Another bush voter

[dude1394]

You go Ross!!
ross

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The Importance of Bush:
Is the Remnant Adequate to Carry the Day?

ROSS MACKENZIE
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Oct 31, 2004

So, sir, excuse me: Who are you going to vote for?

Bush.

Just like that - Bush? No hedging? No lesser of two evils? No 'buts'?

It's a lay-down.

But Kerry -

Kerry is unconscionable. He is a shameless, vindictive, wack-left extrem- ist - a crypto-pacifist. A Kennedy acolyte. A mountebank, a charlatan, a fraud. A con- summate, congenital liar. A self-serving, self-righteous, self-pro- moter - and insufferably arrogant. A fabricator, an embellisher, a credit-taker surpassing even Al Gore.

But Bush is so stup-

Bush has character in spades. He is a leader with discernible values the vast majority of Americans share. 9/11 transformed him - even redeemed him - for the second time. He is a man of optimism and locked-on resolve in the war against jihadist terror - the overwhelming issue in this campaign; Kerry is a pessimist and Hamlet-like waffler. Bush believes in taking the war to the enemy rather than allowing the enemy to beat us up here.

Kerry would enlist the UN and our other allies against terrorism.

BALONEY. Kerry says he wants to do that, but waiting on the UN is an invitation to inaction. And what makes you think he would be more successful in enlisting support for removing Saddam than Bush was - in a military enterprise Kerry voted for? Kerry subsequently has voted against supporting our troops and has insulted our most steadfast allies.

Yet Kerry would bring in the important continental Europeans.

The Europeans you're talking about helped set up Saddam. They don't like our destruction of their investment. Nor do they, much, like us. And they won't help because they have neither the manpower nor the will to provide it. They have hardly any stomach for action at all.

Don't you think Kerry's Vietnam experience garners him support in the military, makes him more knowledgeable of military realities, renders him more sensitive to -

Come on. Kerry is insidiously insensitive to the military. His 20-year Senate record reeks of sniveling hostility to military initiatives - with vote after vote against the critical weapons systems now in the Pentagon inventory. No wonder the polls show the military opposes his election in the neighborhood of 80-20.

You have to admit Vietnam gave Kerry a crucial combat hardening . . . .

YOU CAN'T be serious. Let's begin by noting that Kerry brought up Vietnam - made it and his medals central to this campaign, as he has to all his others. Yet he was in country just four months. The book Unfit for Command, written by the officer who took command of his Swift Boat after Kerry departed Vietnam prematurely, makes clear a number of profoundly troubling things about him.

Such as?

Such as: (1) Kerry evidently wrote up not only his own fitness reports but his own proposed medal commendations - documents often figments, often at war with the facts and the truth. (2) In difficult situations, he usually ran - departed the scene. (3) He clearly was there foremost to establish a story to help him win political races later on. And (4) the vast majority of those who served with him on the Swift Boats detested him then, as they detest him now.

Well -

And there's this - though not from the book: Kerry's peacenik activities after the war may have earned him a dishonorable dismissal from the Navy. Think about it: Does America need or deserve a President who may have been discharged from the military for consorting with the Viet Cong? That's what he did when he went to Paris, while still in the Naval Reserve, and met with the Viet Cong foreign minister. He did something similar later, when - apparently contrary to the wishes of his government - he went with one other Senator to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinistan Communists. Does Kerry "get it," or does he "get it" too well?

BRIEFLY, then, what would you say is the most important thing about the Tuesday election?

The national need - no, the worldwide need - for the re-election of George Bush. This likely is a seminal election, a before-and-after election, a turning-point election.

Why?

Bush knows we are at war and is determined to fight it; Kerry doesn't seem to sense the reality of the war we are in or to deem it a war worth waging. Bush believes in the power of liberty to transform; Kerry - in Bush's words - "prefers the stability of a dictatorship to the hope and security of a democracy."

Domestically, Bush wants to keep taxes on everyone low; Kerry has voted to raise taxes 98 times. With the Chief Justice now fighting cancer, and with but one Justice under 65, Bush would nominate for the federal courts, as he has, individuals determined to interpret the law and not legislate from the bench. Kerry, as he has said, would nominate only those who pass his leftist litmus tests - and in the Senate he has been a key player in stymieing Bush's judicially conservative nominees.

So who will win?

. . .

That depends on the answer to the principal outstanding question: Is the size of the Remnant sufficient?

Albert Jay Nock wrote about the Remnant in his 1937 essay, "Isaiah's Job":

There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up, because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society . . . .The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend [the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life], and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them.

The Remnant understands the stakes. Bush speaks to them, they hear him - and they vote. The question is: Is the Remnant, now, enough? In this turning-point election, is the diminishing Remnant cohort adequate to carry the day?