Do you remember how we laughed at Democrats when President George W. Bush was elected. They were going nuts. We even gave it a label, “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” We thought, how weird and how irrational. It also hurt the credibility of Democrats.

I have been concerned ever since the election that something similar is happening with Republicans. We have all this blogging and email correspondence going on about whether he is a “natural-born citizen” and why he won’t disclose his birth certificate. The same has been taking place with respect to whether he is a secret Muslim and was “planted” here to enable the radical Islamists to take over the country. Someone objectively looking at Republicans could well say we have been infected with “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”

I have consistently said that all of this is not going to accomplish anything except to hurt our credibility. Barack Obama was elected by nearly 53% of American voters – over 64 Million people. He hasn’t done anything yet, except to appoint what seem to be, for the most part, fairly reasonable people. The criticism continues nonetheless.

I am going to re-state what I have said in our SFVRC Yahoo forum.

Barack Obama is my President-Elect and will be my President when he is inaugurated on January 20, 2009. That means that the destiny of our country, to a great extent, will be in his hands. For the sake of our country, I hope he is a good President. I will support him unless he makes decisions which I feel are not in the best interest of America, at which time I will protest with all the resources at my disposal. Until then, I will support and respect the President-Elect, and soon to be, President. I expect that we are going to have an expansion of government during his tenure, and I expect that we are not going to see an expansion of individual liberty during his tenure, but that is what happens when Americans elect a Democrat. Our job will be to urge our Republican representatives to limit the damage as much as possible.

I am not giving him a pass. I am just saying that he hasn’t done anything yet that we can reasonably object to. That being the case, let’s hold our fire, and stop the conspiracy theories. The reality of his birth certificate is really irrelevant. He was elected by a substantial majority of Americans. Despite the potential constitutional breach, you have the practical aspect of disenfranchising 64 Million Americans. A result where someone determined he wasn’t eligible to be President because of some technicality of his birth would result in chaos in our country, make us potentially vulnerable to our enemies and strike a blow to Representative Democracy. The time to vet Mr. Obama was before he was elected to the office. We, the American people, failed to do that, with the complicity, of course, of the mainstream media.

We Republicans did not make our case to the American people and as a result we lost the election. We have to come back in two years and regain seats in the House and Senate, and in four years we have to present ourselves again to the American people with more technological expertise and better funding and make our case. In the meantime, we want America to succeed. It does not benefit our country to have half of our citizens opposing the President, until he does something that gives us reason to oppose him. We don’t want to lose our credibility with Americans by being irrational, as the Democrats have done in the past.

David Horowitz of the Horowitz Freedom Center wrote a blog today that I think articulates well what I have been thinking, so I am passing it on to you.

Birth certificate, Hussein name, Hillary garbage

Posted at 1:55 PM on 12/1/2008 by David Horowitz

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 pont, 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 we are likely to get. Barack Obama is our president. Get used to it.

And what could 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 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. Barack Obama is the president of the United States. Get used to 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.

And the Hillary thing. Get real. Please. 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 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 cxcept 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. So this is President Obama’s way of saying, ok 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.