In the Ditch
Our liberal pals are in real trouble, and as a compassionate conservative, I feel an obligation to help them winch their all-inclusive bus out of the ditch and help them with an ideological front end alignment.
Going into Nov. 2, the libs were riding high. John Kerry was running neck and neck with Bush in the polls. George Soros and the Hollywood crowd, you know, the people so often cited as being representative of “real America” were dumping truckloads of cash into the campaign coffers of Democrat candidates (a good sign, because it’s all about money). And even though Dan Rather got caught with his journalistic pants rumpled up around his ankles with nary an intern in sight, the press on the whole was doing a darned fine job of painting Iraq as an utter disaster. From the streets of Boston to the bath houses in San Francisco, joy and optimism filled the hearts of lefties everywhere.
And midway through election day, the news was so encouraging. Exit polls showed Kerry leading, in many states, by a healthy margin. The news was so good that Alec Baldwin is rumored to have called a real estate agent in preparation for buying an even larger home—on American soil. The staff of the New York Times was undoubtedly putting the finishing touches on their election stories…you know, the ones using phrases like “overwhelmingly rejected,” “tossed out of office,” “a widespread denunciation of the Iraq war,” “frustrated Americans everywhere” about President Bush’s election loss. The pro-legalized abortion crowd was gleeful, realizing they were about to win an unthinkable victory: seeing a pro-legalized abortion Catholic elected to the highest office in the land. And almost certainly, the gay marriage crowd was anticipating the joy that would come with their soon-to-be-legalized “right” to marry, as Mr. Kerry would be happy to help them end-run the American electorate, enlisting the help of a liberal judiciary in winning the Bath House Party its long-delayed “civil right.”
But something went wrong. Kerry lost, taking a four-point pasting at the polls. Gay marriage was banned in 11 states, including two states won by Kerry. Democrats lost House and Senate seats, including that held by their Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle. They even lost several gubernatorial races. And the election map was even more disappointing, with the country covered in red, with the Libs hanging on to the northeast coast, the west coast and a blue island populated by liberals and traditional union workers in the upper midwest.
Oh the pain. The injustice. And worst of all, the presidential victory by Bush was so clear, it couldn’t be clouded with allegations of vote fraud on the part of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
Desperate for answers, the Libs starting searching for reasons for the “unfair” across-the-board spanking. It was wacked-out Evangelical Christians. No, wait, people in the Midwest were uninformed. Really, it’s just that the 60 million people who voted for Bush were “stupid” (uh, how does that square with John Kerry’s sizeable win in the “let’s not talk about them” demographic that is voters who did not finish high school?). It was Hillary’s fault. It was an evil plot by Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh.
Sorry guys. Turn off NPR. Put down Al Franken’s book. Stand up. Look in the mirror. It’s you. It’s your party. And it’s the people who have shoved you out of the driver’s seat and taken the wheel. They’ve made a sharp left turn and now you’re sitting in a ditch. They guy in the driver’s seat, an unkempt, rotund chap wearing a baseball cap is screaming mad and he’s got the accelerator flat against the floor. But you’re not going anywhere.
You see, out here in the Midwest (or “Jesusland” as it was called on a map published recently by a bunch of Libs) the view of the evident majority of voters isn’t even close to what the New York Times, Rosie O’Donnell or Barbra says it is.
First off, we don’t hate anyone. In fact, we love our kids and we want them to first have a real childhood, get through the teenage years unscathed and venture into adulthood in a culture that looks something like the one that produced their parents. We don’t have any problem with gay people living together, or doing whatever. We don’t though, feel that that courts should tell us that we have to formally recognize their relationships in legal marriages. And we work with gays, we live next door to them and those of us that go to church sit in the same pews as they do. So we don’t equate gay marriage with the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. In fact, an awful lot of African-Americans find that comparison insulting. And we average, middle-class midwestern white folks agree with them. Just because we’re not in favor of gay marriage, doesn’t mean we hate gays or wish them harm. So when you scream that anyone who opposes gay marriage hates gay people, you push us away.
Like most of the country, we’re pretty much split on the abortion issue. But the majority of us feel we ought to give our consent before our 14 year-old daughter gets one, just as we have to give consent before the school nurse can give her so much as an aspirin. And most of us, while we may be divided on the issue of abortion, feel that partial birth abortion is a grisly form of infanticide which no reasonable person would consider defensible. And when you tell us regular folks that we’re fascists for disagreeing with you, you push us away.
We’re also somewhat split on Iraq. But what we do know is that if it was O.K. to take out good old Slobodon during the Bosnian Conflict due to his “ethnic cleansing,” then Saddam with his mass graves, support of terrorists and desire to acquire nukes was probably deserving of the same treatment. So when you scream “Wrong war, wrong time, wrong place,” you push us away.
On terrorism: sure, we’d like to see Osama’s head on a plate, or at least know that he’s in the worst imaginable American prison, playing leapfrog with several large, lonely cellmates. But we know that every video of him shows a guy who looks increasingly worse, and who is obviously well on his way to looking like the aforementioned Saddam did when we plucked him out of a hole in the ground last December. He’s obviously on the run, so we don’t think he’s doing a very good job of commanding his “army” of psychopaths. And that’s evidenced by the fact that we haven’t been attacked since 9/11. Somehow, Mr. Bush and Company are doing something right. And we think it’s only a matter of time before we drag Osama into custody, or zip his remains into a body bag. So while you’re busy condemning the president for not pursuing terrorists, we see not only progress but results. Oh, and by yelling about Bush being a failure in the war on terrorism, you push us away.
On your party: you keep sliding leftward, all while your leadership looks back reverently at the JFK years, wondering how to get back to them. Well, think about it: JFK was a tax cutter. JFK also was quick to grab the handle of the sword when he perceived a Soviet threat in Cuba—essentially taking preemptive action. Who does that sound like? We out here in the red states liked JFK and his policies, heck, we liked him so much that thousands of dead people in Chicago even voted for him, giving him the victory back in 1960. So doesn’t it make sense that we voted for Bush? We haven’t changed out here, but the Democratic party has. JFK, your stated hero, would be somewhere to the right of Joe Lieberman, who, just four years after running for VP, now sounds more like a Republican than a Democrat. He hasn’t changed. But his party has. Ask Zell Miller if you don’t believe me.
Finally, you have to realize that we like Bush. No, we don’t think he’s perfect. But we don’t think he’s a whacked out Bible thumping fascist bent on torching the Bill of Rights and then throwing the Constitution into the blaze. We also wonder why it was no big deal for Clinton to go to church, and for Al Gore to imitate a Southern preacher when he addressed the NAACP convention, but Bush gets condemned and compared to a Taliban-style Mullah when he dares to set foot in a church. We’ve suffered no terrorist attacks, we think the economy – despite the press ignoring employment figures identical to those of the Clinton years – is doing well and improving, and we like the idea that Bush seems to have an idea of right and wrong.
So, if you want to winch your car out of the ditch, maybe you ought to put down your triple mocha soy latte, pick up your cell phone and call Joe Lieberman or Bill Clinton. Oh, and leave Mr. Moore, the Rotund Radical on the side of the road. Maybe he can hitch a ride in Leonardo DiCaprio’s Prius.
Posted: November 20th, 2004 under Uncategorized.
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