I come before you a modest Canadian to plead the case for American exceptionalism – because America is exceptional and its survival is an international necessity.

Think of me as a spiritual heir of Thomas Payne, a foreigner, a British subject and friend to the Revolution. America is not exceptional in the limited sense that Obama takes it to mean. When he said, “I believe America is exceptional in the same way a Frenchman believes France is exceptional,” he showed that he doesn’t understand American exceptionalism at all. France is not exceptional. Like all powers, sovereignty is invested in the government and the citizens have rights only to the extent that those rights are “consistent with a civil society” to quote the EU’s Charter of Rights from memory.

What kind of rights are those? Rights are rights independent of government. They pre-exist government or they are not rights but privileges. The first amendment says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the rights of the people…” That shows that the rights exists before the Constitution was written. The Constitution does not bestow rights but forbids Congress from abridging or limiting them. This is the exception to the rule in the establishment of government: this is what American exceptionalism is.

It’s important to understand the exceptionalism in more than the limited chauvinistic term Obama understands (and too many on the right as well) and understand it in this literal way: that, to quote Ronald Reagan, “People have governments, governments don’t have people.” But Obama’s vision of America is that government has people, is responsible for people who should be responsible for themselves. A nation of Julias, his daughters multiplied into a nation of subjects, not citizens, subjects to the whims of bureaucrats under a powerful executive branch. It is a perverted vision, rotten to the core and Mitt Romney has to say so in just so many words. “My father was a farmer so that I could be a politician so that my son could be an architect so that his son can be a poet,” Thomas Jefferson said. “A sixteen trillion dollar debt is not a problem in the short term,” Barack Obama replied. Romney must say this because no one else will. He must say it not to put the case to the American people but to make the dogs of media go insane, chase their tails, bark like banshees, howl at the moon.

If Obama were a good president, the media would not have to pack around him for protection. They wouldn’t need to attack Romney for telling the simple truth about Benghazi. Obama attacked a foreign country without consulting Congress and Ambassador Stevens is dead on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 in a carefully planned assassination. That’s the plain fact. The media will do everything they can to get Obama re-elected. There’s only one way to stop them. Drive them mad.

Abu Nudnik is the non de plume of an artist who would rather remain anonymous in the far left artistic milieu of Toronto.