When George H.W. Bush ran for re-election, one of the problems he faced was a perceived inability to place his policy objectives into a larger, compelling framework that would capture voters’ imaginations. “The vision thing,” as he called it, would dog his campaign. While it was Ross Perot’s candidacy that cost Bush the election (take note, Donald Trump), since that time politicians have been careful to show voters that they have the vision thing down.

Unfortunately, Mitt Romney seems to have a chosen a vision that seems guaranteed to underwhelm. If you turn to his campaign’s website you’ll find the stirring lines in a banner at the top: “WE HAVE A MORAL RESPONSIBILITY NOT TO SPEND MORE THAN WE TAKE IN.” So we have to live within our means. Got it. And then what? Imagine a company whose ads read: “We have a legal obligation to balance our books.” Does that make you want to patronize that company? Buy its products? Tell you anything at all about its products? To be fair, the Romney site also carries the inspirational-sounding “Believe inAmerica,” but that rather generic slogan hardly captures the imagination. And that’s the problem with the Romney campaign.

The thing is, I support Mitt Romney. I support him because of the incontrovertible fact that Romney is the only one of the remaining candidates with a realistic chance to defeat Obama. But I’m not excited about his candidacy. And in tonight’s debate he gave me yet another reason not to be excited about his campaign. When asked about the enticing prospect of constructing a base on the Moon, Romney frowned and said anyone who came to him with that idea would be fired. He was rather like the stern Mr. Bumble denying little Oliver Twist a second helping of gruel. No moon base for you, young man!

American space exploration, particularly the moon landing, was a visible expression of the greatness of our system and the breadth of our vision as a nation. Our space program promised an unlimited future for humanity, and the world held its breath as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on another world. No other nation has ever repeated what we—not just our astronauts and ground controllers—but we Americans did on July 20, 1969.

Since that time, our manned space efforts have dwindled, not in number, but in significance. The space shuttle allowed more frequent visits to space, but the emphasis was on launching orbital payloads, not human exploration. Sure, in the years since the final Apollo mission we’ve had some glimpses of a larger vision–the Viking landing on Mars, the images from Hubble, the Pathfinder mission—but none of these involved humans traveling to space. Now Obama has gutted our space capability. We have lost the ability to launch humans into even near-Earth orbit, relying instead on the Russians. And the Chinese had announced that they, notAmerica, will establish a base on the moon.

As a child, I had a book called ‘You Will Go to the Moon.” I read it over and over again, believing that eventually I would one day go to the Moon, not as an astronaut, but as a tourist or on business. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and found its depiction of a functional moon base by the end of the century to be realistic. But by 1999, as a few friends discussed the approaching millennium, we knew that the grand visions of our youth would not be realized anytime soon. One of us looked around and complained, “Where’s the future?”

That’s a question Mitt Romney needs to answer. But when Newt Gingrich raised the tantalizing vision of a return to the Moon, Romney’s only answer was “We can’t afford that.” The inanity of that response is astounding. Space exploration has always been a tiny fraction of the federal budget, and it has always paid great dividends, not only in knowledge, but in a multitude of real-world applications, from computers to cell phones to advances in medicine. And it has paid in widening the scope of our imagination. Newt has this one right: we need a romantic vision of who we are and what we can do. Great nations have this vision. Little ones don’t. Think about John F. Kennedy’s challenge to land a man on the moon within a decade. And think of how we answered it.

Perhaps the green eyeshade crowd feels differently. But from where I sit, Mitt Romney missed a chance to answer Newt Gingrich’s challenge. To win, he needs to seize our imagination, not shut it down. If he is the nominee, he must face the man selling “hope and change” by giving us something better to hope for.

We all know the problems with Obamacare, both in content and in the way in which it was passed. However, the fact remains that our healthcare system is not serving our healthcare needs. People are being denied insurance and premiums are way up—especially after Obamacare (ironically named the Affordable Care Act) was passed. When a patient has insurance, providers bill substantially more—like five times as much—as they bill uninsured patients. And death panels (a nicer name could be found, but that won’t make what they do any nicer) already exist, denying life-saving treatments to the elderly in favor of cheaper “comfort care.” A solution must be found that values the life of every person, gives doctors and patients authority to decide best care, and also saves money.

 The following nine points represent my modest attempt to solve the problem.

 1. Extend the retirement age to 70 and also delay Medicare eligibility until that age.

 2. Stop treating people over 62 (or even 55!) as “seniors” and acknowledge the (good) reality that people are living longer healthier, and can still contribute.

 3. Reduce healthcare costs through tort reform, not requiring drug companies to give free medicine to the Third World–which is one reason why we pay so much for pharmaceuticals–and reducing paperwork requirements.

