Common sense still exists; it’s just hard to find beneath the layers of hyperbole issued by the usual suspects who force their agendas on the public. Fusillades of nuclear-tipped rounds are fired at the Bush administration regularly by righteous left-wing political types, launched from the silos of certain of the shamelessly biased national press, including the New York Times, Washington Post (who appear to be trying to reform), NPR, the TV networks, CNN; The Nation and The New Republic magazines and the limousine liberal editors of Harper’s, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair.
Every criticism of the Bush administration or its friends is stoked up into a new Watergate. Events in Iraq are a modern Vietnam; an accusation of impropriety by anyone in the vicinity of the White House is styled as the Watergate that will purge the body politic of the Bush Reich. Yet the facts never seem to match the rhetoric. And on almost every issue, the Bush White House wins in the end: Recent nominations to the Supreme Court were covered in most national media as an effort to appoint Satan; the extension of the Homeland Security Act was denounced as the reincarnation of the Gestapo; the drug stipend for seniors was “unworkable”; the Valerie Plame incident would bring down the government; the Dick Cheney hunting accident proved the violence of the administration. None of these issues stuck, including the blame for Katrina and its aftermath, nor misconduct in the Dubai ports deal.
The latest flagellations and wearing of hair shirts is the Bush White House approval of eavesdropping on suspected terrorists by the National Security Agency. The NSA issue has been embraced as the Armageddon of the Bush administration by US Senator Russell Feingold, who is cajoling his colleagues to join him in a resolution to “censure” the president on the floor of the Senate. Like the seditious rant of Rep. John Murtha a few months back— designed to undermine the morale of our military on the ground in Iraq—Feingold’s strategy personifies the political civil war in Washington. It was started by the Democrats under the generalship of Terry McAuliffe in the 2000 Florida presidential vote challenge, with no intervals of peace and civility in national public affairs since.
With a little history behind us, this unsavory atmosphere will be viewed as the death throes of the left wing of the Democrat Party. The country is now well past the grinding anti-American rhetoric of the ’60s and ’70s. The utopian idealism that would replace traditional American values toppled with the statues of Lenin in 1992. Torch bearers like Al Gore, John Kerry, Howard Dean and Ted Kennedy kept the flame flickering during the 2000-2004 presidential elections, with Kerry’s spin doctors in the 2004 race attempting to convert his pro-North Vietnam, pro-Sandinista, pro-Soviet stands as patriotic. It didn’t work, he lost, and now we are near end game. The Left is clinically dead, its corroded brain emitting irrational blips as the darkness descends.
Feingold and Murtha and the like are lighting candles in a hopeless vigil, calling on their false secular gods for one last miracle to revive the glories of the victory of American defeat in Vietnam and the rapture of the collapse of the Nixon administration. Their one slender thread is the media, who shill the empty slogans to the population. Problem is for them—the country isn’t falling for it anymore. Daily newspapers, where the party line begins, who serve as the source for the large portion of broadcast news—are sinking in readership across the board, as evidenced by the forced sale of Knight-Ridder to the McClatchy chain—owners of the Raleigh News & Observer. Even on cable, the conservative Fox News has more viewers than the rest of the cable news channels combined.
If it weren’t for safe congressional seats, carved out by Democrats who manipulate the now out-dated Voting Rights Act to create voter profiles over deliberately biased districts, the Party would be further along the road to oblivion. These House member die-hards, who can afford unacceptable views in their pocket boroughs—conjoined with the agenda-loaded press—are the surviving echoes of the politics of the past. They hold out hope the 2006 by-elections will change the Republican majority in the Congress, which explains the hourly frontal assault on the Bush White House.
The probability of success is small. Even though Bush’s popularity poll numbers are low, most Americans do not want to cut and run from Iraq. Despite the blather about NSA eavesdropping, Americans are aware how current policies have protected them from terrorists on US soil. And, as the charming buffoon Bill Clinton knows, it’s the economy, stupid. Under Bush the US has enjoyed the longest period of economic growth and stability since the late ’50s and early ‘60s. Common sense wins.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
By one count there have been 20 books published since 2000 attacking “sprawl,” the dirty word in the environmental lexicon that supposedly personifies the evils afflicting US cities. Our very own Triangle Transit Authority assumes their stance against sprawl justifies their agenda to force rail transit on the Triangle. Fortunately, TTA has been stopped in its tracks—for now—and a new book has come out defending sprawl and exposing its vociferous opponents as the charlatans they are. Robert Bruegman’s Sprawl: A Compact History says what needs to be said: Americans prefer to live in low-density environments, what we used to call neighborhoods. Common sense wins.
•••
Which explains the obsession with Wal-Mart by activists and their fellow traveling friends in the media. The “big box” chain is regarded as the new Nazi party for building stores where people want to shop. The company allegedly is running small-town retailers out of business and, horrors, contributing to “sprawl” by drawing customers away from town centers to ex-urban locations. US Senator Hillary has heard the cock crow three times and denounced Wal-Mart, although she served on their board of directors for six years from 1986-1992. Hillary, running hard for President in 2008, is putting distance between her and Wal-Mart, aware the jihad is reaching the irrational stage when facts don’t matter. Common sense loses.
•••
TV producers know which way the wind is blowing in the hustings better than political pollsters do. There are no shows about environmentalists and rail transit activists, but a definite trend in programs about tough guys and girls defying the labyrinth of protections afforded dangerous criminals to arrest, torture and kill the bad guys. Jack Bauer in the anti-terrorist show 24, and former program star Dennis Haysbert in the new show The Unit (and Benjamin Bratt and Dennis Hopper in the short-lived but high-quality The E-Ring) are the real heroes, not the whimpering girly men allegiant more to the ACLU and Amnesty International who dominate politics today. Jack Bauer and friends aren’t politically correct, and neither is America, no matter what the academics and activists say. Common sense wins.
•••
It’s hard to convince people that a coterie of mostly liberal arts academics are holding universities hostage, forcing a “politically correct” agenda on administrators and students. Here in the Triangle, two of the three major universities are known nationally for their capitulation to the “tenured radicals,” resulting in a decline in their academic reputations due to grade inflation for “sensitive” students, a lack of scholarship in the syllabus and the imposition of party-line requirements for recruiting new hires and granting tenure. If you lean to the left politically, demonstrate anti-American tendencies, embrace affirmative action, believe in the politicization of course content and view society through the lens of the race-gender-class prism, you are welcomed and promoted to tenure.
Don’t believe it? Then study the case of Larry Summers, former president of Harvard (and a card-carrying Clinton Democrat) who dared speak objectively about the lack of women in the sciences. His big mistake was to apologize for his valid comments. He followed this by arranging a $50 million grant for a program to ensure more women science graduates. All this groveling got him fired. The faculty radicals put another notch in their pistol and academics in America declined further. Common sense loses.