No Oil for Pacifists: Home At Last--Now What?

[Previous post in series here]

I'm back in Washington; my campaign 2004 is over. Sleeplessness, and this series--chronicling my small role--ends with this post. With my head re-emerged from the ground game, what now? What next?

Six weeks before he was assassinated, with the Civil war nearly won, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President for a second term, and spoke these memorable words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

I've compared Bush to Lincoln before, and it's equally appropriate here.

National Review's John Derbyshire has some other ideas:

[G]loating is of course bad — coarse, heartless, insensitive, and ill-mannered. Magnanimity in victory, that's the thing. Humility, grace, gentlemanly forbearance, there but for the grace of God...

YEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAA! . . .

I am going to have no compunction about gloating at Michael Moore, who has done more to boost anti-Americanism world-wide than Farrah Fawcett did for big hair. I was talking to some young English people the other day. They didn't know much about U.S. politics, and half of what they knew came from watching Fahrenheit 911. They knew there was something fishy about that movie, and giggled in a slightly embarrassed way as they played back the opinions they had picked up from it; but those were in fact their opinions faute de mieux, and some of them will stick. In cultures yet further removed from our own — in China, in Latin America, in India, in the Muslim Middle East — Moore's poisonous brew is swallowed without a hiccup, and has become the stuff that "everybody knows..."

Nor do I have any reservations about gloating at George Soros, who has squandered stupendous sums of money in a lost cause.

Then there's the foreigners: the Guardian and Independent newspapers and the BBC in England, the French and the Greeks, Kofi Annan and Mohammed El Baradei...and of course that Friendly Giant to the North. How incredible it must seem to them, to these self-styled sophisticates, that a crude, swaggering boor like George W. Bush should retain the affections of his countrymen after all his crimes and blunders! Well, deal. You're stuck with an honest to God (literally) American conservative — and a conservative America — for another four years. Get used to it.

The big gloat, though, must be directed at our enemies. How they wanted Kerry to win! How they must be sunk in gloom in their caves and hideouts and seedy rented rooms! They knew that, for all his podium salutes and tough talk, Kerry would be another Jimmy Carter, another groveller, another guilt-addled cringing apologizer for America's sins, past and present. Now, instead of a boneless wonder, they are faced with a resolute and determined opponent, a commander-in-chief who actually inspires his troops, and who knows that, as Winston Churchill usefully noted, you can't win wars without fighting.

I'm not sorry the Democrats lost. But I sympathize with their grief (having experienced it in '92 and '96).

Kerry supporters in Hawaii last night

Derbyshire's gloating was targeted toward our enemies. Democrats are not our enemies. Islamic Terrorism, Inc., is. And whomever you supported, the election clearly is a mandate to persevere in the fight against radical Muslim terrorists.

I can't speak for President Bush, much less other Republicans. Thus the first person plural would be pretentious and meaningless here. So, I offer my hand to disappointed Democrats. Join us--not "bi-partisan"; just American.

True, we have much to do. But, united, America cannot lose.

More:

Thursday's Wall Street Journal editorial:

But let's be candid with our Democratic friends: On Tuesday, a majority of the American electorate took a look at their party and asked, "Who are these people?" Who are George Soros, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, Susan Sontag, Teresa Heinz Kerry and all these other self-anointed spokespersons for everything good and true? And what does a party that is dominated by a loose coalition of the coastal intelligentsia, billionaires with too much spare time, the trial lawyers' association, the Hollywood Actors' Guild, rock stars and unionized labor have in common with what's quaintly known as Middle America? The majority's answers were (a) not us; and (b) not a whole lot.

Yet today, the Democratic Party not only suffers trial lawyers and other strange folk -- it puts them on the ticket.

Still More:

Lee county Republicans came through. Bush increased his margin in the county by 2 percent. And turnout was up--not the 15 to 25 percent I predicted, but nearly 30 percent. A whopping 79 percent of county registered voters participated.