Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Sat Nov 6 18:48:49 PST 2004


<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 at 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'





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