God bless America for dropping the dead donkey( Ouch!)

IT’S the morality, stupid! The American presidential election turned out to be a bonfire of the vanities for the acolytes of political correctness (even Tom Wolfe was supporting Dubya). So much for Bill Clinton’s suddenly outdated axiom that elections are about the economy - not that the notorious Oval Office onanist could credibly have opted for moral confrontation. As forecast in this column last week, America’s Christian and cultural conservatives came out fighting and reclaimed their country.

The whole notion, of course, was risible in the eyes of the liberal media on both sides of the Atlantic. That people in the 21st century ("in this day and age", as liberalism’s most brain-dead cliché phrases it) would come out and vote on abortion, stem-cell research and homosexual ‘marriage’, instead of addressing such important issues as medical welfare, gender equality and closer engagement with Europe had the liberal élite rolling in the aisles. They are not laughing now. They stopped laughing at around 7.30pm, Eastern Time, on Tuesday evening, as the first disturbing reports came in from the Florida count.

Until then, the Democratic camp and its media fellow travellers had revelled in the reports of a record turnout. As their television screens relayed pictures of unprecedented queues snaking for several blocks around polling stations, the élite leaped to the egotistic, patronising conclusion that the common people had come swarming out, like extras in an Eisenstein film, to implement the revolution that their betters had devised for them.

That crass delusion epitomised the fissiparous detachment of the liberal subculture from the real America: those lines of voters were not The People - just people, the mainstream Americans with whom the Democrats are now hopelessly out of touch. They were mostly Christians; but they were not, for the most part, bible-thumping disciples of white-suited tele-evangelists - at least not in the states that crucially mattered. They were ordinary, church-going husbands and wives, mild in their manner but firm in their convictions. In 2000, when it was "the economy, stupid", no fewer than four million of them abstained. This time, they came out.

And no wonder they did. The East Coast and Californian liberals had made a science of provocation. The nightly spectacle on television of thousands of same-sex ‘marriages’ in California and Massachusetts was promoted by the homosexual lobby on the principle that familiarity breeds content. The reaction of Middle America to this in-your-face aggression was quite the reverse.

Liberals’ inexplicable fixation with the militant homosexual cause (representative of less than 3% of the population) proved self-destructive. In the past month, that lobby has destabilised such widely disparate institutions as the Anglican Church, the European Commission and, now, the Democratic Party. With all 11 states where referenda were held on same-sex marriage rejecting the proposition by majorities that had to be weighed rather than counted, the constitutional amendment that will finally resolve this issue is in the bag.

How quaint, thought European and New York liberals, that voters should be concerned that one in four Americans is aborted in the womb, when they could be supporting measures that would put an extra $500 in their pockets. How ignorant to oppose stem-cell research that will save so many lives. Who got their priorities right? Are the Americans not more thoughtful, more moral and more intelligent to worry about mass extermination of babies?

As for the exploitation of human embryos, it is not hill-billy stupidity to query the destruction of human life, especially when the inflated claims being made for embryo stem-cell research are as far-fetched, in truly scientific terms, as those made for the Philosopher’s Stone and a cruel deception of the critically ill. And is it not strange that this nation of Luddites and scientific illiterates can send probes to the farthest reaches of the solar system, while enlightened Britain can barely run a train up the West Coast line from London to Glasgow?

Make no mistake, this election was a Christian-led counter-revolution. The national exit poll conducted for Associated Press and the major US television networks found that the highest electoral motivation, at 22%, was "moral values". Among weekly churchgoers, Bush scored 61%, Kerry 39%. This broke down into 70% of Protestants, 56% of Catholics. The latter have had their moral and doctrinal sensitivities blunted by Vatican II, yet there are signs that even Catholics indoctrinated by Justice ’n’ Peace guff are on the turn. When the chips were down, in the swing state of Ohio, 65% of Catholics came out for Bush.

As this column predicted last week, the state of Iowa, with its large Catholic electorate, defected to Bush; the other state forecast to do the same - Wisconsin - was just held by John Kerry. Nationally, he got the support of 60% of those who said they "never" attended church; but since they amount to 14% of voters, that was scant consolation.

Across the Union, this election was as historic as it was dramatic. George W Bush led by 3.5 million in the popular vote and won four million more votes than Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide. The turnout was the equivalent of 70% in a British election, with 120 million Americans casting their votes. Both the Senate and the House of Representatives are now in solid Republican control: that makes a conservative Supreme Court, with both power and a strong popular mandate to reverse Roe v Wade and other liberal obscenities, a shoo-in.

"Dude, here’s our country!" That is what real Americans told Michael Moore, the hygienically challenged human hamburger whose Pravda-style propaganda has earned him more fans in Cannes than in all 50 states of the Union. Now he wants Hillary Clinton to challenge for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Great idea: an East Coast, liberal, feminist überbitch that might have been computer-realised by Karl Rove, to leave the Democrats with just California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Bring her on!

Hillary would be an appropriate sequel to Theresa Heinz Kerry, the worst First Lady that America never had. Yet the one memorable phrase of her non-campaign might have summed up the motivation of those millions of middle Americans queuing for seven hours outside polling stations: "Shove it!"

