Can America Survive Kerry?

I've been rethinking the Presidential election lately. In the past, I've always been dispassionate; my analysis was based on logic and reason rather than emotion. And employing logic, there's plenty of Bush Administration policies I loathe--budget increases, funding the National Endowment for the Arts, not challenging Democrat judicial filibusters, etc. But I began focusing on the war on terror--which shifted from my "most important issue" to the "only issue." Now I'm really scared--about the consequences of Kerry.

Victor Davis Hanson, on National Review Online, agrees. And he's much better cataloging the President's achievements:

[The] Bush Doctrine. . .is now emerging to face the threat of Islamic radicalism. Despite the current shrill claims that the United States is hated, hopelessly naive, bogged down worldwide, and back in another Vietnam, since September 11 we have witnessed a historic emergence of a comprehensive foreign policy to confront Islamic fundamentalism and its parasitic relationship with Middle East autocracy -- without which it cannot survive.

Liberals ridicule the Bush doctrine because they claim to be idealistic, and resent that force, rather than reason alone, is sometimes needed. Islamicists hate it, because if Afghanistan and Iraq work, they are largely through. Moderate dictatorships in the region slur it because they can no longer triangulate with us to garner aid and a pass on their own repression. Arab faux-intellectuals and their fellow travelers in the West caricature it, because reform will make untenable their hothouse cynical anti-Americanism -- as they soon become as irrelevant as Panamanian or Serbian leftists damning the United States for removing Noriega and Milosevic to give democracy a chance.

To the credit of the Bush administration, all American troops will soon be out of Saudi Arabia. Its "charities" are being systematically shut down to end their subsidies to terrorists. For the first time in a half-century, the royal family is more worried about American support for democratic change in the Middle East than we are of an oil embargo.

Yes, exactly! But VDH deploys his best rhetoric in considering the Democrat alternatives:

Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale probably would have led to support of a utopian nuclear freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in military preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has been achieved these last three years as we return to the old, normal way of doing business. . .

[Now that he's won the nomination] Mr. Kerry abruptly will have to talk grandly of what he would have done to make us more secure. Yet a better guide is his own record in opposing defense programs, in harboring a chronic suspicion of using American force, and his own contradictory past votes about deployments to the Middle East.

More likely, if President Bush loses, the war against terror will return, as promised, to the status of a police matter -- subpoenas and court trials the more appropriate response to the mass murder of 3,000 at the "crime scene" of the crater in New York. Europe will be assured that our troops will stay while we apologize for the usual litany of purported unilateral sins. North Korea will get more blackmail cash, while pampered South Korean leftists resume their "sunshine" mirage. Iraq will be turned over to the U.N. as we abruptly leave, and could dissolve into something like the Balkans between 1991 and 1998. Iran and Syria will let out a big sigh of relief -- as American diplomats once more sit out on the tarmac in vain hopes of an "audience" with despots. The Saudis will smile that smile. Arafat will be assured that he is now once again a legitimate interlocutor. And strangest of all, the American Left will feel that the United States has just barely begun to return to its "moral" bearings -- even as its laxity and relativism encourage some pretty immoral things to come.

If White House politicos figured that many who were angered about out-of-control federal spending and immigration proposals would grumble, but not abandon Mr. Bush -- given the global stakes involved after September 11, and the specter of a new alternative foreign policy far to the left of that of a Warren Christopher and Madeline Albright -- then they were absolutely right.

(Emphasis in original.)

I concur with every word. Particular the last four. And will redouble efforts to ensure 271 electoral votes agree as well.