2004/11/08

On the record

I was wrong. I had too much faith in the integrity and judgment of others. It's a character flaw -- hasn't done me much good personally, and led me last week to expect too much also of large chunks of the American voting population. I thought there were more 9/12 voters out there; I thought we'd win walking away, instead of just winning handily overall and improving margins (increasing absolute margins where Bush won and decreasing relative margins where he didn't) in every state.

On the other hand, I think one thing I grossly overestimated was the decline of the old-timey, agenda-driven, hugely dishonest and manipulative mainstream media. To me, Rathergate was the dying gasp of a morally-corrupt, intellectually-vacant empire, collapsing from the weight of its own self-importance -- an opinion that was all superstructure, no content. They are not, shall we say, a reality-based club.

But I've been paying close attention. The fact is, for considerable swaths of the non-information-junky population, that egregious incident was practically a first shot across the bow, the first 'mistake' that they'd consciously noticed in the whole atrocity that this campaign season, this entire Iraq campaign, and more-or-less the whole Bush administration has risen above. It was a decidedly marginal thing to most people.

So I would say that the MSM got their 15% this year.

I hope they enjoyed it, because it's the last time that will happen. The Gutenberg press has been invented, the Bible has been translated into the vernacular, and more and more people will come to the realizations hundreds and thousands of us already have: those people don't know more than I do, they're not smarter than I am, and (if they're thinking at all) they're making judgments and insinuations that don't stand up to the light of day.

They'll keep banging the defeatist drum about Iraq, but we're winning, and now we have four years to brick in some meaningful foundations over there. Thank God. I hope we can also turn some personal attention back to Afghanistan, because they need more help than the crippled creature NATO has become seems capable of providing, too. No bribing/bartering with the madman running North Korea -- the continuation of six-way talks to keep him frustrated in his regional corner is an excellent side-effect of this affirmation of Bush's leadership. It would be wonderful if some of the Old Yurripeons would get on the stick, at least rhetorically, wrt Iran, instead of whining and undermining par for the pre-election course. I wouldn't say I'm hopeful, exactly, of seeing that change, but it would be a hopeful turn of events -- not for Bush particularly, nor even for America, but hopeful for the hard times ahead throughout the world in the ongoing struggle to break the hideous current "international community" that demonizes that very struggle while continuing to legitimate terrorism as an acceptable political strategy.

On to victory, insha'allah.

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