Posted on 11/13/2004 3:42:08 PM PST by CHARLITE
Lame Ducks and New Canucks
When I was young, some thousands of my countrymen fled to Canada in order to avoid fighting the evils of communism in a distant land. More than thirty years later, some thousands of liberals are planning to ascend to the Great White North to avoid fighting the evils of conservatism in their own back yard.
Although I’m not sure that flight is the proper response to the recent election results, I wish them a swift transition to a land more amenable to their sensitive, pacifistic dispositions and one that will accommodate their rampant Francophilia. Some will, no doubt, one day reappear in the lower forty-eight when the inevitable abuse of the grape leads to the need for liver transplants.
It seems that horror, to paraphrase Dan Rather, is sweeping the country like a big wheel through a Delta cotton field. Among widespread reports that moral values trumped all other issues in the campaign, liberals saw their worst nightmare realized: character does count.
They also learned that, like our Founding Fathers, a great many Americans link religion with morality and resent attempts to strip that concept from our national politics. Never has the phrase ''fear and loathing'' been more applicable to that which liberals harbor toward a majority of the U.S. population.
Actually, it was the Democrats who tried to create fear by calling forth their usual Republican bogeymen; no Social Security payments for seniors, racial and gay persecution, and blatant disregard for the poor. They also added some new material: Vote for George W. Bush and your sons will either die in the draft or without a flu shot.
The loathing though, was deeper and more brutally vituperative than ever before. With John Kerry’s presidential dream not yet cold in the grave, media harpies were quick to divide the blame for his demise between the conniving genius of Karl Rove and those who Paul Krugman calls ''a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is.''
To his credit, Mr. Krugman finally gets it right. Too many people in this country remember how this country was, before the media and the courts decreed how it should be. Too many have actually read the Constitution and can find in it no right to abortion, nor special rights for those who embrace certain sexual proclivities, and certainly no directive to favor one race over another.
One thing they find instead is that they, and not the media, elect senators--a simple majority of whom are needed to give ''advice and consent'' to the president to confirm his nominees to the federal bench. Some of these senators have decided to abrogate this responsibility by imposing an extra-Constitutional requirement of sixty votes, thus obstructing the will of the people. And in this election, like the last, the people have sent more of these obstructionists packing, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle himself.
Before correcting himself later, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas predicted in July that media bias in favor of Kerry would be worth about fifteen points in the presidential race, and it says here that he was probably right. But the CBS Rathergate fiasco and revelations of further media mischief will erode that margin in future elections. This new wall of separation between media and state will cast a long shadow of despair along its left flank.
As liberal pundits struggle to interpret the meaning of this, their third consecutive general election loss, they will cite the hateful intolerance of the religious right without realizing who is doing the actual hating; decry the ignorance of rural, red-state hicks while ignoring the fact that President Bush equaled or increased his winning percentage in all fifty states save Vermont; and castigate the GOP for reminding the nation of 9/11 instead of blaming the vicious murderers who perpetrated it and who long to kill even more Americans.
Just as cries of ''selected, not elected'' have faded into history, so too will the nauseatingly echoed claim that the president has ''no mandate,'' follow into the ash heap of liberal lore. The notion that George Bush must subjugate his will to a shrinking congressional minority is wishful thinking at its delusional best.
Given that the president and his veep now represent two of those rare birds known as lame ducks and are thus immune to voter pressure, it is the Democrats who must decide whether or not they will accept the offered trade of political capital to cash in with their constituents back home. This will be especially true of those four red-state senators whose seats are up for grabs in 2006.
And should this scenario of doom and gloom become too much for some of the donkey persuasion: Remember, you’ll always have Ottawa.
About the Writer: Lisa Fabrizio is a freelance writer from Stamford, Connecticut. Lisa receives e-mail at mailbox@lisafab.com
This should be moved to the main forum.
Goodspeed?
You're more polite than me! I was thinking more along the lines of "don't let the door hit you in the a$$ on the way out!"
Oops-Goodspeed = Godspeed.
but their passports should be revoked - AFTER they get to Canada
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