The election results aren't any big surprise to me, for I did a decent job of calling the election before it happened. I did think the popular vote was going to be a bit tighter than it was, and I was wrong in that regard, but I did predict that Bush (1) would win and (2) would ultimately enjoy a larger electoral margin than last time, both of which appear (happily) to be correct.
But this essay isn't about gloating. Gloating would be easy (and fun to boot!), but it isn't very productive. No, my purpose in writing is genuinely to reach out to those on the left and help them understand what has happened, nay, what is happening in America right now. And, of course, I'll make a few of my own observations as well with respect to this election's larger meaning.
Jimmy Carter managed to get so much wrong that he arguably distinguished himself as the worst president of the 20th century, possibly of all American history. He showed nothing but weakness to our enemies, increasing our vulnerability and the risk that the Soviet Union might yet triumph over the United States in the Cold War. And whereas an American victory in that war ultimately meant increased peace, freedom, and prosperity around the globe, a Soviet victory would have meant greater subjugation, slavery under communism, and further economic disaster.
Carter, naif that he was, even managed to give away the Panama Canal—a strategic asset bought and paid for with American blood, sweat, and tears. We paid the Panamanians for the rights to use the land, to let us come in and build it, and we've paid them rent on it every year since, despite the fact that it basically put them on the strategic map and gave them an economy in the first place! In short, everything Carter did made America weaker, less safe, and more at the mercy of our enemies.
But if Carter's treatment of our enemies was idiotic, his treatment of our friends was worse. It was Jimmy Carter who pressured the Shah of Iran to take unrealistic stands for human rights where no appreciation existed for them. It was not much of a surprise when the Shah was subsequently deposed, leaving Islamofascists in control of Iran, but it was a surprise that Carter went so far as to try to wash his hands of the whole affair! That Iran took so many American hostages, and that Carter did roughly nothing useful to bring the situation to a close, followed true to form on both sides. When it comes to the current mess in Iran, there is simply no question that we have Jimmy Carter to thank for it.
And as if those things weren't bad enough, Jimmy Carter managed to drive the American economy into such an awful state that inflation was in the double digits. Such crippling inflation erodes wealth and will destroy any economy completely in pretty short order. I am old enough to remember how peoples' life savings were suddenly in question because inflation outstripped any possible rate of return. Every day, money bought less and less, and yet hanging on to it was the surest way to render it worthless. The gas lines were around the block because of a shortage that didn't exist. The term "misery index" was coined because things were so unpleasant.
Perhaps worst of all, thanks to Carter, America no longer believed in herself. Carter believed that we would ultimately have to accept Soviet domination of much of the world, and he it on more than one occasion. Carter's America could do little more than stand idly by, powerless to stop the boot of communism from grinding yet more human lives beneath its awful soles.
Why is all that stuff important? Because it was Ronald Reagan who absolutely creamed Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election for all those reasons. And he didn't win by just a few states here and there, he utterly destroyed Carter virtually everywhere. America probably would have rejected the fool in the white house in favor of roughly anyone, but they were fortunate to have a visionary in Reagan on the opposing ticket. And yet the house and senate were still under the control of the Democrat party. America didn't go all the way with that election, and perhaps with good reason. That's a matter for historians to debate.
What isn't up for debate is the result: within a couple of years, despite increasingly hostile opposition from the Democrat-controlled congress and virtually all of the mainstream press, Reagan brought inflation under control, brought our hostages home, restored America as the world's greatest superpower, made it clear to terrorist Libya that we wouldn't stand for their crap, kicked off the greatest economic expansion in the history of peacetime through his tax policies, and largely won the Cold War along the way. Though the Berlin Wall didn't topple on Reagan's watch, it toppled shortly thereafter and did so only because he stood up and called a spade a spade.
The press and the left jointly lost what little they had that passed for minds when Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire", but an evil empire it was nevertheless. Communism, as Reagan rightly recognized, was the single greatest evil the world had ever produced. And he stood up to it, clear eyed and resolute, and defeated it outright. And though it didn't fall on his watch, he did live to see it.
