Promises, Promises

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com includes this in an article she writes on despondent democrats who plan to move to Canada in the wake of George Bush's reelection:

"If the country votes for Bush, then 51 percent of the people in this country are psychos," one Colorado resident told the Denver Post before the election. He'd already opened a bank account in British Columbia.

Last week's Ottawa Citizen reported that Scott Schaffer-an assistant professor of sociology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania - had already lined up an immigration lawyer and was applying for jobs in Quebec.

We also heard that Robert Redford had promised to move to Ireland if Bush won. Unfortunately, these people are no more likely to leave the country than were Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand who promised us in 2000 that a Bush win would cause them to take up residence elsewhere. These people are secular liberals and keeping one's word is not a trait one associates with secular liberals. It's too bad.

Stupid Voters

Slate.com has been running a series of very interesting essays written by Democrats on the topic of what their party needs do to gain back some political clout. Some of these, like the ones by Timothy Noah and Katha Pollitt are quite perceptive. They acknowledge that in fact there's not much the Democratic party can do without prostituting itself. For example, as Pollitt observes, the party simply can't try to win over pro-lifers without alienating the pro-choicers that comprise so much of its base. They can't sidle up beside the anti-gay marriage folk without causing serious distress among the gay rights crowd from which they draw economic and electoral sustenance. Nor can they become more hawkish on foreign policy without earning the ire of the Michael Moore/Howard Dean wing of the party. Noah and Pollitt acknowledge that the party is in a very bad way.

Then there are other essays in the series, like that which emerges from the pen of novelist Jane Smiley, a screed which reads like something from a rejected Saturday Night Live script. One suspects at first that it is a parody until it becomes gradually clear that Ms. Smiley is, to put the best face on it, non compos mentis. Perhaps the polite course is to avert one's eyes while she delivers herself of one embarrassing fatuity after another, but since she apparently insists on being taken seriously let's resolve to wade through her sophomoric rant wherein she delivers claims like the following:

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry.

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you-if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do-they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

We see the outcome now - Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Red state types love to cheat and intimidate.

In other words, conservatives are stupid, dishonest, and cruel. Let's set aside the fact that she offers no empirical support for her allegations. She simply asserts them and expects her readers to accept them uncritically, an expectation which demonstrates that she attributes to her leftist audience precisely the same intellectual weakness for which she condemns conservatives.

But as we said, let's not dwell on the logical incoherence of her piece. Let's look instead at the three vices she imputes to the political right. She accuses them of being ignorant and stupid, but take a moment to study the vote-by-county map here. Even a cursory examination shows that Democratic strength in the United States is concentrated in precisely those sectors of the country where schools and education are the worst, where the population is the most poorly educated and often barely literate. This is the Democratic base. Remember, it wasn't Republicans who couldn't figure out how to use a ballot in Florida in 2000.

She alleges, further, that conservatives are dishonest. Apparently, she is unaware of the howlers Senator Kerry's supporters tried to fob off on the public during the campaign. Almost everything they said, from their candidate's war service to their charges that the Bush team had banned stem cell research, planned to take away social security from the elderly, suppress the black vote, and reinstate the draft, was a total fabrication. Likewise the Democrats' allies in the media, like CBS, did not hesitate to press fraudulent documents into service to discredit the president. ABC's Mark Halperin urged his staff to abandon objectivity and tilt toward Kerry in their political coverage. No one in the MSM ever bothered to ask the Senator why he refused to release his military records so that the controversy over his service could be laid to rest. Evan Thomas at Newsweek wrote that the media would be worth 15 points to Kerry on election day and they probably were. When it comes to dishonesty the Republicans are light years behind the competition.

In the middle of her muddled piece Ms. Smiley launches into an extended discursion on the wild west, and, to the extent that her point can be deciphered, it seems to be that people in red states are mean. Perhaps the reader can bring more exacting exegetical skills to bear on the relevant paragraph and offer an alternative interpretation. Here it is:

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a "knock-down-drag-out," where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights. When the forces of red and blue encountered one another head-on for the first time in Kansas Territory in 1856, the red forces from Missouri, who had been coveting Indian land across the Missouri River since 1820, entered Kansas and stole the territorial election. The red news media of the day made a practice of inflammatory lying-declaring that the blue folks had shot and killed red folks whom everyone knew were walking around. The worst civilian massacre in American history took place in Lawrence, Kan., in 1862-Quantrill's raid. The red forces, known then as the slave-power, pulled 265 unarmed men from their beds on a Sunday morning and slaughtered them in front of their wives and children. The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are-they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

This sounds like the maunderings of a drunken sot, but to the extent that there is some allegorical significance buried in the text, she seems to be implying that conservatives are a violent and brutal lot. Yet where is there any evidence to substantiate such a libel? Whatever evidence there is from the last campaign points the finger in the other direction. Almost every instance of campaign thuggery that occurred over the last several months was perpetrated against Republicans. It is not Republicans who hoped for "a thousand Mogodishus" in Iraq. It wasn't Republicans who made a movie about how to assassinate the president. It wasn't Republicans that pined for Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley "now that we need them". It wasn't Republicans who've been arrested in Michigan for slashing the tires of their own GOTV vans, and on and on.

