The reason some Christians have gravitated towards the Constitution Party, is precisely because they feel betrayed by the Republicans, since they’ve never gotten anything for their participation, and Bush’s commitment to his professed faith is http://bushrevealed.com/ questionable, at best. Generally, traditionalist conservatives’ faith is the most important thing to them; all other considerations - national identity questions, foreign policy, disloyalty of multinational corportions, etc. - are second most important, important though these things certainly are, to traditionalist conservatives.
The problem with Nader and company, is that even if social issues are of lesser importance to them than their economic grievances, nevertheless social liberalism for them is a given, not to be questioned (at least, for Nader and other movement leaders, even if not for all rank-and-file unionists).
For this reason, traditionalist conservatives and labour/leftists cannot truly find common ground, except on a selective, issue-by-issue basis.
Just days after the election, Thrasymachus has now publicly regretted voting for Bush:
”[…] I had the chance to meet [Greg Cochran] yesterday. […] And I do have to admit that [our conversations were] enough to make me regret my vote for Bush more than a little.”
Hey that’s OK, man. Anyone can make a mistake.
Just don’t let it happen again … :-)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Mysterious Stranger, a left-libertarian with an unusually strong anti-organized-Christianity streak, makes many good, valid, even excellent points in his long piece as well as many wrong ones. It started off interesting but, so sorry!, my eyes glazed over toward the end where he got to what I suspect was his main bone of contention with Christians: drug laws. Many libertarians’ idea of paradise on earth is de Quincey’s lifestyle in “Confessions of an Opium Eater”: get into a drug-induced stupor and just stay there for decades. Hey, go for it, guys! I mean—why take, let’s say, the Hitler-Stalinist slow boat to nihilism when you can mainline it the way de Quincey did?
Ultimately what makes left-libertarians unsatisfactory is that for them morality doesn’t exist, and they cannot say in what way they object to a Sodom-and-Gomorrah renaissance. The fire and brimstone, of course, that rained down on the first version will as surely rain down, whether in the real sense or the figurative, on the re-born one.
It should be obvious to all thinking people you can’t construct morality as a purely formal system like deriving mathematics from symbolic logic or constructing groups, rings, and fields in algebra or something. Yes, yes, generations of utterly-clueless-but-supremely-cocky college students have gotten a head buzz for four years thinking it could be done—me included. Then they woke up from their dream.
Or, some did. Some slumber on …
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
This one is just barely short enough not to break the formatting. In the future you should copy the BBCode formatting that you will see immediately above the box in which you are typing the comment. Anyone who can cut and paste the URL can also cut and paste the BBCode.
Miguel Estrada? “Bush and the GOP learned their lesson”? You sure of that? I hope you’re right but I’m pretty certain I read recently that though viewed by the Bush crowd as a “conservative” judge, Estrada’s a pretty left-leaning “conservative,” the implication being he’s a very poor choice for the Supreme Court because at significant risk for turning into an outright left-liberal once confirmed. The upwardly-mobile Anthony Kennedy is well-known of course for having “grown” quite a bit in that way since his elevation to the Court: Kennedy’s sense of what the rich liberal snobs and powerbrokers of the Georgetown dinner-party circuit think of him completely overwhelms any feelings of obligation he might have toward such things as truth, morals, principles, and judicial standards. Kennedy’s a judicial whore who’s sold his birthright for a mess of Georgetown potage; sold his soul for twenty pieces of Georgetown mammon. We don’t want the CCRs ( * ) to bestow on us the gift of another Anthony Kennedy, please, or another Sandra Day O’Connor, any more than we want another (gasp!) David Souter.
( * For those in Rio Linda, CCR stands for Country Club Republicans)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Speaking of regretting the vote one has cast, here are some post-election readers’ comments at View from the Right which serve as a reminder to tradcons that any of them who didn’t vote for Bush (I voted for Peroutka, incidentally) certainly have nothing—nothing whatsoever—to regret. (The readers’ comments aren’t individually permalinked; they’re in the comments section for Lawrence Auster’s log entry, THETRIUMPHALISTHYPEOFTODAY’SCONSERVATIVECOLUMNISTS.)
Here are the VFR readers’ comments:
__________________________________
Where, Thordaddy, did anyone here state that all would be well if we just had a sufficiently conservative president?
I will grant that to an extent Bush has been good on the pro-life issue. He reversed the Clinton Executive Orders, he signed the PBA act. But then he goes and deliberately intervenes in the PA primary for the notorious pro-abort Arlen Specter against the solidly pro-life Pat Toomey. Toomey was leading Specter before Bush jumped in and strong-armed the Republican Party to side with him. How does Specter, slated to take charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee, repay Bush’s help? He blatantly warns that Bush had better not appoint any pro-life judges. [Emphasis added.] This is considerably more serious than the ‘political feint’ you seem to think it is. It is a near-total betrayal. Unless Bush pushes Congress—hard—to deny Specter the [chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee] and relegate him to the transportation committee, or some similar place that will minimize his toxic influence, I can no longer regard him as pro-life.
The bottom line: Abortions are currently as easy to obtain in the US, for any reason whatsoever, without parental consent, up through the day of birth, as they were on the day Bush took office. Has the abortion industry been prosecuted for selling body parts? Has it been regulated in any way? You act as if there has been incremental progress when there has been none.
“Affirmative access‗an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Again, you seem to think that Bush’s betrayal in Grutter v. Michigan was some sort of minor political gesture to buy up a few black votes. (He gained a whole 2 percent—wow!) As a result of this decision, racial preferences are now permanently enshrined as Constitutional law. The 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection is a dead letter for whites. This is profoundly more serious than some cheap political trick. It’s a total sellout to the leftist agenda of racial socialism. Only a leftist, who actually believes in multicultural drivel, could hail this as “justice†and respond by parroting Marxist boilerplate like “Diversity is our strength!†Some of us are now—literally—more equal than others under the law thanks to the “conservatism†of Bush.
How is it that a conservative indulges in such betrayals? I think it would be fair to say that the best most of us could ask for are leaders who would not advance the cause of leftism—something the alleged conservative George W. Bush has excelled at.
Posted by: Carl on November 5, 2004 05:26 PM
___
Thordaddy seems to be under the impression that events and conditions in this Nation are going to be stable, or better, in the future. Most people who post at VFR believe that, due to the rapid and historic demographic changes that America is undergoing, our future is going to be troubling at best—and at worst, deadly. When Thordaddy retires in about 40 years he will be a minority in the United States, and his children’s children will know nothing but this experience. As Carl has stated above, whites no longer enjoy equal protection under the law, thanks to GWB. I do not wish this future on Thordaddy, his kids, or their kids, or my own family. That’s why we fight: for our future, and the future of our children’s children. If you do not understand this, what more can I say? I suggest you read Mr. Auster’s articles on demographics here at VFR, and the possible future we face as a Nation if we keep going down the path we find ourselves on now.
