Saturday, Nov. 19

1. Sharansky's Message: Natan Sharansky, former refusenik and Soviet prisoner, current Israeli cabinget minister, is one of the great men of our time. We have frequently written about him on this site, most recently in "Facing down the pacifists." In that post we quoted Tom Rose's interview of Sharansky ("The view from the Gulag") from the issue of the Weekly Standard that commemorated Ronald Reagan on the occasion of his death last summer.
   The interview in its own way provided special testimony in support of the proposition that Reagan should be known as the Great Liberator, a point made by our friend Steve Hayward in another article in that issue of the Standard. In his interview with Sharansky, Rose asked: "Were there any particular Reagan moments that you can recall being sources of strength or encouragement to you and your colleagues?" Sharansky answered:
   I have to laugh. People who take freedom for granted, Ronald Reagan for granted, always ask such questions. Of course! It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.
   It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin's "Great October Bolshevik Revolution" and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution--Reagan's Revolution. When Sharansky was released from the Gulag in a prisoner exchange engineered by the Reagan administration in 1986, Sharansky himself had the opportunity to tell Reagan the story:
   The first time I met President Reagan I told him this story. I felt free to tell him everything. I told him of the brilliant day when we learned about his Evil Empire speech from an article in Pravda or Izvestia that found its way into the prison. When I said that our whole block burst out into a kind of loud celebration and that the world was about to change, well, then the president, this great tall man, just lit up like a schoolboy. His face lit up and beamed. He jumped out of his seat like a shot and started waving his arms wildly and calling for everyone to come in to hear "this man's" story. It was really only then that I started to appreciate that it wasn't just in the Soviet Union that President Reagan must have suffered terrible abuse for this great speech, but that he must have been hurt at home too. It seemed as though our moment of joy was the moment of his own vindication. That the great punishment he had endured for this speech was worth it. Today NRO has posted a column by Joel Rosenberg that is the perfect companion to Rose's interview with Sharansky: "Two great dissidents." Among other things, Rosenberg's article tells the story of Sharansky's meeting last week in the Oval Office with President Bush. What President Bush told Sharansky was off-the-record, but here's Sharansky's account of what he told President Bush:
   "I told the president, 'There is a great difference between politicians and dissidents. Politicians are focused on polls and the press. They are constantly making compromises. But dissidents focus on ideas. They have a message burning inside of them. They would stand up for their convictions no matter what the consequences.'
   "I told the president, 'In spite of all the polls warning you that talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East might be a losing issue — despite all the critics and the resistance you faced — you kept talking about the importance of free societies and free elections. You kept explaining that democracy is for everybody. You kept saying that only democracy will truly pave the way to peace and security. You, Mr. President, are a dissident among the leaders of the free world.'" (powerlineblog)(nro)
2. Iranian boy killed for breaking Ramadan fast: Reader Janet Nilson pointed out this appalling story, complete with a photo, about a fourteen year old Iranian boy who was sentenced by a clerical court to receive 85 lashes for breaking his fast during Ramadan. (I assume this means eating between sunrise and sundown.) The sentence was carried out, and the boy died. The only hopeful note in the article is that townspeople where the boy lived were so outraged that they stormed the cemetery when he was scheduled to be buried, and the burial had to be deferred and carried out under guard.
   Keep this story in mind next time you hear a liberal referring to the "Taliban wing" of the Republican party, or arguing that Christian "fundamentalists" in America are comparable to Islamic "fundamentalists" in the Middle East, or suggesting that the Bush administration is trying to establish a "theocracy." (powerlineblog)
3. Racist Europe: Though many American liberals continue to regard Europe as a model of sophistication and humanism, and thus a great potential check on rampant U.S. "cowboyism," Europe actually is a bit of a fever swamp. There's nothing new about this -- think of pre-World War II Europe. The re-emergence of European anti-semitism, though under-reported, is no secret either. In truth, though, Europe was essentially racist even during the golden age of the former Western Europe. And I'm talking about anti-black racism, not just anti-Semitism. In fact, the appointment of Condi Rice to replace Colin Powell made me recall a remark that a friend of mine who lived in Europe made more than 30 years ago. He said that it would be decades before the U.S. could appoint a black Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense because the Europeans wouldn't take one seriously. Come to think of it, where is England's Rice or France's Powell?
   Anyone who follows European soccer knows about European racism. By the mid-1960s viciously racist crowd behavior was basically a thing of the past in the U.S sporting scene. But it was just getting started in Europe. Black players were routinely abused by English fans for at least two more decades. Unfortunately, Everton fans were considered among the worst, although at least they could be won over by good play. In the famous 1966 World Cup match between North Korea and a Portuguese team full of African players, the Everton crowd cheered the players off the field.
   Overt racism finally has mostly been vanquished from the English game. However, blacks on the English national team often are the targets of terrible abuse when England plays on the continent. Yesterday, England played in Spain, a nation that surely is in the upper echelon of Euro-taste and sophistication. The blacks who played for England -- Ashley Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips, and sub Jermaine Jenas -- faced a torrent of abuse throughout the match from the Madrid crowd, including chants of "monkey" and imitation monkey noises The same thing happened the day before when the England under 21 team played in Spain. One victim, Carlton Cole, complained that even little kids were joining in. Previously, the Spanish coach had made a racial slur about Thierry Henry, the French super-star who plays in England. And speaking of France, fans of the club St. Etienne physcially attacked opponent Bastia's black players after a match this weekend. Accounts of these disgraceful events can be found here, here, here, and here. (powerlineblog)
4. Richard Clarke's fabricated testimony attacking Condi Rice: Clarke's testimony is actually very interesting. The thrust of the questioning is about why the Clinton administration didn't do a more effective job of pursuing al Qaeda during the 1990s. Clarke says that they tried, but were frustrated by institutional weaknesses whose roots went back at least to the 1970s. The biggest problem, Clarke argues, is that over a period of decades, the CIA was beaten up on so repeatedly by Congress over failed operations that the agency became too risk averse ever to act.
   What happened here is pretty obvious. Clarke testified reasonably candidly in June 2002. But a year later, he had broken with the Bush administration over Iraq, and, like a number of other former bureaucrats, he turned his policy disagreement with the President into a personal attack. Clarke fabricated the story that he had delivered some kind of warning or secret plan to Condoleezza Rice, which she ostensibly failed to understand or to act upon. Clarke's tale briefly caused problems for the administration, until Clarke's credibility collapsed when it was revealed that his story was contradicted by his own contemporaneous words, as, for example, in a briefing that he gave to reporters in August 2002. (powerlineblog)
5. Democrats don't hold the public in contempt because they are now the minority party; rather they are now the minority party because they hold the public in contempt: George Will notes how disdain for the judgment of average Americans has become a dominant theme in "progresive" thinking, to the point that some Democrats "relish interpreting the party's defeat as validation." Will connects this phenomenon to the culture of victimhood under which liberals implement their pet projects (or power grab) by positing an infantile American public. (powerlineblog)
6. Cult of Palestinianism: FrontPage has posted two must-reads. Steven Plaut deduces the mythical nature of "Palestinianism" from the relevant history and infers the underlying agenda of destruction from it: "Incitement to genocide, act II." Plaut's is a powerfully argued case that demands attention.
   Bat Ye'or is the world's foremost historian of "dhimmitude" -- the status of non-Muslim peoples under Islam. Her forthcoming book Eurabia applies the theme to contemporary developments in Europe. Today she previews the theme in the context of Arafat's death: "Arafat's legacy for Europe." Her thesis is that Europe has submitted to "the cult of Palestinianism":
   Palestinianism condenses jihadist values. It promotes the destruction of Israel, the denial of Hebrew biblical history and hence Christianity. It preaches Islamic replacement theology and the Arabization and Islamization of the Holy Land’s biblical archeology. Arafat, its leader, was the bin Laden of a seduced Europe, which applauded his policy of spectacular terrorism. It is Arafat who initiated in 1968 air piracy against Jews, hostage ransoming, suicide bombings, random killings of civilians and the destruction of urban areas as in Lebanon. In short, the current global terror campaign was successfully introduced first by Arafat against Jews and Israelis, as well as Lebanese Christians.
   More than Hitler before him, Arafat became the most popular hero in Europe, cradle of Palestinianism, concocted by the second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples (Cairo, 25-26 January 1969), as an international strategic war against Israel, and conducted through today. The Conference’s Sponsoring Committee of 54 members comprised 46 influential European intellectuals and politicians. Palestinianism as an ideology bringing together Europe and the Arab countries on the ashes of Israel was conceived and planned in Europe with unofficial Gaullist benediction, and Arafat was its embodiment. (powerlineblog)
7. A Marine writes home: This is one story of many that people normally don't hear, and one that everyone does.
   This is one most don't hear:A young Marine and his cover man cautiously enter a room just recently filled with insurgents armed with Ak-47's and RPG's. There are three dead, another wailing in pain. The insurgent can be heard saying, "Mister, mister! Diktoor, diktoor(doctor)!" He is badly wounded, lying in a pool of his own blood. The Marine and his cover man slowly walk toward the injured man, scanning to make sure no enemies come from behind. In a split second, the pressure in the room greatly exceeds that of the outside, and the concussion seems to be felt before the blast is heard. Marines outside rush to the room, and look in horror as the dust gradually settles. The result is a room filled with the barely recognizable remains of the deceased, caused by an insurgent setting off several pounds of explosives.
   The Marines' remains are gathered by teary eyed comrades, brothers in arms, and shipped home in a box. The families can only mourn over a casket and a picture of their loved one, a life cut short by someone who hid behind a white flag.
   But no one hears these stories, except those who have lived to carry remains of a friend, and the families who loved the dead. No one hears this, so no one cares. (powerlineblog)
8. True nature of Islam: Jana says: "Monir you dont know anything about Iraq or Islam or the Koran ...."Dear Jana, I was born in the Middle East and went to Islamic school and at one time I memorized parts of the Koran. I am from a neighboring country to Iraq.The Koran says Sureh 4, Verse 35: Men have authority over women (not just the wife but sisters, daughters, maids, etc.). If they disobey, "first admonish them, then refuse to sleep with them, and then beat them". You can read it for yourself at http://www.light-of-life.com/eng/reveal/ or other sites. Also try http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate/index.html to see the 2nd class citizenship of women in Islam (for example they are counted as half of one witness, or receive inheritence half of a man).Now Jana you are wrong that this is a matter of interpretation. When the Koran says women receive half the inheritence of a man, then this is not an issue of interpretation. It says Sureh 4:11 - "A male shall inherit twice as much as a female". Now how can you interpret mathematics in multiple ways?You say that I am "not allowed" (by whom may I ask?) - that I am not allowed to say that the Koran has recommended to beat women or to disinherit women because of their gender. And why cant I say this? What stops me and other open minded people to say that the Koran contains nonsense of this sort? If it offends you that I say this, well then take a cold shower, and if you are a moslem (by the sound of it) then change your religion instead of being so embarrased about it, as I am just repeating what is in there complete with verse numbers and am exercizing my right to free speech, and I can say all I wish about Islam, including facts about the Koran - and this is exactly why the Marines are in Fallujah beating the hell out of these Islamofascists - because they want to stop me from saying the facts, and no Jana, you cannot stop me as those Marines are protecting me, the Iraqis, and ultimately America, and neither can you stop the good Marines who are risking their lives, to bring out the truth about this decrepit religion. You should be ashamed of yourself to undermine our men and women in danger at in the battlezone who are fighting tyranny, while people like you suck up to it. (kevin sites)(powerlineblog)
9. Amnesty International flyer: Whatever happened to the left? When did it give up on the cause of freedom? I don't know. But the American left's abandonment of the cause of liberty is one of the saddest facts of modern history.
   How far have we come from the days when liberals instinctively rallied to the cause of freedom? President Bush's policies have freed 50 million people. His grand aim is to liberate the Arab world, not only because freedom is desirable for its own sake--which it is, of course--but because he believes, we think correctly, that only by bringing liberty to that part of the world can we reverse the cancerous growth of terrorism.
   Today, the liberals' response to the spread of freedom is one of sour disapproval. They attribute the liberation of 50 million to a weird "neocon" conspiracy. They call President Bush a "liar" when he speaks of his desire to help Arabs and Muslims realize their God-given right to be free. (powerlineblog)
10. To the Next Secretary of State: Anonymous internal advice (diplomadic.blogspot)
11. Racist editorial cartoons attack Condi Rice (democracy-project)
12. Beautiful young lass… check. High-powered firearm… check. Pissing off the loony liberal left.. check. This one has it all. (jayreding.com)
13. The Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk: takes the world to task for their reporting on Iraq:
    “It is not all death and destruction,” explained Archbishop Louis Sako in an interview Tuesday published by AsiaNews.
    “Much is positive in Iraq today,” he said. “Universities are operating, schools are open, people go out onto the streets normally.” He did acknowledge that “where there’s a kidnapping or a homicide the news gets out immediately, and this causes fear among the people.”
    Yet, “there is no organized resistance” in Iraq, the prelate insisted. “Those who commit such violence are resisting against Iraqis who want to build their country.
    “Iraqis instead are resisting against terrorism and are not carrying out attacks, which instead are the work of foreign infiltrators. I have stressed this before: Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians and Sudanese have entered Iraq. Prime Minister Allawi has said this as well. And clearly, there are also Iraqi collaborators who, for money, help the terrorist hide.” (jayreding)
14. Democrat Tantrum Watch: Democrats’ slogan in 2006 would be, “Vote for us you drooling morons!” The good news for many Republicans (and bad news for the fans of a healthy two-party system) is that so far, many Democrats like that slogan (kerryspot)
15. The Real HumanistsRevolution from Afghanistan to Iraq. After the seven-week defeat of the Taliban, these deer-in-the-headlights critics paused, and then declared the victory hollow. They said the country had descended into rule by warlords, and called the very idea of scheduled voting a laughable notion. We endured them for almost two years. Yet after the recent and mostly smooth elections, Afghanistan has slowly disappeared from the maelstrom of domestic politics, as all those who felt our efforts were not merely impossible but absurd retreated to the shadows to gnash their teeth that Kabul is not yet Carmel. Western feminists, homosexual-rights advocates, and liberal reformists have never in any definitive way expressed appreciation for the Afghan revolution now ongoing in the lives of 26 million formerly captive people. They never will. Instead, Westerners simply now assume that there was never any controversy, but rather a general consensus that Afghanistan is a "good thing" — as if the Taliban went into voluntarily exile due to occasional censure from The New York Review of Books. (victor davis hanson)
16. Come Clean, Kofi The U.N. secretary-general ducks responsibilty for the Oil for Food scam. (opinionjournal)
17. Your Tax Dollars at Work The U.N. discovers the cause of anti-Semitism: Jews. (opinonjournal)
18. Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion (nyt)
19. Saddam Hussein diverted money from the U.N. oil-for-food program to pay millions of dollars to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who carried out attacks on Israel (ap news, orthodoxnet)
20. In the south of Fallujah yesterday, US Marines found the armless, legless body of a blonde woman, her throat slashed and her entrails cut out. (times.co.uk)
21. Kerry Urges Democrats To Fight Values 'Assault':E-Mail to Supporters Renews Battle Against Bush (wapo)
22. Bush wins majority of Ohio provisional ballots 56% - 43.5% (polipundit)

