MONDAY, DECEMBER 01, 2008
David Horowitz's Daily Blog
Conservatives need to get a grip. My email box is full of right-wing trash talk ? sorry, I'm peeved this morning ? about Obama's fake birth certificate, his alleged covert Islamism, and Hillary's scandals. Worse, we were running a FrontPage story on this last wild goose until I canned it.
Since not everybody is following me at this point, let's take them one at a time. First, the birth certificate. Is Obama a legitimate president of the United States? Well, let me put it to you this way: 64 million Americans voted to elect Barack Obama. Do you want to disenfranchise them? Do you think it's possible to disenfranchise 64 million Americans and keep the country? And please don't write me about the Constitution. The first principle of the Constitution is that the people are sovereign. What the people say, goes. If you think about it, I think you will agree that a two-year billion dollar election through all 50 states is as authoritative a verdict on anything as w e are likely to get. Barack Obama is our president. Get used to it.
And what can conservatives be thinking when they push this issue as though it were important (as The American Thinker did last week)? Do we want to go on challenging the legitimacy of an election that involved 120 million voters? Have we become deranged leftists like Al Gore, who would attack the one binding thread that makes us a nation despite our differences? The mystique of elections is the American covenant. Respect it.
I'm not even going to go into the Hussein idiocy. Obama spent 20 years in Reverend Wright's Trinity Church. There is much that was wrong with that, but being a Muslim isn't one of them.
As for the Hillary thing, get real. Obama was elected in large part by a leftist crusade for hope and "change." Now, as president-elect, he has just formed the most conservative Democratic foreign policy team since John F. Kennedy, one well to the right of Bill Clinton. Where is your gratitude for that? What is more relevant in his Hillary Clinton pick: her prickly past or the fact that, except for Joe Lieberman, she is the Democrat most identified with support for the Iraq War?
Perhaps I should repeat that. Hillary Clinton is the Democrat MOST IDENTIFIED WITH REMOVING SADDAM HUSSEIN BY FORCE. She lost a presidency over it. So, whatever low opinion you may have about Hillary, on foreign policy she is the very best choice for that position that conservatives could expect to get. Even better, because the ONLY issue that really divided Hillary and Obama was the Iraq War. This is President Obama's way of saying, "Okay, now that I'm in office, I'm going to put my anti-war commitments aside and put the defense of the country first. And in case you didn't get that, I'm going to keep George Bush's Secretary of Defense in place, and I'm going to appoint a conservative Marine general as my National Security Advisor."
Maybe some conservatives out there have forgotten, but Clinton's Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, was an anti-Vietnam activist. So were his two National Security Advisers, Tony Lake and Sandy Berger. In fact, they met Clinton in the anti-war movement. Conservatives should be cheering right now, not chasing red herrings.