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| (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
Last week, we learned that the White House has been pressuring Google to censor a video about Muhammad because it has allegedly incited violence in Libya. Google refused, but the very request is a useful reminder of the President's disdain for the democratic process and the principles of free expression upon which it stands. It suggests that, even if his policies were not a catalogue of failure, giving him another term would constitute a clear and present danger to the republic. Time after time, given the choice between accepting the will of the people and clinging to his own agenda, he has chosen the latter. Again and again, given the choice between political expediency and freedom of speech, Obama has chosen the former.
Ironically, one of the most brazen examples of the President's propensity to ignore the wishes of the electorate occurred just recently at the Democratic National Convention. I refer, of course, to the infamous floor vote that resulted in the reinsertion of the words "God" and "Jerusalem" in the Democratic-party platform. Obama and his accomplices belatedly realized that the absence of those words would be a liability during the final weeks of the election season, so they ordered their hapless convention chair to remedy the problem. But a funny thing happened when Antonio Villaraigosa tried to nail down these two seemingly innocuous planks to the platform -- he couldn't get the Democrat delegates to cooperate.
We have all seen the video. Villaraigosa called for a voice vote on the platform change, which required the assent of a two-thirds majority, but the delegates confounded him by responding with as many "no" votes as "ayes." After trying twice more and getting the identical result, Villaraigosa issued an arbitrary ruling that conformed to the wishes of his party bosses rather than the clearly expressed preference of the convention delegates. Most conservative commentators have used this episode as an opportunity to highlight the increasingly militant secularism of the Democrat party, but this aspect of the vote is far less important than what the incident says about how Obama and his DNC stooges regard the democratic process.
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