In short, Ronald Reagan taught America that we had simply lost our way. He demonstrated clearly that if only America would stick to her principles, if only America would not listen to the fools on the left, we would be victorious. And he was obviously right. History has proven him so right that the same journalists who at the time called him a doddering old fool, the greatest threat to peace in the history of the world, a warmonger, etc., could not avoid paying tribute to the man when he died a short time ago. Even they had to admit it: Reagan was right. They admitted it grudgingly, to be sure, and with much wishful revision of history, but they admitted it nonetheless.
I think what galls me most about the whole business is that Jimmy Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his idiocy and is still taken seriously even today. That pacifist fool is so out of touch with reality that he recently suggested that the revolutionary war could have been avoided, and yet he is still taken seriously. Jimmy Carter arguably did as much or more to put America at risk than any other president in history, accomplished nothing with his famous peace talks, and managed to win the Nobel Peace Prize. All this while Ronald Reagan, the man who won the Cold War and truly brought a measure of peace, freedom, and prosperity to parts of the world where it was wholly unknown, was treated like a fool until roughly the day he died. Unbelievable.
But that's how it goes when you're on the left. That is, you're so disconnected from reality that you think a pacifist fool whose ideology destroys human lives somehow deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, while a genuine peacemaker and champion of human life, liberty, and happiness deserves nothing but scorn. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. That's the left.
Which brings me to the 2000 election. In 2000, George W. Bush won the election. He didn't win it by a big margin; he didn't even win it by a comfortable margin; but he did win it. And yet I still see people walking around today with "Not My President" T-shirts, "Selected, Not Elected" buttons, and so forth, four years later.
Such sentiments are completely divorced from reality. Bush didn't just win the first count of the votes; he won all of the recounts as well. He even won the recounts conducted at the behest of various newspapers, applying the very loosest possible standards for counting votes that wildly favored Gore. In every single case, no matter how far people bent over backward to give the election to Gore, George W. Bush still won.
True, he didn't win the popular vote, but that doesn't matter at all. That's usually the first objection people make when I point out that Bush won all the counts; i.e., they reject Bush instead because he didn't win the popular vote. But that's a little like saying that the Red Sox didn't really win the World Series this year because they didn't have the best batting record. It's irrelevant. The popular vote, for those who never had a civics class, is related only contingently to the electoral college. If you don't understand what I'm saying, go read up on the electoral college and come back. I'll wait.
At the end of all the ruckus, there was absolutely no question that Bush won the 2000 election. It was Gore that kicked the whole matter into the courts in the first place, and it was only because of liberal, activist judges' ignoring the well-established election laws in the state of Florida that made it necessary for the Supreme Court to step in and slap them down for doing it. The will of the people was clear, but when the left doesn't like the results they try to find a court that will rule in their favor instead.
That's why we today "enjoy" a constitutional right to privacy when the word 'privacy' appears nowhere in the constitution. That's why we dare not delay a female minor from having an abortion even 24 hours—or notify her parents for that matter—and yet can bury good citizens in paperwork and/or refuse them permits to purchase the very arms the second amendment of the constitution literally guarantees them the right to own. In contemporary legal circles, things explicitly in the constitution can be called into question while things clearly not in the constitution are somehow constitutional. But that's a commentary about the rule of judges, our judicial masters whom we serve without recourse, and it's a subject for another essay.
What's most important about the 2000 election for this essay is the pattern it defines. What was the Democrat response to their loss? It could be summed up pretty simply: they didn't really lose. James Carville et al. suggested that they didn't do better in terms of final numbers because they had failed to get out their message, while Jesse Jackson et al. stepped up to the plate and claimed that as many as a million minorities were denied their right to vote.
Never mind that no polling data or news stories supported Carville's thesis. And never mind that Jesse offered precisely zero evidence for his claims either. Jesse Jackson is (1) black and (2) a Democrat, which jointly ensure that anything he says is accepted as gospel by the mainstream press. And then the rest of the loony left decided simply to reject Bush through "Not My President" T-shirts and the like.
Bush stole the election, you see. Cheney's buddies at Haliburton somehow suckered poor Al Gore into filing legal challenges that, no doubt through a vast right-wing conspiracy, eventually came to the Supreme Court, which was itself "packed" with radical right-wingers. If you buy that line of nonsense, or any of the other similar theories, then you might as well start wearing a tinfoil hat to protect you from Karl Rove's mind-control ray until the mother ship can come back to pick you up.
