The message of Tuesday’s verdict.--Outstanding!

[igloo]

November 05, 2004, 8:26 a.m.

American Exceptionalism

The message of Tuesday’s verdict.

Tuesday's election was the greatest turnout in American political history, the first majority vote for a president-elect since 1988, and the largest number of ballots cast for a president in our history. What are we to make of it all, besides the obvious fact that the citizens have spoken clearly and that their voices were recorded fairly and accurately?

Some of us have been saying for months that there was no way John Kerry was going to erase a stubborn 2-3 percent shortfall, for a variety of reasons. His unsolvable problems ranged from his Brahmin, aristocratic coldness and deductive pessimism, to his transparent and opportunistic flip-flopping, to the venomous "help" of the Michael Moore/Howard Dean/Al Franken extremist fringe, to the incongruity of billionaires voicing boutique leftism — whether that be the often-polarizing Teresa Heinz Kerry or the creepy George Soros. The electorate also sensed that a Kerry victory would represent to the Europeans, the Arabs, and our enemies in the field a repudiation of the current struggle against the terrorists.

Two multimillionaire lawyers from the East Coast were not populists in the manner of a Richard Gephardt, and it was the epitome of arrogance to pretend that they were. Now is not the time for the Democrats to harp about "a divided county," but to ensure that next time Hollywood, MoveOn.org, rock stars, and billionaire currency speculators do not headline their campaign, though venom and money they may bring. Perhaps someone in the Democratic party will tally up a Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry and conclude that there is a pattern here that leads to political suicide. And perhaps the world will conclude that America, thank God, still stands firm against the utopian socialism of the U.N., Europe, and its own privileged sophisticates.

In addition, most of us did not think that all the shrill and increasingly desperate efforts of Michael Moore, the New York Times, Dan Rather, ABC News, Ted Kopel, and Bruce Springsteen would turn the tide. In fact, most of us suspected that they might very well boomerang and ensure victory for President Bush — despite a supposedly "rocky" economy in key states, a war that was systematically reported, in biased fashion, as an American quagmire, and Kerry's smooth debating skills.

Even the election-evening hysteria — exit polls supposedly presaging a massive Kerry turnaround; mythical talk of the radical youth vote, the new Hispanic muscle, etc.; the on-air commentary of mainstream, teary-eyed talking heads sexing up a Kerry upset while the polls were still open in the West — could not pull it off. Despite all that and more, George Bush still out performed Bill Clinton by being reelected with a majority vote and increasing his partisan margins in both the House and Senate.

Despite losing the majority of state legislatures and governorships, the U.S. Congress, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, our anointed elite still doesn't quite get it. Middle America can be amused by, but still despise, Michael Moore. It can be uneasy with the pessimistic reporting from Iraq, but still be very much willing to finish the war and win at all costs. It may enjoy a trip to Europe, but does not wish to emulate the French, Germans, or Greeks.

The East and West Coasts and the big cities may reflect the sway of the universities, the media, Hollywood, and the arts, but the folks in between somehow ignore what the professors preach to their children, what they read in the major newspapers, and what they are told on TV. The Internet, right-wing radio, and cable news do not so much move Middle America as reflect its preexisting deep skepticism of our aristocracy and its engineered morality imposed from on high.

The Democrats now lament that America would prefer to be "wrong" with George Bush than "right" with them. They will no doubt adduce a number of other paradoxes, excuses, and sorrows. But the fact is that the Left was united, well-funded, and ran the most vitriolic campaign in the Democratic party's history — and still lost, taking all branches of power with it. The New York Times and the major networks have undone their legacy of a half-century, and in the desire for cheap partisan advantage have ruined the reputations of anchor men, the very notion of fair front-page reporting, and, indeed, the useful concept itself of an exit poll. 60 Minutes, Nightline, ABC News — these are now seen by millions as mere highbrow versions of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Much of the world — in Europe, among the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East, and indeed among the terrorists themselves — realized that the presidential election was a referendum on America's will in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So be it. Thus the president's victory is a strong message to the Arab League that democracy is coming to the Middle East as it did earlier to Germany, Japan, South Korea, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan, and a message to the terrorists that their beheadings, their sick infomercials, and their deified mass murderers will only earn a rendezvous with defeat if not annihilation. The farmers of Utah, the plant workers of Ohio, and the immigrants of Florida are not the same folk as those of Spain. America saw the election-eve face of bin Laden, heard his pathetic rant — and shrugged that he, not it, was going down.

Finally, with the Kerry defeat we should lay to rest the Left's latest revisionism that was much in vogue during the last few months in the mainstream media — promulgated by journalists and pundits in places like Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. We were lectured ad nauseam that the terrorists did not — as did extremists of all ages such as the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarians — hate us for our allegiance to consensual government, modernism, and the freedom of the individual, but rather had understandable grievances because of our support for Israel, the war in Iraq, or the presence of oil companies in the Middle East. That canard too was rejected by the voters.