Posted by: j.hagan on November 5, 2004 07:37 PM
___
[…]
___
Getting back to the original subject of this entry, there’s another piece of silly hype about the election that is repeated by every conservative columnist, that Bush gained more popular votes in this election than any candidate in history. Well, duh! The population is bigger than ever, and there was a very large turnout this year, so naturally the winner, even a winner who only got 51 percent of the vote, has more votes than any other candidate in history. By the same token, it’s also true (I presume) that the _losing_ candidate this year has a higher popular vote than any _winning_ candidate in American history, other than Bush himself. But somehow the conservative columnists don’t notice that little fact.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on November 5, 2004 08:51 PM
___
Bush ran behind the 1984 Reagan in California and Illinois, and behind Reagan AND Mondale in New York, in absolute number of votes. Hell, the improved Bush of 2004 ran behind the weaker 1980 Reagan in these states. And California grew like Topsy!
Reagan won 13—thirteen!—states twice that Bush lost twice. Who made them “blueâ€?( * ) I’m not sure about California anymore, but patriots still outnumber idiots in New York and Illinois. If only they had someone to vote for.
Posted by: Reg Cæsar on November 6, 2004 04:29 AM
___________________________________
( * Who made them blue, indeed? Rhetorical question of Mr. Cæsar’s, of course: we know who made them blue. Not having voted for him makes me feel clean … )
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Newsletters
Prime Minister’s welcome speech, as Anastasis ship came to the Faroes
Print
07.07.2004
Dear captain and crew!
As Prime Minister it is a great pleasure to welcome this ship and its crew to the Faroes.
We all know that we live in a troubled age, in an era troubled by war and the horrific consequences for its victims. As a father I often ask myself: “What are children, who are growing up in areas where killing, torture and destruction are part of everyday life, to make of things, what are they to believe?â€
It is also a fact of life, that unjust distribution of the world’s resources, is the reason why millions of children do not know what it is like to go to bed on a full stomach, what it means to drink clean water, and how it feels to put on clean clothes - let alone what it means to receive medical attention to injuries and physical and mental difficulties, and to combat diseases that, in our part of the world, are taken for granted.
And like me, many may wonder: “How are they to develop hopes and dreams for a bright future, where love of one’s neighbour, peace and social justice is not an exceptional event, but the main rule of life?
No. It is not always easy to be a child – particularly where the agenda is set by cynical and fanatical people and rulers, because there is no limit to the misery they can cause.
We all need hopes and dreams. If we rob human beings, adults as well as children of all hope for the future, then the basis of their existence will be torn apart, as well as the very foundation required for building a healthy society. Anyone, who has seen hope and excitement distinguished from the eyes of a child, because they are overwhelmed by disappointments, will never forget it. To be truly humans with dignity we must have hope, trust and faith in the future. Hope and faith are the very basis for building a future for oneself and for our neighbour in need, wherever they are.
Therefore it is a great encouragement to receive a visit from a ship and its crew, which puts love of one’s neighbour on the top of the agenda, to such a degree that you are willing to sail the seven seas in order to give people in desperate conditions a concrete help, so that they can recover and spread hopes and dreams to other people.
“Anastasis†is a Greek word and means resurrection or recovery. It is a word that is repeated again and again in the New Testament. More than anything else resurrection symbolises hopes and dreams - the hope for a better life, the hope for a better future. In my own language, Faroese, we also say about an individual, who has been marginalized by society, or fallen on hard times, that he/she has risen again. They have been resurrected.
Dear captain and crew. You do not sit idle and rest, while our fellow man around the world lives in hardship. You seek people in need, give them medical care and medicine, you teach them the basic skills of agriculture, and guide them how to produce clean water. You get through to the children, you touch the children hearts, you give them confidence and you care for them. Through your efforts, you help them regain their self-respect. In other words: “ You show the world, that action speak louder than words. You take Jesus on his word, when he said: â€Love your neighbour as you love yourself.â€
I am convinced that the world would be a poorer place without these words of our Lord, and the emphasis He put on them. Despite our differences of opinions, this is at least something all normal human beings must agree upon. We must believe that these words are stronger than all the hatred that fills the world with poverty, war and horror. If we lose this faith, we give up all hope of a better and more just world. And the loss of hope is directly in conflict with the very spirit of Christianity.
Let me conclude with the voice of Martin Luther King, who said: â€I have a dream.†We must all have a dream, because that is how we become closer to our fellow man, and this is how we build the future. Finally may I say to you, the captain and crew of Anastasis: Thank you very much for carrying this dream with you around the world’s seven seas, so that your dreams can become a real hope for the countless victims, who now live without any glimmer of hope.
“Less than thirty days after receiving 56% of the vote and within hours of a Gubernatorial proclamation as law, Prop 200 has been (temporarily) thwarted by MALDEF and U.S. District Court Judge David C. Bury, a Bush II appointment.”
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
It makes a difference. Kennedy (and before him Blackmun) were remarkably stupid men for someone holding that position. Rehnquist and Scalia in contrast are quite bright. It helps to have someone who’s capable of thinking through a position.
In 1998, the LP ran against John Ensign who agreed with the LP on perhaps 90% of its agenda. Harry Reid will be the Senate Minority Leader because of that race. In 2000, the LP kept up the usual “there is no difference” inane mantra. In 2002, John Sophocl eus and the LP in Alabama took over $80,000 from the Democratic Party to run ads against the GOP candidate for governor. This year, Badnarik used DNC taking points over and over in his campaign (he promoted the lie a draft was immiment if Bush was reele cted). Now the LP, along wi th the Green Pary, is working as a Kerry/Soros front and demanding a recount in Ohio. After a while, even the most dim voter sees what is going on.
Forget the rhetoric or what people say they want. It is what they have done an d are doing now which is important.
The LP has not only done nothing to advance the cause of liberty, it has been a destructive force and empowered the authoritarian left.
After Badnarik openly acted as John Kerry’s Emma Goldman this year, the LP will most likely fade away into nothingness. It certainly will not siphon votes from the right as has been its goal for years. So it remains to be see if the left will continue to fund it.
first: I posted it by their many interesting christian libertarians/very differents to the webmaster himself/ links,including charles watson a killer from sharon tate,now with a beautiful ministry in jails evangelization;second: Libertarian party,as constitution party had many problems and negative aspects as every other human institution/antrophine ketisei in second peter epistle/ but wait for more links,websites,comments,posts about it. God bless your family brother muhlenberg.
I agree that the link in Mysterious Stranger’s comment posted yesterday (4:18pm) is important: if the statistics cited can be believed, it appears that abortions have begun increasing again under Bush after falling through the 1990s. The author of the linked piece, a doctor (and pro-life Democrat would be my guess), cites three possible mechanisms whereby Bush administration policies might be contributing to increased abortion rates. Certainly, where he cites joblessness and low wages he’s right. He could’ve gone further and connected them to Bush’s deliberate encouragement of massive third-world immigration both legal and illegal into this country, and also his strong support of NAFTA, both of which engender job-loss or reduced income among Americans who are at, let’s say, the lower-third of the socio-economic scale, and also Bush’s support for the outsourcing of service jobs and of highly-skilled professional positions—in some cases even whole service industries—causing joblessness and wage stress for the middle and in some instances (like Radiologists for example), upper-middle-class segments of our society. Bush favors a number of policies that go against family values. In fact Bush’s policies are, taken all together, a disaster for U.S. society.