Other

• NJ high school bans "Messiah" (dawn eden, nypost)
• Myth of the working poor: To stay out of poverty in America, it's necessary to do three simple things, social scientists have found: finish high school, don't have kids until you marry, and wait until you are at least 20 to marry. (steven malanga, cityjournal)
• Moderate muslim: The progressive Egyptian intellectual Dr. Amr Isma'il whose articles are regularly published on the secular Arab website www.rezgar.com, wrote an article condemning the Arabs' lack of self-criticism and the Islamists' abuse of the term "democracy." The following are excerpts from the article, which appeared on the progressive Arabic website www.elaph.com: [1]
  "Why are we the only nations in the world that still use religion, Islam, and the name of Allah in everything – in politics, economics, science, art, and literature. We kill in the name of Allah, blow up cars in the name of Allah, and slit throats in the name of Allah and Islam, and then we protest when others depict the Muslims as terrorists. (memri)
• New Kinsey movie (john leo)
• Kinsey revisited (daniel flynn)
• Iraqi Holocaust (iraqshoahfiles.blogspot)
• Thought for the day: Holy Spirit (antimedia.blogspot)

Monday, Nov. 15

1. A bad election for old media: It was a bad election for Old Media. More than in any other election in the last half-century, Old Media -- The New York Times and CBS News, joined often but not always by The Washington Post, other major newspapers, ABC News and NBC News -- was an active protagonist in this election, working hard to prevent the re-election of George W. Bush and doing what it could for John Kerry. The problem for Old Media is that it no longer has the kind of monopoly control over political news that it enjoyed a quarter-century ago. And its efforts to help John Kerry proved counterproductive.
   
