09 November 2004

Election Articles

Written: 11/09/04
Published: Hopefully tomorrow

Marxist worldview can't explain election results

"I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays..."
-- Howard Dean

In 1914, men and women of all classes in virtually every European capital cheered the coming of the Great War, thereby leaving Marxists and communists across Europe utterly confounded as to why working men and women felt a substantially greater affinity for their own neighbors and countrymen than for fellow workers in other nations.

But it's a funny thing about the Marxist outlook. Somewhere along the way, it ceased to be a political ideology and became a de-facto religious faith. As the twentieth century wore on, Marx's prophesy of a world divided along economic fault lines rather than national and cultural ones looked increasingly ridiculous.

Today, though long discredited by history, the Marxist faith continues to thrive. Its faithful would have you believe that it is an ideology for the rational skeptic. Don't be fooled. It is a fanatical religious faith, too fortified against the sway of established history to be considered anything else.

As in 1914 with the dawn of WWI, liberals can't seem to make sense of the conservative electoral victories of last week. Their worldview, rooted in Marxist dogma, simply cannot adequately account for why Americans seem not to care about their "economic interests." Nor can it explain why Republican appeals to cultural values resonated significantly more powerfully than Democratic appeals to a sense of economic victimization.

Not surprisingly, a substantial number of liberal pundits have spent the previous week seething with indignant rage that ordinary Americans are so unwilling to trade away their core cultural and religious values in exchange for economic advantage.

How, they wonder vainly, can Americans care more about "guns, God and gays" than their own "economic interests?"

And so in a twist of poignant irony, the high priests of a faith that holds wealth and greed to be the greatest sins have been reduced to complaining, essentially, that Americans are insufficiently materialistic.

Unbelievable. Their capacity for tolerating their own contradictions seems to have no limit.

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Written: 11/04/04
Never Published

Media shamelessly dances to Kerry's fiddle
"What liberal media?"

It has become the classic comeback line for an increasingly unhinged American left in debates regarding the political orientation of the mainstream media. Listen more closely and you'll hear arrogant, shrill lectures that the media exists to serve the institutions of power, that Fox News is a threat to democracy, and other such nonsense.

Well how about this liberal media.

On election night, the networks released a set of exit polls that gave virtually every battleground state to John Kerry. This, of course, proved to be colossally wrong in every respect, and constitutes nothing less than a national scandal of gargantuan proportions.

"It takes a deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong," wrote former Clinton campaign advisor Dick Morris in a Wednesday piece for the New York Post. "Since the variables of whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test."

But that's not all.

President Bush won Ohio by roughly 137,000 votes. The Kerry campaign simply decided on its own that, contrary to all reality, the race was still close to call; and the media blindly followed its lead like a company of filthy rats trailing the Pied Piper. Every newspaper across the country, almost without exception, carried the headline that there was no clear winner. Prestigious CNN anchors and analysts continued to bumble about the newsroom in denial as if the election were still undecided.

Yet, in my comprehensive scan of internet media sites, I could never find so much as a single doubt expressed about Senator Kerry's 121,000 vote margin of victory in Pennsylvania, nor his meager 12,000 vote margin of victory in Wisconsin.

Why the double standard? By how many hundreds of thousands of votes must President Bush win before the media will declare him the winner? How mathematically ridiculous must the possibility of a Kerry win become before the media, independent of the Kerry campaign, will finally concede a Bush victory?