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
I enjoyed reading Vivianne Fletcher’s comment, in which she made many excellent points. I was left with the strong impression, however, that the individual who wrote that very interesting post was a man.
If it wouldn’t be inappropriate to express the following, I’d like to register my own personal preference that forum participants choose pen names that don’t mislead as to their sex, pen names that are either sex-neutral or reflect the commenter’s actual sex. Among the things implicitly communicated via forum comments is the difference between men’s and women’s points of view and their ways of expressing those points of view, such that misleading pen names implicitly communicate falsehoods that are potentially very important to some readers (probably to most, whether or not they are aware of it), detracting from the discussions’ quality in subtle but at times quite significant ways.
(This issue once came up at the old FrontPageMag.com forum when Richard Poe was editor of that web-site. As a result, Poe asked participants not to misrepresent their sex.)
I look forward Vivianne Fletcher’s continued participation in Turnabout forum discussions (perhaps under a less misleading pen name).
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
I guess John Kerry went into the primary without a plan to win the election.
The Democrats threw everything they had at this election. They ran a phony Vietnam War hero and a phony Southerner. They had middle-aged women executives at MTV hawking “Rock the Vote” to entice the most uninformed young people to vote for Kerry. They had Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and New York Times darling Eminem. They had documentaries, books, the universities, Hollywood (and the French!) on their side.
Books
Strongly Recommended!
Christian Jihad: Two Former Muslims Look at the Crusades…
Hillary’s Secret War, Richard Poe
So Many Enemies, So Little Time, Elinor Burkett
By Ann Coulter
Treason: Hardcover | Audio
Slander: Paperback | Hardcover | Audio | Large Print
High Crimes: Paperback
Sponsors
Annoy a Liberal
Peace Through Superior Firepower shirts
Single Conservatives
Find a single conservative free!
Bank on Iraq
Their money can’t stay this low forever.
Start Advertising Now
.
E-Mail List
They had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day. In Colorado, they traded voter registrations for crack cocaine. In Ohio, they registered Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. In South Carolina, Emily’s List called Republican households and gave them incorrect information about the location of polling places.
The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage, phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.
The Democrats’ cheating never stopped. The big story of this election is the fraudulent exit polls on Election Day. Strange as it seems to me, it is well acknowledged that people are more likely to come out and vote for a winner. Early exit polls showing Kerry the clear winner could be expected to depress the vote for Bush.
Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away. But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began to come in, the election flipped to Bush. It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.
The exit polls were absurd: They showed Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points and Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Only monkey business can explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls – admittedly hard to believe with a party that has behaved so honorably throughout this campaign. Michael Barone speculates that the sites of exit polling were leaked to the Democrats, and Democrats sent large numbers of voters to those polls to take exit polls and throw the results.
But for all their chicanery, vote-stealing, Hollywood starlets, fake polls and faux patriotism, the Democrats were wiped out on Election Day.
Bush won the largest popular vote in history with a 3.5 million margin. Indeed, simply by getting a majority of the country to vote for him – the left’s most hated politician since Richard Nixon – Bush did something “rock star” Bill Clinton never did. Bush maintained or increased his vote in every state but Vermont. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate, and continue to dominate state governorships. Also making history of a sort, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost his election, marking the first time in half a century a Senate leader has been defeated.
To Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, Al Franken and the whole gang at Air America Radio – you were great, guys! Thanks for the help! We couldn’t have done it without you!
Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for “Boy Genius” Karl Rove. It’s absurd that the election was as close as it was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the night before the election we didn’t know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him.
If Rove is “the architect” – as Bush called him in his acceptance speech – then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.
As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment, the amendment passed by 57 percent – a figure noticeable for being larger than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 88 percent of the vote.
))))))Seventy percent to 80 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and partial-birth abortion. Far from appealing exclusively to a narrow Republican base, opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly. There were marriage amendments on the ballot in Michigan and Ohio. Bush won Ohio narrowly and lost Michigan by only 2 points. How different might that have been if Bush hadn’t run from the issue)))))))
But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion – contravening the politicians’ rule of thumb: Talk about your positions that are wildly popular with voters. “Boy Genius” Rove decided Bush shouldn’t even run radio ads on gay marriage, and at the last minute, Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.
Amazingly, it was the Democrats – the ones who support gay marriage – who used the gay issue for political advantage, most famously when Kerry gay-baited Mary Cheney during the third debate.
The one toss-up Senate seat lost by the Republicans was Pete Coors in Colorado, where the Democrats did not hesitate to run commercials of a bacchanalian gay festival in Canada sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. The most narrow Republican win in a toss-up Senate race was in Alaska, where the Republican candidate was another “progressive” on the social issues.
When contemplating a former New York mayor as their next presidential candidate, Republicans should remember: This election should have been over sometime in August, not 1 a.m. election night.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned terrorist attacks in Iraq and around the world will increase if George W Bush is not re-elected in next month’s presidential poll. The Russian leader’s comments are a tacit endorsement of his American counterpart. Mr. Putin says the terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed personally at President George W Bush. He says international terrorist groups want to cause maximum damage to the American President’s campaign for re-election and prevent him from winning the November 2 poll. The Russian leader says if they succeed, international terrorist groups will celebrate victory over America and the international coalition, celebrations that could lead to more terrorist attacks around the world. Mr Putin’s comments back up the widely-held belief that Russia would prefer George W Bush at the helm of the world’s only superpower, even though Russia opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq. But Mr Putin was also careful to add that Russia will respect the choice of the American people and work with the elected President, whoever that may be.”
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Putin may have other reasons to be concerned about the election. There is some resentment in Russia about Kerry’s attitude he is the natural leader of the world. When Kerry complained that Bush was not acting fast enougth to secure nuclear weapons in Russia, and said that he would do it in two years, this provoked editorial reaction in Russia that Kerry does not regard Russia as a sovereign nation.
Then he has to wonder about the Kerry-Edwards pledge to secure energy independence. Right now there is a world-wide contest to control basic natural resources, with the US trying to tear loose former Soviet republics to create a resourse region and and export path that does not cross Russia.
Putin may well look back at Clinton’s agressiveness in the Balkins and then at Kerry’s pledges and wonder whether Kerry might not be a more aggressive adversary than Bush.
Soros wants back in Russia. The oligarchs, most of whom are in exile want Putin gone. Kissinger, Perle and others have urged Bush to pressure Putin to release Khodorkovsky from prison. Bush has stonewalled them.
The goal of Kerry, Soros et al is to try to return Rusia to what it was like under Yeltsin.
Stuart Eizenstat was #2 at Treasury under Rubin. His job was to stop money laundering. Eizenstat knew of and did nothing when the Russian Oligarchs washed over $9 billion through the Bank of New York (BoNY).
What is Eizenstat doing today?
