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Checking Abuse Is Harmful Only To Those Who Abuse Power

Where a reasonably impartial press (tilting only slightly left) used to be, there is now only a passion to hurt a president in a time of war, the most dangerous war in our history. Republicans will be voting against the left-wing media, the left-wing courts, and the whole culture of the Left. ~Michael Novak Yes, […]

Where a reasonably impartial press (tilting only slightly left) used to be, there is now only a passion to hurt a president in a time of war, the most dangerous war in our history. Republicans will be voting against the left-wing media, the left-wing courts, and the whole culture of the Left. ~Michael Novak

Yes, the “left-wing press” that is busily annihilating John Kerry is doing all it can to swing the elections for the Democrats.  Look, everyone knows that liberals are predominant in most major news organisations, news networks and newspapers.  (People who are left-leaning seem more inclined to go into journalism, and the practice of journalism seems to pull people to the left in many cases, though this was not always the case.)  It is overwhelming and obvious.  But even as they are making the most out of GOP woes, they did not create those woes or the reasons for them. 

Speaking of the elections themselves, perfectly professional election-watchers have been predicting potential disaster for the GOP for a year.  Now that the disaster is upon them, it doesn’t surprise me that some of the party loyalists are whistling past the graveyard and talking about left-wing conspiracies.  Now nobody can really tell the political leanings of the folks over at National Journal because they are professionals who analyse political trends and poll data, and they have all been predicting various versions of doom for the Republicans for a very long time.  But they, too, must be in on the plot, since they are making some of the most frightening predictions of GOP doom. 

This reality of electoral trouble is not a left-wing plot.  It is not a “media reality,” as Novak calls it.  It is a reflection of what some people might call democracy, perhaps even self-government to some small degree, in which the wretched ruling party is cast down by the voters as a consequence of its wretchedness.  Manifestations of this democratic process here in America are, of course, always offensive to democratists and fans of “democratic capitalism” when they threaten their side’s power.  This is why those who tend to be keenest on promoting democracy elsewhere are horrified to see it break out in “populist” form here, because they know perfectly well that they, the democratists, will not last long in a country where populism and some measure of real self-government obtain. 

If Americans really believed we were in the “most dangerous war in our history” (which is a mockery of the destructiveness and danger of the War of Secession and WWII), and also believed that Iraq had something to do with that war, they would be foursquare behind Bush in spite of his colossal mistakes.  The administration and its hangers-on have plainly failed to convince us that this is the reality, try as some might to terrify us with truly dire warnings of Venezuelan bases in Bolivia (no, not Bolivia!) and Iranian plans for world conquest.  It might be that people who believe we are in the “most dangerous war in our history” are deeply, impressively wrong about the extent of the threat, and that the rest of us are not being oblivious and are not “sleepwalking” or sticking our heads in the hand.  That we are not in such a war, and that a majority no longer sees Iraq as vital to that war, is a testament to the public’s ability to grasp basic reality long before it becomes accepted pundit wisdom.  Because the public feels confident that we are not in quite the state of emergency that some alarmists seem to think we are in, they feel quite comfortable to hold the government accountable and chastise those who have failed them. 

I thought I had a certain lack of respect for the discernment of the average American voter and his choices over the years, and I have certainly said my fair share on the inanities and evils of democracy (that’s right, evils, of which there are many), but these folks put me to shame in their contempt for the people themselves.  Aristocratic Bolingbrokean reactionaries, in whose tradition I may be said to follow, were many things, but they never hated the people or disrespected them so much as some of these people seem to do now.  Rather, they believed that the consolidation of wealth and power and the rule of money were injurious to both the people and the aristocracy alike; they were anti-democratic because they considered democracy ruinous to the people, and anti-liberal because liberalism was a delusional fantasy.  (They were right.)  But just watch how the cheerleaders of democratisation and “democratic capitalism” scorn all the signs of their own repudiation in their delusional arrogance that they still represent the interests of the people. 

Judicial tyrants have certainly given them a convenient scapegoat this year, but just pore over some of the more obnoxious election appeals and watch how they insult the intelligence and common sense of the voters.  For Tony Blankley, if conservatives abstain from voting GOP they would be as stupid as if they responded to GOP abuses by eating excrement.  For Rick Santorum, to fail to vote for him is to usher in the apocalyptic age of neo-Hitlerism replete with masses of Venezuelan soldiers seizing the commanding heights of Andean passes and looking down hungrily on the plains of Argentina and the jungles of Brazil!  (How any of this would even remotely be our concern is one of those things that no one ever bothers to explain–don’t Argentina and Brazil have rather large populations and their own armies?)  For Michael Novak, should the predictions prove true, the people will have bought in to a left-wing propaganda circus designed to “hurt” Mr. Bush.  Rather than regarding this as an excellent example of the press finally doing some small part of its job in checking an abusive executive, Novak sees it as treachery.  Only praise is meet for the emperor.  In all this, he allows monomania on pro-life questions to excuse all else that the GOP has done–not because they have actually done anything, but because they have said all the right things (for the most part).  One wonders just how much misrule such people would be willing to tolerate for the sake of an abstract commitment to defending life that is rarely, if ever, put into practice.   

To watch these people mock the public’s likely preferences in this election as just so much muddle-headedness and left-wing manipulation is infuriating.  As is often the case with democratists, it is not the actual functioning of accountable, elected government that they admire, but the advantageous political end-result that works in favour of them and their interests.  Thus, this year, the result is coming out wrong and so they must either berate the nation for its stupidity (Blankley) its lack of awareness (Santorum) or, in this case, simply deny that it is going to happen–because there is no way that the nation would be so stupid or irresponsible as to vote out the glorious Republicans who have done so much for us all.  The drive to hold Mr. Bush and his party somewhat accountable for what they have done is described here as an attempt to “hurt” the President, as if checking an abusive executive was a heinous assault rather than the proper functioning of our system of government.

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