the sky is falling
Okay. The election is over, and everyone I know is heartbroken. I've spent the morning on the phone with disappointed Democrats, who seem uniformly stunned at the margin of victory and seem reduced to muttering unhappily about the power of the religious right and the ineptitude of Kerry's campaign.
My message to them:
1. Bush and his team aren't the zealous and incompetent nincompoops you think they are. And red state Americans aren't all bible thumping ignoramuses -- any more than blue state Americans are all latte-sipping pacifists.
2. If you think Iraq is a mess, you should have been an American at Valley Forge or Bull Run or Omaha Beach. Look: everyone knew that going into Iraq was a gamble. Paul Wolfowitz knew it. Rumsfeld knew it. Cheney and Bush knew it. But doing nothing meant leaving Saddam's Spawn in charge of Iraq for the next thirty years, during which time I think it's fairly safe to assume they'd have gotten their sweaty little hands on a nuke, or a new strain of anthrax, or something that would have amused a couple of fun loving guys like Uday and Kusay. Instead, someone -- I think it was U.S. soldiers -- shot them dead. I'm glad, and so are most Americans, red state or blue.
3. Next time, nominate someone who has a fighting chance to carry a southern state. No more Mondales or Dukakii or Kerrys, with their mournful faces and lugubrious ways. No more fat Al Gores flopsweating with rage at the country that didn't quite elect him. No more Hillarys. No more core constituency of angry leftists with their hysterical rants and emptyheaded coffeehouse screeds. No more Al Frankens. Here's a thought: next time around, see if you can't nominate somone who's genuinely optimistic and personally exuberant. Someone the average American factory worker or accountant might like to have over for dinner... a Bill Clinton, maybe, without the velcro zipper.
4. Lose the class-warfare thing. It's not playing in Peoria. And instead of blaming Peoria, come up with a domestic agenda isn't based on envy and resentment.
5. Tie a Pontiac Cutlass to Michael Moore and dump him in Lake Michigan. (Okay. Two Pontiac Cutlasses.) This guy did more to lose the election for the Democrats than you can possibly imagine.
6. Flood the mainstream media with emails and letters urging them to look up the words "fair" and "balanced" in the dictionary. Suggest they re-read their Journalism 101 textbooks. Right now, they're just killing you.
7. Take a dip in the blogosphere. It's an amazing place.
8. Don't lose heart.
9. Fare forward.
My message to them:
1. Bush and his team aren't the zealous and incompetent nincompoops you think they are. And red state Americans aren't all bible thumping ignoramuses -- any more than blue state Americans are all latte-sipping pacifists.
2. If you think Iraq is a mess, you should have been an American at Valley Forge or Bull Run or Omaha Beach. Look: everyone knew that going into Iraq was a gamble. Paul Wolfowitz knew it. Rumsfeld knew it. Cheney and Bush knew it. But doing nothing meant leaving Saddam's Spawn in charge of Iraq for the next thirty years, during which time I think it's fairly safe to assume they'd have gotten their sweaty little hands on a nuke, or a new strain of anthrax, or something that would have amused a couple of fun loving guys like Uday and Kusay. Instead, someone -- I think it was U.S. soldiers -- shot them dead. I'm glad, and so are most Americans, red state or blue.
3. Next time, nominate someone who has a fighting chance to carry a southern state. No more Mondales or Dukakii or Kerrys, with their mournful faces and lugubrious ways. No more fat Al Gores flopsweating with rage at the country that didn't quite elect him. No more Hillarys. No more core constituency of angry leftists with their hysterical rants and emptyheaded coffeehouse screeds. No more Al Frankens. Here's a thought: next time around, see if you can't nominate somone who's genuinely optimistic and personally exuberant. Someone the average American factory worker or accountant might like to have over for dinner... a Bill Clinton, maybe, without the velcro zipper.
4. Lose the class-warfare thing. It's not playing in Peoria. And instead of blaming Peoria, come up with a domestic agenda isn't based on envy and resentment.
5. Tie a Pontiac Cutlass to Michael Moore and dump him in Lake Michigan. (Okay. Two Pontiac Cutlasses.) This guy did more to lose the election for the Democrats than you can possibly imagine.
6. Flood the mainstream media with emails and letters urging them to look up the words "fair" and "balanced" in the dictionary. Suggest they re-read their Journalism 101 textbooks. Right now, they're just killing you.
7. Take a dip in the blogosphere. It's an amazing place.
8. Don't lose heart.
9. Fare forward.
posted by patrickhenry at 3:48 PM
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