He works for Menatep—the bank responsible for a large share of the money laundering . Menatep is owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Btw…Charles Schumer voted against drilling in Alaska. But he was a guest of honor at the opening of Khodorkovsky’s (Yukos) first gas station in America. At the ceremony, Schumer said:
“These new gas stations in New York are an easy win-win. It obviously benefits the Russian economy to be able to tap further into the American gasoline mar ket, and a stronger Russian economy is a net plus for the United States and the West. If there’s one thing New York drivers need, it’s lower gas prices, and that comes from good-old American competition. This Russian gas should increase oil alternatives in our market and will, we hope, help drive gas prices down.”“”
“The following originally appeared in the February 2000 Middle American News:
” ‘In an interview ignored by the liberal press, as well as his GOP rivals, Bush told the editorial board of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, that “we ought to increase legal immigration.” Bush said advocates of immigration reform represent the “xenophobic dark side of American politics,” and derided them as “folks who want to isolate America.” He expressed sympathy for aliens who come to America to take jobs. “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River,” he said. “If you’re a mother and dad, and you got kids to feed, and you’re making 50 cents and you see someone in Iowa making $50, and you care about those kids, you’re coming.” ’ ” (Emphasis added.)
So no, it wasn’t Karl Rove or the neocons who “brainwashed” President Bush into insisting on open borders. He himself was already a dyed-in-the-wool open-borders fanatic and despiser of immigration reformers before he became president. Had he made his open-borders plan clear during the 2000 presidential campaign he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected. Needless to say, if he’s elected again he’ll pursue open borders with redoubled vigor (while turning a completely deaf ear to all other points of view, exactly as he’s always done).
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
I think Lawrence Auster has got it exactly right in this VFRlog entry up today:
“Bush’s leadership method
“Here are the three operational principles of George W. Bush’s leadership: (1) GUTINSTINCT to reach a decision; (2) FAITHANDPRAYER to give him the absolute, unwavering, unquestioning certainty that it’s the right decision; and (3) BOILERPLATE—simplistic, uninformative, endlessly repeated boilerplate—to explain and defend the decision.”
All questions of who’s better, him or Kerry, aside, Bush is not presidential material. (Neither is Kerry of course, but that’s not the point—I would never have voted for Kerry anyway, under any circumstances. Bush fooled us. Yes I thought he’d be somewhat bad. But this bad? Never would’ve believed it in a million years…)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Ten days ago Joseph Farah, the great editor of the great conservative web-site WorldNetDaily.com (and a Christian Arab by ancestry, I believe), held his nose and endorsed George Bush in a column entitled Send Terrorists a Message, explaining he was taking this step because of the war:
“I chose to sit out the [2000] presidential election […]. Until recently, I was planning to sit out the 2004 presidential election, too […]. However, […w]e find ourselves in a global conflict with a radical ideology of evil comparable to our titanic battles of the past with Nazism and communism. […] I have come to the conclusion that, like it or not, Osama bin Laden and his jihadist allies have one short-term goal above all others—defeating George W. Bush at the polls Nov. 2. A victory by John Kerry, a lifelong appeaser of totalitarianism, would hand the terrorists their biggest morale boost since Sept. 11, 2001. […] So this election for me is not so much about Bush. It’s about you. The election has now come down to something very simple. It is your chance to send the terrorists a message. […] If we were at peace, this might be an opportune moment to consider building a third party. It might be a great chance to protest the choices we have. But we are not at peace. We are at war.
]…] Vote for George W. Bush Nov. 2.”
He reiterated his endorsement here, this time citing the widely-reported Dem Party election fraud that is already under way:
“With less than a week to go, it’s getting ugly out there. And this is just the way Kerry and the Democratic Party want it. […] The Kerry campaign is whipping up its supporters into a veritable frenzy about voter fraud, even while the Kerry campaign itself is perpetrating the fraud. It seems the only way to prevent those plans from tearing our country apart Nov. 3 is to ensure the election is not close.”
“George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have done more to demoralize American voters than any two politicians in my lifetime. […T]heir actions suggest all they did was fool enough of the people to get their votes. […] George W. Bush promised to rein in spending. Instead, he signed on to the biggest increase in domestic spending in the history of the country, creating new entitlement programs and burdening future generations with the debt. Bush promised to increase national security. Instead, he proposed a ‘guest worker program’ that not only winks at illegal immigration while the nation is threatened by terrorism and increasing crime, it encourages it with promises of ‘amnesty’ from deportation and prosecution. […] Many people have been turned off to politics because of these […] monumental betrayals. They are asking what can be done. They want to know where they go next. They want to know whom they can trust. I believe Bush is going to lose his bid for re-election. He deserves to lose. I say that fully acknowledging that John Kerry is not worthy of occupying the Oval Office. […] But none of that will serve as comfort to […] betrayed supporters. They’re angry. They’re right to be angry. And they won’t get fooled again. How do we get ourselves as a people out of this electoral trap that offers us a choice that is no choice at all? It’s time for some tough medicine. It’s time to stop pretending that it works to support the ‘lesser of two evils.’ It’s time to stop pretending that we can expect constitutional, limited government by electing people to office who have no respect for constitutional limited government. It’s time to stop pretending that not voting in a race with only bad choices is a waste of a vote. It’s a waste of a vote to give your support to a candidate who will betray his oath of office.”
I like the February Farah way more than the October one. And, sorry but no, I for one definitely do not plan on heeding Buchanan’s call for conservatives to “come home to the GOP” or Farah’s to hold my nose and vote for Bush in view of the war. I’m too concerned about the other, even deadlier, war—the one Bush and the Tranzi GOP are waging right here at home, not against bin Laden but against us ordinary Americans.
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
Comments
No agreement on fundamentals
The reason some Christians have gravitated towards the Constitution Party, is precisely because they feel betrayed by the Republicans, since they’ve never gotten anything for their participation, and Bush’s commitment to his professed faith is http://bushrevealed.com/ questionable, at best. Generally, traditionalist conservatives’ faith is the most important thing to them; all other considerations - national identity questions, foreign policy, disloyalty of multinational corportions, etc. - are second most important, important though these things certainly are, to traditionalist conservatives.
The problem with Nader and company, is that even if social issues are of lesser importance to them than their economic grievances, nevertheless social liberalism for them is a given, not to be questioned (at least, for Nader and other movement leaders, even if not for all rank-and-file unionists).
For this reason, traditionalist conservatives and labour/leftists cannot truly find common ground, except on a selective, issue-by-issue basis.
Thrasy, all's forgiven
Just days after the election, Thrasymachus has now publicly regretted voting for Bush:
”[…] I had the chance to meet [Greg Cochran] yesterday. […] And I do have to admit that [our conversations were] enough to make me regret my vote for Bush more than a little.”
Hey that’s OK, man. Anyone can make a mistake.
Just don’t let it happen again … :-)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
It started off good but, oh Gawd!, then came the drug part ...
Mysterious Stranger, a left-libertarian with an unusually strong anti-organized-Christianity streak, makes many good, valid, even excellent points in his long piece as well as many wrong ones. It started off interesting but, so sorry!, my eyes glazed over toward the end where he got to what I suspect was his main bone of contention with Christians: drug laws. Many libertarians’ idea of paradise on earth is de Quincey’s lifestyle in “Confessions of an Opium Eater”: get into a drug-induced stupor and just stay there for decades. Hey, go for it, guys! I mean—why take, let’s say, the Hitler-Stalinist slow boat to nihilism when you can mainline it the way de Quincey did?