The Democrats are in a tough spot. They're stuck with an ideological message that does not resonate with the majority of the population. They can either abandon their message, or they can try to convert enough people to their message that they become a majority, or they can follow Ms Smiley's example by taking leave of their senses and accuse 59 million people of being stupid, dishonest, and cruel.

Fortunately for the public perception of the Democrats, not all of the essays in the series are so mindless. Some of them are very thoughtful. Viewpoint will take a look at some of those in the days ahead.

The Kind of Fighting Lying Ahead

More insight into what the Coalition is, and has been, facing in and around Fallujah can be found at the Strategy Page:

What kind of fighting will occur in Fallujah? It will be a game of wits, as well as weapons. The most professional and experienced anti-government gunmen are in Fallujah, and they have developed many countermeasures for the coalition advantages. A major disadvantage is the coalition control of the air, and the constant presence of UAVs, aircraft or helicopters. Too many gunmen have seen their buddies ambushed, or jumped by unexpected coalition troops, to ignore the possibility of a UAV above sending live video of the battlefield to coalition commanders. So the gunmen try to set up movement routes that cannot be seen from the air.

Rugs or sheets are spread across alleys to make this possible, and sometimes even short tunnels are dug. The downside of this is that movement is inhibited. In fact, American troops do not always have a vidcam equipped UAV over the battlefield. But Department of Defense public affairs people like to distribute videos of such operations. The implication that American troops can "see everything" is meant to intimidate the enemy. It does, and slows down enemy movements, often fatally so.

Fighting in Fallujah will be a war of surprise and ambush. Whoever first figures out what the other side is up to will have an edge. The smart money is on the Americans. For while the "insurgents" have received lots of positive press for their unequal struggle, they have by far gotten the worst of it. In thousands of little battles, the anti-government forces are almost always defeated. Most of the time they just flee, but all too often they are killed or captured. Coalition intelligence officers know who they are fighting, and how they fight.

There's more at the link.

The Coming European Civil War

Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a descendent of the famous artist, was shot and stabbed to death on a Netherlands street last week by a young Dutch Muslim because Van Gogh was an outspoken critic in his films of Islamic misogyny and bigotry. His murderers pinned a note to his body with a knife. It read in part:

I know for sure that you, Oh America will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Europe, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go under.

The note concludes by threatening several Dutch politicians with death.

As Andrew Sullivan asks, "What part of that do we not understand?"

More pertinently, perhaps, what part of that doesn't the left, both in Europe and in the American media, understand?

Power Line cites the New York Times opinion on the murder and highlights the Times' penchant for turning the wrong way on every one way street. Power Line writes:

Here is how the New York Times responded today to the horrific murder of Theo Van Gogh and the ensuing arrest of nine Islamic militants:

"Something sad and terrible is happening to the Netherlands, long one of Europe's most tolerant, decent and multicultural societies."

Yes, that is true. Van Gogh was shot, and then, while still alive, he was stabbed repeatedly and his throat was cut. The murderer then stuck a five-page letter to Van Gogh's body with the knife; the letter threatened certain Dutch politicians. That is indeed "sad and terrible," although we would be more inclined to rage than sadness.

But what does the Times propose to do in response to this terrorist murder?

"Urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life. The problem is not Muslim immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society. One very real danger is that the public trauma over the van Gogh murder may lead to a clamor for anti-Muslim policies that could victimize thousands of innocent refugees and immigrants. The challenge for Dutch political leaders is to find ways to reverse this disturbing trend of politically motivated violence without making it harder to achieve cultural harmony."

Notice how blame for Van Gogh's murder rests not with the killers, but with the Dutch government's "failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society." Whatever that means. And, of course, in the Netherlands as in the United States, the Times' chief fear is that popular outrage at Islamic terrorism might lead to "victimization" of innnocent immigrants. Let me just hazard a guess here: there won't be any innocent immigrants having their throats cut. Except, perhaps, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others who have been threatened with death by the Islamist terrorists.

