Jay Ambrose

Mitt Romney won the Florida primary, but can he get the Republican presidential nomination and then win the White House?

That's the question most doggedly pursued by most news stories I've read since Romney's victory in the Florida primary, and there's a sure answer: wait and see. It would serve readers better to address his character, competence and political philosophy, matters that give readers a basis for deciding whether he actually should win.

My own view is yes, but.

In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama reminded you of the captain of the Italian cruise ship that took a deadly dive. This seafarer keeps making up weird tales to justify his actions. Those rocks he crashed into? That was to avoid sinking. And he didn't abandon ship. He fell into that lifeboat.

Obama provides similar sleight of hand when he tells about helping to rescue the economy by such maneuvers as putting a 2009 tariff on Chinese tires.

Four Marines urinated on the bodies of three Afghans apparently thwarted in their ambitions to shoot off the Marines' heads. The desecrating deed was an abridgment of military rules, and though it's highly dubious, could have an adverse impact on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, but something worse has ensued.

That's the reaction, which, in the overreaching hands of some, has been far more a moral abuse than anything done to insensible corpses. The yelping and screaming have themselves been a desecration, but a desecration of the living, a means of terrifying and vilifying young, self-sacrificing American volunteers already subjected to the endless brutality of a war that's not a war. It's a nation-building process that instead of allowing adequate self-defense, subjects our military to constant sneak attacks by pretend civilians.

Mitt Romney was a hugely successful, brilliant, insightful, bold, tough business leader of the kind who has lent mightily to American sparkle in good times, and for Newt Gingrich, that's all the ammunition he needs to destroy the man.

Why, Romney is a capitalist! He eats workers for snacks! Vengeance is mine, saith the Newt.

The Democrats win, the Republicans lose, the payroll tax is reduced for a couple of months, unemployment benefits are extended, and you'd be better off avoiding many of the commentators on the subject.

They are caught up in the petty politics of the drama, and wouldn't recognize substance if it bit them on their yapping mouths or typing fingers.

In Russia, where the government does its best to obliterate critical news, 50,000 Internet-informed, middle-class Moscow urbanites protested rigged parliamentary elections. A UFO hovered in the sky. The owner of the New Jersey Nets later said he would run against Vladimir Putin for president, and Putin, looking at the discontent that threatens him, said Hillary Rodham Clinton did it.

President Barack Obama made himself out to be a lot like Teddy Roosevelt in his Osawatomie, Kan., speech, and you wonder if he will soon be charging up San Juan Hill. Probably not. There is no Spanish American War now, and Obama should have noted it's a different world in other ways. Economic and political realities are in many ways the reverse of what existed in the Roosevelt era.

When TR growled his Bull Moose growl about tougher laws and regulations, government interventionism was a shrinking violet and industrialism an eruption of volcanoes. At last count, the U.S. Code was 356,000 pages of laws, rules and annotations, and if you think you or any business can turn around without bumping into dictates that range from inconvenient to devastating, you're wrong.