet. It starts plunging downward, the pilot amazingly, incredibly rolls the plane upside down to keep it just barely under control, and, at this point, if President Barack Obama were watching, he’d probably stand up to reassure the audience.

Ideology and personal tastes often can speak louder in politics than evidence or logic, and, yes, that’s as true for one side as it is for another. But it has been especially pronounced among leftists in recent years, as many found little that George W. Bush did as president that they did not abhor even as they can find little in Barack Obama they do not very nearly worship.

Republican House Speaker John Boehner, who started the fiscal cliff negotiations with a grand compromise offer, got as much as poked in the eye by President Barack Obama, and it didn’t stop there. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called him a dictator, his own House Republicans betrayed him and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie shamefully slammed him on another issue.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in a speech and in a TV interview that Social Security doesn’t increase the debt by even one penny. He is wrong. It adds 2,100 trillion pennies to debt calculated as all future obligations. That’s enough, along with the enormous amounts of money owed to other entitlements, to press down the American future to the point of its being squashed, but never mind. Durbin has politics to tend to.

It would be nice to think this country could continue to amount to something, to assume we have a future despite the recent presidential election, but if nothing much gets done to reverse policies, forget it. Instead of suffering, move to Sweden.

Compare the political philosophies of President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney, and what you see over there in the left corner of the ring is Big, Big Government — runaway spending as the answer to everything, more intervention, more control, an attitude of Washington knows best.