And so the left began its long, four-year stewing. Bush had stolen the election, Cheney was in league with the Devil, and the Devil Himself was posing as our attorney general in the form of John Ashcroft. Those Evil Republicans had bamboozled the American public, cheated, lied, and managed to steal power from The Righteous Left.
But it would never happen again. Or as Stalin might put it, not one step backward! After all, George W. Bush was an idiot, a moron, a monkey wearing a suit, a mere puppet put in place by Haliburton and other corporate interests. He couldn't long survive the harsh, unrelenting light of the truth. He would fail and fail miserably; and then the left would rise victorious again.
Or at least that's what they thought until the mid-term elections of 2002, when Bush the incompetent idiot managed to take back control of the senate for his party. Somehow, despite being a brainless automaton, despite being a bumbler who couldn't string two intelligent words together, Bush managed—accidentally, no doubt—to do the unthinkable: he wrested control of the senate back from the left.
Sure, Bush the idiot's party of morons and fools had flirted briefly with control of the senate after the 2000 election, but Jim Jeffords' defection made it all right again. Nothing could truly put the left out of power in Washington, for they are The Righteous Left, The Anointed Ones, Those Who Are Most Fit to Govern, etc. When your ideology is the left's, you can do no wrong.
And then ol' Jumping Jim's antics were reduced to so much silliness when Republicans captured the senate in the mid-term elections. To be fair, this did seem to give Democrats a moment of pause. It did seem to provide a certain amount of food for thought for some. For example, Zell Miller's A National Party No More hit the nail right on the head: the Democrat party had simply moved far to the left of the average American.
This wasn't any big surprise to those of us with eyes to see, but Miller's clear-eyed and prescient thesis wasn't welcomed at all in Democrat circles. No, they choose to shoot the messenger rather than listen to the message. They chose to believe, yet again, that it was somehow a Republican trick; that Karl Rove and his Cabal of Right-Wing Nut Jobs had somehow pulled a dark but powerful spell from up their slime-encrusted sleeves and cast it on left-loving America.
Which finally brings us to the main event. The 2004 election was going to be it. The 2004 election was going to be the return to power for the left. They were energized. They had a message. They had a war-hero candidate around whom all could surely rally. And most important of all, they had the best darned hair of any presidential ticket in history!
Yes, John F-ing Kerry, decorated Vietnam war veteran, would ride into town and show up George W. Bush for the pathetic dunce he is. Kerry was a genius; Bush was lucky each day that he didn't choke on his own tongue. Kerry was a war hero; Bush went A.W.O.L. from the national guard. Kerry was a man of deep and thoughtful conviction; Bush was a religious freak. Kerry was a centrist; Bush was so far to the right he made Hitler look like Mother Theresa.
This was going to be the election. Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, John F-ing Kerry, John Edwards, and the rest of the cluster of "luminaries" on the left were going to take back the presidency, recapture the senate without breaking a sweat, and maybe even take back the house as well. I think they were also supposed to end world hunger and square the circle along the way; I forget.
At any rate, this was going to be the most important election of our lifetimes. And the left pulled out all the stops, and I mean all the stops. Bush had to run against an overwhelmingly partisan media for more than a year. The press was so obviously partisan that even some in the press noticed!
Bush's national guard service was brought up for a fourth time (or fifth, depending on how one counts), with a late surprise of forged memos trotted out by Dan Rather of CBS. And even after everyone with a brain and eyes to see knew the memos were forged, ol' Dan and CBS stuck to their guns. And when they finally "capitulated", Rather's take on the whole affair was that even though he was sorry for using forged documents, the story was true anyway!
Never mind that CBS could offer no genuine evidence to that effect. Never mind that the fellow who put them up to it, a man once described by Dan Rather as being of unimpeachable credibility, turned out to be a partisan hack with an anti-Bush history. No, the story had to be true, you see, because The Righteous Left said it was and they know best. Trust them on this; they'll tell you so.
