02-13-2006, 04:27 PM
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The Pathetic King Funeral Display
It got me thinking. That, and ALgore's dispicable display at the Saudi Economic Conference. Here's what occurred to me when I first read of what happened at the King funeral:
Seriously, though. It *IS* the Wellstone Funeral all over again. It appears that the Democrats just can't abandon the habit of making Republicans look good by comparison.
The truth is that the majority of Americans are not punditically (haha) inclined. They don't read the blogs or watch the news a lot. These people also aren't necessarily staunch members of either party.
How does an event like this play with the above described group? Recall that this President was elected by a MAJORITY of Americans-- meaning better than 50% of the population probably takes some offense to having THEIR choice be ridiculed. After all, ridiculing someone's choice is ridiculing their judgment, in effect-- and most people take offense to that.
The Democrats can't seem to grasp a couple basic concepts:
1) Bashing the President in front of a crowd of Democratic Sheeple is simply preaching to the choir, and not winning them any new converts.
2) Those who've escaped lobotomization and observe the bahavior are likely to be sympthetic to the President, even if they didn't vote for him. He *is* the President, after all. If you doubt this, ask yourself how these same people would feel if the President were being excoriated by Kharzai, or Chirac, or Blair or some FOREIGN leader. A lot of Americans would be upset. A lot of Dems would be right there next to the foreign mouth singing along.
I'm reminded of a scene in the movie "Oh Brother, where art Thou?" where the KKK guy running for office asks a crowd. "Is you is, or is you ain't my 'constichency'"? The Dems are building their foundation upon a shrinking "continchency"-- either blue dog Dems or something farther left, say Socialists/Communists. Either way, most Americans are constuents of their values, not necessarily of either party. Unfortunately, with only two parties, you end up having to compromise and go with which one is closer.
Pres. Bush has some pretty idealistic/liberal tendencies with respect to big spending, welfare, and foreign policy. Some criticize him for being too conservative, that's he's just a NeoCon tool. I don't see it.
Those criticisms are levied by those who are so radically left that even a fairly moderate/Liberal guy like GWB gets barraged for not being left enough.
Most of us can tolerate the big spending and border malfeasance/fiasco in return for someone who will appoint good judges and otherwise reflect our values wrt abortion and such. We have PLENTY of grounds to criticize, but we don't-- at least not in the brutal manner of the Dems.
I've always had problems with those try to expand the Democratic Peace Theory (i.e. democracies don't fight each other) to every and all situations.
The Bush Doctrine is correct in that we must fight the terrorists abroad before the hit our soil. It's also correct (imo), that fighting them abroad while simultaneously undertaking a Middle Eastern Marshall Plan is the surest path to peace. But this may also be wrong. We are providing many nice modern conviences for the people of Iraq-- new schools, water/power plants, roads, etc. They're getting the best infrastructure they've ever had. Yet these are a people who may not appreciate this that much-- I mean, they are USED to living in the 8th century, as they have for hundreds of years. Can a person truly appreciate something new when they've only known the old way? I'd say yes, but only in time. You miss the electricity more when you have it and it leaves, relative to never having it at all.
Moreover, the Marshall plan windfall is coming from a nation that these people are daily reminded that they are supposed to hate. Will Iraqis overlook our national audacity to let women dress they way we do because we build them nice roads and plants? I suspect they will, but not soon.
But I'm not convinced that Democratizing the M.E. is the path to peace. History books are FILLED with tyrants who were Democratically elected-- at least at first. After all, if a Democracy is simply a "majority rule", then Mao's revolution, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, etc were all "Democratically" obtained.
In the end, it's MORE than just democracy that makes our system work. Our democracy resulted not because our Founders thought that it was noble in and of itself. On the contrary, they were worried about the negative effects of fallible human nature upon society-- that the majority would tyrannize the minority, or that the country would engage in that which is wrong just because it was what the majority wanted.
The reason we have the system we have is that our Founders believed in the God of the Bible, and that He had ordained that we be free-- that He had, in essence, created within us the yearning for liberty when we were made in His image. So our system was conceived to best reflect this, and to PROTECT us from ourselves-- they understoof the nature of democracies to self-destruct. Tytler's famous quote from The Rise and Fall of the Athenian Republic is appropo: from Bondage to Spiritual Faith to Great Courage to Liberty to Abundance to Selfishness to Complacency to Apathy to Dependency and back into Bondage
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