The Times concludes with a wistful plea for "cultural harmony." I think harmony went out the window some time ago; the Times just wasn't paying attention. At this point, the goal should be not so much "cultural harmony" as rounding up the terrorists before more innocent people get killed.

Power Line has more here, and there is a Dutch blog which is focussing almost exclusively on this episode here.

The New York Times' pleas for cultural comity notwithstanding, the fact is that unless moderate Muslims soon start speaking out against the radicals in their midst, unless they soon begin to purge their mosques and communities of these savages, there will result a war of extermination in Europe and perhaps even in North America.

In Europe one of two situations is likely to obtain given the evident indifference of the larger Muslim community to the cancer in its midst. Either the European people will be so cowed by the terrorists that, emboldened by the weakness of their prey, the Islamists will launch a holy war on European soil to hasten the Muslim eschaton of world Islam, or the Europeans, in an uncharacteristic fit of resolve in the face of evil, will begin mass deportations and violence against the Islamic communities within their borders. Such aggressive self-defense will itself precipitate a violent reaction from the Muslims and religious civil war would likely ensue.

Given the silence of the "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, and the aspirations of the radicals, one of these two outcomes is almost inevitable. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future as the Islamists see it, imagine a knife sawing at a human throat, for ever.

Inside the Kerry Campaign

Inside glimpses of the Kerry campaign are starting to leak out. My brother Bill passes along this one by Tim Reid of the U.K. Times Online. Here are a few interesting excerpts:

JOHN KERRY constantly squabbled with his difficult and hypochondriac wife, ran a campaign team riven by internal feuding, and repeatedly begged the Republican senator John McCain to become his running-mate, according to a riveting inside account of his doomed presidential bid. The Massachusetts senator was so obsessed with getting advice from a multitude of rival advisers that one aide confiscated his mobile telephone. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, became such a moody distraction that in the closing weeks of the campaign another aide instructed her to stop whispering advice in his ear and back off.

One of the untold stories of the presidential campaign was the erratic behaviour of the candidate's wife, the Heinz heiress Mr Kerry married in 1995, according to Newsweek. She drove her Secret Service detail mad with her chronic lateness, constantly demanded attention, including her husband's (who seemed to tread on eggshells when around her). She even sent him off on errands, such as fetching bottles of water. She clashed with Mary Beth Cahill, Mr Kerry 's campaign manager, and Mr Kerry was caught in the middle.

Mr Kerry...grew increasingly frustrated. After a faltering press conference by Mr Bush in April, and with Iraq in turmoil, Mr Kerry exclaimed: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot".

During the early summer, Mr Kerry implored Mr McCain, the maverick Republican who ran against Mr Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, to become his running-mate, meeting him seven times. He even offered to expand the vice-presidency to include running the Pentagon. "I can't say this is an offer because I've got to be able to deny it," Mr Kerry told Mr McCain. "But you've got to do this."

Mr McCain told him he was out of his mind, and went on to embrace Mr Bush. "Goddammit," a furious Mr Kerry said to an aide. "Don't you know what I offered him? Why the f*** didn't he take it?"

James Carville, Bill Clinton's former strategist [joined the campaign]. So appalled was he by the chaos inside the campaign, and so desperate to see Mr Bush defeated, that in early September he decided that Miss Cahill had to be ousted, and Joe Lockhart, Mr Clinton's former spokesman, inserted as manager. When he called a meeting with the pair, he was so worked up, he began to cry, screaming to Miss Cahill: "You've got to let him (Mr Lockhart) do it!"

None of this is very flattering to either the Senator or his campaign. There's more at the link.

De-elect Arlen Specter

John Miller of The National Review wrote an article last spring which concluded that Arlen Specter is the worst Republican Senator in the Senate. His reasons were numerous, but chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that Arlen Specter joined Teddy Kennedy in killing the nomination of Robert Bork. Even so, at a time when Specter was fighting for his political life last spring in a tough primary fight against Pat Toomey, President Bush weighed in to lend his support to Senator Specter.

Specter ran the President's endorsement in his ads over and over, but once he had defeated Toomey, solely because the endorsement of the president and his fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum persuaded a lot of Republicans to ignore their better judgment, Specter never again identified himself with George Bush. His gratitude to Bush didn't extend to mentioning the President in any of his ads for the general election. Having exploited the President's endorsement to garner him a win in the primary, he didn't wish to risk defeat in the general election by being too closely identified by liberals with the despised George Bush.