Dan Rather didn't even lose his job for the whole mess, despite CBS' credibility tanking right into the toilet in an election year. Still harder to believe, for me at least, is that CBS received roughly zero admonition from their colleagues for trying to hook the Kerry campaign up with their source, which is arguably the single biggest example of direct media bias I've ever seen! It's hard for me even to believe that the most disturbing aspect of that story receives roughly zero attention. It's amazing. But maybe not so amazing given ABC's Halperin memo, which basically came right out and said that newspaper journalists have an obligation to be biased in favor of Kerry. I guess if journalists should be campaigning for Kerry, then Rather was just doing his job, eh?
And that wasn't even the half of it. Anti-Bush books got nothing but rave reviews and softball questions. The Clarke book, the Woodward book, the Suskind book, the Dean book, heck, even Kitty Kelley's book were received and praised as revealing, insightful, courageous, magnificently "fair" tomes one and all. Anything anti-Bush between two covers was given rave reviews and a completely saccharine treatment on "60 Minutes" and elsewhere. Meanwhile, among the tinfoil-hat-wearing crowd, Michael Moore was busy stringing together an important "documentary", consisting of such over-the-top anti-Bush vitriol and lies that it made Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Hitler films look like hard-hitting, fair and balanced, wholly objective journalism. The recent Team America took a more satirical approach, to be sure, but the message was the same: Bush is a moron.
And still that's not all! Various "foreign leaders" supposedly endorsed John F-ing Kerry. None of them admit it after the fact, of course, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that Jacques Chirac (among others) had something of a "Maalox moment" this morning. As I understand it, some Canadians actually crossed the line and literally worked for Kerry here in the states, though that's somewhat hard for me to believe. I mean, come on. Canadians? Working? With a welfare state like theirs? Why would that make any sense? Ok, that's mostly just a joke. Mostly. But I digress.
Further, overwhelmingly anti-Bush 527s funneled millions of dollars around campaign finance reform laws into ridiculously over-the-top ads. A veritable parade of Hollywood celebrities and other "brights" suggested that Bush was a terrible President at best, and a new incarnation of Adolph Hitler at worst —only far more evil this time around. Maybe waiting all those years and then being reincarnated as a Texan made him a bit more testy? Who knows.
And that’s to say nothing of the intimidation and violence from the supposedly peace-loving, tolerant left. Some nut recently tried to run down Kathleen Harris with his car. And far too many incidents in which GOP campaign headquarters and other such sites have been violated have been largely overlooked by the mainstream press. And then on election morning, the tires on roughly 30 vehicles rented by GOP organizers to help get out the vote were all slashed. But none of this gets any attention; this stuff is all treated as either (a) silly pranks, or (b) merely evidence of healthy political opinions.
The only time action is taken, it seems, is when Tom Daschle manages to get a judge he himself appointed—gee, no possibility of favoritism there—to toss out Republican election observers because they might intimidate Indian voters. In other words, when a Republican might intimidate someone, we need swift and certain legal action, but when criminals on the left fire gunshots into Republican offices, well, those cute little leftists will be leftists!
The point is pretty clear: the bulk of the voter intimidation and violence has been almost exclusively from the left toward the right during the 2004 campaign. This doesn't surprise me much, given the general regard the left possesses for the rule of law, but it's not pleasant to say the least. And the fact that it slips by the radar almost completely unnoticed is similarly unsurprising. The silence of the mainstream press speaks volumes about their priorities.
In summary, the left pulled out every weapon in its arsenal, legal and otherwise. They did everything to make sure things went their way, well, short of assassinating George W. Bush that is. One foreign columnist did wistfully suggest it, mind you, but the paper has since replaced his column for a sort-of apology instead. Whatever else may be said, the left got out their message this time. They filled the voter rolls with new registrations. John F-ing Kerry even managed to take roughly every side of every issue—just to be sure!—so no matter what the American people wanted, they could vote for him and get it.
