Right Wing Nut House

A few days ago, I wrote a much maligned post entitled “If Elected, Obama will be My President.” You would have thought I killed Santa Claus judging by the reaction to that piece. People misunderstood my granting legitimacy to whoever the next president is as a blanket endorsement of his policies. I wrote no such thing, of course. People read into the piece whatever they wanted to and reacted accordingly. Even my pledge to back Obama’s play in a foreign crisis - something all patriots should do when the safety of the country is at stake - was seen as a betrayal.

The point is very simple - too simple for some who seek to complicate matters by ascribing the absolute worst possible motives to Obama and fear his coming administration as medieval peasants feared the appearance of a comet. Ignorance of history and a lack of common sense has caused many on the right to go stark raving, around the bend, screw loose, bat out of hell nutzo.

Obama will not turn America into a Marxist state. There will be no gulags or prison camps where conservatives and Obama regime opponents will be rounded up and sent for re-education (even though there is a sizable subset of Obama supporters who would no doubt crave such treatment of righties).

Obama will not cancel future elections, initiate Soviet style restrictions on free speech (more on the Fairness Doctrine later which, btw, is hardly “a Soviet style restriction”), make us stand in line for toilet paper, or place his smiling visage on 10 story high office buildings in order to perpetrate a cult of personality (I think).

Obama will not “take away” your guns, close churches, shutter conservative newspapers, shut down Fox News, darken conservative blogs, or take any other actions that would smack of dictatorship or authoritarianism.

Holy Christ! We just went through 8 fricking years of listening to the left babble on about all of this crap and now we have to read this kind of garbage from conservatives? Will you listen to yourselves? We have stood shoulder to shoulder these past 8 years laughing at, belittling, screaming about, and pointing a finger of shame at the left for saying many of the exact same things about Bush that you are already saying about Obama.

The exact. Same. Things.

Right down to and including the growing meme - fed and given life, to his eternal shame, by John McCain - that the coming election is about to be “stolen.”

Yes, there are enormous problems with bogus voter registrations in several states. But the kind of conspiracy to turn those bogus registrations into fraudulent votes on a nationwide basis being touted by my conservative friends is just not logical or even feasible. A reasonable person can question whether ACORN and the Obama campaign are in cahoots to steal Ohio. That I will grant because the bulk of the problems seem to be concentrated in the Buckeye state. But an entire election? That would take a conspiracy of gigantic proportions involving dozens of people, perhaps hundreds. History shows that even conspiracies involving a handful of people are rarely successful. And the more people involved, the harder to maintain security.

Vigilance yes, Investigate the fraud, certainly. But let’s not go off half cocked and blame the coming landslide on Democrats cheating. I know how you can turn thousands of fake registrations into fraudulent votes. But you can’t do it by signing up “Mickey Mouse” or “Dick Tracy” to vote. The Democrats already have tried and true methods of cheating and they hardly need ACORN to show them the ropes. And to accomplish something like this on a nationwide scale would require an enormous effort. Hard to see how you could keep an effort of that magnitude from the the watchful eyes of Republicans much less the authorities.

But an Obama-ACORN effort to game the system in Ohio (with help from the usual suspects in unions) should be stopped. There the possibility of vote stealing and ballot box stuffing is real. Much can be accomplished when you have a rabidly partisan Secretary of State as Ohio does in Jennifer Brunner. But in order to steal a national vote, you would need a dozen or more Brunners - some of them Republicans - working for Obama. It just isn’t logical or reasonable.

Obama is a far left liberal, that’s for sure. His policies would aggrandize government at the expense of the individual. His foreign policy will weaken us and, I believe, place us in greater danger as well as making the world much more dangerous place.

There will be a supreme effort to nationalize the health insurance industry (not the health care industry - not yet anyway). And I’ve got news for my conservative friends - John McCain would be forced to do pretty much the same thing. The Democratic Congress is going to make Obama’s health insurance ideas into law. Or, in the unlikely event McCain is elected, they will pass something almost equally abhorrent and send it to him, daring him to veto something that 70% of the country wants.

All of this about Obama is true. But Obama’s agenda is liberal boilerplate - the same crap they’ve been advocating for 30 years. It isn’t communism. It isn’t socialism (Obama is not going to guillotine the rich and throw their money to the peasants in order to “spread the wealth.”). In fact, Obama’s and the Democrats’ ideas are egalitarian in nature. They can be traced to the Utopian movements of the 19th century and early progressives of the 20th century who saw government as something that could be “perfected” scientifically.

We conservatives know the folly of believing in such nonsense. We also know what this “tinkering” means; threats to private property rights, threats to individual liberty, threats to the free market, threats to the civic values that we believe are essential in order to ensure a just and moral society.

We will fight these threats with every ounce of our strength and through whatever means we have at our disposal. But we will do it free from the fear that Obama and the Democrats want to turn the US into a Soviet style state or destroy the Bill of Rights.

Bringing back some form of the Fairness Doctrine (it won’t be called the “Fairness Doctrine” I assure you - probably something innocuous like “Broadcasting Bill of Rights” or some other Orwellian formulation) will be fought tooth and nail - and not just by bloggers. You are talking about gigantic corporations who would be adversely affected. They are not just going to take the reimposition of a Fairness Doctrine lying down. We will have powerful allies in this fight that we all know is coming. There will probably be some Democrats of good conscience who join us as well.

But is the Fairness Doctrine a communist plot? Is it socialism run rampant? We existed as a nation for nearly 40 years with its draconian restrictions and I didn’t hear too many conservatives claiming we were living in a totalitarian state because of it. Besides, unless the government wants to hire a million monitors for the internet, it is extremely unlikely that any such restrictions would ever trickle down to blogs and other news websites. The lefties would be up in arms if they were forced to give any bandwidth to conservatives so one would think the internet will remain free of any such nonsense as long as both sides would be affected.

An Obama presidency means there will be changes, not revolution. Liberal pablum is not the same as Marxist dialectic. Equating liberalism with Marxism ignores the history of liberalism in America and its sometimes salutary effect on society. Yes, it has been wrongheaded, stubborn in its refusal to deal with reality, class conscious, weak in the face of tyrants, and too eager to turn to the national government to solve local problems. It has also been almost sublime in its effect on some of our most intractable problems having to do with race, sex, and the social structure of America - problems, I might add, that we conservatives have either ignored or accepted as “the way things are.”

Liberalism is the yin to conservatism’s yang. We need each other and can’t make America a better place without the constant tug and pull of conflict between the two ideologies. What in many countries is a source of revolution, our war of ideas with liberalism and theirs with conservatism makes us both better. It forces us to come up with new approaches to solving problems in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas. This is a free market that Obama, no matter what his proclivities, cannot shut down.

No doubt we will be angry at many of the changes attempted by Obama. But change is what all elections are about. America stands still for no one, no ideology, no group of people. We always have one foot in the future. And if the American people choose this lurch to the left, it will be up to us to come up with the ideas and the principals to show them a better way.

After all, 2012 is just 4 short years away. And that’s the great thing about politics in America: There’s always another election.