For some reason that we'll leave to the psychiatrists to fathom for us, Republican voters reelected him to the Senate and now he shows his true character by essentially warning the President that sending up pro-life judges to the judiciary committee he is in line to chair would be pointless. He as much as told the president that he will personally kill the nomination of any judge who might be less than enthusiastic about Roe v. Wade. This is as incredible an arrogation of power as it is a monumental act of political ingratitude. One Republican senator is threatening to thwart the will of 59 million Americans who voted for President Bush's agenda.

His arrogance has created a storm of criticism and he has subsequently backtracked, but the man is not to be trusted. Once he is ensconced in his chairmanship he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He needs to be prevented from being elected to the chair in the first place.

The Republican caucus may vote on committee chairmanships as early as next week. If you feel the same about Senator Specter as does Viewpoint you can do something about it by contacting your senator (if you have a Republican senator) by phone or e-mail (check here for numbers and e-mail) and tell them you believe Arlen Specter is unsuited to be chairman of the judiciary committee. If you don't have a Republican senator, (or even if you do), contact Bill Frist the Senate majority leader and make your concerns known to him. Let them know that this is a very important matter to those of us who comprise the base of the Republican party.

There's a lot more on Arlen Specter at NRO's The Corner.

How Bad Can it Get?

This Reuter's report pretty much puts the kibosh to the left's complaint that the economy under George Bush is in such miserable shape:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. jobs soared at the sharpest rate in seven months in October, the government reported on Friday, helped by a surge in construction activity as hurricane-battered areas in the Southeast were rebuilt.

A surprisingly strong 337,000 jobs were added to payrolls last month -- twice the 169,000-job growth that Wall Street economists had forecast and the strongest since March when 353,000 jobs were created, the Labor Department said.

Still, the unemployment rate edged up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent in September, but that was because more people joined the search for employment, a potentially hopeful sign.

Not only was October a strong month but the number of jobs created in the two prior months was revised up -- to 139,000 in September instead of 96,000 and to 198,000 in August instead of 128,000.

The dollar, which has been under pressure, strengthened broadly on the news while bond prices weakened in the expectation that a resurgent labor market may foster higher interest rates and that investors may favor stocks.

"It looks like the job situation is improving and that this will support consumer spending going into the holidays and offset some of the drag caused by high oil prices this year," said economist Gary Thayer of A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St, Louis, Missouri.

If things get any "worse" under the evil Bush we'll have to bring our troops home just to guard our borders to keep the rest of the world from pouring in.

Analyzing the Election

If you're a political science type or just a junkie you'll find Jay Cost's analysis of the recent election well worth reading. You can read it at Horserace Blog here

The Clock is Ticking

Chester at Adventures With Chester explains how we are shaping the battlefield in Fallujah. An excerpt:

Folks, many of the psychological aspects of the battle are starting to become clear. Let's see what we end up with when we try to calculate the overall effect on the enemy that the following combination of military and political events will have:

1. Bush has won re-election in the US with a clear victory that is unchallenged. This shows unity in the American populace.

2. Four Arab-language media outlets have been forced from Fallujah by the insurgents for refusing to display stock footage of civilian casualties. This is a huge plus for us, especially when we learn that Iraqi journalists are being embedded with US forces. Remember how well embedding worked for us during the invasion? No reason it won't work again in swaying Iraqi public opinion. Note that the article states that Al-Jazeera declined to embed a reporter. If the battle goes well for the US, and Iraqis and other Arabs watch it go well on their TVs, but Al-Jazeera reports negatively, the US can publicize AJ's "no thanks" to being included to AJ's detriment. Another note: I bet the US has some very solid signals intelligence, or other human intelligence that many of the fighers in Fallujah are not Iraqi. Being able to show them on TV as the US assaults will be a huge plus for Allawi. I don't think he would take this risk if he didn't know for sure.

3. There is a British report that the Black Watch will be patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah. The article states that the Brits are based in Camp Dogwood. If that's the case, then the idea that they are patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah is spin, pure and simple. Camp Dogwood is a good 50 miles as the crow flies from Fallujah. The Brits are serving as a blocking force, and are going to be watching one of the high-speed avenues of approach running north-south from Baghdad to Iskandriyah (I can't find the name of this highway at the moment) to clean up any fleeing insurgents. I bet the US will leave them one avenue of escape. This is because:

a) it will definitely be very bloody if all the jihadi's have nowhere to go and fight to the finish in the city, b) if they flee, we can attrit them from the air very effectively (a highway is a relatively open battlespace), and c) the British, maybe coupled with US Army units, will be in a position to bat cleanup as the bad guys move toward them.

