Ignorant Armies: Final Thoughts on the Election by Thomas Fleming • October 31, 2008 • Printer-friendly
This election is too tedious a farce to deserve a serious editorial, but since I wake up every morning with a few complaints that I inflict upon my family, I may as well subject my readers to some of them.
Watching McCain on the news or in a commercial, I become convinced that he is the most evil piece of selfishness who has ever run for the presidency, but my disgust quickly ebbs away when the simpering Obama takes the stage. I can understand people who vote for McCain’s resume or support him as the lesser of two evils, but I no longer want to know anyone who votes for Obama for any reason. He is an enemy of anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization, and when he is elected, I hope that all those Silicon Valley libertarians who supported him will live to see their property confiscated and their kids sent to reeducation camps. Yes, that is mean-spirited and unChristianm but it is unsettling to realize that you have lived among such monsters for so long without grasping the depth of their depravity and stupidity.
The McCain people are apparently too stupid to pin Obama as a Marxist. When Obama answers the charge that he favors redistribution of wealth by giving his cute line about sharing his cookie in kindergarten, all McCain had to do was to point out that Obama is not planning to share his cookies but ours. Poor Rush Limbaugh cannot believe that the American people are stupid enough to vote for socialism. I wish I shared his naiveté. The McCain camp is forever dissecting Obama’s tax proposals as if they seriously believe that campaign platforms and policy statements have anything to do with reality. All politicians are liars–surely McCain looks in the mirror often enough to know that–so nothing they say in a campaign can be interpreted as a sincere reflection of what they actually believe, much less as a proposal they intend to carry out. Getting bogged down on what the O’Reilly likes to call minutiae (all those facts he cannot comprehend) is exactly the wrong strategy. To the extent Obama believes anything he is a socialist, to the left of Biden and Pelosi. He may not be able to do much about it, other than impose socialized medicine, bankrupt the government, and wreck the economy, but it will not be for lack of conviction.
Where is Willie Horton when you need him? The Republicans have to play the “race card” because they have few other cards to play. White Catholics are gravitating toward Obama, even some pro-life Catholics. People who have lost their money in the markets are praying for another Clinton administration. And, by now, the argument that “the surge has worked” is cutting little ice with people whose sons and daughters may be stuck in Iraq for another decade. The fact is, Obama has been friends with anti-white bigots of the worst type, and if McCain were not both obtuse and cowardly, he would not hesitate to play the race card–or arrange for some front group to play it for him. The world awaits the return of Willie Horton in the guise of Jeremiah Wright.
The other night in New York I told a small gathering that I did not blame anyone for voting for John McCain. Someone shouted out that he was voting for Sarah Palin. I was content to point out he could not have read the ballot, but, really, in the unlikely event of a McCain victory, I will pray for the continued health of Senator McCain. Palin is Dan Quayle in a designer outfit. Quayle was a cute guy, they all said, and a sound conservative. Mr. Buckley informed the world that Dan Quayle was not as dumb as he seemed. His spiritual heirs are saying the same thing about Ms Palin. Perhaps both of them have IQ’s high enough to boil water on the Celsius scale, but there is more to dumbness than a low IQ. Some peope are simply clueless, incapable even of realizing just how obtuse they are. That is Palin in a nutshell.
Dan Larison on his Eunomia blog now on AmCon has drawn attention to our old friend Stacy McCain’s defense of ignorance. Palin and her supporters are virtuous, he is arguing, precisely because what they don’t know won’t hurt them. I fear, however, that it will hurt us. This is worth an entire issue of the magazine. Since Socrates (at least) we have understood that to pilot the ship of state requires skill, not just a good heart, especially when that ship is no longer a simple republican skiff but a nuclear powered submarine armed with missiles carrying nuclear warheads. Besides, it is easier to make a judgment of someone’s experience and competence than of the soundness of his heart.
I haven’t liked a candidate since Ronald Reagan, and even he struck me as too Hollywood to be President. My portfolio went up under Reagan, but that is about the only good thing I can say. The good news is that human happiness does not depend on which imbecille or thug is in the White House. Vote if you must, but go to bed early on election day and do not bother to read the front page of your newspaper the day after. Stick to the funny papers: They are more intelligent and more relevant to our condition than news stories and editorials. Over and out.
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