I've been following this thread with interest and I am not sure I've witnessed anyone perform such a monumental degeneration into the kind of attacks they were so keen to criticize in some of their opening exchanges. To give you an example: in your initial reply to “ihatepeople” (by the way, I’m hoping there is some irony in that moniker) you rebuke his comments (justly in my opinion) with the following –

“Please try refuting my facts with rational arguments, rather than invective. By the way, your moniker is well-chosen.”

You make a similar comment to “Al Garnier” (again, justly in my opinion):

“Invective, not facts or rational arguments. You leftists really are to be pitied, Mr. Garnier.”
In both cases you have resorted to ad hominem attacks however, which does not amount to a rational argument.
Following several more exchanges you end up offering the following in reply to “JasonNewstatesman” (in this instance I’m afraid you do not have my support)

“Islam was not one of the "igniting forces" of the Renaissance, Jason.
Keep digging. You're just making yourself look more foolish.”

I have one thing to say regarding the above – invective, not facts or rational arguments and insulting at that. Now either you hold these aspects of debate to be virtuous or you do not but to resort to that which you criticize within a single thread seems lazy at best. Or perhaps you are not able to rebuke “JasonNewstatesman”? I think he could be making some good points (I am yet to cross-check his facts).
With regard to the criticisms you level at Mr. Obama I am actually indifferent to whether to comments you attribute to him are true or not. At best they seem ill-conceived and perhaps his researchers and speech writers are more accountable than the man himself. I certainly do not see anything that could be described as cynical or sinister in these comments whether he said them in the context you suggest or not (I will do my own research before taking anyone’s word for it whether it be you or “JasonNewstatesman” or any of your other antagonists). As I said though, it matters not.

Why does it not matter? Because you appear to simply be using these comments to pit the intellects of Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney against one another and this is intellectually dishonest on your part. Here is why – Mr. Romney is a Mormon. Now I should be able to leave it there and you should understand what I’m getting at but I feel I should clarify. Now, if Mr. Romney believes, as Mormon’s profess to, that the following is true – (Paraphrased or directly quoted from Christopher Hitchens article in Slate October 17th 2011)

The founder of the church, one Joseph Smith, (who was a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities of upstate New York) claimed to in his possession some gold plates on which a new revelation was inscribed in no known language. Conveniently, he appointed himself as the only individual capable of translating it.
Smith also announced that he wanted to be known as the Prophet Muhammad of North America, with the slogan: “Either al-Koran or the Sword.” He levied war against his fellow citizens, and against the federal government.
This completely fabricated cult held pro-slavery views at the time of the Civil War, and also with a “bible” of its own that referred to black people as a special but inferior creation, the Mormon Church did not admit afro-Americans to the priesthood until 1978, which is late enough—in point of the sincerity of the “revelation” they had to undergo—to cast serious doubt on the sincerity of their change of heart.
More recently, and very weirdly, the Mormons have been caught amassing great archives of the dead, and regularly “praying them in” as adherents of the Latter Day Saints, so as to retrospectively “baptize” everybody as a convert
But they also got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution and fairly recently began making these massacred Jewish people into honorary Latter Day Saints members as well. Indeed, when the practice was discovered, the church at first resisted efforts to make them stop. Whether this was cultish or sectarian it was certainly extremely tactless: a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.
So far, Mitt Romney, who praised Skousen as recently as recently as 2007, has evaded most questions by acting as if he was being subjected to some kind of religious test for public office. He’s been supported in this by some soft-centered types who think that any dislike for any “faith group” is ipso facto proof of some sort of prejudice. Sorry, but this will not wash. I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist for high office, or indeed any other kind, and I think attempts to silence criticism of such outfits are the real evidence of prejudice.
The Mormons apparently believe that Jesus will return in Missouri rather than Armageddon: I wouldn’t care to bet on the likelihood of either. In the meanwhile, though, we are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about "competence not ideology," he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.

I do not see how you can equate Mr. Obama’s intellect to the intellect of Mr. Romney given that Mr. Romney is willing to surrender his critical and intellectual faculties to such a degree.

Now just to pre-empt a potential rebuttal that because Obama professes to be a Christian he is equally guilty of such a surrender I would point you to the President’s inaugural speech where he quotes directly from Thomas Paine (perhaps the most hated man by Christian apologists in the U.S.A), and the fact that the man studied Marx and Hegel, and that he only seems to have professed a belief in the supernatural when it would have benefitted his political career (and even then rather grudgingly). Now, it is not Obama’s fault that such an alliance with Christianity has to be professed in order to reach the top job in the U.S.A and I think that it is sad that such cynicism has to be adopted by anyone with such ambitions but it seems to be the case. However, there is no political reason why Mr. Romney should ally himself to Mormonism, therefore, one can only suspect that he actually believes the tenets of a racist, absurd, plagiarized, fraudulent cult and should be held intellectually accountable for it. Obama is not beyond criticism in the slightest but in the UK at least, Romney is viewed as a joke, while, at least in the majority of the press, Obama still retains a degree of credibility. So I would be wary before writing him off and trying to usher in Mr. Romney: the man who believes the unbelievable and the immoral.

Just because you cannot come down from your high perch of intellectual superiority and admit Islam as having an influence on the Renaissance, whether "explosive" or not, does not mean you are right to any degree.
I was raised as a conservative myself, but personalities like you are why I distance myself from the word/party.