The analyses we've seen point to a commencement of battle within days if not hours.

The Current Civil War

There's a lot of buzz on talk shows and the internet about how Christian Evangelicals turned out in big numbers to swing the election for George Bush. Something like 25% of Ohio voters, for example, identified themselves as Evangelical Christians and they voted three to one for George Bush. Similar numbers prevailed throughout the country, and the Democrats are now commencing an extended season of self-examination to determine why so many of these people, especially in states which had been traditionally Democratic, have defected to George W. Bush.

The very fact that they have to ask the question, of course, reveals part of the problem. Democrats, at least liberal Democrats, which is almost all of them in the leadership, are tone deaf when it comes to religion and morality. They just don't get it. They can't understand why people who hold a Christian worldview, especially one which is theologically conservative, would feel alienated by the Democratic party. In an act of graciousness in the wake of victory Viewpoint offers them the following brief tutorial.

There is a second Civil War taking place in this country, not a war fought with guns but a war fought with ideas and the artillery of culture. Indeed, it is a culture war, a war that has riven this nation more deeply than anything since the first Civil War, and surprisingly, some people on both sides are just now coming to realize it. For at least three generations the secular left, the "progressives", concentrated in Hollywood, the academy, the television and music industries, and in the legislatures and judiciaries of government have been assiduously undermining and assaulting the traditional values that much of the rest of the country holds dear. The traditionalists, for their part, have complained about these attacks on their values but felt impotent to do much about them. The progressives controlled the levers of power and it just seemed to many, especially among the progressives, that their ultimate victory is inevitable. Maybe it is, but in this election the traditionalists finally felt they had an opportunity to stand against the tide, if only for a moment, and shout "enough."

Now the political organ of the progressives, the Democratic party, is stunned. They had fallen victim to an overweening confidence in their own inevitability, concocted in equal parts by their past success and their present ideological incestuousness. They are astonished that there are still so many people out there who can't see the obvious rightness of their cause and who were able to muster sufficient political energy to thwart them on their way to establishing a completely secular polity. What some Democrats are beginning to realize, as if awakening from a slumber, is that their party has sold its soul to the ideological far left and is in thrall today to the Michael Moores and Al Frankens of the world. It has become the party of rich and powerful men like John Kerry, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy and George Soros who patronize and pander to the working class but who have nothing in common with them. It is the party of academics and intellectuals who see the masses of people only as an abstract entity residing in remote frontiers that they themselves have only personally observed from an altitude of 35,000 feet. It is the party of those who hold in contempt the values and religion which that 25% of the voting public cherishes and which an even greater number respects. And now this party sits in wonderment at their repudiation by the heartland of this nation.

Concerned Democrats might do well to reflect on the fact that their party has had exactly two presidents in the last thirty years. One was an unabashed Evangelical, Jimmy Carter, and the other, Bill Clinton, at least made a pretense of being devout. John Kerry's awkward attempts to appear pious were transparently phony and, in any event, his high church style of piety did not much impress the Christian conservatives who turned out for Bush.

So the political post-mortems are concentrating quite a lot on the party itself and questions are being raised about how Democrats can regain some purchase among the people on the moral values issue. Pundits are asking why there can't be some unity between left and right on core values. The assumption seems to be that there must be common ground somewhere and that it's just a matter of finding it. What so many don't seem to understand is that there is no common ground. The relentless advances of secularism and our silly infatuation with "diversity" and "tolerance" have swept it away.

In our grandparents' day most people, whether they were Christian or not, accepted the moral authority of the Church and of the Bible. They may not have lived by it, but they somehow knew they should. There was a shared platform upon which to stand to discuss and debate moral issues and disagreements. That is much less the case today. Today the platform has been razed to the ground in the interest of "maximizing a diverse mosaic" of views and consequently we're like people adrift on rafts that have floated away from each other and are too far apart for us to join hands, to reconnect.

People on one raft base their values upon the Bible and/or Christian tradition, while the another raft is occupied by people who are, at the very least, skeptical of those as sources of moral authority. Many on that raft are openly hostile to the Christian worldview. Much, if not most, of the gulf between the red staters and the blue staters has resulted from this fundamentally disparate way of grounding moral truth. Since the two sides lack a common vision of what is ultimately right, their goals and means will rarely converge. Indeed, those who ground their values in God's revelation are seen by the secularists as superstitious fools whose benighted ideas deserve to be sent to the nearest landfill.

