Bush Nation?
Prof. Erik S. Root
The election is over and I suspect that most people are at once relieved and ebullient that it ended in a Bush victory. Many others are just happy it is over, period. Yet the campaign would not be complete without bringing to a close the spectacle we witnessed. Kerry was soundly defeated and the Republicans picked up seats in both houses. Overall, it was a great election for the Republicans and further solidified the creeping realignment that has been underway since 1994. The last time any Democrat candidate for president received 51 percent or more of the vote was 1964. Indeed, something important happened in this election, but in his own way Kerry contributed to the emerging Bush nation. In the closing weeks of the campaign, the Kern campaign engaged in two practical blunders.
The day after Superman succumbed to the mortal stab of the Grimm Reaper, John Edwards gave one of the most demagogic speeches in modern times: if Kerry and Edwards were in office, Christopher Reeves. Edwards divined, would have been able to walk again. The born again Kerry/Edwards campaign thus morphed into the Benny Hinn ticket. They promised fantastic things in ways that challenged the most able mental gymnasts. Many Americans may believe in the scientific god, but most certainly know that such miracles are not just around the corner and ready for implementing. Aside from promises, Kerry/Edwards also tried to foist on America an October Surprise.
The New York Times wrote a "news" item explaining that somehow Bush was responsible for allowing explosives to be smuggled out of al Qaqaa. As Bill Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard:
The allegations that nearly 400 tons of 'high explosives' were missing from the al Qaqaa arms dump are based on charges leveled by Mohamed al Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The claims are old and increasingly suspect. But that hasn't kept John Kerry's presidential campaign from using the story in a new television ad and in virtually every- stump speech and media appearance over the past two days.
Kerry was so desperate, seeing the election slipping from him, that he engaged in a grand lie. Kerry continued to run his ad even though NBC did yeoman's work in criticizing the NYT story—they had an embedded reporter with the troops as they approached and inspected al Qaqaa. In essence, the material was not "smuggled" out of al Qaqaa after the invasion, but most likely disappeared in the weeks before the invasion. Even Richard Holbrooke, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, admitted there was no hard evidence for the accusation: "You don't know the truth and I don't know the truth." Bush went on the offensive and publicly criticized Kerry: "a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."
The al Qaqaa debacle planted a crescendo on a campaign already in meltdown mode. In taking the side of al Baradei, Kerry was accepting the U.N.'s word over the word of the 101 st Airborne and the 3rd infantry division. Kerry's position on al Qaqaa also exposed him to flip-flopping charge again. Remember, he claimed that WMDs did not exist. If the weapons that were "smuggled" out of al-Qaqaa did not represent a serious threat, why should we care; if they were a threat, then the war might just be justified on those grounds. The talented folks at Powerline were the first to notice the contradiction.
All these practical missteps aside, Bush's victory might be a triumph of what James Ceaser has called "neo-natural right." Ceaser wrote that:
President Bush has identified the Republican party with a distinct foreign policy, which he has justified by recourse to certain fixed and universal principles—namely that 'liberty is the design of nature' and that 'freedom is the right and capacity of all mankind.' Not since Lincoln has the putative head of a Republican party so actively sought to ground the party in a politics of natural right.
With the Republican majority now fully entrenched, we might expect another twenty years of Republican rule, but does the party and the people who make up this nation, believe in the idea of America? Bush has attempted to revive our ancient faith, which is a timeless idea, and he has stated it in such a way as to require something of all of her citizens. In the process. Bush just may have refashioned the GOP.
Perhaps nothing captures Bush's understanding of America more than his July 2003 speech on Goree Island. Senegal. In that speech Bush reflected:
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith, and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, 'No fist is big enough to hide the sky.' All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God. In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the Exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence—and asked the self-evident question, 'Then why not me?1
And again.
These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they left behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused Americans to examine our hearts, to correct our Constitution, and to teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of even-' race. By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free."
And finally,
The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries. Yet. eventually, the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced—what Martin Luther King called 'a certain kind of fire that no water could put out." That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. . . . It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us.
Bush did not just engage in a physical war. he promulgated an ideological one as well. The argument against slavery emanates from the same idea that justifies fighting Islamofascism. In part. Bush's justification for the war both in Afghanistan and in Iraq are commiserates with the understanding that all men possess natural rights. He contended as much before the United Nations on September 21. 2004. This nation was formed in order to secure those rights, and Safety and Happiness are the beginning and end—the alpha and omega—of politics. A nation (a president) that allows an attack without a response is a government that is not fulfilling its moral duty.
