Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/07/do0704.xml> The Telegraph Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush By Mark Steyn (Filed: 07/11/2004) The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'." Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too. In all but six states, the Republican vote went up: the urinating rednecks have increased their number not just in Texas and Mississippi but in Massachusetts and California, both of which have Republican governors. You can drive from coast to coast across the middle of the country and never pass through a single county that voted for John Kerry: it's one continuous cascade of self-righteous urine from sea to shining sea. States that were swing states in 2000 - West Virginia, Arkansas - are now solidly Republican, and once solidly Democrat states - Iowa, Wisconsin - are now swingers. The redneck states push hard up against the Canadian border, where if your neck's red it's frostbite. Bush's incontinent rednecks are everywhere: they're so numerous they're running out of sisters to bunk up with. Who exactly is being self-righteous here? In Britain and Europe, there seem to be two principal strains of Bush-loathing. First, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be an idiot - as in the Mirror headline "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" Second, the guys who say, if you disagree with me, you must be a Nazi - as in Oliver James, who told The Guardian: "I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s [sic] and thought, 'Why doesn't anyone see where this is leading?' " Mr James is a clinical psychologist. If smug Europeans are going to coast on moron-Fascist sneers indefinitely, they'll be dooming themselves to ever more depressing mornings-after in the 2006 midterms, the 2008 presidential election, 2010, and beyond: America's resistance to the conventional wisdom of the rest of the developed world is likely to intensify in the years ahead. This widening gap is already a point of pride to the likes of B J Kelly of Killiney, who made the following observation on Friday's letters page in The Irish Times: "Here in the EU we objected recently to high office for a man who professed the belief that abortion and gay marriages are essentially evil. Over in the US such an outlook could have won him the presidency." I'm not sure who he means by "we". As with most decisions taken in the corridors of Europower, the views of Killiney and Knokke and Krakow didn't come into it one way or the other. B J Kelly is referring to Rocco Buttiglione, the mooted European commissioner whose views on homosexuality, single parenthood, etc would have been utterly unremarkable for an Italian Catholic 30 years ago. Now Europe's secular elite has decided they're beyond the pale and such a man should have no place in public life. And B J Kelly sees this as evidence of how much more enlightened Europe is than America. That's fine. But what happens if the European elite should decide a whole lot of other stuff is beyond the pale, too, some of it that B J Kelly is quite partial to? In affirming the traditional definition of marriage in 11 state referenda, from darkest Mississippi to progressive enlightened Kerry-supporting Oregon, the American people were not expressing their "gay-loathin' ", so much as declining to go the Kelly route and have their betters tell them what they can think. They're not going to have marriage redefined by four Massachusetts judges and a couple of activist mayors. That doesn't make them Bush theo-zombies marching in lockstep to the gay lynching, just freeborn citizens asserting their right to dissent from today's established church - the stifling coercive theology of political correctness enforced by a secular episcopate. As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum. The restrictions on expression that B J Kelly sees as evidence of European enlightenment are regarded as profoundly unhealthy by most Americans. When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders. And, if Americans do "hate abortion", is Mr Reade saying he loves it? It's at least partially responsible for the collapsed birthrates of post-Christian Europe. However superior the EU is to the US, it will only last as long as Mr Reade's generation: the design flaw of the radical secular welfare state is that it depends on a traditionally religious society birthrate to sustain it. True, you can't be a redneck in Spain or Italy: when the birthrates are 1.1 and 1.2 children per couple, there are no sisters to shag. What was revealing about this election campaign was how little the condescending Europeans understand even about the side in American politics they purport to agree with - witness The Guardian's disastrous intervention in Clark County. Simon Schama last week week defined the Bush/Kerry divide as "Godly America" and "Worldly America", hailing the latter as "pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical". That's exactly the wrong way round: it's Godly America that is rational and sceptical - especially of Euro-delusions. Uncowed by Islamists, undeferential to government, unshrivelled in its birthrates, Bush's redneck America is a more reliable long-term bet. Europe's media would do their readers a service if they stopped condescending to it. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/politics/07court.html?partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print We're going to get some extremist anti-abortion, pro-internment, anti-1A, anti-4A, anti-5A, anti-14A, right-wing wacko. Imagine Ashcroft as Chief Justice. I really hope I'm wrong. What happens when the Chief Justice is dead? Can someone close to him (like his secretary) pull the strings on his corpose and "send in" his votes indefinitely, without his being in attendance during the conferences, receiving case briefs from his law clerks, or attending oral arguments?
In the two weeks that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, has been treated for a serious form of thyroid cancer, life at the court has proceeded without a sense of crisis. The judicial function is shared by eight other people, with Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior associate justice, presiding over courtroom sessions and the justices' private conferences. The administrative tasks are carried out, as they usually are under the chief justice's direction, by his administrative assistant, Sally M. Rider, a former federal prosecutor and State Department lawyer.
