Posted on 11/07/2004 3:57:24 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
This was supposed to be the presidential election in which those hip souls who dwell in the cybersphere would revolutionize politics, and a gargantuan army of draft-wary young people would really rock the vote.
These and other axioms were embraced by many as articles of faith going into Election 2004.
Hopeful Democrats also believed that President Bush would find reelection impossible because so many Americans disapproved of his performance, thought the country was headed in exactly the wrong direction, and knew they were worse off in almost every imaginable way than they were four years ago.
Bush's opposition was convinced that African Americans, embittered by their disenfranchisement in 2000, would turn out to vote as never before, and that nearly every Latino voter would remain faithful to the Democratic Party. The opposition was sure that a yawning gender gap would give nominee John Kerry an overwhelming edge among women voters, that he could win without carrying a single Southern state, and that 11th hour campaigning by ex- President Bill Clinton would turbo-charge the Kerry-Edwards ticket's chance for victory.
Most of all, Bush opponents perceived that the quicksand of Iraq, which more and more Americans regarded with a sense of impending doom, would morph into the campaign's overriding issue and ensure the president's undoing.
A curious thing happened on the way to the polls, however: all those fond beliefs proved to be mere myths. The demonized George W. Bush got the White House. The Democrats just got it wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The young people did vote against the draft. They voted against the party that proposed it, not the party accused of planning it.
And here is the democrats BIGGEST PROBLEM
They are prisoners of the Pro Abortion--Gun Grabbin--Homosexual Pushing--Tree Worshipping--Anti Religion --Anti Military-- America is The Cause of All the World Ills --wack jobs that are the basis of the VAST majority of their $$$$$$$$$$$
They say $$$$$ is the mother's milk of politics and the democrats ain't got no other teats to feast on
No way they can shake off that Tar Baby and survive financially
you might think this article was written by any number of Free Republic regulars. MiaT - Kattracks and others could have told these liberals in Calif or other places 2 weeks before the election that all their bases are ours. NIce job ground team.
The lie is their mantra - it's all they have.
Bump!
An interesting, if not cynical, analysis. No matter how one slices it, it still comes across as sour grapes masquerading as wine.
Democrats remain rooted in the past and their "clock" absolutely stopped in 2000. This article only documents what didn't happen in this election - not what did.
What the heck does that mean?!
The media went straight from "the exit polls are garbage" to "based on exit polls, Bush increased his margin among _______". No one has ever explained to us whether these "trend analyses" are based on exit polls which over-sampled Kerry supporters, thus understating Bush's "trends".
If anyone has read an explanation of this, please enlighten me!
We tend to forget how blessed we may have been in this election.
One thing I've noticed is that the same extreme liberals who held power during Clinton's regieme, haven't changed heir beliefs, nor have they gone away.
The election, IMHO, was about 30% too favorable for the liberal socialist agenda.
IMHO, America needs to return its democratic base to democrats like Everett Dirkson rather than promoting a socialist elite.
The reason they are back on exit polls is that the policy wonks are so out of touch that they cannot, of their own accord, get out a pencil and peace of paper and write an essay on why out of touch liberal elite policy wonks who wanted to shove gay marriages and promised tax increases down the throats of Americans lost the election. They are so clueless they actually have to go ask someone.
Yes. We are blessed with this victory.
The magnitude of it gets clearer and clearer.
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RE Hillary:
..........."In their way of thinking," Noonan observes of the Clintons, "America is an important place, but not a thing of primary importance. America is the platform for the Clintons' ambitions, not the focus of them." The implication is that if they were principled emissaries of a political cause, the ambition to do big things for America would override all others. Instead, they have focused on themselves and consequently have made the American political landscape itself "a lower and lesser thing."
They have "behaved as though they are justified in using any tactic in pursuit of their goals," including illegality, deception, libel, threats and "ruining the lives of perceived enemies . . . " They believe, she continues, "they are justified in using any means to achieve their ends for a simple and uncomplicated reason. It is that they are superior individuals whose gifts and backgrounds entitle them to leadership." They do it for themselves; for the continuance of Them.
But the fact is they all do it. The missionaries of the big progressive causes, the Steinems, the Irelands, the Michelmans, the Friedans, and Hillary Clinton herself, were all willing to toss their feminist movement overboard to give Bill Clinton a pass on multiple sexual harassments, and on a career of sexual predation that reflects his utter contempt for the female gender.
Indeed, the Clinton-Lewinsky defense-accord which the feminists signed onto, can be regarded as feminism's Nazi-Soviet Pact. Their calculation was both simple and crude: If Clinton was removed, Hillary would go too. But she was their link to patronage and power, and they couldn't imagine losing that. Their kind was finally in control of the White House, and the conservative enemies of their beautiful future were not.
Almost a decade earlier-in the name of the very principles they so casually betrayed for Clinton-the same feminists had organized the most disgraceful lynching of a public figure in America's history. Despite fiercely proclaimed commitments to the racial victims of American persecution, they launched a vicious campaign to destroy the reputation of an African American jurist who had risen, unblemished, from dirt-shack poverty in the segregated south to the nation's highest courts. They did it knowingly, cynically, with the intent to destroy him in his person, and to ruin his public career.
