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Covering President Obama's second inauguration, media voices made repeated references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and his  famous "I Have A Dream" speech. Rarely mentioned, however, is another speech by the civil rights icon delivered about one year before his assassination wherin he said "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

A number of surveys and studies clearly show that historically, Muslim Americans lean more towards the Democratic Party. By looking at Muslim voting behavior over the years, we can try to identify patterns. We can also pose some questions and try to guess what is needed in the evolution of this behavior. Is the Muslim American vote the result of a well organized effort of forming a bloc vote? Or is it more haphazard, where as members of a minority group, we independently arrive to similar conclusions? Do Muslims vote based on “lesser of two evils”, or based on principles and values? It seems to be a combination of all these factors. But as of yet, there seems to be no coherent platform that one can identify as being “Muslim”, whether on the national or local levels.

Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in.  But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.