"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Manhattan correspondent Steve M sends the cartoon above found at Lucianne.com. Good to see I'm not the only one drinking to Jawn Forbes K's field coat. (I just hope I'm not drinking even harder come Wednesday morning.)
The old saying goes that God looks out for children, drunks and the United States of America. Fingers crossed.
* * *
More than anything Tuesday, I'd like to see the repudiation of the Michael Moore wing whose talking points are now being channeled by Osama.
"Bush's enemies are the reason he deserves to be re-elected," London Times US editor Gerard Baker writes:
The list of those whose world could be truly rocked on Tuesday is just too long and too rich to be ignored. If you think for a moment about those who would really be upset by a second Bush term, it becomes a lot easier to stomach.
The hordes of the bien-pensant Left in the universities and the media, the sort of liberals who tolerate everything except those who disagree with them. Secularist elites who disdain religiosity except when it comes from Muslim fanatics. Europhile Brits who drip contempt for everything their country has ever done and long for its disappearance into a Greater Europe. Absurd, isolationist conservatives in America and Britain who think the struggles for freedom are always someone else's fight. Hollywood sybarites and narcissists, self-appointed arbiters of a nation's morals.
Soft-headed Europeans who think engagement and dialogue with mass murderers is the way to achieve lasting peace. French intellectuals for whom nothing has gone right in the world since 1789.
The United Nations, which, if it had its multilateral way, would still be faithfully minding a world in which half the population lived under or in fear of Soviet aggression. Most of Belgium.
Above all, of course, Middle Eastern militants. If your bitterest enemies are the sort of people who hack the heads off unarmed, innocent civilians, then I would say you are probably doing something right.
This may sound petty. It is not. This constellation of individuals, parties and institutions has very little in common other than the fact that it has contrived to be wrong on just about every important issue of my adult lifetime.
And so, perhaps for the wrong reasons, perhaps less because he has been right and more because those who hate him so much have been so wrong, I want this President re-elected.
Go on America. Make Their Day.
Hear, hear!
* * *
"The liberal elite hasn't got a clue," the Guardian is told by white-clad zeitgeist chronicler Tom Wolfe:
"Here is an example of the situation in America," he says: "Tina Brown wrote in her column that she was at a dinner where a group of media heavyweights were discussing, during dessert, what they could do to stop Bush. Then a waiter announces that he is from the suburbs, and will vote for Bush. And ... Tina's reaction is: 'How can we persuade these people not to vote for Bush?' I draw the opposite lesson: that Tina and her circle in the media do not have a clue about the rest of the United States. You are considered twisted and retarded if you support Bush in this election. I have never come across a candidate who is so reviled. Reagan was sniggered it, but this is personal, real hatred.
"Indeed, I was at a similar dinner, listening to the same conversation, and said: 'If all else fails, you can vote for Bush.' People looked at me as if I had just said: 'Oh, I forgot to tell you, I am a child molester.' I would vote for Bush if for no other reason than to be at the airport waving off all the people who say they are going to London if he wins again. Someone has got to stay behind."
So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them."
Parting cordially, it seems strange that such an effervescent maverick, such a jester at the court of all power - all vanity, indeed - should so wholeheartedly endorse the power machine behind George Bush. And so an obvious thought occurs: perhaps Wolfe is jester at the court of New York too. Would he really be happier away from New York, out on the plains, in the "red states" where everyone at dinner parties votes for Bush? Wolfe's eyes revert to that mischievous glint, and he allows himself a smile. "I do think," he admits, apparently speaking for himself, his country and his president, "that if you are not having a fight with somebody, then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning."
* * *
Jennifer Watson hears in the current anti-Bush wails the echoes of anti-Reaganism, circa 1984:
To listen to the Democrats, you would think that George W. Bush is the first Republican candidate they've ever disliked and that this is the first time this nation has faced a close election.
Does anyone remember 1984? Do you recall how much the Democrats hated Ronald Reagan?
If you buy their version of the Reagan presidency, he invented homelessness, eliminated birth control for the poor and personally killed thousands in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras. He created AIDS and apartheid and single-handedly broke the back of organized labor. You think the liberals dislike Don Rumsfeld? Just ask them about James Watt!
Don't forget about Reagan's "assault on the poor." No, the left wing of American politics couldn't just disagree with Reagan's economic policies -- he was assaulting the poor. (Via Megan McArdle at Instapundit)