America is the first nation to be founded on the everlasting twin towers of liberty and equality. These convertible terms form the ground of legitimate government. The Founders believed that all men have a divine spark for liberty sown into their constitutional make-up and Bush fondly reiterated that by contending that men long for freedom. However, to properly exercise this freedom, men need enlightenment. Certainly, Bush's statesmanship had the political effect of enlightening the American people to remember that timeless idea and hence act on behalf of freedom. The President's justification of the ill-named war on terror is, at least, a reaffirmation of the rights we all share. The election was in many ways a referendum on the w^ar, and when the people reflected on the American idea, they ushered Bush back into office. Ceaser argues correctly that Bush held "there is a structure and order to human beings and their affairs, and standards that can be both known and used to guide political action." The war was no less a moral issue than same- sex marriage. Like the evil of slavery, Americans reasoned that the evil—ever inventive—of Islamofas-cism does not, and will not, stop at the water's edge. Was this a difficult decision? Surely. It is never a joyous decision to commit lives in order to secure liberty. Yet, to do nothing would be unjust.
The High Commissioner of the blogosphere, lawyer, professor, and afternoon drive talk show host, Hugh Hewitt, believes that this election ended the ideological grip, stemming from the 60s, on American politics. No more can the left effectively run against America for she is indeed a force of good in the world. She is not the vile country that the left successfully portrayed her as in Vietnam years. Gone are the days when left was able to find an audience to "blame America first." Even the far left editor of Dissent Magazine. Michael Walzer. criticized his own for their unpolitical politics.
Christopher Hitchens also delighted in the ideological defeat of his former comrades. Why? Because the left does not even pretend to believe in human, much less natural, rights. They stand at once for everything and nothing. The left's attack on the American ideal is politically dead. May they rest (forever) in peace.
Bush's statesmanship has dealt the left a serious, if not fatal, blow. However, the future of freedom is not assured. While Bush believes in the power of liberty, in a speech before the National Endowment of Democracy he warned that ''the success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history." Do Americans believe in the concept of liberty as expressed in the hallowed Declaration? Will they keep, and draw nearer to, our ancient faith? The next few elections will determine just how persuasive Bush was in reestablishing the GOP on Lincolnian grounds.
The election is over and I suspect that most people are at once relieved and ebullient that it ended in a Bush victory. Many others are just happy it is over, period. Yet the campaign would not be complete without bringing to a close the spectacle we witnessed. Kerry was soundly defeated and the Republicans picked up seats in both houses. Overall, it was a great election for the Republicans and further solidified the creeping realignment that has been underway since 1994. The last time any Democrat candidate for president received 51 percent or more of the vote was 1964. Indeed, something important happened in this election, but in his own way Kerry contributed to the emerging Bush nation. In the closing weeks of the campaign, the Kern campaign engaged in two practical blunders.
The day after Superman succumbed to the mortal stab of the Grimm Reaper, John Edwards gave one of the most demagogic speeches in modern times: if Kerry and Edwards were in office, Christopher Reeves. Edwards divined, would have been able to walk again. The born again Kerry/Edwards campaign thus morphed into the Benny Hinn ticket. They promised fantastic things in ways that challenged the most able mental gymnasts. Many Americans may believe in the scientific god, but most certainly know that such miracles are not just around the corner and ready for implementing. Aside from promises, Kerry/Edwards also tried to foist on America an October Surprise.
The New York Times wrote a "news" item explaining that somehow Bush was responsible for allowing explosives to be smuggled out of al Qaqaa. As Bill Kristol wrote in the Weekly Standard:
The allegations that nearly 400 tons of 'high explosives' were missing from the al Qaqaa arms dump are based on charges leveled by Mohamed al Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The claims are old and increasingly suspect. But that hasn't kept John Kerry's presidential campaign from using the story in a new television ad and in virtually every- stump speech and media appearance over the past two days.
Kerry was so desperate, seeing the election slipping from him, that he engaged in a grand lie. Kerry continued to run his ad even though NBC did yeoman's work in criticizing the NYT story—they had an embedded reporter with the troops as they approached and inspected al Qaqaa. In essence, the material was not "smuggled" out of al Qaqaa after the invasion, but most likely disappeared in the weeks before the invasion. Even Richard Holbrooke, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, admitted there was no hard evidence for the accusation: "You don't know the truth and I don't know the truth." Bush went on the offensive and publicly criticized Kerry: "a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."