Bin Laden's allegiance to fundamentalist fascism and hatred of the West may stay constant, but it is ignored by our intelligentsia, who instead gives credence to al Qaeda's various grumbles that have ranged from the U.N. embargo of Iraq to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to, most recently, the supposed toppling of high-rise buildings in Lebanon. That there is now no embargo of Iraq, but U.S. aid; that there are no troops in Saudi, but increasing U.S. criticism of the monarchy; that Americans were butchered in Beirut and did not really retaliate but instead saved Arafat from his doom — all that apparently does not register with Bush's critics. In contrast, the majority of Americans insists with the president that the Islamic fascists have no more gripe against America than did a Tojo, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, or Khomeini — and that such nightmarish figures, not our values and policies, must and will pass away.

The revisionists kept repeating in this campaign that Afghanistan was lost to the warlords due to "taking the eye off the ball in Iraq" and "outsourcing" the fighting and thus losing bin Laden. George Bush ignored these second-guessing experts, assured the American people that, like our forefathers who won WWII, a much richer America could still fight and win two conflicts at once, and that bin Laden, in the manner of a Karadzic or Mladic, was a doomed man — his end a detail of when, not if.

The harpies shrieked that Saddam's petrofueled barbarity was not connected with al Qaeda or even the larger wave of Islamic terrorism — as if, say, Aryan Nazis could not have had anti-democratic alliances of convenience with Asian imperialists in Japan; as if the first World Trade Center bombing, the North Africa killings, the career of Zarqawi, and the al Qaedists in Kurdistan were either nonexistent or irrelevant.

In response, George Bush maintained that Islamic fascism is global, fed by self-induced failures of Middle East autocrats, who hand-in-glove with terrorists diverted the frustration of the Arab Street against America — a hyperpower that is not, pace bin Laden, libertine Sweden but rather their worst nightmare. Autocracy is their illness, and democracy, not American apologies, is their cure.

The administration maintained, without wavering, that those who were blowing up Americans in Kabul, or Baghdad, or Westerners in Madrid and Bali were of the same ilk. Their differences were the stuff of legalistic nit-pickers who might have equally parsed Mussolini's fascism from Hitler's Nazism or claimed that Mao's Marxism so differed from Stalin's Communism that the two could never have teamed up in Korea with yet a third wild-card totalitarian.

George Bush — through the beheadings, the kidnappings, Abu Ghraib, the hysteria of a Richard Clark, Joe Wilson, Anonymous, Rathergate, the 9/11 Commission, CIA rogue analysts, cheap European slurs, insane remarks from Walter Cronkite to Bill Moyers, and last-minute media fabricated "scandals" — has never faltered, so confident was he in the exceptionalism of America and the unshakeable resolve and competence of the U.S. military.

Most of the American people, of course, agreed all along.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

[tres-b]

This article is reality. I love it.

[xpyrate]

the majority of people used to think the world was flat

[igloo]

the majority of people used to think the world was flat

Excellent xyprate! Excellent news that your "special" classes seem to be working. We look forward to hearing your next progress report.

[rya21]

No Ways Tired Defeat, Dissent and the Bush Machine By CHRIS FLOYD

Well, that's it. The great American electoral agon is over at last. Now George W. Bush--the duly elected, finally legitimate president of the United States--can get back to doing what he does best: killing people for corporate profit and personal aggrandizement.

Yes, it's a hard blow for the world. Yes, it's a deep shame for American democracy, poisoned by lies, fear, greed and hysteria. Yes, it means that tens of thousands of innocent people will now be killed--by more war, more neglect, more ignorance, more repression, more brutality, more hatred, more fanaticism. Yes, it means that the planet will be gashed with more wounds, smeared with more filth, left to wither and die. Yes, it's a giant step backward for the human spirit, back to the muck of arbitrary rule by vicious elites and their ham-fisted goons, their well-wadded courtiers, their yapping sycophants. Yes, it means that somewhere out there, in the blood-dimmed haze of a dark age falling, Lucifer and bin Laden are lighting cigars and raising a glass to toast the victory of their good friend George.

These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?

Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation--give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence--and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin that Bush and his terrorist partners have made of the world.

Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist--without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.

