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GoEagles
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 14 Sep 2004
Posts: 147
Location: Philadelphia
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 Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 6:41 pm Post subject: Mark Steyn: Bush hatred flops big |
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This piece is classic. Enjoy.
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Mark Steyn: Bush hatred flops big
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11288119%255E7583,00.html
November 05, 2004
A COUPLE of weeks ago, Michael Moore was touring the US offering unregistered voters incentives such as free "clean underwear" in return for a promise that they would show up at the polls. I'm not sure whose underwear he was giving away - his own or someone else's - but, if it was the former, the grateful recipients evidently accepted a pair, went and camped out in them up in the Rockies, and forgot to return to town for election day.
The swollen turn-out on Tuesday -- the biggest since 1968 -- killed one of Moore's most cherished myths: that if only more people voted, the natural "liberal" "progressive" nature of the American people would manifest itself. "Slackers are going to rise up in this election," he predicted. "The slacker motto is: Sleep till noon, drink beer, vote Kerry."
Well, two out of three ain't bad.
According to Moore, there are hardly any conservatives in the US, but they do a great job of persuading all the progressives to stay away from the polling booths by putting obstacles in their path, like not giving them free underwear. So the long queues reported at polls were assumed by the media to be proof of that big pro-John Kerry youth vote we always hear about.
But, as always, the "youth vote" never showed up. Last year, I saw some patronising BBC documentary (aired on Your ABC) claiming that George W. Bush was controlled by fanatical Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Rapture. The "youth vote" is the Left's equivalent of the Rapture: it may happen one day, but not on any schedule you want to put money on.
If you had to pick a picture that summed up what went wrong for Kerry, it would be the shot of Moore and Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic national convention. All you needed was P.Diddy, aka Puff Daddy (or vice-versa), of the Vote or Die mythical youth movement and it would have been the Democrats' equivalent of those Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin wartime summits. That picture is the Dems in a nutshell: yesterday's politicians, today's show-biz colossi. It's the other way round at the Republican Party: yesterday's show-biz colossi (well, Pat Boone) and today's politicians -- Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani. On the whole, that's a better combo.
The Michael Mooronification of the Democratic Party proved a fatal error. Moore is the chief promoter of what's now the received opinion of Bush among the condescending Left -- Chimpy Bushitler the World's Dumbest Fascist. There are some takers for this view, but not enough. By running a campaign fuelled by Moore's caricature of Bush, the Democrats were doomed to defeat.
Granted, Kerry was more nuanced about Chimpy: he ran an over-cautious campaign putting up his supposed "competence" against Bush's "incompetence", which naturally degenerated into reflexive anti-Bush oppositionism. Meanwhile, everyone around Kerry sounded like they'd OD-ed on Moore: his stepson, Chris Heinz, called Bush a "cokehead" and John Edwards went on about war profiteering.
Happily, The Guardian, the fever chart of the British Left, decided to arrange a controlled experiment in the effectiveness of the Bush-hating strategy. They targeted the voters of Clark County, Ohio, one of the swingiest counties in a critical swing state, by getting Guardian readers to send them letters explaining why they shouldn't vote for Bush. Antonia Fraser, John Le Carre and other celebrated Guardianistas put pen to paper and marshalled their arguments.
Richard Dawkins demonstrated the incisive forensic analysis of Bush one expects from one of Oxford's most celebrated professors: "An idiot he may be, but he is also sly, mendacious and vindictive ... thuggish ... pariah state ... brazenly lying ... cynical mendacity." Gloomy film-maker Ken Loach, who makes Moore look like Busby Berkeley, began: "Today, your country is reviled across continents as never before ..."
In return, The Guardian received many responses, saying things like "real Americans aren't interested in your pansy-ass, tea-sipping opinions", which was one of the more polite replies in that it eschewed observations on the defects of British dentistry. In 2000, Clark County went narrowly for Al Gore. On Tuesday, it went decisively for Bush. The local Republican chairman claimed that Fraser and co had done a grand job of rallying the county's Bush voters and getting them to the poll. Thank you, Guardian lefties! Had they launched Operation Massachusetts, Kerry would have lost his own state.
Bush hatred flopped big on Tuesday. That's not a problem for The Guardian's editors, who have to sell papers in Britain, but it is for a Democratic Party that has to sell itself in the US. Michael Mooronification damages everyone who gets it.
