If, like me, you grew up in New York and spend your adult life in Southern California, you’re terminally bicoastal. And if you’re terminally bicoastal it’s hard to love George W. Bush. There are too many associations with “Gentlemen’s C’s” and drunken fraternity parties. He says “nucular.” He has an annoying lateral “s.”
Moreover, beyond style, there are plenty of his policies to criticize.
Nevertheless, I’m convinced that this year’s election is the most important in a generation, and it’s imperative that we re-elect the man.
There’s one overriding reason. We are at war. I refer not to the episodic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, important though they are. We are in a long, twilight struggle much like the 70-year struggle with Russian Communism, with Islamic fascism.
Bush and his associates, whatever their limitations and failings, understand something of the threat, and the need to resist it, at times with force. The Democrats do not understand this. They will temporize. They will rationalize. They will respond symbolically (remember the Sudan factory bombing), but not with force. They are enamored of international bodies such as the tyrants’ cartel at the UN, the search for ‘root causes’ such as poverty (which is NOT an important part of the problem). They fear, and the more left-wing among them hate, any show of strength by this country.
Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor of The Hedgehog and the Fox comes to mind. The fox, like a bicoastal liberal, knows many small things. The hedgehog doesn’t, but he knows One Big Thing. Bill Clinton, for example, knew many little things, and could chatter endlessly into the night about them. George W. Bush, for certain, knows One Big Thing. We are at war against a determined and cruel enemy, and we must sacrifice and fight that enemy.
All the rest, my friends, is commentary.
March 21, 2004
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