The whole vile, patronising agenda of the bespectacled drabby wimmin, the Florida conspiracy bores, the wine-bar Europhiles and the Hollywood freak show has been trashed. Infanticide is out of fashion; embryos may not be cannibalised much longer; Butch and Sundance will not be taking a trip down the aisle in their lifetimes. Consider it shoved, lady.

in fact, I liked it so much, I'm going to post it here...

Blair rants as Britain sleepwalks into slavery

GERALD WARNER

SECOND only to the inelegant word "Kafkaesque", the term "Orwellian" is the next most over-used adjective in the English language. Its significance has been diluted by frequent and irrelevant application to situations that did not merit it. Last week in Brighton, however, furnished an occasion that met every referential criterion to the prophetic nightmare conjured by the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Labour Party conference was a demonstration of the extent to which Britain has succumbed to creeping totalitarianism. This has happened, by a process of osmosis, over the past seven years. The Führer Principle is now as entrenched in our society as trial by jury, civility and bicameral government formerly were. The Leader of All Progressive Humanity is unchallengeable by the whipped curs that constitute his party.

Beyond that, he is now bolstered by the newly-articulated doctrine of "Progressive Consensus" (that’s "one-party state", to you), which the Chancellor brought into the political lexicon last week. This underlined the reality that Blair and Brown are equally committed to displacement of traditional British parliamentary democracy, to be replaced by an all-embracing, all-intrusive state.

The significance of a "progressive consensus" is that it enlists almost the whole of society into one vast movement, with all the People (when that entity acquires a capital ‘p’, pack a suitcase and wait for the midnight knock) subscribing to its doctrines. There was a progressive consensus in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1989 and in Germany from 1933 to 1945. China, North Korea and Cuba still enjoy that Utopian state of affairs. The progressive consensus is the indispensable vehicle for a world theory that is too ambitious to be constrained within one political party: it needs to supplant all other parties.

"A world theory is intolerant and is not content with being one party amongst a number of other parties; it insists on exclusive and persistent recognition of itself and on an absolutely new conception of the whole of public life in accordance with its views. Thus, it cannot tolerate continuance of a force representing the former conditions." Who said that - Tony or Gordon? In fact, it was Adolf (Mein Kampf, chapter V). Yet he was describing the prevailing outlook at Brighton - the Leader’s as much as the Chancellor’s. For "a force representing the former conditions", read the New Leader’s "the forces of conservatism".

These latter were represented at Brighton by the pro-hunt protesters, hemmed in by Stasi-style riot police with alsatians. Hunting with dogs has been outlawed in Germany since 1936, on the whim of Guess Who. Metropolitan commentators made remarks about country people that they would never have dared (as the Prince of Wales once pointed out) to make about any ethnic or sexual minorities. Be aware: the rhetoric anent minorities has been reversed, so that the rural community is now dismissed on the very grounds on which other groups were formerly mollycoddled. You have to keep pace with the volatile party line.

Urban scoffers are turkeys voting for Christmas. The hunting issue has been chosen as the Trojan horse for a further erosion of democracy: the imposition of de facto unicameral government. If the Parliament Act can be invoked to bulldoze through legislation that is not government policy, not a matter of urgency nor of the highest national importance (neither the Prime Minister nor the Chancellor bothered to vote on it), then the Second Chamber, in effect, has been abolished. Last week we witnessed Billy Bragg outlining his proposals for an alternative second chamber; we have yet to hear Ozzy Osbourne’s thesis on the subject.

Freedom, in a parliamentary democracy, is indivisible. When the unwary and the partisan yield to the totalitarian serpent’s temptation to applaud the removal of someone else’s liberty to do something they find distasteful, they compromise their own freedom. The tired cliché "They came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I did nothing... And finally they came for me" is still valid. For decades, every spotty polytechnic Trot screamed "Fascist!" at half of humanity, ranging from Margaret Thatcher (in fact, the destroyer of corporatism) to men wearing ties. Now the reality is upon us and the media are so many somnambulists.

The essence of fascism is not the goose-step, coal-scuttle helmets or racism (irrelevant in Mussolini’s Italy). Men in bad suits are the new gauleiters. Until recently, the one technical objection to rating Blair as a fascist was his apparent rejection of corporatism: the Warwick agreement with the trades unions has now removed that obstacle to his full membership of the club. It is time some of our commentators opened their eyes and did an audit of how much freedom has been snuffed out by prescriptive laws since 1997.

Yet this is no Fourth Reich: we are merely a protectorate within the European Union, which imposes 25,000 laws a year upon us without even cosmetic rubber-stamping by Westminster. Last week the Great Charlatan committed himself to Blunkett’s identity card régime. The final measure of the power complex of this deeply sinister mountebank was the insouciance with which he regretfully warned us that, despite any pleas to the contrary, he was not willing to rule us for 16 years - only for 12. That puts "We have become a grandmother" entirely in the shade. If the British public does not hear alarm bells ringing and remove this megalomaniac at the ballot box, this country will be complicit in its own enslavement.

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