NOT SO DUMB THEN? [Christopher Hitchens says Bush deserves respect]

London Mirror ^ | November 11, 2004 | Christopher Hitchens

[ejdrapes]

NOT SO DUMB THEN?
Christopher Hitchens on why George Bush deserves respect

I AM wondering if I should be miffed at a full-page headline which accuses all supporters of the re-election of the president of being "so dumb".

I have a very thick skin and a very broad back, so I think that I shall not complain of being called a redneck mutant, provincial philistine, backwoods dolt or blood-crazed religious maniac. Insults come with the turf.

No, if I feel upset at all it is at the herd mentality that seems to have seized almost all my British friends (and quite a few of my American ones, as well).

I don't mind being shouted at, while having discussions around the dinner table or the studio set. After all, I have done some yelling on my own account.

What I do mind is the pitying glance, or the heavy sigh, that is deployed these days. I am not ready to be patronised, or condescended to, unless by someone of some eminence who has earned that right. And even then I regard it as a sign of weakness rather than strength.

To be frank about it, I don't know all that many geniuses in the anti-Bush camp. In Britain, I gather, conceited nonentities such as Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy (neither of whom could be elected as mayor of Hogwallow, Nebraska, in a bad year) are treated as serious party leaders, while George Galloway and Tariq Ali pose as leaders of an "anti-war" movement.

Confronted in this way, I have to say that I don't feel myself in the presence of genius at all. While Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Jon Bon Jovi, Ben Affleck and Bill Clinton (who left my university without being able to take his degree) strike me as having a long way to go before they even attain intellectual mediocrity.

It's quite a few years now since George W Bush took down the Democratic Party's then-favourite daughter, Ann Richards, as governor of Texas.

SINCE then, he has regularly beaten every Democrat who has run against him. But this hasn't prevented many supposedly clever people from continually underestimating him.

And now look what he's done. Won the popular vote, cleaned up the electoral college vote, increased his party's hold on both Houses, while enabling a successful election in Afghanistan and fighting to hold one in Iraq. What an idiot! What a nutcase and bastard as well. He'll evidently stop at nothing.

In the UK, the Queen is the head of the church and head of state, as well as the Armed Forces - a state of affairs that is so ridiculous that many people hardly notice it. In the US, the Constitution states that the government cannot sponsor any church.

This means, and has meant for some time, that voluntary religious participation is one of the defining things about American life. As an atheist I am sorry to say it, but there it is.

It may seem regrettable to you that these pious church-goers also have the right to vote but so they do. They had it when the British were living under absolute monarchy.

And it was prayer-muttering farm-boys from Tennessee and Vermont who came over to Europe in such large numbers, bringing their various chaplains along, and did us all such a favour a generation ago.

At the time, many of the black members of this great people's army were prevented from voting but they later managed to win that right, led largely by clergymen, and are still quite loyal to their touching Sunday devotions.

Of course, I would prefer that only secular humanists and believers in Darwin had been in the front line against first fascism and then Stalinism and now Islamic nihilism but one can't have everything.

Another annoying implication of the Mirror's now-famous front page is that, with a few hundred votes in the opposite direction, the US would somehow have proven itself to be a more intelligent country.

THE fact is that the Democratic Party, built on an old coalition of heavy-industry unions, the liberal middle-class and a majority of blacks and Jews, is failing to reproduce itself demographically.

This has been evident for a long time. It has also ceased to stand for anything much politically or idealistically - if the country is still without universal health care, for example, then what does that say about a party that controlled Congress, and the presidency, for so many years?

Most of all, in my opinion, the Democrats have failed to find a non-squeaky voice in which to speak about the real menace of religious bigotry, which faces us on the streets of London and Amsterdam as well as New York and Washington, and celebrates a cult of death on video.

I must also say that, after living nearly a quarter of a century in Washington, I actually know - gasp! - quite a few Republicans. This means that I've met some alarming fools, of course, but in general I do not recognise my acquaintances from the hysterical descriptions I read in the European press.

Pound for pound of brainpower, Karl Rove and Paul Wolfowitz can blow most liberals straight out of the water. Fact.

And whether it is Saturday night or Sunday morning, I can usually get my right-wing friends on the phone without finding that they are chanting or moaning in some church or temple.

All that most "European" supposed-sophisticates are saying is that they haven't ever met an American who disagrees with them. Well, fine. But who's the parochial and narrow-minded person in that story?

When Tony Blair comes to Washington this week, he will be urging Bush to stick by his pledge to help create a Palestinian state.

Good. A solution is long overdue. It is a good cause in its own right. It is not a simple way to end violence or appease Islamism, since the Islamists will promptly declare war on any Palestinian state that falls short of an entirely Muslim entity.

But John Kerry would never even have come close to saying, as Bush was the first president to say, that a Palestinian state was a good idea.

If Bush is remembered for kicking out the keystone of Arab rejectionism, in his first term, and then helps Palestinian statehood in his second, he'll be remembered as a historic president.

I can hear the jeers already but they come from people who misunderstand. And who are bad losers.

[hobson]

...failing to reproduce itself demographically.

Same sex marriage and abortion on demand will fix that prob... er... oh... nevermind.