   Kerry would have been better served, it turned out, by apologizing early on for his 1971 testimony that besmirched all troops in Vietnam. He could have done so in the spring when questioned by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," but decided not to. Memo to future Democratic nominees: You can no longer rely on Old Media to hush up stories that hurt your cause. Your friends in Old Media don't have a monopoly any more.. (Michael Barone, townhall)
2. Arafat's legacy: Ambivalent? Nonsense. Yasser Arafat was supremely decisive and single-minded. He was not complex and, regarding Israel's fate, never conflicted. Indeed the reason for his success, such as it was -- creating the Palestinian movement from which he derived fortune, fame and reverence -- was precisely his single-mindedness. Not about Palestinian statehood -- if that was his objective, he could have had his state years ago -- but about the elimination of Jewish statehood
   
   Bill Clinton was astonished when Arafat rejected the offer of a West Bank and Gaza state, turning down the opportunity to be its George Washington. Americans never understood that Arafat saw himself completely differently: as an anti-imperialist revolutionary in the mold of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Like them, his motto was "revolution unto victory." Total victory. No half loaf. And given Israel's stubborn refusal to die, Arafat's cause became sustaining the struggle -- the revolution -- indefinitely, almost as an end in itself.
   It is for this reason that, while Arafat's death does open a first chance for peace since he took over the Palestinian movement four decades ago, that chance remains remote. Why? Because the revolution continues. Arafat made sure it would survive him. He created Palestinian nationalism and shaped it in a revolutionary mold that will take years, perhaps decades, to undo. (Charles Krauthammer, wapo)
3. On the trail of Kerry's failed dream (boston globe)
4. The Swift Boat Veterans gather to assess their impact on the campaign. Now, I must confess: My own view is that Jesus would probably not vote at all, given the organized corruption that passes for modern American politics. But the idea that Christ Himself might sit out the 2004 election was apparently not under consideration, so I accepted the invitation--much to the pastor's avowed surprise. As an active Baptist who grew up in the Baptist church, I had no illusions that most of my co-religionists were ardent Democrats, but I rarely turned down any chance to make the case for my own candidacy and that of my fellow party members. After all, wasn't Daniel blessed for braving the lion's den? (brad carson, tnr)
5. NRO summary of campaign: The latest issue of NRO is worth buying for the cover alone. But it also has a look back at the Bush campaign, a story on the impact of the Swifties, Zogby-Bashing, secular-liberal-bashing, Euro-weenie-bashing, lying-liberal-media-bashing… Just buy it already.
   The basic conception of the campaign never changed. Early on, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd explains, “we realized that 90 to 92 percent of the country were aligned, and only about 7 to 8 percent were swing voters or independent voters. That was a big thing for us to notice and model the campaign on.” It dictated two strategic insights. One was that there would have to be an emphasis on the Republican base. After 9/11, the Bush team saw that levels of GOP support for the president were going to stay at historic highs, which would allow them to maximize turnout. “He has stronger support among Republicans than Reagan,” Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman says, “and the Republican base is 10 points bigger than it was then.” Dowd says a presidential campaign traditionally spends 85 to 90 percent of its resources chasing swing voters. The Bush campaign instead roughly split its resources between the base and swing voters. “We knew if we turned out our base, we could split independent voters or lose them slightly, and still win,” Dowd says. (polipundit)
6. "Redneck vote" is a liberal myth: Ten years and another Democratic defeat later, and liberals are at it again. The Angry White Male has been transmuted into the Bigoted Christian Redneck.
   In the postelection analyses, the liberal elite just about lost its mind denouncing the return of medieval primitivism. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times achieved the highest level of hysteria, cursing the GOP for pandering to "isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism" in its unfailing drive to "summon our nasty devils."
   Whence comes this fable? With President Bush increasing his share of the vote among Hispanics, Jews, women (especially married women), Catholics, seniors and even African-Americans, on what does this victory-of-the-homophobic-evangelical rest? Its origins lie in a single question in the Election Day exit poll. The urban myth grew around the fact that "moral values" ranked highest in the answer to Question J: "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for President?"
   
   This does not deter the myth of the Bigoted Christian Redneck from dominating the thinking of liberals and from infecting the blue-state media. So once again they angrily claim the moral high ground, while standing in the ruins of yet another humiliating electoral defeat. (nydailynews)
7. Exit Ashcroft - abused, maligned, but right after all: Remember the hoopla about Ashcroft ordering those topless statues to be covered up? The immediate reaction from the entire press corps, late night comics, and all other "enlightened" people was that Ashcroft was proving he was a prude, a square, a Comstock. I think, in fact, he is probably all of those things. But for reasons that still elude me, many people apparently think we need a real hepcat serving as America's chief law enforcement officer.
   Anyway, the statues were covered up because news organizations just thought it was hilarious to frame pictures of Ashcroft from just the right angle so that he was always depicted alongside a giant bronze boobie or two. Of course, doing such a thing to Janet Reno would have been outrageous, but with Ashcroft the assumption was he should lighten up. So an aide ordered the statues covered because that was the only way to stop it. Politically it was a dumb move, but Ashcroft's prudery wasn't what caused it. The press' giggling obsession with it did
   
   By conventional standards, Ashcroft was among the best attorney generals in American history. Violent crime dropped 27 percent on his watch, reaching a 30-year low. Federal gun crime prosecutions rose 75 percent, and gun crimes dropped - something that should please liberals. By unconventional standards his service was heroic. There hasn't been a single terrorist attack since 9/11, despite all predictions by experts and efforts by terrorists to the contrary. Ashcroft was willing to take gross abuse to do what was necessary. Indeed, even the 9/11 commission certified that the Patriot Act was absolutely necessary to fix many of the problems that led to that awful day. (jonah goldberg, townhall)
8. The Architects of Defeat: Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry’s daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag.
   “If we can’t win this damn election,” the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, “with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55% of the country believing we’re heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can’t win this one, then we can’t win shit! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party.”
   Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.
   
   But shouldn’t it have been obvious that Iraq and the war on terror were the real story of this campaign? Only these Washington insiders, stuck in an anachronistic 1990s mind-set and re-fighting the ’92 election, could think that the economy would be the driving factor in a post-9/11 world with Iraq in flames. That the campaign’s leadership failed to recognize that it was no longer “the economy, stupid,” was the tragic flaw of the race.
   In conversations with Kerry insiders over the last nine months, I’ve heard a recurring theme: that it was Shrum and the Clintonistas (including Greenberg, Carville and senior advisor Joe Lockhart) who dominated the campaign in the last two months and who were convinced that this election was going to be won on domestic issues, like jobs and healthcare, and not on national security.
   As Tom Vallely, the Vietnam War veteran whom Kerry tapped to lead the response to the Swift boat attacks, told me: “I kept telling Shrum that before you walk through the economy door, you’re going to have to walk through the terrorism/Iraq door. But, unfortunately, the Clinton team, though technically skillful, could not see reality — they could only see their version of reality. And that was always about pivoting to domestic issues. As for Shrum, he would grab on to anyone’s strategy; he had none of his own.”
   
   Just how misguided the campaign’s leadership was can be seen in the battle that took place between Vernon Jordan, the campaign’s debate negotiator, and Cahill and Shrum. “They were so opposed,” someone close to the negotiations told me, “to Jordan’s accepting the first debate being all about foreign policy, in exchange for a third debate, that Jordan and Cahill had a knock down, drag out argument. It was so bad that Jordan had to send her flowers before they could make up.” It was a familiar strategic battle with Jordan siding with those who believed that unless Kerry could win on national security, he would not win period.
   Behind the scenes, former President Clinton also kept up the drumbeat, telling Kerry in private conversations right to the end that he should focus on the economy rather than Iraq or the war on terror, and that he should come out in favor of all 11 state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage — a move that would have been a political disaster for a candidate who had already been painted as an unprincipled flip-flopper. Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq here and there until the end of the race (how could he not?), but the vast majority of what came out of the campaign, including Kerry’s radio address 10 days before the election, was on domestic issues
   
   As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness. Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes? In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters. It appears that you couldn’t teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It’s time for some fresh political puppies. (ariannaonline)

Humor

• Blue State Blues as Coastal Parents Battle Invasion of Dollywood Values: "I'm not sure where we went wrong," says Ellen McCormack, nervously fondling the recycled paper cup holding her organic Kona soy latte. "It seems like only yesterday Rain was a carefree little boy at the Montessori school, playing non-competitive musical chairs with the other children and his care facilitators."
  "But now..." she pauses, staring out the window of her postmodern Palo Alto home. The words are hesitant, measured, bearing a tale of family heartbreak almost too painful for her to recount. "But now, Rain insists that I call him Bobby Ray."
  Even as her voice is choked with emotion, she summons an inner courage -- a mother's courage -- and leads me down the hall to "Bobby Ray's" bedroom, for a firsthand glimpse at the psychic devastation that claimed her son.
  She opens the door to a reveal a riot of George Jones CDs, reflective 'mudflap mama' stickers, empty foil packs of Red Man, and U.S. Marine recruiting posters. In the middle of the room: a makeshift table made from a utility cable spool, bearing a the remains of a gutted catfish.
  "This used to be all Ikea," she says, rocking on heels between heaved sobs. "It's too late for us. Maybe it's not to late for me to warn others." (iowahawk.typepad)

