Friday, October 15, 2004

 
Sullivan serves up a "Dish" prepared with a heapin' helpin' of revenge for some conservatives' oppostion to gay marriage and served as "cold" as the [comfort or]consolation that we might hope for with a Kerry victory(gawd, this is awful writing):

"FORCING THE DEMS INTO RESPONSIBILITY: It's a simple argument and it goes as follows. One reason to vote for Kerry this time is that, whatever his record, he will, as president, be forced by reality and by public opinion to be tough in this war. He has no other option. You think he wants to be tarred as a wimp every night by Fox News? Moreover, he would remove from the Europeans and others the Bush alibi for their relative absence in the war on terror. More important, his presidency would weaken the Michael Moore wing of the Democrats, by forcing them to take responsibility for a war that is theirs' as much a anyone's. As Bob Kagan put it recently,
There are many reasons why, in theory, the US would benefit from a Democratic victory. It is important for the Democrats to own the war on terrorism and not simply be the opposition. Also, we would have a fresh start with the Europeans and other allies, though they would quickly be disillusioned to learn that Kerry wouldn't be that different from Bush in some respects."

Maybe he's got something. There may be a lot of "ruin" in this here "nation"(and hackneyed phrases in this post) and the military assets of Islam are objectively much weaker than those of the old USSR.
The hopes above are none the less uncomfortably close to those often expressed with respect to what might happen after the coming to power of radicals in other countries. Folks had hopes that the Bolsheviks, Hitler, Castro, Allende and many others would be forced to moderate their radicalism after assuming power -compromise with bankers, industrialists, churches, international bodies, and generally become more moderate as they made the transition from parties in opposition to ones accepting responsibility as well as power. At any rate, unbridled optimism doesn't seem justified from a non-totalitarian viewpoint.
While Kerry's communist cousins have been quite willing to make war on Muslims during the Bolshevik revolution and later in Afghanistan, they considered the West, not primitive, superstitious Islam its main enemy. The thought that a President Kerry might decide for reasons of expediency to go through the motions of defending a United States which would still be infested with a sizable number of Republicans is hardly inspiring. Maybe the motivation won't affect the tactics used or even the outcome, and perhaps LBJ, who viewed Republicans, not communists as his real enemy, would have still opted for avoiding both victory and immediate defeat in Vietnam even if he had been as patriotic as JFK.
I suspect that more than a few voters have decided, albeit not consciously that while Republicans remain patriotic even under Democratic administrations(unlike Alec Baldwins, Republicans really have no where else to go but here in the US of A), Democrats will side with any foe, no matter how vile, unless they have unquestioned domination of the government. And that it makes sense to vote Democratic to bring the bastards into the fold. I'm not sure I should paste some old emails which argued and hoped for mass resignations from our armed forces in the event of a Kerry victory, but KJL had something like this today on the Corner. Perhaps we'll survive Kerry, just as we survived Jimmy C.

-Yippie skippee....