A Mandate For Tyranny

By Doug Patton
May 12, 2009

How is it that when liberals win elections, even by the slightest of margins, they claim a mandate for the most sweeping change in history? Yet, when they lose, not only is the percentage of the vote irrelevant to them, frequently the issue itself is said to have been wrongly decided -- or it is said that the matter should never have been put to a vote in the first place. This is particularly true when a vote of the people (whom liberals don't trust) overrides one of the Left's precious activist court decisions (which they do).

Case in point: President Barack Obama and California's Proposition 8, in which the people were forced to take it upon themselves to do what their State Supreme Court refused to do (deny recognition of counterfeit marriage). Both received 52 percent of the vote last November. Yet listening to liberals and their propaganda ministers in the nation's mainstream media, you would never know it. One vote is a mandate while the other is a controversy.

Simply by virtue of his election last November, Obama's supporters believe that he has a mandate for change -- not reform, mind you, but fundamental, transformational change in our system of government. This is not unprecedented. FDR worked tirelessly for twelve years to change what had been the most unobtrusive system of government in the history of the world into an intimidating nanny-state that looked more like the socialist democracies of Western Europe than anything devised by our Founding Fathers. Of course, Roosevelt could never have gotten away with most of it without the convenient economic emergency of the Great Depression. (Remember, never let a good crisis go to waste.)

As commander in chief, Obama feels empowered to close a very effective detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without any realistic notion of an alternative, and without regard for the safety of the American people. He believes he has the right to alter the direction of the war on terror (now euphemistically called an "Overseas Contingency Operation") by moving military assets around as if they were pawns on a chess board instead of brave flesh-and-blood patriots putting their lives on the line in the war's two main fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His trips abroad have been little more than apology tours. They are an embarrassment to any thinking American who is disinclined to believe that the United States or her people have anything for which to apologize. He has bowed before a Saudi tyrant, posed for grip-and-grin photo ops with people who despise our country, and conveyed to those who would like to see us destroyed that we are weak. (But then, what can we expect from a man who sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for twenty years listening to the exact same vile hatred we now hear from our sworn enemies?)

And then there is the spending -- more in three months than in the previous 220 years! He has bullied investors into taking a back seat to his union supporters. He is moving the census from the Commerce Department to the White House and turning it over to ACORN to run it. That should produce an interesting turn of events when it comes time to redraw congressional districts after next year's count. Can you say permanent Democrat congressional majority? And he hasn't even gotten started yet on energy, health care or the environment.

And the congressional Republicans seem as mesmerized as the drones who voted for the man.

If elections have consequences (and they do), then the vote of the people of California on Prop 8 should be every bit as much of a settled mandate as was the last presidential election. If that is the case, why does Barack Obama feel confident running the U.S. government as if he is Benito Mussolini while Carrie Prejean is about to be stripped of her Miss California crown for daring to defend traditional marriage? Could it be that liberals believe they have a mandate for tyranny?

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Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and policy advisor to conservative candidates, elected officials and public policy organizations. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net

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