Ultimately what makes left-libertarians unsatisfactory is that for them morality doesn’t exist, and they cannot say in what way they object to a Sodom-and-Gomorrah renaissance. The fire and brimstone, of course, that rained down on the first version will as surely rain down, whether in the real sense or the figurative, on the re-born one.
It should be obvious to all thinking people you can’t construct morality as a purely formal system like deriving mathematics from symbolic logic or constructing groups, rings, and fields in algebra or something. Yes, yes, generations of utterly-clueless-but-supremely-cocky college students have gotten a head buzz for four years thinking it could be done—me included. Then they woke up from their dream.
Or, some did. Some slumber on …
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
This one is just barely short
This one is just barely short enough not to break the formatting. In the future you should copy the BBCode formatting that you will see immediately above the box in which you are typing the comment. Anyone who can cut and paste the URL can also cut and paste the BBCode.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
I've read that Miguel Estrada's not really very conservative
Miguel Estrada? “Bush and the GOP learned their lesson”? You sure of that? I hope you’re right but I’m pretty certain I read recently that though viewed by the Bush crowd as a “conservative” judge, Estrada’s a pretty left-leaning “conservative,” the implication being he’s a very poor choice for the Supreme Court because at significant risk for turning into an outright left-liberal once confirmed. The upwardly-mobile Anthony Kennedy is well-known of course for having “grown” quite a bit in that way since his elevation to the Court: Kennedy’s sense of what the rich liberal snobs and powerbrokers of the Georgetown dinner-party circuit think of him completely overwhelms any feelings of obligation he might have toward such things as truth, morals, principles, and judicial standards. Kennedy’s a judicial whore who’s sold his birthright for a mess of Georgetown potage; sold his soul for twenty pieces of Georgetown mammon. We don’t want the CCRs ( * ) to bestow on us the gift of another Anthony Kennedy, please, or another Sandra Day O’Connor, any more than we want another (gasp!) David Souter.
( * For those in Rio Linda, CCR stands for Country Club Republicans)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
My conscience is clear ... and I feel great!
Speaking of regretting the vote one has cast, here are some post-election readers’ comments at View from the Right which serve as a reminder to tradcons that any of them who didn’t vote for Bush (I voted for Peroutka, incidentally) certainly have nothing—nothing whatsoever—to regret. (The readers’ comments aren’t individually permalinked; they’re in the comments section for Lawrence Auster’s log entry, THE TRIUMPHALIST HYPE OF TODAY’S CONSERVATIVE COLUMNISTS.)
Here are the VFR readers’ comments:
__________________________________
Where, Thordaddy, did anyone here state that all would be well if we just had a sufficiently conservative president?
I will grant that to an extent Bush has been good on the pro-life issue. He reversed the Clinton Executive Orders, he signed the PBA act. But then he goes and deliberately intervenes in the PA primary for the notorious pro-abort Arlen Specter against the solidly pro-life Pat Toomey. Toomey was leading Specter before Bush jumped in and strong-armed the Republican Party to side with him. How does Specter, slated to take charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee, repay Bush’s help? He blatantly warns that Bush had better not appoint any pro-life judges. [Emphasis added.] This is considerably more serious than the ‘political feint’ you seem to think it is. It is a near-total betrayal. Unless Bush pushes Congress—hard—to deny Specter the [chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee] and relegate him to the transportation committee, or some similar place that will minimize his toxic influence, I can no longer regard him as pro-life.
The bottom line: Abortions are currently as easy to obtain in the US, for any reason whatsoever, without parental consent, up through the day of birth, as they were on the day Bush took office. Has the abortion industry been prosecuted for selling body parts? Has it been regulated in any way? You act as if there has been incremental progress when there has been none.
“Affirmative access‗an Orwellian phrase if ever there was one. Again, you seem to think that Bush’s betrayal in Grutter v. Michigan was some sort of minor political gesture to buy up a few black votes. (He gained a whole 2 percent—wow!) As a result of this decision, racial preferences are now permanently enshrined as Constitutional law. The 14th amendment’s guarantee of equal protection is a dead letter for whites. This is profoundly more serious than some cheap political trick. It’s a total sellout to the leftist agenda of racial socialism. Only a leftist, who actually believes in multicultural drivel, could hail this as “justice†and respond by parroting Marxist boilerplate like “Diversity is our strength!†Some of us are now—literally—more equal than others under the law thanks to the “conservatism†of Bush.
How is it that a conservative indulges in such betrayals? I think it would be fair to say that the best most of us could ask for are leaders who would not advance the cause of leftism—something the alleged conservative George W. Bush has excelled at.
Posted by: Carl on November 5, 2004 05:26 PM
___
Thordaddy seems to be under the impression that events and conditions in this Nation are going to be stable, or better, in the future. Most people who post at VFR believe that, due to the rapid and historic demographic changes that America is undergoing, our future is going to be troubling at best—and at worst, deadly. When Thordaddy retires in about 40 years he will be a minority in the United States, and his children’s children will know nothing but this experience. As Carl has stated above, whites no longer enjoy equal protection under the law, thanks to GWB. I do not wish this future on Thordaddy, his kids, or their kids, or my own family. That’s why we fight: for our future, and the future of our children’s children. If you do not understand this, what more can I say? I suggest you read Mr. Auster’s articles on demographics here at VFR, and the possible future we face as a Nation if we keep going down the path we find ourselves on now.
Posted by: j.hagan on November 5, 2004 07:37 PM
___
[…]
___
Getting back to the original subject of this entry, there’s another piece of silly hype about the election that is repeated by every conservative columnist, that Bush gained more popular votes in this election than any candidate in history. Well, duh! The population is bigger than ever, and there was a very large turnout this year, so naturally the winner, even a winner who only got 51 percent of the vote, has more votes than any other candidate in history. By the same token, it’s also true (I presume) that the _losing_ candidate this year has a higher popular vote than any _winning_ candidate in American history, other than Bush himself. But somehow the conservative columnists don’t notice that little fact.
Posted by: Lawrence Auster on November 5, 2004 08:51 PM
___
Bush ran behind the 1984 Reagan in California and Illinois, and behind Reagan AND Mondale in New York, in absolute number of votes. Hell, the improved Bush of 2004 ran behind the weaker 1980 Reagan in these states. And California grew like Topsy!
Reagan won 13—thirteen!—states twice that Bush lost twice. Who made them “blueâ€?( * ) I’m not sure about California anymore, but patriots still outnumber idiots in New York and Illinois. If only they had someone to vote for.
Posted by: Reg Cæsar on November 6, 2004 04:29 AM
___________________________________
( * Who made them blue, indeed? Rhetorical question of Mr. Cæsar’s, of course: we know who made them blue. Not having voted for him makes me feel clean … )
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
prolife leftists
faeroes a dispensationalist/lutheran country in northern europe ruled by republicans/socialists,reads about his prime minister
Prime Minister’s Office
P.O.Box 64
FO-110 Tórshavn
Faroes
Tel: +298 351010
Fax: +298 351015
info@tinganes.fo
Newsletters
Prime Minister’s welcome speech, as Anastasis ship came to the Faroes
Print
07.07.2004
Dear captain and crew!