 4. Reduce insurance costs through encouraging more groups to form voluntarily to spread the risk and allowing people to freely buy health insurance across state lines.

 5. Stop allowing illegals to get on Medicaid, and enforce Medicaid laws.

 6. Instead of increasing unemployment insurance benefits, allow the unemployed and underemployed to use part of those benefits to buy health insurance.

 7. Instead of allowing insurance companies to reject folks with preexisting conditions, allow people to buy insurance to exclude certain treatments (for instance, instead of being rejected for having psoriatic arthritis, one could opt to sign an exclusion for Embrel, etc.) Life-saving treatments could not be excluded–in such cases, allow more U.S. citizens with low income to go on Medicaid. For instance, low income, childless singles are generally excluded from receiving Medicaid. That should change.

 8. Require doctors to charge no more than 10% more for insurance cases than they do for self-pay (to account for paperwork), and require insurance companies to reimburse whatever the doctor orders (no formulary). Both insurance companies and doctors could report cases of non-compliance by the other party to the state insurance commissioner.

 9. Any treatment recommended by a doctor and accepted by a patient should be followed. If the company won’t pay for it, there must be an option for partial self-pay in such cases.

 Maybe not all of these will work, but they are all worth a try. And perhaps given time, maybe I can come up with two more nines to add some extra pizzazz.

In the novel 1984, the protagonist, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue. His job? Alter news articles to reflect current Party policy. Meanwhile, Smith’s illicit lover, Julia, works in Minitrue’s Fiction Department, working on a novel writing machine, helping to churn out fiction supporting the Party line. Any fact, any sentence, any historical reference that might threaten Big Brother or the all-encompassing ideology of “Ingsoc” (English Socialism) had to be expunged. As an early Soviet historian said, “History is politics projected into the past.”

 Under Stalin—and Big Brother—it was. Even in theU.S., many, perhaps most, history texts appear to be influenced by ideology. But it’s unthinkable that actual historical documents or works of art should be changed for ideological reasons here, in theU.S.That should give even most leftists pause.

 Yet, as I watched the classic film The Bridge on the River Kwai the other night, I found that the Fiction Department had been busily at work. As you probably know, this film concerns the construction of a railway bridge by British POWs, working under their Japanese captors—except that the commander of the British troops ends up running the show, thereby collaborating with the enemy in the name of British prestige. When planning the bridge, the commander, Lt. Col. Nicholson, tells his officers “We can teach these barbarians [referring to the Japanese camp guards] a lesson in Western methods and efficiency.” Except what I heard was: “We can teach these…a lesson in Western methods and efficiency.” I played it again and heard only an unintelligible murmur. The word “barbarians” was missing, replaced by the sound of water splashing.

 I then went online, and found others had noted the same phenomenon on their DVD copies—the word “barbarians” was missing. When some had looked at the subtitled versions, they found that “them” had been substituted for “these barbarians.” Some postulated politically correct government interference, others noted that Sony, a Japanese company, now owned the work and probably deleted it because they found it offensive. Regardless, a work of art had been altered to suit contemporary sensibilities. And that is very frightening.

 The specific instance is not important in itself, but it represents a larger principle: an artist’s work is a statement of the artist’s thought. You can criticize it, you can defend it, you can ignore it, but you cannot alter it to change the content. Now theatrical movies on TV are often edited. However this is done either to allow a film to fit in a small screen or to allow it to be viewed by children, who were not the intended audience for the original picture. There is also always a notice posted that some editing has been done. And, of course, there are adaptations for different media, such as when a book or play becomes a film, and there are translations of varying quality for different languages. But sneaky alterations such as the deletion of a single word are not announced in advance, not expected, and not required so that a new audience may have access to it.

 Sadly, this is not the only instance of such alteration. There is a black and white sequence filmed in Nazi Germany during a parade in which Hitler is greeted by cheering throngs. One woman’s face stands out—perhaps you recall it. The look of ecstasy on her face is arresting—she almost looks drugged. I saw that same face in another documentary—about Ronald Reagan. The Nazi footage was spliced into 1980s footage, formerly in color, but rendered in black and white. I can’t think of any reason to do this other than to subtly suggest equivalence between the two leaders. And I noticed this only because I had seen the original Nazi footage only a few days prior to the Reagan documentary.

 Then there’s the 2011 edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

 Mark Twain’s original work made liberal use of the “n-word.” It appears 219 times, according to the editor. And in every case, he has replaced it with the much milder “slave.” Never mind that Twain penned the book in  large part to reveal the evils of racism, and his use of such an offensive term was meant to highlight and critique racist attitudes. Tone deaf to that fact, many school districts banned the book. Indeed, the editor has claimed that his rewrite was in response to that government censorship. He did it, he says, so that schoolchildren in those districts would be able to read Huck Finn. In other words, a work of art was changed to conform to government policy.

