I like the Powerline blog, and read it nearly every day. But like a lot of conservative intellectual blogs (as opposed to say, this blog), the writers at Powerline strongly advise conservatives to take the higher road and show deference for Obama simply because he's the POTUS. They say things such as:
Conservatives should not mimic liberals by recklessly deploying the
charge of "racism," a term that has largely lost its meaning.
and
So, birthers, give it a rest. Focus on President Obama's ideological
errors and his many policy blunders. We conservatives are better than
our opponents. Let's keep it that way.
There are many more examples on their site, of course, otherwise I wouldn't claim that they say such things all the time. But I have to disagree with them on this course of action.
Should one care to examine the entire candidacy of Obama, one cannot come to any other conclusion except that he won the election simply because he was not George Bush. In fact, he proclaimed himself to be the anti-Bush. And this is not simply my take, Obama himself claimed that electing McCain would be the same as having George Bush in a third term.
Obama declared that McCain would carry out a "third Bush term" in a speech that stressed that detrimental effects the Iraq war has had on the American economy.
During the campaign, there was little, if any, true policy pronouncements by Obama. Little, if any, note of past accomplishments by Obama. And little, if any, reason to believe that Obama would be a good president. But there was an overwhelming belief by Obama supporters that Obama would take the US in a new direction, 180 degrees out from that taken by President Bush. And that was enough.
But that begs the question...why was that enough? Why indeed, is it enough to say that you are willing to put in the White House a neophyte racist like Obama, simply because he is not George Bush? The answer is not that most Lefties are political simpletons ready to be lead around by anyone who flashes a good smile and talks to them as if they were children (though in fact they are simpletons who are ready to be lead around by anyone who flashes a good smile and talks to them as if they were children). The real answer is that the Lefties who voted him into office are political simpletons who are ready to be lead around by the main stream media and liberal blogs, the same media and blogs that spent the previous nine years (remember the slams on Bush during the campaign?) telling those simpletons (hereafter referred to as Leftards) that every single thing under Bush was worse than before. Every. Single. Thing.
One need only read liberal blogs, or listen to liberal talk radio to realize that there isn't a single subject on which a Leftard is willing expound on, without "proving" how George Bush made it worse. The national debt? Hell, even Obama is willing to blame Bush on where the national debt resides though he's added more debt in his six months than has all previous US presidents combined. Global Warming? Bush's fault. Islamic terror? Bush's fault. Hurricane Katrina? Bush's fault. Floundering economy? Bush's fault. It's all Bush's fault.
I don't blame Leftards for believing it's all Bush's fault. They are, after all, Leftards. They still believe that Stalin put millions to death in re-education gulags because they were counter-revolutionaries. They still believe that Mao's Great Leap Forward was a great leap forward. They are Leftards; even one of their own called them "useful idiots". But there are not enough Leftards in the US to elect a president. The ones I blame for saddling us with such an incompetent self-aggrandizing moron like Obama is those independents who simply took in, month after month after month, MSM bullshit about how George Bush was the worst president ever. During Bush's presidency, the MSM stated every quarter that even though that quarter had seen record growth, record low employment, and record low inflation, hard times were just around the corner and they were coming thanks to George Bush giving tax breaks to the rich! And the MSM kept harping on the number of civilians killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even though these numbers pale in comparison with either the number of civilians killed by our enemies, or the number of civilians killed in any previous war. And US casualties? These numbers were flashed every evening on the news, and on front pages of newspapers everywhere, even though the number killed in both wars under George Bush's eight year tenure as CinC was less than one-fifth the number of soldiers lost in one day at Antietam, and a little more than one percent of the US losses during WWII.
So what? Well, the so what is that we conservatives can no longer afford to take the high road as suggested by the writers at Powerline Blog and other high-brow conservative blogs. And I'm willing to lead the way. We need to begin today to bring every single smear, every single innuendo, every single underhanded vicious attack (along with all the legitimate attacks) on the Obama administration and the Demcratic majority in Congress. We will not get help from the MSM in getting the information out about even the legitimate concerns Americans may have about Obama/Pelosi/Reid policies and proclamations. So we need to get it out any way we can. If Obama isn't going to take his position as CinC seriously, and it takes a "birther" to get the attention of the media vis-a-vis fighting and winning in Afghanistan, than so be it. If Obama is going to lie about every aspect of his health reform policies, than so can we. If Obama is going to lie and say that he doesn't want to own GM while he's firing the CEO and authorizing the Treasury Department to purchase 70% of GM stock, than we have every right to say Obama's gone way beyond socialism and well into communism.
The stakes are too high to play with a deck of cards fixed only by the MSM and ACORN. We can also fix the deck of cards, and I intend to do so every chance I get; fairness and decency be damned.