As Prime Minister it is a great pleasure to welcome this ship and its crew to the Faroes.
We all know that we live in a troubled age, in an era troubled by war and the horrific consequences for its victims. As a father I often ask myself: “What are children, who are growing up in areas where killing, torture and destruction are part of everyday life, to make of things, what are they to believe?â€
It is also a fact of life, that unjust distribution of the world’s resources, is the reason why millions of children do not know what it is like to go to bed on a full stomach, what it means to drink clean water, and how it feels to put on clean clothes - let alone what it means to receive medical attention to injuries and physical and mental difficulties, and to combat diseases that, in our part of the world, are taken for granted.
And like me, many may wonder: “How are they to develop hopes and dreams for a bright future, where love of one’s neighbour, peace and social justice is not an exceptional event, but the main rule of life?
No. It is not always easy to be a child – particularly where the agenda is set by cynical and fanatical people and rulers, because there is no limit to the misery they can cause.
We all need hopes and dreams. If we rob human beings, adults as well as children of all hope for the future, then the basis of their existence will be torn apart, as well as the very foundation required for building a healthy society. Anyone, who has seen hope and excitement distinguished from the eyes of a child, because they are overwhelmed by disappointments, will never forget it. To be truly humans with dignity we must have hope, trust and faith in the future. Hope and faith are the very basis for building a future for oneself and for our neighbour in need, wherever they are.
Therefore it is a great encouragement to receive a visit from a ship and its crew, which puts love of one’s neighbour on the top of the agenda, to such a degree that you are willing to sail the seven seas in order to give people in desperate conditions a concrete help, so that they can recover and spread hopes and dreams to other people.
“Anastasis†is a Greek word and means resurrection or recovery. It is a word that is repeated again and again in the New Testament. More than anything else resurrection symbolises hopes and dreams - the hope for a better life, the hope for a better future. In my own language, Faroese, we also say about an individual, who has been marginalized by society, or fallen on hard times, that he/she has risen again. They have been resurrected.
Dear captain and crew. You do not sit idle and rest, while our fellow man around the world lives in hardship. You seek people in need, give them medical care and medicine, you teach them the basic skills of agriculture, and guide them how to produce clean water. You get through to the children, you touch the children hearts, you give them confidence and you care for them. Through your efforts, you help them regain their self-respect. In other words: “ You show the world, that action speak louder than words. You take Jesus on his word, when he said: â€Love your neighbour as you love yourself.â€
I am convinced that the world would be a poorer place without these words of our Lord, and the emphasis He put on them. Despite our differences of opinions, this is at least something all normal human beings must agree upon. We must believe that these words are stronger than all the hatred that fills the world with poverty, war and horror. If we lose this faith, we give up all hope of a better and more just world. And the loss of hope is directly in conflict with the very spirit of Christianity.
Let me conclude with the voice of Martin Luther King, who said: â€I have a dream.†We must all have a dream, because that is how we become closer to our fellow man, and this is how we build the future. Finally may I say to you, the captain and crew of Anastasis: Thank you very much for carrying this dream with you around the world’s seven seas, so that your dreams can become a real hope for the countless victims, who now live without any glimmer of hope.
Thank you and have a safe voyage!
A little taste of what's in store, Muhlenberg?
From Vdare.com’s blog tonight:
“Less than thirty days after receiving 56% of the vote and within hours of a Gubernatorial proclamation as law, Prop 200 has been (temporarily) thwarted by MALDEF and U.S. District Court Judge David C. Bury, a Bush II appointment.”
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
How smart is Estrada?
It makes a difference. Kennedy (and before him Blackmun) were remarkably stupid men for someone holding that position. Rehnquist and Scalia in contrast are quite bright. It helps to have someone who’s capable of thinking through a position.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
LP is a DNC front
In 1998, the LP ran against John Ensign who agreed with the LP on perhaps 90% of its agenda. Harry Reid will be the Senate Minority Leader because of that race. In 2000, the LP kept up the usual “there is no difference” inane mantra. In 2002, John Sophocl eus and the LP in Alabama took over $80,000 from the Democratic Party to run ads against the GOP candidate for governor. This year, Badnarik used DNC taking points over and over in his campaign (he promoted the lie a draft was immiment if Bush was reele cted). Now the LP, along wi th the Green Pary, is working as a Kerry/Soros front and demanding a recount in Ohio. After a while, even the most dim voter sees what is going on.
Forget the rhetoric or what people say they want. It is what they have done an d are doing now which is important.
The LP has not only done nothing to advance the cause of liberty, it has been a destructive force and empowered the authoritarian left.
After Badnarik openly acted as John Kerry’s Emma Goldman this year, the LP will most likely fade away into nothingness. It certainly will not siphon votes from the right as has been its goal for years. So it remains to be see if the left will continue to fund it.
two notes here
first: I posted it by their many interesting christian libertarians/very differents to the webmaster himself/ links,including charles watson a killer from sharon tate,now with a beautiful ministry in jails evangelization;second: Libertarian party,as constitution party had many problems and negative aspects as every other human institution/antrophine ketisei in second peter epistle/ but wait for more links,websites,comments,posts about it. God bless your family brother muhlenberg.
Bush's "Family Values" include an increased abortion rate
I agree that the link in Mysterious Stranger’s comment posted yesterday (4:18pm) is important: if the statistics cited can be believed, it appears that abortions have begun increasing again under Bush after falling through the 1990s. The author of the linked piece, a doctor (and pro-life Democrat would be my guess), cites three possible mechanisms whereby Bush administration policies might be contributing to increased abortion rates. Certainly, where he cites joblessness and low wages he’s right. He could’ve gone further and connected them to Bush’s deliberate encouragement of massive third-world immigration both legal and illegal into this country, and also his strong support of NAFTA, both of which engender job-loss or reduced income among Americans who are at, let’s say, the lower-third of the socio-economic scale, and also Bush’s support for the outsourcing of service jobs and of highly-skilled professional positions—in some cases even whole service industries—causing joblessness and wage stress for the middle and in some instances (like Radiologists for example), upper-middle-class segments of our society. Bush favors a number of policies that go against family values. In fact Bush’s policies are, taken all together, a disaster for U.S. society.
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
Are you a man?
I enjoyed reading Vivianne Fletcher’s comment, in which she made many excellent points. I was left with the strong impression, however, that the individual who wrote that very interesting post was a man.
If it wouldn’t be inappropriate to express the following, I’d like to register my own personal preference that forum participants choose pen names that don’t mislead as to their sex, pen names that are either sex-neutral or reflect the commenter’s actual sex. Among the things implicitly communicated via forum comments is the difference between men’s and women’s points of view and their ways of expressing those points of view, such that misleading pen names implicitly communicate falsehoods that are potentially very important to some readers (probably to most, whether or not they are aware of it), detracting from the discussions’ quality in subtle but at times quite significant ways.
(This issue once came up at the old FrontPageMag.com forum when Richard Poe was editor of that web-site. As a result, Poe asked participants not to misrepresent their sex.)
I look forward Vivianne Fletcher’s continued participation in Turnabout forum discussions (perhaps under a less misleading pen name).