Death of Arafat

1. How Arafat Got Away With It: It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third World after the demise of the European empires.
   Yet even as these rulers were torturing their own people, they were lionized in the salons of the West. European and American intellectuals, motivated by a combination of guilt for their countries' past conduct, vicarious zest for revolutionary adventure and condescension toward Africans and Asians who were thought incapable of conforming to Western standards, were willing to excuse any crime committed in the name of "national liberation."Arafat benefited from this deference ever since taking over the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969. He and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against various enemies and "collaborators." In return, Arafat reaped worldwide adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize.
   George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people "to elect new leaders … not compromised by terror" and to "build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless "peace process," but it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by Arafat continues to exist . (Max Boot, LaTimes)
2. Arafat the monster: In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."
   God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.
   Perhaps his signal contribution to the practice of political terror was the introduction of warfare against children. On one black date in May 1974, three PLO terrorists slipped from Lebanon into the northern Israeli town of Ma'alot. They murdered two parents and a child whom they found at home, then seized a local school, taking more than 100 boys and girls hostage and threatening to kill them unless a number of imprisoned terrorists were released. When Israeli troops attempted a rescue, the terrorists exploded hand grenades and opened fire on the students. By the time the horror ended, 25 people were dead; 21 of them were children.
   Thirty years later, no one speaks of Ma'alot anymore. The dead children have been forgotten. Everyone knows Arafat's name, but who ever recalls the names of his victims?
   So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands of who died at Arafat's command. (Jacoby, Boston Globe)

Democrat Angst

1. New Group to Tout Democrats' Centrist Values- Third Way Plans to Focus On 'Moderate Majority': As Democrats continue to stagger from last week's election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile.
   Among Third Way's programs will be a "New South" project, aimed at crafting policies and political strategies for cultural and values issues that have played against Democrats in that region in recent decades. The project will be led by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a vice chairman.
   Third Way will also conduct a national security retreat and craft policy initiatives on health care, taxes, tort reform and Social Security reform -- all identified by Bush as key items on his second-term agenda. (wapo)
2. Worse than it looks: By this measure, if the electorate was as unchanged as many have suggested, the Kerry-Nader percentage of the vote in each state in 2004 should have equaled the Gore-Nader percentage in 2000.
   But this was decidedly not the case. Although John Kerry received a larger share of the vote than Al Gore in 25 states, this masks the general decrease of the Left Coalition, which was often substantial. In only three states–most noticeably in Howard Dean’s Vermont, but slightly in South Dakota and Wyoming, where the Left is at its weakest–did the score of the Left Coalition clearly increase between 2000 and 2004. Take, as one of the most conspicuous examples, John Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts. Kerry slightly outpolled Al Gore. But this point is hardly as relevant since in 2000 Gore and Nader combined to receive 66 percent of the vote. Without Nader on the ballot in Massachusetts, Kerry was still only able to poll 62 percent–a notable decline, even with the added pull of a favorite son on the ballot. In New York, 64 percent of voters chose the Left coalition in 2000, while only 60 percent did so in 2004. There were instances of larger losses in other Blue states: Hawaii 8 points, Rhode Island 7 points, and in Connecticut and New Jersey 6 points each. Changes of this magnitude belie the notion of “stability” that [Harold] Meyerson and others have advanced.
   THE DECLINE of the Left Coalition was not restricted to the Blue states. In 17 of the 31 Red states this year, it lost anywhere between 2 and 6 percentage points. Alabama, Nebraska, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Arizona, comprising 47 electoral votes, witnessed at least a 4 percent decline in Leftist support. Because Nader’s share in these states was generally small in both elections, these losses came almost entirely at the Democrats’ expense.
   These changes qualify the interpretation that Bush increased his popular vote percentage simply by turning out evangelical voters in the Red states. The construction of the national Republican majority drew on broader sources of support. The Left Coalition was losing strength across the board, above all in Blue states, including Rhode Island or Massachusetts, where Republicans took out few TV ads and where there were no mega-church rallies. The Left Coalition is facing erosion of its percentage of the vote in its own territory, while Republicans are expanding their lead in states they already control and increasing their share in states they do not. These results hardly resemble the 2000 election. (weeklystandard)(polipundit)
3. Myths of the Republican Mullah-cracy -- You can't blame Jesus for the voters' choice: Few reporters or commentators appear to have gone back to examine the 2000 exit polls, which would seem to be necessary if one wishes to assert a trend.
   I did. I found that the percentage of voters sampled who said they attended church at least weekly was the same—42 percent—in both 2000 and 2004. The percentage never attending church was also the same, at 15 percent. The middle group, those attending occasionally, was, you guessed it, 42 percent each time. Interestingly, while Bush slightly improved his standing among frequent churchgoers, by about a point in 2004, his support grew by 3 to 4 points among those attending seldom or never.
   Yep, it was the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004. (reason)
4. Europe Must Adapt to U.S. View on Terror, NATO Chief Says: "Your country focused very much on the fight against terror while in Europe we focused to a lesser extent on the consequences for the world," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary general, said in an interview. "We looked at it from different angles, and that for me is one of the reasons you saw such frictions in the trans-Atlantic relationship."
   As a result, he said, Europe was lagging behind the United States in merging external and internal security to combat terrorism, and Europe had to catch up. (nyt)

Other

• Liberal groupthink is anti-intellectual: Conservatives on college campuses scored a tactical hit when the American Enterprise Institute's magazine published a survey of voter registration among humanities and social-science faculty members several years ago. More than nine out of 10 professors belonged to the Democratic or Green party, an imbalance that contradicted many liberal academics' protestations that diversity and pluralism abound in higher education. Further investigations by people like David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, coupled with well-publicized cases of discrimination against conservative professors, reinforced the findings and set "intellectual diversity" on the agenda of state legislators and members of Congress.The public has now picked up the message that "campuses are havens for left-leaning activists," according to a Chronicle poll of 1,000 adult Americans this year. Half of those surveyed -- 68 percent who call themselves "conservative" and even 30 percent who say they are "liberal" -- agreed that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach. The matter, however, is clearly not just one of perception. Indeed, in another recent survey, this one conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles, faculty members themselves chose as their commitment "far left" or "liberal" more than two and a half times as often as "far right" or "conservative." As a Chronicle article last month put it: "On left-leaning campuses around the country, professors on the right feel disenfranchised."
  Why?The obvious answer, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is that academics shun conservative values and traditions, so their curricula and hiring practices discourage non-leftists from pursuing academic careers. What allows them to do that, while at the same time they deny it, is that the bias takes a subtle form. Although I've met several conservative intellectuals in the last year who would love an academic post but have given up after years of trying, outright blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond.Some fields' very constitutions rest on progressive politics and make it clear from the start that conservative outlooks will not do. Schools of education, for instance, take constructivist theories of learning as definitive, excluding realists (in matters of knowledge) on principle, while the quasi-Marxist outlook of cultural studies rules out those who espouse capitalism. If you disapprove of affirmative action, forget pursuing a degree in African-American studies. If you think that the nuclear family proves the best unit of social well-being, stay away from women's studies.
  The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.
  Sometimes, however, the Assumption steps over the line into arrogance, as when at a dinner a job candidate volunteered her description of a certain "racist, sexist, and homophobic" organization, and I admitted that I belonged to it. Or when two postdocs from Germany at a nearby university stopped by my office to talk about American literature. As they sat down and I commented on how quiet things were on the day before Thanksgiving, one muttered, "Yes, we call it American Genocide Day." (chronicle of higher ed)
• Why Bush won -- gut reasons: I think the people tended toward Mr. Bush because the American people judged him to be the better man. He seemed to have the better character of the two candidates. He'd tell you what he was going to do, and why, and then he'd do it. He'd been doing that for four years. He did it in the campaign, too. He was dependable, and he was predictable. It's nice to have a predictable president. It's not nice in the nuclear age to have a surprising one. (peggy noonan, wsj)
• Tribute to a fallen marine: Joshua Michael Palmer was born on Nov. 28th, 1978. He loved to read, he’s read more books than most people have heard of. He particularly loved history and politics. He also played football in High School. He had a very close group of friends while growing up, called the Banning Boys. They were like brothers. In High School, he was known as a leader. He was the guy who always knew what to do, in any situation. While in High School, he went on a trip with his friends to Mexico, and saw the children selling Chiclets gum on the streets. He saw the corruption of the government, and vowed that he would never let that sort of corruption ruin the lives of his children, or the children of America. That’s when he decided to join the Marine Corps., to protect America from that sort of life.
  Josh hated Communism. He saw what it had done to the people of the world. Once, a professor in college told the class that he thought Communism was the best way to live, that we ought to share everything, all of our money, and that doctors ought to be paid the same as gardeners. Josh stood up and asked the teacher to give his paycheck to the gardener, who was working outside. The professor was stunned for a minute, so Josh continued. He said “If it’s so great, why don’t you start? Sign over a check, right now”. The professor had never been confronted this way before. Josh always, always stood up for what he believed in. That is one thing that all of his friends have vowed to do, in memory of him, because it was so important to him that people live by their words and stand up for their beliefs. On anther occasion, this same professor began talking about the Holocaust. Josh calmly walked to the front of the class, and wrote 10,000,000 + on the board, the number of people killed by Communism. He turned to the class and said “The Nazis killed 6 million Jews. Communism has killed many more people, of all religions. Yet our professor will talk to you about how evil the Nazis were, but not tell you how evil Communism is.” Then he sat down.
  It is important to know that the snipers, when the US soldiers got there, were strapped with C-4, a very dangerous explosive. They were cowards and monsters. They had enough to blow up the entire city block. It was a civilian block, and many innocent people would have been killed. Josh died protecting other people, the same as the way he had lived. (hugh hewitt)
• Dean Esmay response to John Perry Barlow "Magnanimous" post (deanesmay.com)