These arrangements can continue almost indefinitely. Nonetheless, as it has become evident that Chief Justice Rehnquist will not be returning soon, a sense of sadness and uncertainty has spread throughout the court and into the wider community of federal judges who have received no more information than the general public about the chief justice's condition and prospects.
Judges have refrained from calling either Chief Justice Rehnquist or Ms. Rider. "I don't have the nerve," one judge who has worked closely with the chief justice said Friday. "The vibes I get just aren't good."
A judge who did call the chief justice's chambers in anticipation of a visit to Washington was steered away from visiting his home in Arlington, Va. The justices have sent notes, but it is not clear whether any have seen or even talked to him.
Information from official channels has been minimal. The court's press office would not say whether the chief justice was present for the justices' regular Friday morning conference, at which they review new cases and decide which to grant. (He was not.) Nor would the press office say whether, if he did not attend, he sent in his votes. (He did.)
The chief justice, it appears, has functioned as his own press officer. Surely a professional would have cautioned him, on the day it was announced that he had just undergone a tracheotomy, against making a public promise to be back at work in a week. Every cancer specialist whom reporters consulted after the announcement found that prediction highly implausible.
And when the chief justice found on Monday that he could not fulfill the promise, he subtly but unmistakably indicated that the error had been his own and not his doctors': "According to my doctors, my plan to return to the office today was too optimistic."
Chief Justice Rehnquist's statement on Monday said that he was receiving radiation and chemotherapy on an outpatient basis. Both the aggressive treatment and the observations of those who have seen him in recent weeks suggest that the disease is advanced and rapidly progressing.
A judge who attended a meeting with him in late September said the chief justice looked well and spoke without the hoarseness that was apparent by the time the court's new term began Oct. 4; a spreading thyroid tumor can impinge on the nerves that control the vocal cords. By mid-October, one court employee who saw the chief justice in his street clothes was struck by his frailty. "That robe can hide a lot," this employee said.
The court will hear arguments in this coming week and then again in the two weeks following the Thanksgiving weekend. It will then go on recess until Jan. 10. During that substantial interval, people at the court now appear to think, the chief justice will have a chance to assess his situation and decide whether to retire.
Although there seems to be widespread public confusion on this point - memories have faded in the 18 years since Chief Justice Rehnquist's contentious confirmation hearing - a chief justice must be separately nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, even if the person is already sitting on the Supreme Court. If the president wants to choose a sitting justice, he can pick any of them, without regard to seniority.
Historically, promotion from within has been the exception; only 5 of the 16 chief justices previously served as associate justices, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, who spent his first 14 years on the court as an associate before President Ronald Reagan offered him a promotion in 1986.
The timing of his illness, more than two months before the start of the 109th Congress, raises another prospect: that of a recess appointment to the court. The Constitution gives the president the power to make appointments to fill "vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate," although whether and under what circumstances this authority applies to judges is open to some debate.
A case recently appealed to the Supreme Court on which the court could act as early as Monday challenges the validity of President Bush's appointment of William H. Pryor to a federal appeals court during an 11-day Congressional recess last February.
A recess appointment expires at the end of the following session of Congress unless confirmed by the Senate in the interval - in late 2005 for any appointments made in the remaining weeks of 2004, or at the end of the second session of the new Congress, in late 2006, for appointments made after Jan. 1.
While there have been 12 recess appointments to the Supreme Court, 9 of them occurred in the early years of the country. The only 3 recess appointments in modern times, those of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Potter Stewart, were all made by President Eisenhower in the 1950's.
Although the Senate subsequently confirmed those three justices, the experience left many senators uneasy. While some simply resented the exercise of presidential power, others argued also that judicial independence was compromised by the recess-appointed justices' knowledge that they would be confirmed to lifetime appointments only if the Senate was satisfied with their performance.
In 1960, the Senate passed a resolution opposing the practice on a largely party-line vote, with most Democrats voting for the resolution and all the Republicans opposed.
-- The old must give way to the new, falsehood must become exposed by truth, and truth, though fought, always in the end prevails. -- L. Ron Hubbard
On Sun, 7 Nov 2004, Justin wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/politics/07court.html?partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print
We're going to get some extremist anti-abortion, pro-internment, anti-1A, anti-4A, anti-5A, anti-14A, right-wing wacko.
You mean Shrub is going to elevate Clarence Thomas? Did we bring a new secretary for him to harrass?
Imagine Ashcroft as Chief Justice.
Oh. My. God. Don't even *think* of such a thing. Seriously, I don't believe he could make it through confirmation, although he would likely (a) be a recess appointment, and (b) serve till the filibuster ended in 2006 :-( -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org 0xBD4A95BF "An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core" S. Plath, Temper of Time
participants (3)
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J.A. Terranson -
Justin -
R.A. Hettinga