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
NO.
NO.
Oh ...
OK.
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
ok!
One Last Flip-Flop
November 3, 2004
I guess John Kerry went into the primary without a plan to win the election.
The Democrats threw everything they had at this election. They ran a phony Vietnam War hero and a phony Southerner. They had middle-aged women executives at MTV hawking “Rock the Vote” to entice the most uninformed young people to vote for Kerry. They had Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews and New York Times darling Eminem. They had documentaries, books, the universities, Hollywood (and the French!) on their side.
Books
Strongly Recommended!
Christian Jihad: Two Former Muslims Look at the Crusades…
Hillary’s Secret War, Richard Poe
So Many Enemies, So Little Time, Elinor Burkett
By Ann Coulter
Treason: Hardcover | Audio
Slander: Paperback | Hardcover | Audio | Large Print
High Crimes: Paperback
Sponsors
Annoy a Liberal
Peace Through Superior Firepower shirts
Single Conservatives
Find a single conservative free!
Bank on Iraq
Their money can’t stay this low forever.
Start Advertising Now
.
E-Mail List
They had liberal thugs ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters, stealing Bush-Cheney signs and slashing the tires of Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote vans on Election Day. In Colorado, they traded voter registrations for crack cocaine. In Ohio, they registered Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. In South Carolina, Emily’s List called Republican households and gave them incorrect information about the location of polling places.
The media campaigned heavily for Kerry with endless Abu Ghraib coverage, phony National Guard documents and, days before the election, false news reports that hundreds of tons of munitions had been looted in Iraq.
The Democrats’ cheating never stopped. The big story of this election is the fraudulent exit polls on Election Day. Strange as it seems to me, it is well acknowledged that people are more likely to come out and vote for a winner. Early exit polls showing Kerry the clear winner could be expected to depress the vote for Bush.
Stunningly inaccurate exit polls released around noon on Election Day convinced news anchors, talking heads and even the campaigns that Kerry would win walking away. But at 9 p.m., when the first actual results began to come in, the election flipped to Bush. It was the first Kerry flip-flop that actually served the national interest.
The exit polls were absurd: They showed Kerry winning Pennsylvania by 20 points and Bush tied with Kerry in Mississippi. Only monkey business can explain the wildly pro-Kerry exit polls – admittedly hard to believe with a party that has behaved so honorably throughout this campaign. Michael Barone speculates that the sites of exit polling were leaked to the Democrats, and Democrats sent large numbers of voters to those polls to take exit polls and throw the results.
But for all their chicanery, vote-stealing, Hollywood starlets, fake polls and faux patriotism, the Democrats were wiped out on Election Day.
Bush won the largest popular vote in history with a 3.5 million margin. Indeed, simply by getting a majority of the country to vote for him – the left’s most hated politician since Richard Nixon – Bush did something “rock star” Bill Clinton never did. Bush maintained or increased his vote in every state but Vermont. Republicans picked up seats in the House and Senate, and continue to dominate state governorships. Also making history of a sort, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle lost his election, marking the first time in half a century a Senate leader has been defeated.
To Michael Moore, George Soros, Terry McAuliffe, Dan Rather, Al Franken and the whole gang at Air America Radio – you were great, guys! Thanks for the help! We couldn’t have done it without you!
Of course, we could have done it a lot earlier on election night but for “Boy Genius” Karl Rove. It’s absurd that the election was as close as it was. The nation is at war, Bush is a magnificent wartime leader, and the night before the election we didn’t know if a liberal tax-and-spend, Vietnam War-protesting senator from Massachusetts would beat him.
If Rove is “the architect” – as Bush called him in his acceptance speech – then he is the architect of high TV ratings, not a Republican victory. By keeping the race so tight, Rove ensured that a race that should have been a runaway Bush victory would not be over until the wee hours of the morning.
As we now know, the most important issue to voters was not terrorism, but moral values. Marriage amendments won by lopsided majorities in all 11 states where they were on the ballot. Even in Oregon, the state targeted by gay marriage advocates as their best shot of defeating a marriage amendment, the amendment passed by 57 percent – a figure noticeable for being larger than the percentage of votes cast for Bush in Oregon. In the great state of Mississippi, the marriage amendment passed with 88 percent of the vote.
))))))Seventy percent to 80 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage and partial-birth abortion. Far from appealing exclusively to a narrow Republican base, opposition to gay marriage is strongest among the Democratic base: blacks, Hispanics, blue-collar workers and the elderly. There were marriage amendments on the ballot in Michigan and Ohio. Bush won Ohio narrowly and lost Michigan by only 2 points. How different might that have been if Bush hadn’t run from the issue)))))))
But Rove concluded Bush should stay mum on gay marriage and partial-birth abortion – contravening the politicians’ rule of thumb: Talk about your positions that are wildly popular with voters. “Boy Genius” Rove decided Bush shouldn’t even run radio ads on gay marriage, and at the last minute, Bush started claiming he was in favor of civil unions, just like John Kerry.
Amazingly, it was the Democrats – the ones who support gay marriage – who used the gay issue for political advantage, most famously when Kerry gay-baited Mary Cheney during the third debate.
The one toss-up Senate seat lost by the Republicans was Pete Coors in Colorado, where the Democrats did not hesitate to run commercials of a bacchanalian gay festival in Canada sponsored by Coors Brewing Co. The most narrow Republican win in a toss-up Senate race was in Alaska, where the Republican candidate was another “progressive” on the social issues.
When contemplating a former New York mayor as their next presidential candidate, Republicans should remember: This election should have been over sometime in August, not 1 a.m. election night.
bush and his constituency
http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp
why a christian can`t endorse bush or kerry
http://hometown.aol.com/ILoveCourtney18/MonthlyArticle.html
pieter friedrich endorses peroutka!
http://pieterfriedrich.com/weblog/
peroutka says:to be catholic or protestant is unimportant
Here.
Beslan has apparently scared Vladimir Putin into endorsing Bush
From ABC News Online:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned terrorist attacks in Iraq and around the world will increase if George W Bush is not re-elected in next month’s presidential poll. The Russian leader’s comments are a tacit endorsement of his American counterpart. Mr. Putin says the terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed personally at President George W Bush. He says international terrorist groups want to cause maximum damage to the American President’s campaign for re-election and prevent him from winning the November 2 poll. The Russian leader says if they succeed, international terrorist groups will celebrate victory over America and the international coalition, celebrations that could lead to more terrorist attacks around the world. Mr Putin’s comments back up the widely-held belief that Russia would prefer George W Bush at the helm of the world’s only superpower, even though Russia opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq. But Mr Putin was also careful to add that Russia will respect the choice of the American people and work with the elected President, whoever that may be.”
(Thanks to John Ray’s log entry for the link.)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
Putin and Bush
Putin may have other reasons to be concerned about the election. There is some resentment in Russia about Kerry’s attitude he is the natural leader of the world. When Kerry complained that Bush was not acting fast enougth to secure nuclear weapons in Russia, and said that he would do it in two years, this provoked editorial reaction in Russia that Kerry does not regard Russia as a sovereign nation.