Look at the recently resurrected Osama bin Laden. Three years ago he was Mr Jihad, demanding the restoration of the caliphate, the return of Andalucia, the conversion of every infidel to Islam, the imposition of sharia and an end to fornication, homosexuality and alcoholic beverages. In his latest video he sounds like some elderly Berkeley sociology student making lame jokes about Halliburton and Bush reading My Pet Goat.
The lesson of Moore's underwear, P.Diddy's "Vote or Die", Bruce Springsteen's "Rock the Vote" and all the other celebrity props of the Democratic Party is very simple: having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side does nothing for your popularity. Every time Kerry was seen cavorting with Hollywood A-listers, he was alienating the Z-listers -- the American people.
On election day, I was driving through Vermont and found myself behind a car with a Kerry-Edwards sticker and an Instead of Being Born Again, Why Not Grow Up? sticker. Fair enough, the feeling's mutual: the secular, coastal, libertine Democratic Party has zero appeal to born-again Christians. The problem is the crude numbers: 40 per cent of Americans identify themselves as born-again. So right there you've written off 40 per cent of the electorate. What have you got in return? The gay vote? Five per cent? And Bush got a quarter of that.
Another significant sliver of their vote doesn't care much for the holy rollers but recognises that on the big issue -- the war -- the Republicans are right.
Feisty internet blogger Michele Catalano put it very well in her election day declaration: "I voted for George Bush. I am not a redneck. I do not spend my days watching cars race around a track while I drink cheap beer and slap my woman on the ass. I am not a Bible thumper. In fact, I am an atheist. I am not a homophobe."
In their desperation, the Democrats have wound up damning a big chunk of the American people as stupid, bigoted and a bigger threat than Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida. This is ridiculous. As Catalano continues: "You will not be thrown in jail for the sole reason of being a liberal. Your child's public school will not suddenly turn into a centre for Christian brainwashing. Your favourite bookstore will not turn into puritan central."
She didn't add to that list of phony terrors my own choice gem from this election season, courtesy of that eminent political analyst Cameron Diaz, who advised Oprah Winfrey's viewers: "Women have so much to lose. I mean, we could lose the right to our bodies. If you think that rape should be legal, then don't vote. But if you think that you have a right to your body, then you should vote." Poor Cameron. The scary people won. She's just lost all rights to her body. Unlike Alec Baldwin, she can't even move to France. Her body was grounded in Terminal D.
As long as Democrats prefer phantom enemies to real ones, they will be increasingly irrelevant. If I were a Dem, I'd support any candidate who pledged to de-celebrify the party and disown the paranoid Left. That's the big lesson of this election: on Tuesday, the bottom dropped out of Moore's underpants.
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"We cannot win this election" - John Fraud Kerry 11/3/04
Would you have gone to war with Iraq?
"You bet we might have" - John Fraud Kerry |
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srmorton
PO2
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 383
Location: Jacksonville, NC
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| Posted: Sat Nov 06, 2004 7:46 pm Post subject: |
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Great article, GoEagles. Thanks!
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Susan R. Morton |
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GoEagles
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 14 Sep 2004
Posts: 147
Location: Philadelphia
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| Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2004 1:51 am Post subject: |
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Glad you liked it. Steyn is one of my favorites. He put out another great one today -
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Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
By Mark Steyn
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/07/do0704.xml
The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."
Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.
In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with.
Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' "
Mr James is a clinical psychologist.
If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years ahead. This widening gap is already a point of pride to the likes of B J Kelly of Killiney, who made the following observation on Friday's letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in the EU we objected recently to high office for a man who professed the belief that abortion and gay marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US such an outlook could have won him the presidency."
I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow didn't come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to Rocco Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on homosexuality, single parenthood, etc would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular elite has decided they're beyond the pale and such a man should have no place in public life. And B J Kelly sees this as evidence of how much more enlightened Europe is than America.
That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a whole lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J Kelly is quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate.
As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum.
The restrictions on expression that B J Kelly sees as evidence of European enlightenment are regarded as profoundly unhealthy by most Americans. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.
And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it? It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag.
What was revealing about this election campaign was how little the condescending Europeans understand even about the side in American politics they purport to agree with - witness The Guardian's disastrous intervention in Clark County. Simon Schama last week week defined the Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America", hailing the latter as "pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical". That's exactly the wrong way round: it's Godly America that is rational and sceptical - especially of Euro-delusions. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshrivelled in its birthrates, Bush's redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet. Europe's media would do their readers a service if they stopped condescending to it.
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_________________
"We cannot win this election" - John Fraud Kerry 11/3/04
Would you have gone to war with Iraq?
"You bet we might have" - John Fraud Kerry |
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