It is not that we simply disagree about the best way to get from A to Z . The two sides disagree about whether Z is where we should go at all. Traditionalists see marriage, for example, as a sacrament ordained by God. The left scoffs at this and views marriage as an oppressive, undesirable social structure evolved by ancient man and obsolete in today's world. Traditionalists believe that we should protect marriage from innovations and inroads, like easy divorce and gay marriage, which would eventually prove its undoing. The left sees any rules that would limit people from doing whatever they want to do as unjust and confining. There is no common ground here upon which a debate can be held. The only course is to resort to the exercise of power by one side over their antagonist and to secure for their values the force of law. The progressives have been doing this for fifty years, and the traditionalists have been fighting a rear-guard action against them, trying to preserve their way of life until they could amass sufficient political and judicial clout to undo some of the damage.

Lacking a common set of metaphysical assumptions upon which to base our moral judgments, both political parties have long ago given up trying to convince their opponents by argument and logical persuasion. They have realized, if only subliminally, that if we aren't starting from the same basic assumptions we'll never wind up at the same end point. Thus the parties find themselves engaged now in a mining operation, trying to extract votes from people who already agree with them, but who typically don't vote. The Republicans registered millions of people in this election over the age of 40 who were voting for the first time in their lives. But what neither party will be able to do with any significant success, in our opinion, is convert many voters. The politicos may fool the uninformed into believing that they're on the same side of the worldview divide as the people are, but, because there is so little common ground between the party elites and those whose worldview they disdain, they won't be successful in convincing those people to change their minds about what they believe. They will continue to just talk past each other. Better to spend one's resources on energizing those who already agree with you.

If this is true the prospects for national comity between red state/blue state folks are dim. The civil war will continue, perhaps in an increasingly uncivil fashion, and the gulf between the two groups will only widen as resentments are nourished and reinforced by new outrages. It is an interesting coincidence, perhaps, that the electoral strength of both sides lies pretty much along the same lines as the national division in 1860. Senator Kerry's blue states lie almost completely north of the Mason Dixon Line (Maryland and California are exceptions) and George Bush's electoral college strength lies predominantly south of it. Let's hope that this is indeed a coincidence and not a portent.

A Plea For Graciousness

Megan McArdle at Instapundit has some good advice for all of us who are delighted with Bush's victory:

A DEMOCRATIC FRIEND OF MINE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL from a Republican she doesn't speak to that often, allegedly to "say hi" but transparently to gloat. This is my plea to Bush voters to give peace a chance. If we have any chance of ending the sniping and bitterness that characterise the current political scene, it's going to start with Republicans being gracious winners. If you have to indulge your schadenfreude, do it silently by lurking on Democratic websites and reading hair-tearing left-wing editorials, not by alienating people with whom we'd like to eventually build a better America.

Having endorsed Ms McArdle's plea for civility Viewpoint has to confess that we did, though, laugh at Glenn Beck's riff on the radio this morning. Beck is, in our mind, the most talented, the most entertaining, talk radio host on the air and that includes Limbaugh and Hannity. If you can find him on the dial give him a listen. In the Harrisburg, PA area he's on WHP 580 at 9:00 a.m. Sometimes you just have to laugh even though you know you shouldn't.

Random Thoughts

Yesterday's election brought the Republicans a coup of four net Senate seats, including that of Tom Daschle, which puts the count at 55 R, 44 D, and 1 Independent. There are two things about this that bode well for Bush's agenda.

First is that it will now be much more difficult for the Democrats to stonewall Bush's judicial appointments, most importantly to the Supreme Court, on which there may be as many as four vacancies over the next four years. This will reverberate through our polity for the next two generations. Secondly, some Democrats may well lose enthusiasm for serving in the minority for the foreseeable future and may soon choose to retire (or even switch). This could well produce an even larger Republican majority in 2006 and 2008.

Eleven states had a referendum on the ballot yesterday that would amend their constitutions to ban gay marriage. The measure won in all eleven states bringing to seventeen the number of states whose constitutions prohibit legal recognition of such unions.

Californians approved a $3 billion measure to fund stem cell research. How a state which teetered on the brink of insolvency a year or two ago will pay for this is not yet clear.

George W. Bush received the highest vote total ever awarded to a winner. He is the first candidate to win over 50% of the vote since his father did it in 1988. The Clinton years are looking more and more like an aberrational interruption of an otherwise steady march toward a political hegemony of traditional and conservative values that began with Reagan in 1980. The long march through the institutions continues, and there is still a long way to go, but it's conservatives which are doing the marching and it's the left which is finding itself on the wrong side of history. At least we can hope.