 In a dictatorship, this sort of editing for political purposes serves to rob people of any intellectual resource that challenges the state, and makes the state the arbiter of the truth. It’s an essential prop for any totalitarian system. In a democracy, it is the opposite. If the electorate is given lies, it will make decisions that favor the interests of the liar. If works of art can be changed to serve political agendas, the message of the artist is set aside in favor of the message the censors want to tell. In some cases, they become propaganda, rather than art—witness the Nazi regime’s “dejewification” of the Bible. With the apparent demise of printed books in favor of e-books, such “updating” becomes all too easy. Fortunately, we have Orwell’s classic work to remind us of the dangers of tampering with artistic creations and historical documents.

 That is, until someone decides to rewrite it.

Students, faculty, and staff at a northeastern liberal arts college recently received an email that announced that a printing quota was being imposed in order to reduce the use of paper. The email stated that this “green initiative” was being undertaken in the interest of “raising consciousness” about the environment—and, of course, save money. Among the “printing facts” was the somber note that “400 trees” had fallen victim to college printers last year.

Never mind that trees are a renewable resource, and most paper gets recycled, anyway. Or how the college knows how many trees went into its yearly paper consumption. Such practical objections are irrelevant. The purpose of that “400 trees” figure was not to educate, but to engender guilt among the readers and persuade them to buy into a cost-cutting scheme by justifying it with the rhetoric of greenness. It’s the liberal way: make people feel responsible for some evil, then offer them a way to atone. The appeal to greenness is also reminiscent of the way in which every scientific theory in the Soviet Union had to accord with Marxist-Leninism. Or how every scientific idea in the Middle Ages had to be given some warrant in Scripture.

If green activists really saw humans as part of the ecosystem, they would accept that our activities, including pollution and wasteful energy usage, are “natural.” My view is that humans are both part of the ecosystem and also apart–to use a convenient, if out of context quote, we are “in the world, but not of it.” But greenies see us as not only apart, but standing in a godlike relationship to the natural world. We humans have the ability to “save the planet.” Really? The fact is, we can neither save nor destroy the planet. It’s hubris to think otherwise.

Sane environmentalism (what I would call conservation) would seek to do things that benefit us and our domesticated animals and plants. Clean air and water is certainly part of that. So are many other conservation measures. But throwing thousands out of work on the off-chance that our activities might harm the habitat of a little-known species is not. Greenies think we should sacrifice ourselves for this notion of “Gaia.” But this is a strange twisting of natural selection–we act to harm ourselves and “save” a species which, for all we know, is slated for extinction anyway. It’s irrational. And it depends on our own (non-existent) omniscience, as well as theological, not scientific, assumptions that most of us don’t share. Such a minority view should not dictate policy for the majority.

The parallel to the dogmas of the Soviet Union under Stalin and the medieval Church is clear. Like the greenies, these institutions had their inquisitions, relied on scholarly “consensus” as their main intellectual support, would not accept information that contradicted official ideologies, and attacked and destroyed individuals who dared to publicly challenge those ideologies. The green inquisitors can’t murder heretics, but they can (and do) destroy their careers and reputations.

Witness the latest spectacle of a scientific journal editor being forced to resign after publishing a peer-reviewed paper questioning global warming. Not only did Wolfgang Wagner resign from the journal Remote Sensing, but he wrote an editorial publicly disavowing the paper. His stated reason? Too many critical comments on the Internet, what he refers to as “open discussions.” In Wagner’s words:

“Why, after a more careful study of the pro and contra arguments, have I changed my initial view [that controversial papers should be published]? The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extent also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers” (emphasis mine).

It is doubtful that Galileo could have crafted a better recantation.

Wagner’s apology was highlighted in a number of websites, including the Center for American Progress’s thinkprogress.org, where entire the second sentence was placed in bold type and lauded, and where commenters demanded that whoever selected the paper’s reviewers should be, as one phrased it, “next on the chopping block.”

Now. The standard in scientific publication is the use of peer review. The review process produces some quality publications, others not so much. But it is extremely rare for an editor to step down because of a bad decision—though it has happened before when an article casts doubt on global warming. And the reason give won’t wash. Articles appear all the time that fail to mention opposing views. The fact that “to some extent” the article’s findings have been refuted in the literature seems a feeble excuse to resign and also throw the authors under the bus. The real reason is the “open discussion” part—Wagner was trying to save his professional career in the face of what amounts to being shouted down by a mob.

Yes, this is the 21st century. But be comforted—if professional careers are being placed on the chopping block, at least 400 trees will be spared that fate.