Bush Victory Bigger Than Expected, While The Good News For Freedom Keeps On Getting Better
Dean
In case you hadn't heard, Bush did in fact win New Mexico and Iowa, two states Gore won in 2000. The only state Kerry won that Bush won in 2000 was tiny New Hampshire. That makes the final electoral vote total 286 to 252, with a popular vote final margin of 59 to 56 million. (Figures here.)
You know, honestly, someone ought to give acknowledge Kerry for coming so close against a popular incumbent with an excellent war effort and a solid economy under his belt. Which of course are not things most of the press would have wanted to acknowledge before the election was over.
But, as Ann Althouse notes, now that there appears to be no effect on the election, the press seems (reluctantly) willing to concede that things are going pretty well in Iraq after all. Meanwhile, we all recognize now that Osama bin Laden has been reduced to parroting Michael Moore (which Moore is proud of, of course), and job creation at home is surging like crazy.
Fallujah should be secured soon, and elections are still expected to go in January as expected, and the European governments are beginning to rally behind it.
The real question for the left is when they're finally going to join the actual reality-based community instead of the hate-based fantasy-land they've been inhabiting and, for that matter, when they'll stop apologizing for America.
Tim Blair notes that the hard-left sewer-blog known as Daily Kos raised over $500,000 for various hard-left candidates for office this year, and not a single one won. Yet if you read some of the left-wing commentary now, the reason is that Democrats, not content to embrace vicious fascist propagandists like Michael Moore and to declare America a disaster area and our war efforts futile and lost, they should actually get meaner and more emotional and raise still more money because that's what will help them next time.
Once again: when will the left join the rest of us in reality, stop apologizing for America, and stop embracing defeatism and hate?
The rest of us are waiting for you, ready to embrace you. We still view you as our fellow Americans and would like to unite with you. We're just waiting. The choice is yours.
Of course they would never understand how much of foreign relations is like junior high. Kinda spooky, if you asked me.
Mike wrote:
"Having been bullied in junior high, I would like to tell the "reality based community" that being on your knees, begging forgiveness from bullies, never works. Only waxing the floor with them does."
That is absolutely true. And it applies not only to the military Wae abroad but also to the spiritual War here in America. The Enemy within is the same as the Enemy without.
The faith-based paradigm works like this. Suppose you *believe* that there exists a general notion of terror that one can wage a war on. It follows that to not be in action against terror would be a moral lapse, and moreover, no mistake that you make, whether in implementation (i.e. Kerry's "incompetence" critique) or strategy (i.e. why invake Iraq when Iran seemed like more of a threat) should be considered a shortcoming. Never mind the New York Times looking for fault after the fact - you should have the confidence to be able to say *in advance* that even if some "bumps in the road" were to arise, you would be willing to go ahead anyway.
The key points of this approach are that you will simply not know the facts in advance, and you really are not setting yourself up to be judged afterwards on the facts, because the important thing was to have taken action on principle before the facts became available.
In case this sounds esoteric, there are many important decisions that we make this way, the most obvious one being marriage. Another is having children. Imagine having a child who, as a result of complications due to spinal meningitis after birth, will never speak, walk, or be able to care for him/herself. EVERYONE who decides to become a parent takes the risk of having this happen. Does that mean that we all decide not to have children, or that we somehow have an option to back out of parenting because we didn't have a perfect alpha male child who goes to Harvard? I don't think so.
There are also lots of decisions we don't make this way. I don't know about you, but when I buy a $1M plus home in California, I don't take things on faith. I get a termite report, an earthquake report, talk to the neighbors etc. Moreover, I can say that in advance. In other words, again never mind after the fact lawsuits and finger-pointed, somebody who didn't do their homework in advance is irresponsible out of the starting gate.
Epidemiology also usually proceeds in a reality-based way. In response in the SARS outbreak, the response was not to call all living things evil and declare a moral war on them. Instead, scientists, public health officials etc tried to isolate the pathogen that caused of SARS only, and they confined their attention to the new threat. Tigers and polar bears, while dangerous and capable of attacking humans, were not considered relevant.
So the legitimate question is whether or not the war in Iraq was conducted because of faith-based reasoning or reality-based reasoning, and which is appropriate.
It seems to me that you could take a epidemiological approach, define the threat as reality-based Al Qaeda, and then proceed to understand Al Qaeda, identify targets in order of importance (e.g. Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, etc) and then intervene in the most effective way in those places. You could decide that Iraq was a threat, say in the way that tigers or polar bears are dangerous, which is to say that are legitimate threats, but they are not relevant to the new disease, Al Qaeda, that you are targeting.
The one comment I would make for sure about the way George W. Bush presents himself and his arguments is that he sure doesn't sound like an epidemiologist. In contrast, I suspect that if Dick Cheney were president would have declared a moral "war on terror" - I think he would have proceeded more like an epidemiologist. I don't pretend to be wise enough to judge what is appropriate in response to 9/11, but I think it is possible for reasonable people to disagree.