Winners and Losers

With word that Senator Kerry is prepared to concede the election to George Bush, Viewpoint sees a number of winners and losers in the aftermath of this national exercise in democracy. Perhaps readers might wish to add some of their own (or delete one or more of ours:

Winners:

The American People

The People of Iraq and Afghanistan

Israel

The Republican Party

Compassionate Conservatism

The Swift Vets

Hillary Clinton

The New Media (Talk Radio, Blogosphere, Fox News)

Civil and Optimistic Political Rhetoric

Political Honesty

Losers:

Jacques Chirac and Old Europe

Islamist Radicals and the Axis of Evil

Palestinian Terrorists

The Democrat Party

Leftism/ Liberalism

George Soros, Michael Moore, and Hollywood Glitterati

Terry McAuliffe

Mainstream Media (esp. CBS, ABC, AP, NYT, WaPo, LA Times)

Hate and Pessimism

Political Lies and Fraud

Exit Polls, Presidential Debates, Trial Lawyers, NEA/PSEA, Gay Marriage

The Coming Israeli Strike

A brief respite from the election coverage takes us to the Strategy Page which predicts a preemptive series of strikes by Israel against Iran in the not too distant future. Some excerpts:

Since 1979, Iran has been run by Islamic radicals who, among other ambitions, wants to see Israel destroyed. Logically, it would make no sense for Iranian Islamic radicals to nuke Israel. It's well known that Israel has nuclear weapons, and several ways to deliver them. A nuke from Iran would risk several in return from Israel. And one or two Iranian nuclear warheads would not destroy Israel, while several nuclear weapons would cause enormous damage to Iran. Israel has made it known that if Iran gets close to having a nuclear weapon, Israel would launch air strikes and bomb dozens of industrial sites that are part of the Iranian nuclear program.

All of the Iranian targets are within 2,000 kilometers of Israel. Israeli air power is strong enough to overfly Jordan, and deal with any Jordanian opposition. In Iraq, the only anti-aircraft missiles are American, and it is doubtful that they would be fired at Israeli aircraft. Even if they were, Israel probably has the means to defeat the missiles (as Israel uses the same anti-aircraft missiles, and knows exactly how they work.) Israel has no problem getting jet bombers over Iran.

Neither Europe nor the United States wants Iran to have nuclear weapons, but neither Europe nor the U.S. would resort to bombing. They don't have to. Israel is the obvious first target of Iranian nukes, should it ever come to that. So Israel would be the first to attack Iran's nuclear program. And Israel is best qualified to make such an air strike.

The major unknown is; would Iran attempt to use their nuclear weapons on Israel? Iranian public pronouncements make it clear that such a rash move is seriously considered. Should Israel hold it's fire on the assumption that even the Iranian Islamic radicals would not be so foolish as to start a nuclear war?

Another question is what reaction would an Israeli strike against Iran elicit from the Islamist extremists in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere? And what effect would it have on public opinion in Europe and the U.S.? There's probably no way to answer these, but these questions don't really matter anyway. The only important question is should the world stand by and let the mad mullahs in Tehran start churning out nuclear weapons. If the answer to that is "no" and if negotiations fail to dissuade the Iranians from building these weapons, as they almost certainly will, what other options are there?

Early Report

Exit polls during the day were showing a big move toward Kerry, but evidently they were very misleading. To get better analysis try HorseRace Blog and Kerry Spot throughout the evening.

The early good news is that Tom Daschle appears to be sinking in South Dakota.

Good Military Site

Readers interested in the military tactics being used in Iraq, and especially those which will be employed in the impending takedown of Fallujah, might want to bookmark The Adventures of Chester. In his current post Chester gives his reasons why he believes the fight for Fallujah will last less than two weeks. It's very informed and very informative stuff.

Osama's Choice

Yigal Carmon, the president of the highly respected Middle East Media Research Institute, calls our attention to the correct translation of bin Laden's words on the video which was made public last Friday:

The tape of Osama bin Laden that was aired on Al-Jazeera on Friday, October 29th included a specific threat to "each U.S. state," designed to influence the outcome of the upcoming election against George W. Bush. The U.S. media in general mistranslated the words "ay wilaya" (which means "each U.S. state") to mean a "country" or "nation" other than the U.S., while in fact the threat was directed specifically at each individual U.S. state. This suggests some knowledge by bin Laden of the U.S. electoral college system. In a section of his speech in which he harshly criticized George W. Bush, bin Laden stated: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security."

The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, 'Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,' it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy.

By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn't treat all American people as if they're the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections."

Another interesting aspect of the speech is the fact that while bin Laden made his specific threat to each U.S. state, he also offered an election deal to the American voters, attempting to influence the election by these means rather than influencing it through terrorist attacks.