This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Bush Machine--that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber-stamps, hard-right media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, neo-conservatives, neo-Confederates, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and woman-haters--might appear at the moment. Let's look at the facts. Despite four years of the most relentless barrage of propaganda, deceit, misinformation and fearmongering ever hurled against a free society, more than 54 million people voted to reject Bush and all his works: his Hitlerite policy of aggressive war; his gulag system of torture and lawless detention; his savage assault on civil rights, the environment, working people and the poor; his systematic destruction of social programs; his transfer of sovereignty from individuals and communities to the iron grip of his corporate donors; his trashing of hard-won international agreements on nuclear weapons, conventional arms, war crimes, global warming, the rights of women and the protection of children; his unleashing of rabid religious zealots into the bowels of government to set policies on science, health, education, welfare, while sucking up billions in public money to fund their sectarian causes.

Such mass dissent--even in "wartime," in the face of the Machine--is surely cause for hope. Moreover, recent academic studies show that a large majority of Bush supporters actually disagree with him on everything from the Kyoto treaty to missile defense to international law to workers' rights--but somehow believe that he shares their views. Most Bush-backers also still believe that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda colluded in the September 11 attacks and that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction--yet this same majority says that the conquest of Iraq would be illegitimate if there were no WMD and no 9/11 connection. Thus more than half of the Bush voters on Tuesday oppose his actual policies, including the criminal war in Iraq--they just don't know it yet, because they're mired in carefully-cultivated delusion.

Of course, many Bush voters are willfully deluded, glad to be suckered and betrayed. They love the ludicrous puppet-show of his supposed greatness, his all-seeing wisdom, his mandate from God. They get teary-eyed at the thought of his honesty and goodness--while he kills 100,000 innocent people in Iraq, as a new medical study shows, with a brutally stupid military aggression based on lies and fantasies, fomenting more terrorism with each new barbarity and gorging his cronies on blood money. This hard core will never respond to the truth.

But if we can enlighten even the smallest percentage of Bush's razor-thin majority, then support for his murderous folly and waste will quickly erode. One by one, the puppet-strings will snap, and America's headlong plunge into tyranny, bigotry and endless imperial war can perhaps--perhaps--be halted, even reversed.

It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity and justice starts now.

[karch]

the largest number of ballots cast for a president in our history.

Guess who got the 2nd most votes for President in history. John Kerry.

[siceone]

Guess who got the 2nd most votes for President in history. John Kerry.

Who Cares about second?

[obby]

Guess who got the 2nd most votes for President in history. John Kerry.

John who ???????

[igloo]

Guess who got the 2nd most votes for President in history. John Kerry.

If that helps alleviate your pain, go with it.

[karch]

I know 2nd place isn't much but if I would just like for those conservatives stop talking about, "oh George Bush got the most votes in presidential election history, even more then Ronald Raegan". I hope they know that his opponant got the 2nd most votes (even more then the bigot Ronald Raegan)

[bigpoppanils]

the majority of people used to think the world was flat

[nootsy]

Guess who got the 2nd most votes for President in history. John Kerry.

and he still lost 52% 47% - Keep counting the votes

[nootsy]

I know 2nd place isn't much but if I would just like for those conservatives stop talking about, "oh George Bush got the most votes in presidential election history, even more then Ronald Raegan". I hope they know that his opponant got the 2nd most votes (even more then the bigot Ronald Raegan)

Ronald Regan was one of the greatest presidents in American History - Loooosiiiiinggggg touch with America and you libs hate it. All the Pdiddys and Micheal Moores and Dan rathers couldnt help.

[georgym]

and he still lost 52% 47% - Keep counting the votes

But you Republicans aren't getting the big picture:

This election was VERY, very close. yes a majority won, but only by 3 million. There's 3 million people in certain cities alone. This election clearly could have gone in either direction.

The fact that republicans keep saying (as igloo quoted int he begin) that people have spoken clearly? yes, many spoke for Bush, but many spoke for Kerry as well

This country is so divided its scary

[georgym]

and he still lost 52% 47% - Keep counting the votes

But you Republicans aren't getting the big picture:

This election was VERY, very close. yes a majority won, but only by 3 million. There's 3 million people in certain cities alone. This election clearly could have gone in either direction.

The fact that republicans keep saying (as igloo quoted int he begin) that people have spoken clearly? yes, many spoke for Bush, but many spoke for Kerry as well

This country is so divided its scary

[nootsy]

But you Republicans aren't getting the big picture:

This election was VERY, very close. yes a majority won, but only by 3 million. There's 3 million people in certain cities alone. This election clearly could have gone in either direction.

The fact that republicans keep saying (as igloo quoted int he begin) that people have spoken clearly? yes, many spoke for Bush, but many spoke for Kerry as well

This country is so divided its scary

I agree with the scary division. But if you look at past elections very few elections were won by a 52% 47% margin. Clinton didnt even come close to this percentage. By the way - Not to rub noses in it but since Kerry promised all vote sto be counted - Bush is up 4 million