This shouldn't be, as James Bond once said, "Shocking". I vote Republican and I'm one of those annoying Southerners who bases his vote on God, gays, and guns. I also don't sneer at people who drive pickup trucks with gun racks and who display the battle flag of the Confederate States Army, provided they are of character. Of course, this makes me anathema to many of the sandalistas who seem to be rampant amongst the Democrats these days. Darn.

It is conventional wisdom among my intellectual brethren on the Right of the blogosphere to salivate eagerly over the prospect of running President Bush against Governor Dean. Some people believe that the potential scope of a Bush victory could rival Richard Nixon's 1972 thrashing of George McGovern.

That may be true. It is also hubris, and fate has a nasty way of punishing it. We wrote off a blundering, philandering, pseudo-intellectual buffoon from Arkansas in 1992. That mistake cost this country eight years of moral, spiritual, and civilizational decay when instead we could have been taking the war against Islamist terror to its warrens in foreign lands, and the name of Osama bin Laden could have been a footnote in a history book buried somewhere. '911' would be a number dialed on telephones, and would not symbolize the death of men like Richard Rescorla, or other individuals whose only crimes were that they sought to earn money and make a living.

Governor Dean presents similar problems, but those are not what concern me at the moment. I believe he will be defeated if he is the eventual nominee. I will do my part here in my home, casting a vote for George W. Bush. Virginia will do her part in standing in the ever-thinning ranks of those who stand for what is right and good, and send Dean's irrational ideology back into a dark corner for two more years.

However, I consider Dean's ideology to be poisonous, if not downright cancerous, and his most vocal supporters' beliefs trouble me with their words. They strike me as some sort of evil djinn, which once unleashed from a bottle into the mainstream of American politics, can probably not be recaptured. If indeed this is true, I certainly don't want it to be the case any more than it already is.

Dean's rantings regarding Presidential foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks belong on the fringes of the American political debate, and nowhere near the center ring. Indeed, they have no place under the big top in the American circus of politics. They more properly should be placed in a tent off to the edges of the circus, where only a fevered few travel. Even if they were true---and I do not believe that they are---such a truth could never be admitted. It would have to be concealed among those in the circles power, for such an admission could inflict near-mortal wounds to the body politic.

Dean has, unfortunately, taken up the rantings of the feverish, and will continue to grant them respectability. The threat this poses is to further fragment the American body politic, destroying the "sensible center" where reasonable men of Left and Right meet to discuss what must be done, and how it shall be done.

Dean and his ilk won't be happy to have a vibrant Republican Party on one side, and a vibrant Democrat Party on the other, with civilizational progress achieved through the essential tension between the two. They want the Republican Party defeated, and ejected from politics. This is not Western republican democracy. This is the banana republic single-party system theory, and it is un-American. A true American, devoted to our Republic, would eagerly support two vibrant political parties, either of which was at any point in time, capable of winning elections. To have it any other way probably thwarts our system at some level, and that, to steal from Martha Stewart, is "A bad thing".

For shame, Governor Dean. The people who propel you now are those whose voice should not be the voice of the Democrat Party. I don't want you getting the nomination. I don't want you or your kind to ever influence politics again. I want an adult at the lead of the Democrats as they come forward to challenge the Republicans for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

UPDATE: For what it's worth, I don't believe that a Nixon-style romp through the Republic is possible for George W. Bush, even if Howard Dean is the nominee. Nixon had the benefit of the Thomas F. Eagleton disaster for the Democrats, and McGovern had some real kooks surrounding him. Seeing pictures of the Senator listening seriously to Hunter S. Thompson in bug-eyed sunglasses doesn't make me think that McGovern was doing the right things operationally to maximize his admittedly slim chances of victory. Likewise, the Democrats of 1972 were suffering from the ruins of the post-1968 takeover by radicals who re-wrote the rules of nomination. Demoralized yellow-dog Democrats probably were organizationally demoralized and not eager to work for McGovern. Likewise, Nixon stood astride the country like a giant, and the media organs were a lot more concentrated, thus easier to manipulate. I also am not certain the population base and mix that Nixon used for victory exists today. The weakness of my analysis can be easily shown by a look at demographic trends and so forth, but I don't have that kind of information in front of me.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 10:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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