More on the elections later, but for now, it is instructive to observe this county-by-county voting map from USA Today.
They old conventional wisdom is that the Democrats are the party of the little guy and the working man, and the Republicans are the party of the fat cats.
The objective fact of the Map puts that to rest decisively.
Kerry only won in the metropolises; Bush swept rural and small-town America.
The counties won by Bush represent 80% of the landmass of the country, containing 60% of the population.
As an aside, if I were some ancient person attempting to devise a more representative system of governance than heredity, would give an electoral weight to the favorite candidate of each province proportional to its landmass, rather than to its population (as the our current system partly does)! Because, after all, the King and the Land are One.
Under its current leadership, the Democrats have clearly become the party of urbanites and the new-money rich. They raised and spent more money than the Republicans, with larger support from elites such as Trial Lawyers, Wall Streeters, and celebrities. George Soros, for example, threw away at least $25 million on the Kerry campaign, that we know of.
Therefore, it was just absurd that Kerry, a billionaire (unearned!) and euroweenie, would at all resonate as some pseudo-populist champion of the Common Man, which used to be the archetypical role of the Democrats.
One good thing we've learned from this decisive, historic election (and it shattered a great deal of myths to be discussed later) is that the system works -- you can't just buy an election, even with a scandalously partisan media shilling your position.
In other words, you can't fool all the people all of the time! Who knew?
You can't just fabricate issues, you have to have a coherent vision that goes beyond reflexive contrariness.
Tactics alone won't work.
You need strategery.
Well-Liked
Reduced to its essential essence, a Kerry victory will result in two things.
The first will be a repudiation of the doctrine of pre-emption, that seeks to untie our hands and pierce the veil of deniability between the terrorist actors and the tyrannical states that generate and/or support them morally or materially.
This return to the 9/10 status-quo is apparently deemed acceptable by Kerry supporters due to the second obvious result of his possible victory: the rest of the world will like us more.
It will certainly feel good to have the nightly news anchors speak the soothing words that we're back on the right track, forging consensus and building alliances, and praise from foreign leaders will be reported regularly.
Of course, this being a military struggle (our opponents surely consider it a military struggle, and their only hope to win is for them to lull us into thinking it's not), the "rest of the world" will have little of actual value to offer us. It will be a hollow consolation.
Furthermore, their "moral" support will come with a price: we will have to restrict ourselves to policies that are approved of in Paris, Brussels, and the U.N.
Which will mean the enemy will receive a desperately needed respite, and buy the time necessary for them to build or acquire nuclear weapons.
It really is only a matter of time.
But oh, in the meantime, we will surely be "well-liked", which is the only thing of substance that a Kerry Presidency can definitely be said to offer.
I am reminded of Willy Loman, who also preached the virtues of being well-liked above all else.
And of course he was a loser.
Who eventually committed suicide.
Meaninglessly.
The first will be a repudiation of the doctrine of pre-emption, that seeks to untie our hands and pierce the veil of deniability between the terrorist actors and the tyrannical states that generate and/or support them morally or materially.
This return to the 9/10 status-quo is apparently deemed acceptable by Kerry supporters due to the second obvious result of his possible victory: the rest of the world will like us more.
It will certainly feel good to have the nightly news anchors speak the soothing words that we're back on the right track, forging consensus and building alliances, and praise from foreign leaders will be reported regularly.
Of course, this being a military struggle (our opponents surely consider it a military struggle, and their only hope to win is for them to lull us into thinking it's not), the "rest of the world" will have little of actual value to offer us. It will be a hollow consolation.
Furthermore, their "moral" support will come with a price: we will have to restrict ourselves to policies that are approved of in Paris, Brussels, and the U.N.
Which will mean the enemy will receive a desperately needed respite, and buy the time necessary for them to build or acquire nuclear weapons.
It really is only a matter of time.
But oh, in the meantime, we will surely be "well-liked", which is the only thing of substance that a Kerry Presidency can definitely be said to offer.
I am reminded of Willy Loman, who also preached the virtues of being well-liked above all else.
And of course he was a loser.
Who eventually committed suicide.
Meaninglessly.
Mortal Stakes
A long-time Iraqi blogger, the Mesopotamian, puts the election stakes clearly:
The stakes are mortal!
President Bush now represents a symbol of defiance against the terrorists and it is a fact, that all the enemies of America, with the terrorists foremost, are hoping for him to be deposed in the upcoming elections.We mustn't give up now.
That is not to say that they like the democrats, but that they will take such an outcome as retreat by the American people, and will consequently be greatly encouraged to intensify their assault. The outcome here on the ground in Iraq seems to be almost obvious. In case President Bush loses the election there would be a massive upsurge of violence, in the belief, rightly or wrongly, by the enemy, that the new leadership is more likely to “cut and run” to use the phrase frequently used by some of my readers. And they would try to inflict as heavy casualties as possible on the American forces to bring about a retreat and withdrawal...
On the other hand if President Bush is reelected, this will prove to them that the American people are not intimidated despite all their brutality, and that their cause is quite futile. Yes there is little doubt that an election victory by President Bush would be a severe blow and a great disappointment for all the terrorists in the World and all the enemies of America...
Note that we are not saying that President Bush is perfect, nor even that he is better than the Senator, just that the present situation is such that a change of leadership at this crucial point is going to send an entirely wrong message to all the enemies. Unfortunately, it seems to me that many in the U.S. don’t quite appreciate how high the stakes are. The challenge is mortal, and you and we are locked in a War, a National Emergency; and in such circumstances partisan considerations must be of secondary importance.