Has there ever been a more reprehensible witch-hunt in American public life than the one organized by feminist leaders who then emerged as vocal defenders of the White House lecher? Was there ever a more sordid betrayal of common decency than this collective defamation-for which no apology has or ever will be given?
What was the sin Clarence Thomas committed to earn such punishment? The allegation-that he had talked inappropriately ten years before to a female lawyer and made her uncomfortable-appears laughable in the post-Lewinsky climate of presidential gropings and borderline rapes that the same feminists have sanctioned for their political accomplice. Thomas' real crime, as everybody knew but was too intimidated by the hysteria to confirm at the time, was his commitment to constitutional principles they hated. They hated these principles because the Constitution was written for the explicit purpose of preventing the realization of their socialist and egalitarian dreams.
Peggy Noonan is right. The focus of Hillary Clinton's ambition is not her country. But it is not just herself either. It is also a place that does not exist. It is the vision of a world that can only be achieved when the Chosen accumulate enough power to change this one.
That is why Hillary and Sid Blumenthal, her fawning New Left Machiavelli, call their own political philosophy the politics of "The Third Way." This distinguishes it from the "triangulation" strategy Dick Morris used to resurrect Bill Clinton's presidency. Morris guided Clinton, in appropriating specific Republican policies towards a balanced budget and welfare reform as a means of securing his re-election. Hillary Clinton was on board for these policies, and in that sense is a triangulator herself. But "triangulation" is too merely tactical and too morally crass to define a serious political philosophy. Above all, it fails to project the sense of promise that intoxicates the imaginations of self-styled "progressives." That is why Hillary and Sid call their politics "The Third Way."
"The Third Way" is a familiar term from the lexicon of the left with a long and dishonorable pedigree in the catastrophes created by messianic socialists in the 20th Century. It is the most ornate panel in the tapestry of deception I described at the beginning of this essay.
In the 1930s, Nazis used "The Third Way" to characterize their own brand of national socialism as a equidistant between the "internationalist" socialism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of the West. Trotskyists used "The Third Way" as a term to distinguish their own Marxism from Stalinism and capitalism. In the 1960s, New Leftists used "The Third Way" to define their politics as an independent socialism between the Soviet gulag and America's democracy.
But as the history of Nazism, Trotskyism and the New Left have shown, there is no "Third Way." There is the capitalist, democratic way based on private property and individual rights-a way that leads to liberty and universal opportunity. And there is the socialist way of group identities, group rights, a relentless expansion of the political state, restricted liberty and diminished opportunity. The Third Way is not a path to the future. It is just the suspension between these two destinations. It is a bad faith attempt on the part of people who are incapable of giving up their socialist schemes to escape the taint of their discredited past.
Is there a practical difference in the modus operandi of Clinton narcissism and Clinton messianism? I think there is, and it is the difference between "triangulation"-a cynical compromise to hang onto power until the next election cycle, and "The Third Way"-a cynical deception to ensure the continuance of Us, until we acquire enough power to transform everyone else. It is the difference between the politics of getting what you can, and the politics of changing the world.
A capsule illustration of these different political ambitions can be found in the book Primary Colors , which describes, in thinly veiled fiction, Bill Clinton's road to the presidency. Primary Colors is an admiring portrait not only of the candidate, but of the dedicated missionaries-the true believing staffers and the long-suffering wife-who serve Clinton's political agendas, but at the price of enabling the demons of self.
These staffers-political functionaries like Harold Ickes and George Stephanopoulos-serve as the flak-catchers and "bimbo eruption"-controllers who clean up his personal messes and shape his image for gullible publics. But they are also the idealists who design his message. And in the end, they enable him to politically succeed.
It is Primary Colors' insight into the minds of these missionaries that is revealing. They see Clinton clearly as a flawed and often repellent human being. They see him as a lecher, a liar and a man who would destroy an innocent person in order to advance his own career. (This is, in fact, the climactic drama of the text). Yet through all the sordidness and lying, the personal ruthlessness and disorder, the idealistic missionaries faithfully follow and serve the leader.
They do it not because they are themselves corrupted through material rewards. The prospect of fame is not even what drives them. Think only of Harold Ickes, personally betrayed and brutally cast aside by Clinton, who nonetheless refused to turn on him, even after the betrayal. Instead, Ickes kept his own counsel and protected Clinton, biding his time and waiting for Hillary. Then joined her staff to manage her Senate campaign.
The idealistic missionaries in this true tale bite their tongues and betray their principles, rather than betray him. They do so because in Bill Clinton they see a necessary vehicle of their noble ambition and uplifting dreams. He, too, cares about social justice, about poor people and blacks (or so he makes them believe). They will serve him and lie for him and destroy for him, because he is the vessel of their hope.
Because Bill Clinton "cares," he is the vital connection to the power they need to accomplish the redemption. Because the keys to the state are within Clinton's grasp, he becomes in their eyes the only prospect for advancing the progressive cause. Therefore, they will sacrifice anything and everything-principle, friends, country-to make him succeed.
But Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else-for an idea, a party, or a cause.* He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled with himself that he cannot tell the difference.
But the idealists who serve him-the Stephanopoulos's, the Ickes's, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary Clinton-can tell the difference. Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39611fde5615.htm
They walked into a wall.
I had to read that one a couple of times and it still didn't make sense.
That is EXACTLY what did happen, and the pajama-clad troops at Free Republic were in the vanguard!
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