Even though the next presidential election is still more than 500 days away, it’s never too soon to be prepared. After all, Obama hasn’t stopped campaigning since Election Day, 2008.

To begin with, and let me be very clear about his, no third party candidate, no matter how sincere or how well-funded – whether the party calls itself Libertarian, Constitution, Tea Party, Bull Moose or Whig – is ever going to win a national election. All a third party candidate will do is ensure that a liberal will be able to win with just 40-45% of the vote.

Also, anyone who is too pure in heart to vote for the Republican nominee, whoever it turns out to be, doesn’t then get to say, “Well, at least I had nothing to do with re-electing Barack Obama.” If you don’t vote for, as some folks like to say, the lesser of two evils, you will have a lot to do with electing the greater menace.

It is high time that Republicans grew up. The reality is that politics isn’t a game for kind hearts and gentle spirits; it’s a blood sport with everything from war to energy policy to tax rates riding on the outcome. Therefore, it verges on the insane when conservatives demean the less conservative as Republicans in Name Only (RINOS). Whether out of true conviction or mere geography, not everyone in America is going to be as conservative as you might like, but in the real world a RINO is better than a liberal. So, as off-putting as they can sometimes be, people like Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, are preferable to Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer. I, for one, will always prefer a senator who votes the way I like 50% of the time or even 10% of the time to someone who carries Obama’s water 24/7. And, to be fair, in liberal states such as Maine and Massachusetts, states that Obama won with over 54% of the vote in 2008, we’re lucky to have three senators willing to appear in public with a big, fat ® target on their backs.

I also can’t help noticing that Democrats never make it a practice to insult any of their supporters by calling them DINOS.

George W. Bush was not my ideal, but I will forever be grateful that he kept Gore and Kerry out of the Oval Office and, moreover, appointed Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court. Not too shabby for a RINO.

Next, in the coming months, I would hope that the various paranoiacs in our midst would refrain from predicting that martial law will be instituted and that Obama will see to it that the 2012 election never takes place. The first time I recall hearing this nonsense, Clinton was president. Then it began all over again, this time instigated by leftists when G.W. Bush was in office. Now, once again, it’s Republicans parroting this rubbish. I’m happy to report that when the 2008 election went off on schedule, I actually won $10 from a born sucker I happen to know. But I’d gladly forego the easy money if we could just get through the next election without having to put up with this childish flapdoodle.

Something else I’d like to avoid are those people who think themselves so smart and sophisticated when they insist that there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats. Oh, really? Republicans want a balanced budget and a greatly reduced national deficit, the Democrats want to fund cowboy poetry festivals, trains to nowhere and, lest we forget, tunnels for turtles, with our tax dollars.

Moreover, while the Democrats pushed for the trillion dollar stimulus, Government Motors, ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, a moratorium on offshore drilling, card checks, and tax dollars for ACORN, the NEA and Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills, the greatly out-numbered Republicans kept pushing back. So just exactly how are they alike? They all put on their shoes one at a time?

Let us not forget that it was the Democrats who were vandalizing Madison, Wisconsin, and trashing the rule of law, on behalf of the goons and oafs in the public sector unions, while such Republican stalwarts as Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, were fighting for sanity and sound fiscal policies.

Do you think Republicans agree with Obama’s National Labor Relations Board that Boeing doesn’t have the right to build its new 787 Dreamliner factory in South Carolina, a right to work state, simply because the International Association of Machinists want it built in the state of Washington? Washington, is also the place where the machinists union has struck Boeing four times since 1989, at a cost in lost revenues of $1.8 billion.

Not too long ago, Barack Obama promised to double our exports. Democrats, who are always ready and eager to listen to fairy tales, ballyhooed the fatuous pronouncement and then begged to have Little Red Riding Hood read to them before they’d go to sleep.

Republicans, on the other hand, all knew better. They knew that the only exports Obama has any chance of doubling will be American jobs.