But as is usually the case when dealing with the left, what actually happened caught them with their pants down, though this is (thankfully) true only in the figurative sense now that Bill Clinton isn't running. The following were what I took to be the most salient bits of news from the web sites of Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News as of 10:00 a.m. this morning:
In my view, these facts alone tell us some interesting things about the media and the election as a whole. The first thing they tell us is that if the news organizations named are biased, they're all clearly biased against Bush. Even Fox News, oft-considered a mere propaganda tool of the right, managed to miss the obvious. Let's not make the same mistake, shall we? When (a) 100% of the precincts have reported, (b) a candidate has a clear lead, and (c) there are no substantive concerns about voting irregularities, then the only honest, reasonable, and responsible thing to do is to call the state for said candidate.
Both Iowa and New Mexico clearly should have been called for Bush far earlier than they were, as Nevada should have been as well. So why weren't they? Because it would have made Bush the winner "too soon"? I really can't say why, but it was bloody obvious that all of the news agencies were shying away from calling anything once the Kerry campaign's claims about Ohio started coming up far short of reality. I'm not convinced this data shows evidence of bias, but it is clear that if bias exists it's clearly anti-Bush.
Second, when it comes to such anti-Bush bias, ABC News is obviously the worst. Despite a commanding lead in Ohio and his clear leads elsewhere, ABC News just couldn't bring themselves to call Bush a winner. Their electoral count and headline combine nicely to suggest that Bush didn't really win the election, only that Kerry gave up the good fight. I realize that caution is a good thing in such important news coverage, dear reader, but the caution displayed at the beginning of the evening was very different from the "caution" displayed once it became clear Kerry was losing.
Third, only NBC News got the headline right. It is absolutely transparent evidence of anti-Bush bias when a network, in possession of data that shows Bush to be the clear winner, puts up a weasel's headline like "Kerry Concedes to Bush" instead. The most honest headline would read: “Bush Wins, 286 to 252”. Omitting the numbers is easily overlooked for stylistic concerns, so NBC News still gets it exactly right. All of the other three focus not upon Bush’s win, however, but rather upon Kerry’s concession. I compliment NBC on its honesty in this respect for Bush won, and obviously so by about midnight PST for those who aren't Democrat National Committee lawyers.
"But what about all those provisional ballots, Phil?! You're being too hard on the news networks! You're not being fair, giving Kerry a chance to look into his options!" I could hear it before you said it, dear reader. So let's focus on Ohio first. As of last night, the Ohio secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, said, pace the Kerry campaign, that there were somewhere north of 100,000 provisional ballots issued. He didn't have the final numbers, but the final total was likely to be between 125,000 and 140,000 provisional ballots. Given that Bush enjoyed a lead of roughly 136,000 votes this morning, several individually unlikely things would have to happen for John F-ing Kerry to win Ohio.
For starters, roughly all of those provisional ballots would have to be valid, which prior history suggests is simply ridiculous. But even if that were somehow the case, John F-ing Kerry would have to win those votes at a ratio of approximately 34 to 1, given the broad numbers we're working with here. In other words, for every one vote found for Bush, the next 34 votes would have to be for Kerry, which means Kerry would have to capture better than 97% of those votes in order to have any hope at all. There isn't a single area in Ohio that votes so completely pro-Democrat, so that's a ridiculous assumption even to consider. And that's to say nothing of the absentee and military ballots, neither of which Kerry could expect to carry as a whole.
And that's to say nothing of the other states. Despite there being no substantive reason to contest those races, the networks refused to call them for Bush. Heck, even now Fox News still refuses to call Iowa for Bush despite all of the data being available and a clear lead. Yeah, that's a right-wing propaganda organization alright. They sure are rushing to judgment in favor of Bush. Right.
In short, there was no open, empirical question remaining after roughly midnight as to who the next president of the United States would be. Or at least, there was no question working on the assumption that the laws would be followed. Yet none of the news agencies called Bush the winner. Heck, most didn't say Bush won even after Kerry had conceded! Instead, they said only that Kerry had conceded; that's not what I call objective coverage by any stretch of the imagination.
Even though the final numbers are not yet certified, it looks like Bush won the popular vote by roughly 3.5 million votes. As I said before that's irrelevant to determining who won the election, but it is worth noting that there is no close question here at all. And not only did Bush win the popular vote, he surmounted two important obstacles in so doing: (1) he won more absolute votes than any other president in U.S. history, and (2) he won more than 50% of the vote, something no president has done since his father, George H. W. Bush, pulled it off in 1988. No matter what the Democrats say, a clear majority of the American voters chose George W. Bush. Period.