Then he has to wonder about the Kerry-Edwards pledge to secure energy independence. Right now there is a world-wide contest to control basic natural resources, with the US trying to tear loose former Soviet republics to create a resourse region and and export path that does not cross Russia.
Putin may well look back at Clinton’s agressiveness in the Balkins and then at Kerry’s pledges and wonder whether Kerry might not be a more aggressive adversary than Bush.
Khodorkovsky and Soros are why Putin is for Bush
Soros wants back in Russia. The oligarchs, most of whom are in exile want Putin gone. Kissinger, Perle and others have urged Bush to pressure Putin to release Khodorkovsky from prison. Bush has stonewalled them.
The goal of Kerry, Soros et al is to try to return Rusia to what it was like under Yeltsin.
Stuart Eizenstat was #2 at Treasury under Rubin. His job was to stop money laundering. Eizenstat knew of and did nothing when the Russian Oligarchs washed over $9 billion through the Bank of New York (BoNY).
What is Eizenstat doing today?
He works for Menatep—the bank responsible for a large share of the money laundering . Menatep is owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Btw…Charles Schumer voted against drilling in Alaska. But he was a guest of honor at the opening of Khodorkovsky’s (Yukos) first gas station in America. At the ceremony, Schumer said:
“These new gas stations in New York are an easy win-win. It obviously benefits the Russian economy to be able to tap further into the American gasoline mar ket, and a stronger Russian economy is a net plus for the United States and the West. If there’s one thing New York drivers need, it’s lower gas prices, and that comes from good-old American competition. This Russian gas should increase oil alternatives in our market and will, we hope, help drive gas prices down.”“”
Hi Andre
I urge you to do the BBCode thing, so people can click through to your recommendations. Remember, [url=http://ethicsdaily.com]this[/url] becomes http://ethicsdaily.com this.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Bush was against immigration reform already before his election
From a VFR http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002702.html log entry today:
“The following originally appeared in the February 2000 Middle American News:
” ‘In an interview ignored by the liberal press, as well as his GOP rivals, Bush told the editorial board of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, that “we ought to increase legal immigration.” Bush said advocates of immigration reform represent the “xenophobic dark side of American politics,” and derided them as “folks who want to isolate America.” He expressed sympathy for aliens who come to America to take jobs. “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River,” he said. “If you’re a mother and dad, and you got kids to feed, and you’re making 50 cents and you see someone in Iowa making $50, and you care about those kids, you’re coming.” ’ ” (Emphasis added.)
So no, it wasn’t Karl Rove or the neocons who “brainwashed” President Bush into insisting on open borders. He himself was already a dyed-in-the-wool open-borders fanatic and despiser of immigration reformers before he became president. Had he made his open-borders plan clear during the 2000 presidential campaign he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected. Needless to say, if he’s elected again he’ll pursue open borders with redoubled vigor (while turning a completely deaf ear to all other points of view, exactly as he’s always done).
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
Lawrence Auster really nails Bush's leadership method
I think Lawrence Auster has got it exactly right in this VFR log entry up today:
“Bush’s leadership method
“Here are the three operational principles of George W. Bush’s leadership: (1) GUT INSTINCT to reach a decision; (2) FAITH AND PRAYER to give him the absolute, unwavering, unquestioning certainty that it’s the right decision; and (3) BOILERPLATE—simplistic, uninformative, endlessly repeated boilerplate—to explain and defend the decision.”
All questions of who’s better, him or Kerry, aside, Bush is not presidential material. (Neither is Kerry of course, but that’s not the point—I would never have voted for Kerry anyway, under any circumstances. Bush fooled us. Yes I thought he’d be somewhat bad. But this bad? Never would’ve believed it in a million years…)
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
Surprisingly, Joseph Farah holds his nose and endorses Bush
Ten days ago Joseph Farah, the great editor of the great conservative web-site WorldNetDaily.com (and a Christian Arab by ancestry, I believe), held his nose and endorsed George Bush in a column entitled Send Terrorists a Message, explaining he was taking this step because of the war:
“I chose to sit out the [2000] presidential election […]. Until recently, I was planning to sit out the 2004 presidential election, too […]. However, […w]e find ourselves in a global conflict with a radical ideology of evil comparable to our titanic battles of the past with Nazism and communism. […] I have come to the conclusion that, like it or not, Osama bin Laden and his jihadist allies have one short-term goal above all others—defeating George W. Bush at the polls Nov. 2. A victory by John Kerry, a lifelong appeaser of totalitarianism, would hand the terrorists their biggest morale boost since Sept. 11, 2001. […] So this election for me is not so much about Bush. It’s about you. The election has now come down to something very simple. It is your chance to send the terrorists a message. […] If we were at peace, this might be an opportune moment to consider building a third party. It might be a great chance to protest the choices we have. But we are not at peace. We are at war.
]…] Vote for George W. Bush Nov. 2.”
He reiterated his endorsement here, this time citing the widely-reported Dem Party election fraud that is already under way:
“With less than a week to go, it’s getting ugly out there. And this is just the way Kerry and the Democratic Party want it. […] The Kerry campaign is whipping up its supporters into a veritable frenzy about voter fraud, even while the Kerry campaign itself is perpetrating the fraud. It seems the only way to prevent those plans from tearing our country apart Nov. 3 is to ensure the election is not close.”
But look what Farah was saying in February. In a piece very aptly entitled Betraying the Will of the People, Farah wrote:
“George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger have done more to demoralize American voters than any two politicians in my lifetime. […T]heir actions suggest all they did was fool enough of the people to get their votes. […] George W. Bush promised to rein in spending. Instead, he signed on to the biggest increase in domestic spending in the history of the country, creating new entitlement programs and burdening future generations with the debt. Bush promised to increase national security. Instead, he proposed a ‘guest worker program’ that not only winks at illegal immigration while the nation is threatened by terrorism and increasing crime, it encourages it with promises of ‘amnesty’ from deportation and prosecution. […] Many people have been turned off to politics because of these […] monumental betrayals. They are asking what can be done. They want to know where they go next. They want to know whom they can trust. I believe Bush is going to lose his bid for re-election. He deserves to lose. I say that fully acknowledging that John Kerry is not worthy of occupying the Oval Office. […] But none of that will serve as comfort to […] betrayed supporters. They’re angry. They’re right to be angry. And they won’t get fooled again. How do we get ourselves as a people out of this electoral trap that offers us a choice that is no choice at all? It’s time for some tough medicine. It’s time to stop pretending that it works to support the ‘lesser of two evils.’ It’s time to stop pretending that we can expect constitutional, limited government by electing people to office who have no respect for constitutional limited government. It’s time to stop pretending that not voting in a race with only bad choices is a waste of a vote. It’s a waste of a vote to give your support to a candidate who will betray his oath of office.”
I like the February Farah way more than the October one. And, sorry but no, I for one definitely do not plan on heeding Buchanan’s call for conservatives to “come home to the GOP” or Farah’s to hold my nose and vote for Bush in view of the war. I’m too concerned about the other, even deadlier, war—the one Bush and the Tranzi GOP are waging right here at home, not against bin Laden but against us ordinary Americans.
________________________
“If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.
________________________
Pages