Posted on 12/04/2004 5:37:20 AM PST by GMMAC
DEMOCRACY NEEDS NO APOLOGY
Barbara Kay
National Post
November 24, 2004
I have singled out Globe and Mail columnist Heather Mallick for censure in the past, I'm rounding on her again today, and if she continues to set herself up for ridicule as Canada's paramount, almost parodic embodiment of liberal narcissism and corrosive anti-Americanism, I can't promise I won't dump on her in the future. It's nothing personal (we've never met). She just keeps putting a match to the American flag, and I just happen to walk by with a bucket of water. In deconstructing her Nov. 20 column I was, in her words, "spoiled for choice." For starters there was her implication of moral equivalence between the terrorist execution of CARE director Margaret Hassan and the unfortunate killing of a wounded insurgent by a jumpy U.S. Marine. That's offensive. Then there was her assertion that if she were dying, the 51% of Americans who voted for President Bush would "finish me off with a bullet," although, she claims, if they were dying "I'd offer them a drink."
But Mallick's anti-Americanism -- and her extraordinary self-regard -- is old news. We know only too well that she loathes George W. Bush ("this violent, stupid president") and indeed all American conservatives with a passion that often renders her incoherent. Her infidel conservative enemy having been re-elected, she has been stocking up the mini-Falluja of her political mindscape with journalistic bombs to wreak her vengeance. Last Saturday Mallick detonated one of them in eager support for a shameful post-election attack on Bush-voters by a small cadre of embittered American Democrats.
What do incensed liberals do when their candidate loses? Some run dreadful Web sites. The site Mallick favours, www.sorryeverybody.com, features pictures of people (and their babies and pets) "holding up written apologies to the planet" for Bush's re-election. Mallick comments: "What fine people these good Americans are!"
"Fine people"? "Good Americans"? Was Bush's victory a coup by a military junta? Were the polls closed to Democrats? George W. Bush was returned to power in a free and democratic election. In whose name are these people apologizing and by what right?
Mallick and the angry losers she champions seem not to understand the nature of apologies. Individuals may apologize to others for their own wrongdoings. A company president may apologize on behalf of his employees for his company having caused public harm. A nation may apologize to the world through its leader, as Bill Clinton did in Rwanda, for having abdicated its moral responsibility.
But surely this is the first time in history that a group of people joined only by ideology and an unshakable belief in their own moral pre-eminence have apologized to outsiders on behalf of fellow citizens for whose actions they have neither the responsibility nor the authority to speak, simply because they freely and democratically elected the "wrong" man. These Democrats, and the Bush-hating world who find conduits to vent their rage in like-minded journalists such as Mallick, are really saying that 51% of Americans were more than misguided, they were guilty of thought crimes and immoral behaviour.
"Millions" of people are visiting the apology site, Mallick reports with satisfaction: "Citizens of Austria ... have accepted Democratic apologies for what Republicans did and will do, as have Swedes, Canadians and even Muslims...."
Apologies today, show trials tomorrow. No journalist should be celebrating this contemptible Web site. Their "apology" is illegitimate and cannot be "accepted" by anybody. According to Mallick's curious strain of logic, if the Conservative party wins the next election, Globe journalists should apologize for the conservative opinions expressed in the National Post and rejoice when this apology is "accepted" by socialist readers of Danish, Austrian and French newspapers.
Mallick notes that Republican Web sites have struck back, arguing it is disloyal and even traitorous to submit internal divisions to foreign judgment. Mallick characterizes them thus: "There are hate Web sites and there are stricken-with-guilt websites ... You decide." Here is the imperial liberal mindset: It is a "hate Web site" to admonish your fellow citizens for disloyalty. But it is a virtue to spread messages of self-loathing -- for that is how the apology Web sites will be interpreted -- to America's enemies.
An apology for the choice made by your opponents -- whether it comes from the left or the right -- is an attack on the democratic process itself. As a vote of non-confidence in the will of the people, it is a subversion of the very premise of democracy, and an incipiently totalitarian impulse.
I cannot imagine a similar scenario -- conservatives apologizing to the world for a Kerry win -- if the situation were reversed. All reasonable people understand, and I wish Mallick did too, that the glory of democracy lies in neither side ever having to say it's sorry.
© National Post 2004
I sure would!
Well, yeah, but that's mostly to poke fun at the whiners and make PhotoShop parody pictures. People are scrolling through the sorryeverybody site to get fodder for their artistic fun.
bttt
I can't understand these people. Equate 9/11 with Pearl Harbor. Then picture the US going to war and some "Americans" behaving in the same fashion back then. These people are morally banckrupt and blind to reality. I wish they'd explain the difference between the Pearl Harbor attack and 9/11.
Heather Mallick:
The face of immaturity.
This assumes two things. One, that 51% of Americans know or care about how she is or what she thinks. Two, that the left has cornered the market on compassion. The second is an old liberal lie from way back. The first is an amazing example of over estimating ones own importance.
I don't see many folks on there who are like the rest of us. Take a look, how many of these folks look like they hold down blue collar or white collar jobs? Most of them look like they work in a head shop or tattoo parlor. The website promotes them as what they want to be, what they have always wanted to be - victims.
In fact, I do recall a similar situation, but in 1992-'99 my sign (as well as many others') read "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush"
That was definitely NOT intended as an apology, but as an indictment of all those fools who managed to get the 'Toon elected not once, but twice.
Nice article. I'm waiving back at Ms. Kay with all 5 fingers.
What's in it for Mallick? Money? Not yet,maybe but eventually it will be.
placemark
This assumes two things. One, that 51% of Americans know or care about how she is or what she thinks. Two, that the left has cornered the market on compassion. The second is an old liberal lie from way back. The first is an amazing example of over estimating ones own importance.
You missed another point...
3) What caliber would the bullet be, and would it actually be worth the expense; unless I could bill her family for the bullet's cost, as does one of her OBVIOUS choices for a more "compassionate" Ideal society.
You can drop her a line of thanks HERE
Ms. Mallick is guilty of brain death. It's just that simple.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.