It does not, of course. It rarely does when Chief Executives do their Constitutional duty and report to Congress on how the nation is doing. Yet we, hungry for answers, excuses, and bromides, lean forward to read accounts of this ritual even if we don’t actually watch it.

Our fascination with the Commander in Chief is both regrettable and understandable. Our government depends more upon 535 Representatives and Senators to guide our nation toward its ends than the person in the Oval Office. Our liberties are protected or crushed more on the basis of the Supreme (and other) courts than on the inclinations of this one figure.

Yet a President embodies our nation in a way that the more amorphous other two branches cannot. In the present case, he represents a charismatic version of all that we are not as a nation. He is the last icon of a failed philosophy of government and would rather bring down the temple as he is dragged from it rather than admit that his vision of the world is dead–stone cold dead.

Obama will accuse Congress of doing nothing. Actually, they have been quite busy making sure he doesn’t do something so irrevocably destructive that it can’t be fixed. Republicans, for all their faults, learned something from Obamacare–that this President will do absolutely anything to move this nation toward his quasi-socialist ideal. If it takes a midnight vote from a razor-thin majority, so be it. He is full of maniacal confidence and devoid of restraint. He should do more of what he accuses Congress of doing–nothing.

Doing nothing, by the way, should be what government does best. The Founders set it as the default position for us and we have allowed hackers to adjust the settings time after time. Invariably they gravitate toward more intrusion into our operating systems. As the President waxes on about how Congress (read “those nasty Republicans”) is hell-bent on obstruction, some of us will recognize a small blessing–government fighting with itself. A few more years of this and we may move a few precious degrees toward being a nation in which there is once again a presumption that we citizens know what we want and how to get it, all without Washington’s omnipresent assistance.

To whom will the President appeal? One group will be the well-off whose hubris dictates that they right every perceived wrong with a scold and a law. The other will be the gullible ones who believe that they are actually being served by this kind of tactless appeal to class warfare. Both will see in Obama’s vision the light at the end of the tunnel and neither will recognize it as a grizzly bear with a flashlight.

And boy, will they be surprised when they run toward it, arms extended in anticipation of a nice warm hug. If Obama wins and pushes his toxic agenda forward until 2016, there will be nothing to reap but sorrow and nothing to do but rebuild. The vision our President holds is already repugnant to people with initiative and self-respect. It soon will be to those who were counting on him to do something.

I am a firm believer in the protection of intellectual property rights. When I write a book, it belongs to me, not just anyone who can run a copy machine or copy and paste on a computer. The law has evolved to put reasonable boundaries on such rights. For example, if I sell you a paper copy, you can lend it to someone, you just can’t run 100,000 copies and sell them. Likewise, you can’t make it available for free on the Internet. You can, however, use small portions for certain things, like in a classroom for educational purposes.

Before the advent of computers, it would have required a substantial investment in a printing press and a distribution system to go with it in order to pull of a serious violation. Hollywood and Rupert Murdoch are right to be concerned about the ease with which movies can be given away for free–movies that required millions to make. The problem is that these two laws include a heck of a lot more than IP protection.

If a foreign site were to offer The Dark Knight Rises for free, these laws* would require search engines to block access. In some cases, the law would require ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to block access to foreign sites that host pirated material. In other words, the bill requires private businesses to enforce a law that, in its present form, is vague, arbitrary, and draconian.

Though the analogy is not perfect, this is similar to the seller of copy machines having to monitor what gets copied by the customer after the sale. My book, for example. No one argues that Xerox should be the policeman in this context, so why would Google be forced to do the dirty work for the government? Besides, they already voluntarily take down copyrighted material after verifying a complaint.

Just as methods of protecting proprietary software evolved in response to pirating, so will there emerge methods for selling copyrighted material that work without the ham-fistedness of SOPA and PIPA. And this really is the point. The Internet is just about the only thing government has not screwed up yet. When authorities start telling search engine providers and site hosts what they can and cannot refer to or host, we will have started ruining the one things in our lives that shines as an example of near-complete freedom. Let’s not go there.

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*At least some versions that are being considered. The House and Senate bills have not been reconciled yet.

Yet in one way, we really are a bundle of mistakes. For every person on Earth, each ancestor received a DNA code from its parents, but the code was not perfect. “Typographical” errors caused imperfections in the transference of information from generation to generation. Some errors, probably the vast majority, resulted in weaker offspring who succumbed to the elements and to predators at a higher rate than others. Those few errors that made offspring more viable eventually resulted in, well, us.

This article by Sir James Dyson is a wonderful description of the process of mistake-making and how it impacts business. Dyson, a prolific inventor, went through more vacuum cleaner prototypes than Georgia has Waffle Houses. He did not become successful until he had outlasted the problem. And he still keeps improving on the original cyclone-vac idea.

Were it not for Dyson’s or any other entrepreneur’s willingness to err over and over and over, we would still be the equivalent of non-organic sediment–a boring and lifeless collection of gunk. Instead, entrepreneurs and inventors give us progress and invariably pay a high price for their persistence. Any complaints that the creator of a beneficial new tool, technique, or treatment does not deserve his/her reward when the suffering finally pays off is a ingrate and a lout.

Yet this is precisely what we have become–a nation that despises the pioneer and loathes the mistake. We take a mental snapshot of the wealthy inventor after he/she spends years unnoticed, unappreciated, and unwealthy and then cry foul. Each idea and each attempt to rectify a mistake is like that constantly evolving genetic code, except it takes place on the inventor’s dime instead of nature’s.

And so Newt Gingrich, a nasty and confused man, has taken Mitt Romney to task for his willingness to correct mistakes. No, Romney is not a recovering child molester or a serial adulterer. He (gasp!) bought troubled companies and tried to turn them around. At the risk of offending anyone out there who is not brain-dead, companies sometimes have too many people on the payroll to survive. Layoffs are necessary to the survival of firms that for whatever reason have too many.

Gingrich is upset that peoples’ jobs got cut. What he doesn’t explain is why that is better than the entire company folding or why the saved money shouldn’t be put where it can do more good for more people. Gingrich, whom George Will rightly calls the quintessential rental politician, has made his living of late “consulting” for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the spoiled stepchildren of progressivism gone wild. Even a cursory review of the FM duo should convince us that Newt is much better at feathering the beds of government-backed parasites than creating value or reallocating non-stolen capital.

Ron Paul is the only candidate I have heard with the decency to defend Romney against the absurd accusation that he is evil incarnate for committing capitalism. I have grave reservations about Romney, but I sure as the sunrise don’t fault him for having actually had to conduct some business during his lifetime.

When mistakes, biological, business, or otherwise, are covered up or prevented by bureaucrats and politicians, the very life of progress is smothered. Romney had a hard job–deciding how to take a mistake and hopefully make it better. In that role, he did not take taxpayers’ money to shore up a bloated and predatory quasi-government entity. Rather he risked voluntary investors’ money on tough turnaround cases. Sometimes he won and sometimes he lost, but he understood mistakes and corrections as necessary to a free and vibrant economy.

Yes, mistakes are glorious. They are painful as the fire that burns a forest to make way for new life. They are as frustrating as a knotted shoelace. They are as irritating as a mosquito. Yet for all that, they are our best friends, both as individuals and as a society. For Republican hopefuls to pile on to Romney for his willingness to be a true capitalist is disgusting beyond description. I hope I never see the like again in my lifetime.