In other words, bin Laden joins Kim Jong Il and a host of other tyrants, terrorists, and lesser whackos around the world in telling Americans that it is in our interests to elect John Kerry as our president. Vote for Kerry, the terrorists' choice.

One of the most interesting aspects of MEMRI's analysis is this:

Another conspicuous aspect of the tape is the absence of common Islamist themes that are relevant to the month of Ramadan, which for fundamentalists like bin Laden is the month of Jihad and martyrdom. Noticeably absent from the Al-Jazeera tape was his usual appearance with a weapon, and more importantly the absence of references to Jihad, martyrdom, the Koran, the Hadith (Islamic tradition), Crusaders, Jews, and the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad on the duty to wage Jihad against the infidels. For the followers of the Al-Qa'ida ideology, this speech sends a regressive and defeatist message of surrender, as seen in the move from solely using Jihad warfare to a mixed strategy of threats combined with truce offers and election deals.

This strongly suggests that George Bush's strategy for fighting terrorism is working. Al Qaida is demoralized and hoping to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat by effecting a change in the way the United States is fighting the war against him. Their best hope, evidently, is to get John Kerry elected. Good grief.

Will We Be What We Have Been

Charles Krauthammer refreshes our memories regarding one of the greatest feats of liberation in the history of world civilization. We refer to the victory over the exceedingly repressive regime imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Krauthammer writes that:

In 2001, we had nothing there. What had the Clinton administration left in place? No plausible military plan. Virtually no intelligence. No local infrastructure. No neighboring bases. The Afghan Northern Alliance was fractured and weak. And Pakistan was actively supporting the bad guys.

Within days of Sept. 11, the clueless airhead president that inhabits Michael Moore's films and Tina Brown's dinner parties had done this: forced Pakistan into alliance with us, isolated the Taliban, secured military cooperation from Afghanistan's northern neighbors, and authorized a radical war plan involving just a handful of Americans on the ground, using high technology and local militias to utterly rout the Taliban.

President Bush put in place a military campaign that did in two months what everyone had said was impossible: defeat an entrenched, fanatical, ruthless regime in a territory that had forced the great British and Soviet empires into ignominious retreat. Bush followed that by creating in less than three years a fledgling pro-American democracy in a land that had no history of democratic culture and was just emerging from 25 years of civil war.

This is all barely remembered and barely noted. Most amazing of all, John Kerry has managed to transform our Afghan venture into a failure - a botched operation in which Bush let Osama bin Laden get away because he "outsourced" bin Laden's capture to "warlords" in the battle of Tora Bora.

The liberation of Afghanistan is quite literally an astonishing feat, one that could not have been accomplished apart from force of arms, a fact that those on the left who say that war never settled anything might do well to ponder. Nor could it have been accomplished without extraordinary leadership from the Commander-in-Chief on down. It is almost impossible to imagine this achievement, for which Americans should be extremely proud, having occured under a Kerry administration. Senator Kerry's whole approach to terrorism and his disdain for the military make an expedition such as the Bush team put together in Afghanistan quite unthinkable under a President Kerry.

Krauthammer's essay, which has a lot more to say than the excerpts quoted above, implicitly reminds us of how much is at stake in tomorrow's election. Tomorrow we will decide what kind of nation we will be for the next decade. Will we continue to be the hope of oppressed peoples everywhere as we were under Ronald Reagan and as we have been under George Bush or will we be a nation fashioned after the image of Michael Moore? Will we continue to be the hope of those who live in fear of Islamo-terrorism as we have been under George Bush or will we withdraw from the fray and become a reactive force, as John Kerry has suggested he prefers, rather than the proactive force we have been under President Bush? Will we continue to be a nation that does what is right even if others refuse to join us or will we be a nation which must pass John Kerry's "global test", i.e. get approval from the French, before we can act to oppose terrorism and other threats against our security? Will we be a nation whose president has the endorsement of most of the world's worst tyrants and anti-semites, will we be a nation whose president is the man Osama Bin Laden has recently tacitly endorsed, or will we be a nation whose president is a threat to tyrants and terrorists everywhere? We'll know in thirty six hours.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

Why Not Kerry

Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

"[Faustus' ideas] seemed to me no better merely because [they] were expressed better, nor true because eloquent....[People] thought him wise simply because they liked his speaking....[Yet] a thing was not bound to be true because uttered eloquently, nor false because the utterance of the lips is ill-arranged....plain or beautiful language may clothe wisdom or folly indifferently."

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.