It is also apparent that Bush won the electoral college and thus the presidency. Whereas he beat Al Gore by almost the slimmest of possible margins, 271 to 267, he beat John F-ing Kerry 286 to 252, though I'm apparently the only person willing to make that call. Even if those final numbers turn out differently, by some freaky oversight or something far less wholesome, there is simply no way that Bush has lost the electoral college. George W. Bush has won the 2004 election and has won it clearly, which means he will be the president of these United States of America for another four years.
But that's not all Bush won; he also won big in the senate and in the house. It looks like Republicans will enjoy a 55 seat majority in the senate, possibly as many as 230 seats in the house, and something like 28 of the nation's gubernatorial offices. The left treated it as unthinkable that Republicans managed to capture the senate in the off-year elections, but it is clear now that it wasn't a fluke. Quite the contrary, it was only a harbinger of bigger victories yet to come.
Finally, and arguably most telling depending on how one thinks about it, there were a total of eleven states that had gay marriage issues on the ballot. And in every case, without exception, the people rejected gay "marriage". The various proposals were worded differently, mind you, but they were ultimately united in their assent to a single proposition: marriage is an institution between one man and one woman. Period.
So what does all this really mean? What am I really saying to my brothers and sisters on the left? Well, despite the fact that the left pulled out all the stops, despite all the attacks, the complete lack of reason, the over-the-top vitriol, and the outright criminal violence, Bush won a clear and unambiguous victory. The GOP increased their power in the senate, house, and governorships —even defeating the senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, in what I find to be a beautiful upset. And the will of the people was expressed clearly and unambiguously in opposition to gay marriage. In short, despite being wholly unable to get a fair shake anywhere, conservatism kicked liberal ass across the board in every respect.
But again, the point of this essay is not to gloat. I don't say that because I want to cram it into faces on the left; rather, I say it because it's true, ineluctably and unambiguously true. This leaves the left with the following three choices in how they will respond:
The left responded to the 2000 election with a combination of (1) and (2). They didn't really lose, as already discussed; the right stole the election, through a combination of illegal and unethical moves (e.g., Jesse Jackson's nonexistent one-million disenfranchised minorities). Where the blame clearly wasn't laid was at the feet of their own ideology. As James Carville put it, they simply didn't get out their message, the clear implication of that statement being that their message was the message that the American people would have selected, if only they'd heard it.
The left responded to the mid-term elections largely through the same mechanism, though the connections weren't quite the same. But again the fault wasn't with liberal candidates or ideology; the fault was clearly with the system, the right's devious and unsavory tactics, and so forth. To be sure, their response was far more muted, but the lesson they clearly took from the off-year elections was that they hadn't been true enough to their own ideology. What they had offered, said many, was a sort of "Bush lite"; if only they had been true to their far-left roots and base, then they would surely have carried the day. They were simply distracted by Bush, bamboozled again by Evil Republicans.
And thus, true to form, the big news in the 2004 election primaries was Howard Dean, the farthest left candidate who hadn't actually gone so far off the deep end (at that time, anyway) so as to be unrecognizable as a political figure (ala Dennis Kucinich). It was an easy thing to predict that the Democrats would simply run farther to the left. And all of a sudden, when it was obvious that far more credible candidates like Joe Lieberman or Dick Gephardt were being left behind in the polls, John F-ing Kerry did a full reversal and started sounding like the anti-war activist he was in the 1970s.
So you now have a choice, my leftist brothers and sisters, in how you will respond to this. You can continue to live in fantasyland, focusing on options (1) and (2). You can declare victory, despite Kerry's conceding defeat, and spin ridiculous conspiracy theories around Karl Rove, companies that make e-Voting machines, the Illuminati, and every other ridiculous notion out there. You can continue to tell yourselves that your ideology is the real winner with America, that the Evil Right, despite being populated entirely by uncultured boobs and racist rednecks, somehow managed to steal the election again.