The al Qaqaa debacle planted a crescendo on a campaign already in meltdown mode. In taking the side of al Baradei, Kerry was accepting the U.N.'s word over the word of the 101 st Airborne and the 3rd infantry division. Kerry's position on al Qaqaa also exposed him to flip-flopping charge again. Remember, he claimed that WMDs did not exist. If the weapons that were "smuggled" out of al-Qaqaa did not represent a serious threat, why should we care; if they were a threat, then the war might just be justified on those grounds. The talented folks at Powerline were the first to notice the contradiction.
All these practical missteps aside, Bush's victory might be a triumph of what James Ceaser has called "neo-natural right." Ceaser wrote that:
President Bush has identified the Republican party with a distinct foreign policy, which he has justified by recourse to certain fixed and universal principles—namely that 'liberty is the design of nature' and that 'freedom is the right and capacity of all mankind.' Not since Lincoln has the putative head of a Republican party so actively sought to ground the party in a politics of natural right.
With the Republican majority now fully entrenched, we might expect another twenty years of Republican rule, but does the party and the people who make up this nation, believe in the idea of America? Bush has attempted to revive our ancient faith, which is a timeless idea, and he has stated it in such a way as to require something of all of her citizens. In the process. Bush just may have refashioned the GOP.
Perhaps nothing captures Bush's understanding of America more than his July 2003 speech on Goree Island. Senegal. In that speech Bush reflected:
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith, and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, 'No fist is big enough to hide the sky.' All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God. In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the Exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence—and asked the self-evident question, 'Then why not me?1
And again.
These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they left behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused Americans to examine our hearts, to correct our Constitution, and to teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of even-' race. By a plan known only to Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free."
And finally,
The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries. Yet. eventually, the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced—what Martin Luther King called 'a certain kind of fire that no water could put out." That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. . . . It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us.
Bush did not just engage in a physical war. he promulgated an ideological one as well. The argument against slavery emanates from the same idea that justifies fighting Islamofascism. In part. Bush's justification for the war both in Afghanistan and in Iraq are commiserates with the understanding that all men possess natural rights. He contended as much before the United Nations on September 21. 2004. This nation was formed in order to secure those rights, and Safety and Happiness are the beginning and end—the alpha and omega—of politics. A nation (a president) that allows an attack without a response is a government that is not fulfilling its moral duty.
America is the first nation to be founded on the everlasting twin towers of liberty and equality. These convertible terms form the ground of legitimate government. The Founders believed that all men have a divine spark for liberty sown into their constitutional make-up and Bush fondly reiterated that by contending that men long for freedom. However, to properly exercise this freedom, men need enlightenment. Certainly, Bush's statesmanship had the political effect of enlightening the American people to remember that timeless idea and hence act on behalf of freedom. The President's justification of the ill-named war on terror is, at least, a reaffirmation of the rights we all share. The election was in many ways a referendum on the w^ar, and when the people reflected on the American idea, they ushered Bush back into office. Ceaser argues correctly that Bush held "there is a structure and order to human beings and their affairs, and standards that can be both known and used to guide political action." The war was no less a moral issue than same- sex marriage. Like the evil of slavery, Americans reasoned that the evil—ever inventive—of Islamofas-cism does not, and will not, stop at the water's edge. Was this a difficult decision? Surely. It is never a joyous decision to commit lives in order to secure liberty. Yet, to do nothing would be unjust.
The High Commissioner of the blogosphere, lawyer, professor, and afternoon drive talk show host, Hugh Hewitt, believes that this election ended the ideological grip, stemming from the 60s, on American politics. No more can the left effectively run against America for she is indeed a force of good in the world. She is not the vile country that the left successfully portrayed her as in Vietnam years. Gone are the days when left was able to find an audience to "blame America first." Even the far left editor of Dissent Magazine. Michael Walzer. criticized his own for their unpolitical politics.
Christopher Hitchens also delighted in the ideological defeat of his former comrades. Why? Because the left does not even pretend to believe in human, much less natural, rights. They stand at once for everything and nothing. The left's attack on the American ideal is politically dead. May they rest (forever) in peace.
Bush's statesmanship has dealt the left a serious, if not fatal, blow. However, the future of freedom is not assured. While Bush believes in the power of liberty, in a speech before the National Endowment of Democracy he warned that ''the success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history." Do Americans believe in the concept of liberty as expressed in the hallowed Declaration? Will they keep, and draw nearer to, our ancient faith? The next few elections will determine just how persuasive Bush was in reestablishing the GOP on Lincolnian grounds.
posted by Tim Hoskins at 8:00 PM
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