If Elected, Obama Will Be My President

The latest “scary Republicans are gonna get ya!” has been debunked at Patterico’s.  Even Dana Milbank didn’t think the guy at the McCain rally meant Obama when he shouted “Kill him!”  He clearly meant Bill Ayers, an unrepentant domestic terrorist who would have been tried and likely convicted had the government not screwed up the case against him.  Does that make it okay?  Of course not.  I don’t want Ayers killed either, and people, no matter how angry they may feel, need to Get A Grip.  Unlike the mad mobs of Bush-haters to which we’ve been subjected for the last eight years.  How many artists have drawn Bush with a gun to his head?  How many protesters have burned him in effigy?  How about the protester who carried a sign drawn with Bush’s decapitated head?  How many leftists have demanded he and Cheney be tried and executed?  Those and more, here and here.  Honestly, if the best the media can come up with is a handful of jackasses at campaign rallies, then they’ve got nothin’ on what their side has been doing, unsanctioned and even applauded, for nearly a decade.

What does worry me, though, is that the right is going to flip out the way the left has done all these years.  Yes, I’m extremely partisan, and extremely passionate in my opinions.  I’m also furious, because I believe if the public was being given the full information on Obama, they would not support him.  We’d have Hillary, whom I don’t like, but who is at least a decent candidate, a known quantity, and would make an adequate President.  But I don’t want to see the right repeat the bad behavior of the left.  We can oppose him without sinking to that level.

We also need to acknowledge that the insanity the left has engaged in toward Bush is simply an extension of what our side did toward Clinton.  Yes, it’s worse.  But it’s a difference in degree, not in kind. Can we go back even further and point at how the left acted toward Reagan?  Yes, we can.  To the point that Ted Kennedy conspired with the USSR to undermine him, in fact.  The fact remains that if we care about America’s strength as a nation, we need to change the tone, not continue it.

Along those lines, I want to echo Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse.

The Constitution says we have only one president at a time. Given the importance of that office, it is stark raving lunacy to seek to destroy the man occupying it.

The fact that the Democrats and the left have acted like 2 year olds the last 8 years doesn’t mean that if Obama is elected we should throw the same infantile tantrums and look for ghosts in the machine – or accuse the opposition of foul play without a shred of physical proof, only the paranoid imaginings whipped up by people who knew exactly what they were doing – undermining the legitimacy of the elected leader of the United States government.

I can certainly understand the desire given voice by Reynolds correspondent. There would be something hugely satisfying in giving back to the left in spades what they have done to Bush and the Republicans for the last 8 years. But think about it for a minute. Our country is in a helluva fix – the worst since I’ve been alive and probably the worst since the eve of the great depression. The only comparable crisis in my lifetime is the one faced by Reagan when he came into office.

I disagree to an extent; there certainly is a lot of proof that the election is being rigged in ways both legal and criminal.  From the media’s open promotion of Obama and their deliberate, deceptive torpedoing of McCain/Palin to ACORN’s antics to the types of shenanigans Democrats engaged in last election; slashing tires and other criminal acts, this will not be a fair election.  If McCain does win, it will still not have been a fair election; he will just have won in spite of that.  However, the time to deal with those things is now and post-election; we MUST clean up the electoral system.  We must actively fight against the Cloward-Piven strategy being implemented by the far left to undermine it.

But let me be clear: if Obama wins, even if I believe that win is illegitimate, I will still acknowledge him as my President and pray for his health and safety as well as for America under his rule.  I won’t support him personally, but I’m not yet willing to throw in the towel on the system.  I will instead fight even harder to restore the system to what it should be.