Politics

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

November 1, 2004 — If President Bush is re-elected tomor row, the victory will have come de spite the best efforts of two erstwhile American journalistic icons — the Grey Lady of Times Square and Edward R. Murrow’s Tiffany Network: The New York Times and CBS News.

If nothing else, the notion that “objectivity” animates America’s media elite has been exposed this year for what it truly is — at best, a quaint myth; at worst, a pernicious lie.

Meanwhile, a new element has been injected into American politics: the Web-based truth-squadders who exposed Dan Rather for the sad partisan hack that he has become while deconstructing one elite-media hit after another throughout an agonizingly long election season.

Read the entire editorial on the New York Post website.

By CHARLES J. CHAPUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/22/opinion/22chaput.html?ex=1099442009&ei=1&en=0626a7e7415fe210

Denver — The theologian Karl Barth once said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

That saying comes to mind as the election approaches and I hear more lectures about how Roman Catholics must not “impose their beliefs on society” or warnings about the need for “the separation of church and state.” These are two of the emptiest slogans in current American politics, intended to discourage serious debate. No one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy. Nor does anyone doubt the importance of morality in public life. Therefore, we should recognize these slogans for what they are: frequently dishonest and ultimately dangerous sound bites.

Lawmaking inevitably involves some group imposing its beliefs on the rest of us. That’s the nature of the democratic process. If we say that we “ought” to do something, we are making a moral judgment. When our legislators turn that judgment into law, somebody’s ought becomes a “must” for the whole of society. This is not inherently dangerous; it’s how pluralism works.
[Read more…]

By Don Feder
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 20, 2004

The Democrats have been characterized as a party of peace marchers and flag-burners — a Neville Chamberlain cadre chattering away on cable TV, knee-jerk internationalists who’ve mistaken the United Nations for the United States Marines.

I must protest this calumny.

Under the right circumstances, the Democrats can be Sgt. York and Audie Murphy times Rambo. There was a little war of which Democrats are exceedingly fond — so much so that they’re still bragging about it five years later.

It’s a conflict that didn’t involve allegations of weapons of mass destruction. The nation we subjugated wasn’t a sponsor of international terrorism. (This time, we fought for the terrorists.)

It wasn’t remotely related to national security. And the justification for our intervention turned out to be a complete fabrication.

For 78 days in 1999, we bombed Christian Yugoslavia (our ally in two World Wars) to aid Moslem separatists who were tight with Osama bin Laden. Ever since, NATO has occupied its sovereign territory — with disastrous results.

Read the entire article on FrontPageMagazine.com.

It looks like Rather did it before. Why is this important? Because it shaped perceptions that are false.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/morse200409150552.asp

It’s a bit wordy and self-conciously clever, but Jonah Goldberg’s point (see article) that the CBS stonewalling on the forged documents represents the end of the dominance of big media is accurate I think. The days of big media hegemony are over.