Fallujah Assault

1. OODA strategy: It's nice to see that someone else besides me has studied the OODA Loop. It was the brainchild of the greatest fighter pilot the US Air Force ever had as well as the force behind development of the F-16, F-18, and A-10. Without John Boyd the defenses of the USA would be much different. Read the book Boyd - The Fighter Pilot That Changed The Art Of War.
2. The OODA loops analysis of warfare while on the surface seems simple, it is also a very deep one as well and demonstrates exactly how networked warfare will create the advantage over the enemy. One could think about it in terms of blogs and the MSM.....Blogs observation on a topic, then orientation to it, then decision to publish followed by the act of doing it is infintely tighter than the MSM right now. Consequently, the MSM is fighting a losing battle in many way against the superior OODA loop of blogs. Our forces right now, particularly the Marines who are big fans of Boyd (they adopted his teachings while the Air Force exiled him), are operating in a decentralized way with massive amounts of communication (re: battle field internet), superior observational tools, and the ability to immediately and precisely act on these sources of information. Think a MSM organizational resources coupled with the decentralized networked power of the blog. The results are disasterous for our opponents, and we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg as far as these capabilities go.
3. OODA loop...Observation - Orientation - Decision - ACTION!This technique, getting INSIDE the enemy's decision-response cycle, has been broadcast and taught at nearly all levels of American military decision-making, right down to units on the ground!Because of this, (and because of technological advances NOT available to Iraqis-Syrians-Sudanese) Americans are disrupting and destroying the best-laid plans of the mujaheddin on their home territory, and are doing so with very few casualties!
4. Fallujah Again (belmontclub)
5. 'I got my kills ... I just love my job': Toby Harnden in Fallujah observes American soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division taskforce avenging their fallen comrades as battle begins (telegraph.co.uk)
6. Bomb fiend was white: THE suicide bomber who killed three Black Watch heroes was a white al-Qaeda terrorist, Army chiefs said yesterday.
   The revelation came as soldiers reacted with outrage at an alleged home video of the attack — claimed by terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — aired on an extremists’ website.Troops from the tough Scottish infantry regiment called the video’s makers “animals” — and told of their disgust at images of insurgents supposedly stamping on body parts left near the scene (thesun.co.uk)

Election

1. Election '04 epiphanies: In 2000, Americans were reminded that electoral votes select presidents. In 2004, Democrats were reminded that Bruce Springsteen does not. Other Nov. 2 epiphanies include:
   In 1984, Walter Mondale's running mate was Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic woman from New York. Ronald Reagan carried Catholics, women, New York -- and even Ferraro's district. Vice presidential nominees rarely sway this or that national demographic group. However, a running mate should help carry his or her state. But last week Bush carried North Carolina, getting 295,026 more votes than in 2000, and carried John Edwards' home county, as he did four years ago. Edwards was supposed to cut Bush's appeal in rural America. He did not.
   Republicans should send a thank-you note to San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom -- liberalism's George Wallace, apostle of ``progressive'' lawlessness. He did even more than the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to energize the 11 state campaigns to proscribe same-sex marriage. (george will)
2. Elizabeth Edwards DU'er? (polipundit)
3. Bush mandate (podhoretz, nypost)
4. The 51 percent nation: Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched the "old media" --the New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC, and NBC--beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years. (michael barone)
5. Kerry run in '08 called conceivable: The former aide said Kerry plans to work closely with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is expected to replace Tom Daschle as Senate Democratic leader, to form the "loyal opposition" to Bush. He also plans to revamp his staff and meet this week with Senate and former campaign aides to plot strategy for his political reemergence. The Senate returns to business in a lame duck session next week, and Kerry is determined to have an agenda when he steps back into public view.
   Toward that end, "he has been working the phones like crazy," the aide said, and "is determined that he will never let Democrats get beaten again on the ground game." (boston globe)
6. 'Fired Up' Kerry Returning to Senate Aides Say He Wants to Act as Counter to Bush, and Possibly Run in 2008: Several Democrats expressed skepticism about Kerry's plans, saying they believe the party needs a fresh face and must turn a corner. One well-known Democratic operative who worked with the Kerry campaign said opposition to Bush, not excitement about Kerry, was behind the senator's fundraising success. "If he thinks he's going to capitalize on that going forward, he's in for a surprise," said the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
   Another Democrat involved in Kerry's campaign strategy -- who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid -- said: "I can't imagine people are going to say, 'It worked pretty well last time. This is what we need next time.' "
   