Or, you could try something new. You could stare into the intellectual abyss that is contemporary liberal ideology and recognize that it's simply wrong . America did not "rush to war" unilaterally. The world is safer and better off without Saddam Hussein in power. Terrorists should be killed preemptively, preferably elsewhere in the world before they come to our shores. Giving 100+ million taxpayers a tax cut is not a tax cut for only the wealthiest Americans. Karl Rove is not Satan any more than Dick Cheney is. And comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler is coming unhinged completely from reality.
It's really quite simple. All you need to do is try looking at the world and seeing it as it is for a change. Rather than seeing everything through the lens of racism, homophobia, religious zealotry, sexism, classism, and all the other "isms" that you think pervade this great land of ours, simply see America as it is instead. See it as the most powerful, free, wealthy, and all around greatest nation in the history of human civilization. I realize that's asking a lot, but, as a man far wiser than I once suggested: know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
When all is said and done, there are two significant conclusions that we can draw from the 2004 election, in my view, first among which being that America has clearly rejected the left. Oh, not all Americans rejected all of the left's ideology and agenda, to be sure, but a clear majority of Americans stood opposed to the left, in terms of political candidates, and outright bitch-slapped the gay movement silly along the way.
That's not to suggest that America is now a unified, monolithic block of happily bubbling conservatism. But there is an unmistakable trend toward that side of the political spectrum. It is transparently clear, particularly from the rejection of the incredibly obstructionist Tom Daschle, that (1) the people of America want a government that works, and (2) they obviously trust Republicans more than Democrats to make such a government possible.
The second significant conclusion is far less pleasant. I really hope I'm just making a mountain out of a mole hill, but I'm not so sure that's the case. The rule of law was a casualty of the 2000 election. Activist courts were literally stepping in where they had no jurisdiction to re-write election laws that had been decided legitimately by the state legislature. Unfortunately, the only remedy for such excesses required that the Supreme Court get involved and interject themselves where they shouldn't have been either.
Yet though we now enjoy a quicker conclusion to the 2004 election, the ramifications for the rule of law are far less encouraging. At least the 2000 election was close, and I mean really close. Automatic recounts, based on the differences in the final vote tallies falling short of various percentages, were triggered in four or five states. And the election really did come down to something like 500+ votes. That's an incredibly small margin for an election in which roughly 100,000,000 people voted. But this time around the race really wasn't that close at all. Bush won the popular vote easily, and he won the electoral college pretty easily as well. The fact that John F-ing Kerry and his party were thought to have options to mount a substantive challenge in Ohio when Bush was up by roughly 136,000 votes is positively nuts.
There should have been no question at all. Logic and common sense allowed me to call this election easily by midnight last night. But none of the news agencies dared to call a spade a spade, none of them dared call states for Bush—even though Bush enjoyed an obvious and uncontested margin in those states. And where Ohio was concerned, no reasonable person could honestly believe that Kerry had any claim whatsoever, given Bush's 136,000 vote lead, and yet the consensus of thought clearly seemed to be that Kerry somehow still had options. What in hell does that mean for the rule of law when a candidate who clearly loses by such a wide margin somehow still has options?!
The possible answers to such a question are not encouraging for civilization. That so many clear and egregious violations of criminal law were allowed from the left without seemingly any real attention only makes the point stronger. Why am I so concerned, you ask? Because I fear that we are rapidly heading for a day when a close election will be decided not with mere ballots or court rulings but with guns. For if our election laws are up for grabs, then what laws, I ask, are not? Just thinking about it makes me shudder.
Whatever the case, we go forward. The GOP now controls the executive branch and the legislative branch of government, albeit to a lesser degree. I have no doubt that part of the people's intent in putting Republicans into office was to ensure that something is done to take back the judicial branch as well. Maybe, just maybe, we'll end up getting some judges here and there who actually apply existing law to particular cases, rather than making up whatever the hell they feel like as they go along.
In fact, we could be seeing a new dawn for government in America. I exhort my brothers and sisters on the left to wake up and smell their ideology, for the stench of its rotting carcass wafts across the land tonight. If they don't learn the right lessons from this election, they just might put themselves out of power completely for the foreseeable future. To borrow from Darwinism, the left can either adapt or die. It's their choice. Here's hoping this helps them make the right one.
11/03/2004