Be thankful for small favors

We can be grateful that Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote was great enough that it will not give birth to any "ACORN stole the election" conspiracy theories.

One of the most corrosive influences on American politics over the past eight years has been the myth of the stolen election from Florida in 2000. Even though a group of left-wing newspapers, led by the New York Times, went to Florida and counted every ballot and concluded that Bush won fair and square the left was never able to abandon the illusion that Gore was the "real" president and that every single thing that Bush did was illegitimate.

This was the largest single factor in creating the phenomena of Bush Derangement Syndrome in which the left was unable to credit President Bush with doing anything right even when what he did was entirely in line with their own program.

The "Stolen Election" isn't the only myth to have disastrous effects on a nation. After WWI the myth of the "Stab in the Back", which said that the German army was not defeated by its enemies on the battlefield but was stabbed in the back by sinister domestic forces (The Jews), helped prepare the way for Hitler's rise to power.

We do not need to fall into Obama Derangement Syndrome. If Obama tries to fulfill his promises to bring about a trillion dollars in new spending and to declare war upon the productive sector of the American economy conservatives will have plenty to legitimately criticize him about. Remember how the left sacrificed every last shred of its credibility by chasing "Florida 2000" off into the outer fringes of loon-land. We cannot let that become us.