   "I'm not in denial. Reality hit me," Carville said. "Let's take the greatest morality story of all -- we're born again," he added, in a play on words connoting both his view that the party needs a fundamental change, as well as the importance of evangelical Christians to Bush.
   "We have to treat the disease, not the symptom," Carville said. "The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and we're not doing that."
   Carville said that the party's concern about interest groups had resulted in "litanies, not a narrative."
   "The party needs a narrative," he said. adding later that one possibility would to become "an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party." (wapo)
7. Democratic Party must be 'born again' says Carville: Democrats are debating what went right and what went wrong in last Tuesday's election, in which President Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry, and Democrats also lost seats in both the House and Senate. Some have said there is no need for soul-searching, and blamed the losses on a difficult election-year map or a poor candidate at the top of the ticket.
   "The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country," said Mr. Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign win. "We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again."
   "We can deny this crap, but I'm out of the denial. I'm about reality here," Mr. Carville told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "We are an opposition party, and as of right now, not a particularly effective one. You can't deny reality here." He said the party is desperately in need of a compelling narrative to tell voters, rather than the "litany of issues" the party stands for now. (washtimes)
8. Magnanimous Defeat: I feel as if half the people in America have just forced a fat crow down my gullet. I am compelled to admit that I am genuinely out of touch with half my country.
   At the very least, I need to take the other side seriously. Dismissing them as a bunch of homophobic, racist, Bible-waving, know-nothing troglodytes, however true that may be of a few, only authorizes them to return the favor. I don't want somebody calling me a dope-smoking, fag-loving, one-worlder weirdo, however true that might be. We are all masks that God wears, whatever God that is. We might try to treat one another with according reverence. At least we might try to listen as though the other side might have a point.I truly think we all owe one another an apology.
   I have a terrible admission to make. I've been so fanatically opposed to this administration that I have taken dark satisfaction in their failures, even though they were American failures as well. I welcomed growing indications that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating into a sump-hole of back-alley insurgency. Good economic news was bad economic news as far as I was concerned, and vice versa. I was tickled to death with Al Qaqaa and its terrorist-purloined WMDs, and not just because the name was so great. Surely all these bad tidings would eventually add up to an indictment that would convict Bush in the eyes of the American people and they would rouse themselves from Fox-hypnosis and 'possum sleep and vote for change.
   But it didn't turn out that way. While I still believe that half of America is hallucinating on hot religion and bad TV, I can't say I have been any too sane, having been delivered into a condition where I took comfort in the successes of our enemies and frowned at news of economic recovery. Despite my own financial anxieties, and those of all around me, I have been so zealous that my own well-being was secondary in importance to the political damage bad times might do the Bush administration. Now that's hallucination. And I'm sorry. (john perry barlow, typepad)
9. Take a ride to exurbia: I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation and I could never find a way.
   The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. Everybody is giving advice to Democrats these days, and mine is don't take any advice from anybody with access to the media - including me, just to be safe.
   Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there. (david brooks, nyt)
10. Social issues shock Dems: Democrats might want to tone down the contempt for evangelicals in particular and religious people in general that increasingly flows through their secular-dominated party. This is a very religious nation. If the Democrats aspire to become the majority party, why do they tolerate so much antireligious behavior and expression? They also might have a word with out-of-control adjuncts of the party like People for the American Way, whose mission is apparently to hammer away at religious conservatives, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is always ready to descend on every 6-year-old who writes a school essay on Jesus or who says, "God bless you" after a sneeze. Do they think religious voters fail to notice?
    They might also have second thoughts about the strategy of getting judges to impose solutions that they want but that the voters are unwilling to accept. It is beginning to dawn on many Democrats that John Kerry may have lost the election on Nov. 18, 2003, when Massachusetts's highest court, by a 4-to-3 vote, conjured up a right to gay marriage that nobody else had ever located anywhere in the state Constitution. In a backlash, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed easily in all 11 states that had them on the ballot last week, including Ohio. Incredibly, Democratic leaders and the media didn't see this coming, though polls keep showing opposition to gay marriage of around 60 percent.
    The other thing the Democrats might do is to acquire a copy of Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? and then ignore everything he says. Frank seems to be saying that voters are ignorant to vote on social issues. The book is an argument for a return to the same old-time liberalism that has paralyzed the Democratic Party. Frank has no understanding of why cultural issues are important to so many Americans. The fact is that the Democrats are unlikely to win the presidency again until they do something about the cultural divide. (John Leo)
11. Why Americans Hate Democrats—A DialogueForget Starbucks—head to Wal-Mart instead: There are those—like Walter Dellinger—who argue that last Tuesday's events were less than disastrous for Democrats. In fact, things really aren't so bad, they say. After all, as Bruce Reed points out, we really won last time, and this time, well, Kerry nearly hit the finish line. "See, the people still love us Democrats" some will say. "We just need to tinker, and those of us in Washington will have plenty of time to figure it out. We'll have a confab. Eat croissants. Sip some tea. Eat health food. When not discussing politics, we can sit and discuss gyms, vacations, and how much we love our money managers."
    But Democrats don't seem to learn. They keep telling people what's good for them. And the people keep telling the Democrats they're wrong. In fact, this election probably concludes the critical realignment in American voting patterns that began in 1968 and resulted in the election of Richard M. Nixon. The legacy of that Democratic defeat is the nearly impregnable Republican coalition of Southern Protestants and Northern—especially Midwestern—Catholics. Voting as a result has been a fairly constant dynamic of region and religion. White men over 40 have been leading the charge with voting levers in hand as scimitars to slay nearly every Democratic messenger. They'll sacrifice better economics to protect icons and their sense of faith.
    So, dump the croissants and spend some time at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Go to the local Wal-Mart, not to Starbucks. The Democrats might learn a lot more and then begin to understand the long road to winning this republic back.
    Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, has worked on campaigns on four continents, in nine foreign nations, and in 46 American states at every level, and served on the creative team for President Clinton's re-election effort. (sheinkopf, slate)
12. Why did Kerry Lose? It wasn't "values": It is easy to explain the election. Too easy. Depending on your instincts and how much time you are given to think, you can say that the electorate has moved to the right or that John Kerry flip-flopped or that the Democrats were unable to appeal to the moral values of people. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that President Bush was re-elected by people who disagree with him on what America should be. His evidence is that "Christian fundamentalists" have used their "religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad." Garry Wills has said much the same thing.
    These explanations are wide of the mark. The nation did not undergo a rightward shift in 2004 any more than it had when it elected Reagan in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984. The policy preferences of Americans are remarkably stable, a fact that has been confirmed by virtually every scholar who has looked at the matter.
    There is no doubt that John Kerry showed great skill at embracing deeply contradictory positions, but that does not make him unusual; all politicians have mastered the art of self-contradiction. What was remarkable in this election is that one candidate, President Bush, never changed: He said what he meant and meant what he said.
    I draw lessons from the election, but not very deep ones. One is that the profound liberal bias among many big-city newspapers and most TV stations did not determine the outcome. Evan Thomas was wrong when he said that the left media would add 15 points to the Democrats' total, but may have been right when he later scaled down his projection to five points.
    What is most impressive about this election has been the extraordinary success both parties have had in registering new voters and getting them to the polls. Suppose the Democrats had done this better than the GOP. The result might well have been a Bush loss in Florida and Ohio, and thus the loss of the election. Our press would now be running columns about the liberal shift in public opinion, the defeat of fundamentalists, and the importance of antiwar sentiments. But in fact the Democrats did not do a better job than the Republicans. Perhaps the columnists should now just say that Karl Rove out-organized his opponents. (james q. wilson, aei)
13. Liberal lamentations: One liberal acquaintance, who had predicted John Kerry would crush George W. Bush, raised the ghost of Adolf Hitler and the Inquisition in the same sentence: "It's 1933 again" and "the theocracy is coming."
    Writing for the leftist Web page Slate, Jane Smiley expresses a theme heard often among many liberals: "The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry." Other disparaging labels, including "stupid" and "moron" were hurled at Bush voters by various lefties. If so many people - more than 59 million - who voted for President Bush are stupid, what does this say about our costly and monopolistic public school system?
    The New York Times' Thomas Friedman wrote a column headlined "Two Nations Under God." He, too, detects the strong odor of a coming theocracy. Can the beheaders be far behind?
    Other columnists - from Maureen Dowd to Paul Krugman - were apoplectic in their response to Bush's impressive victory. They demonstrate how clueless they are about a majority of Americans whose worldview differs from their own.
    The condescension and elitism expressed by the left displays intolerance at its worst. The left is again exposed as hypocritical, preaching tolerance and inclusion, but practicing intolerance and exclusion of all ideas not in conformity with their own. Has it never occurred to liberals that they might be objectively wrong?
    If you study this map, you have to conclude that America is not becoming more divided; it is slowly, but perceptively, becoming more conservative and Republican.
    It's difficult to select a favorite line from all of the insulting and insane comments made by liberal commentators, but Garry Wills had one of the best. Writing in The New York Times, Wills said: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?"
    Maybe so, if you consider what a higher and really intelligent authority says: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1). (cal thomas)
14. Polls apart: liberals alienated from mainstream America: There is a word for this sort of condescension, and it isn't fear, concern, or anxiety about the impulses of Middle America. It is anti-Americanism
    Critics of red America, needless to say, fancy themselves defenders of rationality. Or as Nation writer Eric Alterman puts it on his Altercation blog: "The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Neatly summarizing the views of this "reality-based community," Kerry volunteer Jessica Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts told The Boston Globe: "Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."
    If this is what passes for rational discourse on the left--and for too many liberals these days, it is--then just who is it that belongs to the "reality-based community" and just who is it that suffers under the weight of what the left used to call "false consciousness"? The question merits an answer, since Wills and otherwise sensible voices on the left--such as The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who professes himself "alarmed that so many of our fellow citizens could look the other way and not hold Bush accountable for utter incompetence in Iraq" and "amazed that a majority was not concerned about heaping a huge debt burden on our children just to give large tax breaks to the rich"--see their task as raising the level of consciousness of Americans out of step with reality. But what if their own estrangement leads not to insight, but rather to blindness and, more important, to separation from the very Americans they mean to influence?
    To be alienated these days, after all, is what Todd Gitlin once described as "a rock-bottom prerequisite for membership" in an establishment of its own. That establishment, comprising much of the media, academia, the punditocracy, and indeed entire swaths of blue America, forms a cohesive community--with its own rewards, norms, and favorite enemies. And as the post-election commentary has revealed, one of those enemies happens to be mainstream America. The conceit, of course, is that none of its residents are listening when the likes of Smiley craps all over them. But they are, and have been all along. Moreover, as nearly every election going back to 1968 shows, the more liberals become estranged from Middle America, the more Middle America becomes estranged from them. The latter reaction, needless to say, generates far more votes. So long as the "reality-based community" denigrates the heartland's supposed ignorance, reality-based America will respond in kind. (lawrence kaplan, tnr)
15. Why Democrats are tagged as the party without values: According to the New York Times, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, reflecting on her party's recent losses in the presidential, Senate and House elections, asked: "How did a party that is filled with people with values – and I am a person with values – get tagged as the party without values?"
    Gov. Napolitano, your party does indeed have very many people with values in it. But the Democratic Party is no more representative of the average Democrat's values than the National Council of Churches is of the average Protestant's values. Both are far to the left of their membership.
    To most Americans, Michael Moore is a Marxist who has utter contempt for most of his fellow Americans, who goes abroad and tells huge audiences how stupid and venal his country is, and in his dishonest propaganda film, portrays the American military as callous buffoons. Yet, this radical was given the most honored seat at the Democratic Party convention in Boston, next to former President Jimmy Carter.
    To most Americans, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are race-baiting demagogues. Yet they are heroes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans do not see their country as the bigoted and racist nation regularly depicted by both black and white Democratic leaders.
    To most Americans, the American military is not only heroic – it is regarded as more important to safeguarding freedom than any other human institution, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the United Nations or the university, to cite three major Democratic Party affiliates. To virtually the entire Left, which includes the Democratic Party, the military is, at best, a necessary evil. Otherwise, the overriding doctrine is "Make love, not war." That is why Harvard still refuses to allow ROTC training – and it is unlikely that either of the Massachusetts senators even finds that wrong, let alone as reprehensible as most Americans do. (dennis prager, wnd)
16. An ominous Specter: The key turning point was the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 and the massive smear campaign against him. No nominee to the Supreme Court was ever more qualified than Judge Bork but Senator Specter voted against him.
    At one crucial point, Senator Pat Leahy took a cheap shot at Judge Bork by saying that he had earned large consulting fees in some years, when he was a law professor, as if that were something dishonorable. What was not revealed to the public was that those were years in which Professor Bork's wife was fatally ill and he needed that money to do all that he could for her.
    But, when it was proposed to end the hearings for the day, Senator Arlen Specter refused to agree. He wasn't prepared to wait to get his shots in against Judge Bork. Senator Specter's agenda was more important to him than common decency.
    Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States. (thomas sowell)
17. Bush lost PA because of Specter endorsement: Exit polls reveal that President Bush may have miscalculated in endorsing pro-abortion Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in his primary battle against conservative challenger Pat Toomey.
    Needless to say, Bush's endorsement of Specter angered pro-life Republicans across the state, and now exit polls suggest that many of them did not show up to vote on election day.While national polls indicate that moral values was the number one priority for 22% of all voters, only 18% of Pennsylvania voters listed moral values as their top priority. Since 80% of these "moral values" voters nationwide supported the President, their lower turnout in Pennsylvania probably gave Kerry his narrow margin of victory in the Keystone State.Furthermore, while Catholic voters played a major role in Ohio and Florida, Pennsylvania Catholics did not turn out in force for the President.
    What do these numbers mean? That Bush will further alienate his base if he allows Specter to Chair the Senate Judiciary Committee.(seamax)
18. The political genius of George W. Bush: Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush's re-election victory last week and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century. (watson, cnn)