If you lose this war, you are no more, and you will have to withdraw within you boundaries cringing and waiting for terror to strike you in your homeland, afraid to move around, afraid to travel, afraid to do business abroad. You will have to see all your friends abroad annihilated and intimidated and nobody will have any confidence or trust in you anymore. And you will have to watch from far with bitterness the forces of darkness and evil taking over in many parts of this earth, with feelings of impotence and inability to do anything about it. In other words you would lose all credibility, and the fiends of terror and obscurantism would go triumphantly dancing the macabre dance of mayhem and death, and darkness would descend and obliterate the light and the hope...
And all this for what? For failing to confront few thousands ex-baathists and demented religious fanatics and some common criminals, concentrated in some rural areas of a country of the size of just one of your states; and that for a nation that has defeated Natzism, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Empire!
The stakes are mortal!
Rotted Through
That the upcoming election appears to be close is in itself an extreme tragedy. Too many yearn for surrender. As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen writes,
...even if Mr. Bush wins, I have seen the face of defeat. It is obvious to me, at the end of the most gruelling political campaign that I can remember, over the most extraordinary stakes, that the elites in the media, in the academy, in the legal and other public professions -- the "intellectuals" considered together as a class; the "clerisy" as Coleridge called them; the people upon whom a society depends for its thinking -- are, in America as much as elsewhere in the West, morally rotted through.The essay concludes:
This has been most evident in the media, because the big newspapers, TV networks, and the repulsive entertainment industry of which they have become increasingly a part, are what we see from day to day. Yet the people in the media, whom polls have shown overwhelmingly support Kerry, seldom do any original thinking. They are more reflective of the conditions that made them; they represent the thinking of the larger class.
It could be said, of this larger intellectual elite in the United States, that when their own country, under attack by a lethal, entrenched, and unambiguously evil enemy, rose in self-defence, they pretended to be neutral. But it was only a pretence: for as we've seen through the media, the battlefield reporting and the rumour-mongering has been consistently slanted. There was no mistake, nor presumed mistake, made by American forces, or the U.S. political leadership, that was not blared across the front pages and the television screens.
Conversely, there has been only the most perfunctory coverage, not merely of American successes and accomplishments in the field -- which have been many, and some astonishing -- but even of the real problems U.S. forces have encountered. How, with such media on their backs, could the allies have defeated Hitler?
Now here, in my view, is the heart of the matter: Michael Moore's "documentary" film, Fahrenheit 9/11, presented a crackpot conspiratorial view of events in which easily established facts were wildly skewed. It did not play to small audiences. I believe the view of reality presented in that film -- with its leading suggestion that 9/11 itself was merely a convenient pretext for the Bush administration -- is actually embraced by America's intellectual elite. Worse, they believe it because they want to believe it.
This is the face of defeat. And the fact that the Democrats have been willing to appeal to this constituency, yet still hope to win the presidential election, speaks tawdry volumes.
The fact of Mr. Kerry is a symptom only. I'm afraid the disease that has made his candidacy not only possible, but competitive, goes much deeper than that. And it is from that, in the end, I pray America will recover.Amen!
Relentlessly and Thoroughly
In a prescient piece written 3 years ago, just one month after the 9/11 attacks, English historian Paul Johnson makes the case that the fight against islamism must be relentless and thorough:
Got it? Good. It gets worse:
For those who complain, like Kerry, about lack of allies in Iraq, Johnson was way ahead of him:
And finally, we are reminded to not falter
One central reason why appeasement is so tempting to Western governments is that attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.Dispensing with the deliberate fiction that Islam means "peace", Johnson states the unpleasant Truth:
Islam means "submission," a very different matter, and one of the functions of Islam, in its more militant aspect, is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force.Read that last sentence again, it's important.
Islam is an imperialist religion, more so than Christianity has ever been, and in contrast to Judaism...
Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true. In other words, mainstream Islam is essentially akin to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism...
Got it? Good. It gets worse:
Moreover, Koranic teaching that the faith or "submission" can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest.Johnson deals with another bit of modern self-hating revisionism:
The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the "occupied territories" of the Holy Land.He clearly lays out the age-old cycle: civilizations, no matter how advanced, always fall under the pressures of barbarians:
This millennial struggle continues in a variety of ways...Indeed, in the West, the battle is largely demographic, though it is likely to take a more militant turn at any moment. Moslems from the Balkans and North Africa are surging over established frontiers on a huge scale, rather as the pressure of the eastern tribes brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The number of Moslems penetrating and settling in Europe is now beyond computation because most of them are illegals. They are getting into Spain and Italy in such numbers that, should present trends continue, both these traditionally Catholic countries will become majority Moslem during the 21st century.That's no hyperbole. It's an accurate portrayal of what's going on today -- right now -- and is not the work of some tiny minority.
The West is not alone in being under threat from Islamic expansion. While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India's appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty.
Meanwhile, the religion of "submission" continues to advance, as a rule by force, in Africa in part of Nigeria and Sudan, and in Asia, notably in Indonesia, where non-Moslems are given the choice of conversion or death. And in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death.
For those who complain, like Kerry, about lack of allies in Iraq, Johnson was way ahead of him:
It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly. Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency, it is better in the long run for America to act without many allies, or even alone, than to engage in a messy compromise dictated by nervousness and cowardice. That would be the worst of all solutions and would be certain to lead to more terrorism, in more places, and on an ever-increasing scale.He concludes by noting, as Gladstone said, that "the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted", and exhorts the US, the main holder of those resources, to live up to its responsibility to relentlessly and thoroughly crush these soul-destroying lovers of Death.
And finally, we are reminded to not falter
when the weasel words of cowardice and surrender are pronounced.Especially when pronounced by the likes of exit-strategy-seekers and quagmire-declarers such as Kerry and the media-celebrity complex that backs him.
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