[Breitbart] Sheriff David Clarke began his closing address to CPAC 2017 as he knew everyone familiar with him would expect, by declaring “Blue Lives Matter in America!” “To what purpose did our Founding Fathers and the soldiers of our great Continental Army strive? Did they work to form the horrible mistake of what progressive Democrats call the Great Society – a place of cradle-to-grave reliance on the benevolent providence of government as the father, the mother, the breadwinner, and the teacher?”
Clarke asked as he settled down to the primary business of his speech.
“I think not,” he answered. “You see, General Washington was rightly and firstly proud of the nation that he believed lay within the grasp of the colonists, as they struggled to tear it away from the corpulent arms of an overbearing King of England. George Washington wrote to Benjamin Franklin that no country upon Earth had it more in its power to attain these blessings than united America.”
Clarke quoted extensively from Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his address. His overall theme was a call to arms; his closing request was for CPAC attendees to go out and fight. It was, in some respects, the type of closing speech one might have expected to hear if Republicans had lost the 2016 presidential election. Clarke’s purpose was to impress upon his conservative audience that they faced determined opposition from the Left, and would need to remain in fighting trim themselves if they wanted President Donald Trump to implement the policies they voted for.
Clarke stressed that Washington and his revolutionaries “never intended to build a nation to be ruled from a throne room or a centralized government.”
“They weren’t building a land where Boston, or Philadelphia, or New York City, or even today’s capital city that bears his name would dictate terms and conditions to the American people,” he continued. “No, their efforts to secure the basic human rights endowed by the Creator and formation of a most limited government, instituted justly by men and deriving its limited powers from the consent of the governed. They embraced the concept of self-rule.” |