Other

• Unlucky in riches: For a lot of people, winning the lottery is the American dream. But for many lottery winners, the reality is more like a nightmare. "Winning the lottery isn't always what it's cracked up to be," says Evelyn Adams, who won the New Jersey lottery not just once but twice (1985, 1986) to the tune of $5.4 million. Today the money is all gone and Adams lives in a trailer.(bankrate, yahoo)(bankrate)
• Poll: French see Arafat as hero: The French regard Yasser Arafat as a hero rather than a terrorist, according to a new poll.
  Asked to choose whether the Palestinian Authority chairman is a "hero of national resistance" or a terrorist, 43 percent chose the former and 27% the latter.
  Ten percent said Arafat fit into both categories, while 9% said he was neither.
  The poll, published Monday and commissioned jointly by the Lib ration newspaper and a national public radio station, also found that three times as many French people hold Prime Minister Ariel Sharon more responsible for Middle East violence than hold Arafat.
  In addition, 34% said they had more sympathy for the Palestinians, as opposed to 13% for Israel. (jerusalem post)
• LOOK HOW FAR HARVARD HAS STRAYED:I have to remain anonymous, but on November 6, 2004, I went to see an acapella concert at Harvard. It was the Harvard Pitches, a female group, and the Din and Tonics, a male group. Often these two groups will group up to get larger audiences.They had a professor act as the MC. This is not unusual, but not common. I've seen other professors MC and make jokes before.
  He introduced himself as teaching Human Sexuality. It originally had 90 students. Then 150. And now, over 400 students. It was becoming a very popular course.
  Course Objectives This course is intended to challenge students to think critically, to understand that sexuality and responses to intimaterelationships occur in a psychosocial context, to appreciate the importance of examining key psychological and interpersonal issues from a scientific perspective, to identify research needs in the field, and to examine the implications of this knowledge on issues ranging from one's personal behavior to social policy. Much of your learning through this course may consist of uncovering myths, half-truths, factual errors, and distortions you have accumulated throughout your lives. Through dedicated participation in this course, you may become more knowledgeable and accepting of yourself and others as sexual beings. Ideally, you will be better able to view and appreciate sexuality as a normal, integral, and joyful part of being human, while becoming more aware and tolerant of others whose views and lives may differ considerably from your own. Many cultures convey few positive and affirming messages related to the discovery and expression of sexuality. (course syllabus). (spiritdaily.com)

Presidential Race Completed

1. Freedom squelches terrorist violence: A John F. Kennedy School of Government researcher has cast doubt on the widely held belief that terrorism stems from poverty, finding instead that terrorist violence is related to a nation's level of political freedom. (harvard gazette)
2. Suspicions grow that Arafat is dying of AIDS (israelinsider)
3. American Exceptionalism:The message of Tuesday’s verdict. (victor davis hanson, nro)
4. We weren't dumb enough to vote Kerry: The American people don't want to be condescended to by ketchup heiresses, billionaire currency speculators, $20-million-a-picture Hollywood pretty boys, and multi-millionaire documentary-makers posing as bluecollar lardbutts.
   The Democrats keep talking to people as if they're like John Edwards's 40-year mill-workers, but that's not what work is any more, and a 23-year-old hairdresser can know enough about starting and running a business to be unimpressed at a few footling tax credits dangled in front of her by a 60-year-old lifelong "public servant" lucky enough to be living a grand old life thanks to his billionaire wife's first husband. (mark steyn)
5. The Times Wrings Its Hands
   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. (powerlineblog)
6. Tire slashing update
   On Tuesday we noted that thirty vans rented by the Republican Party in Milwaukee to drive voters to the polls had been disabled by having their tires slashed. It appears that the Milwaukee police are making some progress investigating the case. Several readers have sent us the link to yesterday's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story by Cary Spivak and Dan Bice (registration required): "Tire slashing questions await Democrats' sons." The whole story is of interest; here are the first four paragraphs:
   The investigation has already led to the Tuesday arrest of Opel E. Simmons III, a veteran party activist from Virginia in town to work on John Kerry's presidential campaign. Simmons, 33, was released Thursday afternoon without being charged. (powerlineblog)
7. Tell Bill Frist to “just say no” to Arlen Specter for Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Remind Bill Frist what happened to Dan Rather when Rather betrayed the people through forged documents. Frist does not want to start Fristgate. (notspecter.com)
8. NOVELIST ROGER SIMON RESPONDS TO JANE SMILEY'S SCREED on the idiocy of American voters:
   The mind of a good fantasist must make those stories vivid. And to do that you have to live in those stories, believe your vision and live it like an actor. Contradictory ideas are to some extent not allowed because they would vitiate the drama, leaving only a lifeless essay.
   That means the novelist (myself included) must be something of an hysteric when writing. You are inventing your own private reality. That is what Ms. Smiley has done in her article.
   Indeed.
   UPDATE: Speaking of fantasy, Smiley has her Civil War history backwards, too:
   According to Smiley:
   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.
   Now, if history hasn't completely reversed itself recently, wasn't William Clarke Quantrill a Confederate raider? (instapundit)
9. I’m Loving It: Krugman’s post-election meltdown — and more! (nationalreview)
10. Krugman cutting off Dem nose to spite face (command-post.org)
11. Newsweek's dereliction of duty: Included with all the little anecdotes (Teresa Heinz Kerry is a royal pain — duh!) was at least one major political bombshell.
    After clinching the Democratic nomination, Newsweek reports, John Kerry was so desperate to enlist GOP Sen. John McCain as his running mate that he made an "outlandish" offer: He'd expand the role of vice president to include the duties of secretary of Defense.
    Moreover, Kerry — seeking the presidency in a time of grave international danger — promised to put McCain in charge of all U.S. foreign policy should they win.
    "You're out of your mind," McCain reportedly told Kerry. "I don't even know if it's constitutional."
    John Kerry clearly is not out of his mind — and nobody will ever confuse him with a constitutional scholar.
    No, one lesson here is that he is so utterly devoid of moral fiber that he'd trade away the heart and soul of the presidency in order to win the office in the first place. But how close would that election have been had the voters known that such an offer had been contemplated — much less made?
    Not very, we guess.
    So why did Newsweek sit on the news for all those months? (nypost)
12. Vandals Hit GOP Headquarters in N.Carolina: Vandals spray painted vulgar messages on the walls of the North Carolina Republican Party headquarters and left a burned effigy depicting President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, police said. Police said at least two windows were broken and it appeared that the vandals tried to put incendiary devices inside of the building.
    Investigators also found a partially burned, two-headed effigy in military fatigues. One head had the face of Bush and the other the face of Kerry.
    "The people who did this are sick," said Kevin Howell, communications director for the state Republican Party. "People don't understand that debate and elections are part of the process. This isn't how you act." (apmyway)
13. Reagan is Smiling: Let this be clear: this election is a reaffirmation of Ronald Reagan--his hopefulness, his vision, and his adherence to the conservative values that rescued the Republican Party from its political exile. After the celebrating, President Bush must get down to the hard work of achieving conservative goals. Doing this will expand the Republican majority not shrink it. As we beat back the terror threat around the globe, President Bush needs to offer further support for the culture of life, advance meaningful tax reform, appoint judges who don't act like super-legislators, and enforce our national borders for cultural and security reasons.
    In Shut Up & Sing, I wrote about the dynamic that we saw play in this election--the elites versus Americans. In the end, the latter will always win out. They find inspiration in Al Franken. We find inspiration in Tommy Franks. They admire Michael Moore. We admire Mel Gibson. We believe in partial privatization of Social Security. They believe in partial birth abortion. They think: "In Kofi we Trust." We think "In God We Trust." They pray for an opening at Spago. We pray for an opening in Heaven. (laura ingraham, townhall)
14. Democrats Map Out a Different Strategy The 2008 nominee must appeal to red states, analysts say. Hillary Clinton may not qualify. "We have to be very careful about the kind of candidate that we nominate and where that candidate comes from," said Scott Falmlen, executive director of the Democratic Party in North Carolina, where Easley won in a landslide Tuesday despite Kerry's lopsided loss there to President Bush. "This party has got to get in a position where it does not write off an entire section of the country."Dick Harpootlian, former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, was more blunt. "As of now, Hillary Clinton's a bad idea," he said.
    "Do we see a pattern here? No L.A., no Cambridge, no Manhattan," said Harpootlian, who remains a key party strategist in South Carolina. "The majority of America isn't from those areas, and they don't hold the values of these folks.". (latimes)
15. The Values-Vote Myth: Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.
    In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.
    This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong.
    Here are the facts. As Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center points out, there was no disproportionate surge in the evangelical vote this year. Evangelicals made up the same share of the electorate this year as they did in 2000. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who are pro-life. Sixteen percent of voters said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. There was no increase in the percentage of voters who say they pray daily. (david brooks, nytimes)
16. A question of values: A poorly devised exit poll question and a dose of spin are threatening to undermine our understanding of the 2004 presidential election.
    The news media has made much of the finding that a fifth of voters picked "moral values" as the most important issue in deciding their vote - as many as cited terrorism or the economy. The conclusion: moral values are ascendant as a political issue.
    The reporting accurately represents the exit poll data, but not reality. While morals and values are critical in informing political judgments, they represent personal characteristics far more than a discrete political issue. Conflating the two distorts the story of Tuesday's election.
    This distortion comes from a question in the exit poll, co-sponsored by the national television networks and The Associated Press, that asked voters what was the most important issue in their decision: taxes, education, Iraq, terrorism, economy/jobs, moral values or health care. Six of these are concrete, specific issues. The seventh, moral values, is not, and its presence on the list produced a misleading result.
    How do we know? Pre-election polls consistently found that voters were most concerned about three issues: Iraq, the economy and terrorism. When telephone surveys asked an open-ended issues question (impossible on an exit poll), answers that could sensibly be categorized as moral values were in the low single digits. In the exit poll, they drew 22 percent.
    Much of the misinterpretation of this election derives from a poorly worded question in the exit polls. When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote, voters were given the option of saying "moral values." But that phrase can mean anything - or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result.
    The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.
    He won because 53 percent of voters approved of his performance as president. Fifty-eight percent of them trust Bush to fight terrorism. They had roughly equal confidence in Bush and Kerry to handle the economy. Most approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq. Most see it as part of the war on terror. (nyt)
17. The Gay Marriage Myth Terrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election. The morality theory rests on three claims. The first is that gay-marriage bans led to higher turnout, chiefly among Christian conservatives. The second is that Bush performed especially well where gay marriage was on the ballot. The third is that in general, moral issues decided the election.
    The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small. Based on preliminary turnout estimates, 59.5 percent of the eligible voting population turned out in marriage-ban states, whereas 59.1 percent turned out elsewhere. This is a microscopic gap when compared to other factors. For example, turnout in battleground states was more than 7.5 points higher than it was in less-competitive states, and it increased much more over 2000 as well.
    
    politics
    Who's winning, who's losing, and why.The Gay Marriage MythTerrorism, not values, drove Bush's re-election.By Paul FreedmanPosted Friday, Nov. 5, 2004, at 1:16 PM PT
    Did "moral values"—in particular, the anti-gay marriage measures on ballots in 11 states this week—drive President Bush's re-election? That's the early conventional wisdom as Democrats begin soul-searching and finger-pointing. These measures are alleged to have drawn Christian conservatives to the polls, many of whom failed to vote last time. The theory is intriguing, but the data don't support it. Gay marriage and values didn't decide this election. Terrorism did.
    The morality theory rests on three claims. The first is that gay-marriage bans led to higher turnout, chiefly among Christian conservatives. The second is that Bush performed especially well where gay marriage was on the ballot. The third is that in general, moral issues decided the election.
    The evidence that having a gay-marriage ban on the ballot increased voter turnout is spotty. Marriage-ban states did see higher turnout than states without such measures. They also saw higher increases in turnout compared with four years ago. But these differences are relatively small. Based on preliminary turnout estimates, 59.5 percent of the eligible voting population turned out in marriage-ban states, whereas 59.1 percent turned out elsewhere. This is a microscopic gap when compared to other factors. For example, turnout in battleground states was more than 7.5 points higher than it was in less-competitive states, and it increased much more over 2000 as well.
    It's true that states with bans on the ballot voted for Bush at higher rates than other states. His vote share averaged 7 points higher in gay-marriage-banning states than in other states (57.9 vs. 50.9). But four years ago, when same-sex marriage was but a twinkle in the eye of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Bush's vote share was 7.3 points higher in these same states than in other states. In other words, by a statistically insignificant margin, putting gay marriage on the ballot actually reduced the degree to which Bush's vote share in the affected states exceeded his vote share elsewhere.
    If the morality gap doesn't explain Bush's re-election, what does? A good part of the answer lies in the terrorism gap. Nationally, 49 percent of voters said they trusted Bush but not Kerry to handle terrorism; only 31 percent trusted Kerry but not Bush. This 18-point gap is particularly significant in that terrorism is strongly tied to vote choice: 99 percent of those who trusted only Kerry on the issue voted for him, and 97 percent of those who trusted only Bush voted for him. Terrorism was cited by 19 percent of voters as the most important issue, and these citizens gave their votes to the president by an even larger margin than morality voters: 86 percent for Bush, 14 percent for Kerry. (slate)
18. Freedom vs. License: LIBERALs wondering why they lost Tuesday might want to consider the difference between "freedom" and "license."
    Freedom is about disagreeing with the policies of George W. Bush. License is referring to a wartime president as a "Nazi."
    Freedom is having thoughtful doubts about how we are conducting the War on Terror. License is automatically referring to every military effort we make as "another Vietnam," or an "incompetent failure" — even as our troops remain in harm's way.
    Freedom is about exploring the idea of "civil unions." License is about court-mandated same-sex "marriage" absent legislative input.
    Freedom is about respecting other peoples' opinions even when you disagree with them. License is assuming that anyone who doesn't think like you is a "moron."
    This election may very well have been about the difference between "freedom" and "license." License lost — decisively. (nypost)
19. The Vets AttackNew Battles: Underestimating the Swift Boat ads, the Kerry team suffered from their slow response. Then Bill Clinton's former aides arrived and staged a silent coup. Edwards played along, but his aides were indignant. They warned the veep candidate that the story was already out of control and about to get worse. Historian Douglas Brinkley, author of a wartime biography of Kerry, cautioned that Kerry's diary included mention of a meeting with some North Vietnamese terrorists in Paris. Edwards was flabbergasted. "Let me get this straight," the senator said. "He met with terrorists? Oh, that's good." (newsweek)
20. Believe it or not, it wasn't just rednecks who voted for Bush, Mark Steyn The big question after Tuesday was: will it just be more of the same in George W Bush's second term, or will there be a change of tone? And apparently it's the latter. The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."
    Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765. Forty five per cent of Hispanics voted for the President, as did 25 per cent of Jews, and 23 per cent of gays. And this coalition of common-or-garden rednecks, Hispanic rednecks, sinister Zionist rednecks, and lesbian rednecks who enjoy hitting on their gay-loathin' sisters expanded its share of the vote across the entire country - not just in the Bush states but in the Kerry states, too.
    (telegraph)
21. Journalists can't grasp electorate's morality (chicago tribune)
22. How Karl Rove won the election for Bush (boston globe)
23. Specter Campaign Crumbling (humanevents)
24. NY Elites Out of Touch With America’s Heart and Soul (alicia colon, nysun)
25. Baffled in Loss, Democrats Seek Road Forward (nagourney, nyt)
26. Let the explaining begin! (howard kurtz, wapo)

Other

• Blog links to soldiers' blogs from Iraq (beautiful atrocities)
• Winners and losers (new england republican)
• ESRI 3D Electoral vote map (polipundit)
• New Vatican Sex Guide: It's A Sin Not To Do It In their attempt to galvanise the faithful, Roberto Beretta and Elisabetta Broli, who write regularly for the Italian Bishops' magazine, Avvenire, have written one of the raciest works ever to deal with the Church and sex.
  Bullet points on the jacket cover underline the central message: "Sex? God invented it. Original sin? Sex has nothing to do with it. Without sex there is no real marriage."
  The pages of It's A Sin Not To Do It, however, feature a frank interview with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini in which he emphasises that "the Church is not an enemy of the flesh". He argues that Vatican doctrine has always defended the "nobility of sexuality", which is regarded by the Church as a "treasure" of humanity.
  Another chapter likely to raise eyebrows unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse. (telegraph.co.uk)
• Young Rove's dreams became everyone else's nightmare: Far better than any of his old friends, Karl truly has achieved his dream job. Unfortunately for the rest of us it's become our nightmare. --- Dr. Brian Moench is an anesthesiologist at LDS Hospital and former instructor at Harvard Medical School. (Brian Moench , Salt Lake)