THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S FUTURE
I surrendered at three o’clock in the morning after watching election returns for eight straight hours, and fell asleep convinced GW had won but oddly unemotional. Up at six to get my 12 year-old to school and let my wife sleep, I fussed away the morning with newspapers and the computer. Checking Fox again for the umpteenth time at eleven, when the announcement came that Kerry had called Bush to concede I didn’t yell or jump for joy. An emotional dam broke instead, and I just sat and cried my heart out with relief.America’s future is on track. Cokie Roberts on NPR stated that, more than Iraq or terrorism or the economy or anything else, exit polls showed that “moral values” was the issue of highest concern to voters. Bill Strauss and Neil Howe would not be surprised.I wrote about Strauss and Howe in The Curse of the Xer’s (TTP, February 5, 2004, currently up in Classics, and providing a capsule summary of their theory). Using their model of generational cycles, I predicted that:
American culture has not disintegrated, we’re not going to keep heading down into a bottomless cultural barrel. We’re in the bottom of a generational cycle that our country has gone through before and will again. Our nightmare of degeneracy will soon be coming to an end.And so it has come to an end yesterday, November 2, 2004.
AN OPEN LETTER TO LIBERTARIANS
I am glad to see Professor Hospers’ letter on websites such as WorldNetDaily. We offer it here in case you have not seen it. John Hospers changed my life, and so much for the better. When he was Chairman of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, he persuaded me to teach there and get my Ph.D. under his guidance. That was 33 years ago, and whatever philosophic capacities I have result in large part from the impact of his wisdom and counsel. It is a tragedy that so many libertarians pretend to live in Plato’s Cave, despising the real actual America because it does not live up to their Platonic ideals. Let’s hope Professor Hospers’ valiant effort persuades them to leave the comforting dark of fantasy and have the courage to fight for the country they actually live in. -JW As a way of getting acquainted, let me just say that I was the first presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party back in l972, and was the author of the first full-length book, Libertarianism, describing libertarianism in detail. I also wrote the Libertarian Party’s Statement of Principles at the first libertarian national convention in 1972. I still believe in those principles as strongly as ever, but this year — more than any year since the establishment of the Libertarian Party — I have major concerns about the choices open to us as voting Americans. There is a belief that’s common among many libertarians that there is no essential difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties — between a John Kerry and a George W. Bush administration; or worse: that a Bush administration would be more undesirable. Such a notion could not be farther from the truth, or potentially more harmful to the cause of liberty. The election of John Kerry would be, far more than is commonly realized, a catastrophe.
THE CIA IN DEEP QAQAA
Since new CIA Director Porter Goss blocked the October Surprise agency left-wingers had prepared against Bush (discussed in “Porter At The Pass” last week), they desperately rigged another one, working with Mohammad ElBaradei at the UN.What nobody is focusing on in Al Qaqaagate is that the CIA is behind it.
THE DEATH OF PALESTINIANISM
The Jewish Talmud makes the following observation:
There is no beauty like Jerusalem, no wealth like Rome, no depravity like Arabia.This was written in the 3rd Century AD - three hundred years before the Arabs embraced Mohammed’s Islam. But neither the adoption of Islam nor all the intervening centuries since has decreased the addiction Arab men have to pederasty. Arab pederasty was personified in Yasser Arafat, one of the vilest human beings to ever infest the earth. Far worse than his pedophilic predilections, however, was Arafat’s Arab Naziism. Yasser Arafat was the Hitler of Palestinian Arabs. Just as Hitler led the German people in a euphoric frenzy to their doom, so Arafat has done the same to his people. On his deathbed next to him lies the Myth of Palestinianism.
SHUT OUT AND SHUT DOWN
OK, I’ve taken off the black hat I wore to write “The 279 Trigger” and I’m back to normal now. So forgive me if I poach a title from an article I wrote last February, but Shut Down is still the best way to describe my electoral predictions for next Tuesday.So step right up and get ‘em, folks, while they’re hot. Bottom line: Bush wins not in a landslide, but not close either - a comfortable victory garnering 52-53% of the total vote, and between 290-310 electoral votes.Let’s face it -when Bush might take Hawaii, you know Kerry is in deep scatology.
HANOI JOHN AND SLICK WILLIE
The contempt I have for Bill Clinton doesn’t come remotely close to the revulsion I have for John Kerry. While I despise Bill Clinton on many grounds, I don’t question his patriotism. I would question John Kerry’s - if he had any patriotism to question. For all his faults, Bill Clinton is not a traitor to America. John Kerry is.Many of you have asked what is the October Surprise of the SwiftVets that I mentioned last month. This is it.
THE 279 TRIGGER
While I am an incurable optimist, today I’m putting on my black hat and taking a look at the dark side.All those prayers that whoever wins on the 2nd let it be a clear and convincing win, are just whistles in the twilight. The litigation war contesting 2004 will make 2000 look like a small skirmish. Kerry has made a decision: that if the electoral vote is less than 280 - that is, even if Bush wins by 9 electoral votes -- he will not concede. It takes 50%+1 of the 538 in total: 270. Recall that Al Gore did concede late Tuesday night November 7th - then rescinded his concession after midnight, launching his legal war to win the presidency in the courts. That’s the precedent. The Democrats have decided that with the precedent established, they will make the same attempt again. 279 is the trigger - if Bush wins states that add up to no more than 279 electoral votes, Kerry refuses to concede and legally contests the results.Confronted with Kerry’s decision, Bush has now decided he will do the same.
TO MY FELLOW JEWS
One of the key indicators of Bush’s impending victory on November 2nd is a historic shift in Jewish voting habits. American Jews in unprecedented numbers will cast their ballot for a Republican president. Cliff Alsberg, a writer and television producer in Los Angeles, has written this compelling essay addressed to his fellow Jews still struggling with their reflexive compulsion to pull the Democrat lever. -JWI am writing to you today as members of my “extended family”—my family of fellow Jews and fellow Americans with whom I most strongly identify and who I most cherish. Never before have the stakes in a presidential election been greater for us; both here at home and abroad. Never before has there been a clearer choice between two candidates, and never before has so much depended on us-- both as Jews and as Americans.I’d like to address six key issues that invariably affect each of us as both Jews and Americans. I urge you to read and to “listen” to these issues with an open heart and an open mind. If you are truly “undecided”, I implore you to dig deep within your heart to weigh the consequences of your vote. If you are already a staunch Kerry supporter, I respectfully ask you to remain open and intellectually honest for the duration of this letter.
THE BOSTON MANIFESTO
Here is the link to a remarkable document: The Boston Manifesto.It is “A Statement by a Group of Vietnam Veterans Explaining their Outrage Over the Nomination of Senator John F. Kerry to be President of the United States,” prepared by the Vietnam Veterans to Correct the Myths.What follows is the Manifesto’s explanatory note. I encourage you to read the Manifesto’s Executive Summary (via the link above) and consult the supportive documentation. -JWFor four days beginning on July 26, 2004, a group of Vietnam veterans, scholars, and experts—including recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, several former Special Forces officers and enlisted men, and veterans who have taught about the war at the high school, college, and graduate school levels —gathered at a small college in Boston to examine the “Myths of the Vietnam War.”
A CALIFORNIA HISPANIC EARTHQUAKE?
The military leader of the Contra anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua back in the 1980s was Enrique Bermudez. “003” as he was code-named, arranged for me to cross into Nicaragua from Honduras a number of times with Contra groups. I came to have tremendous admiration for his extraordinarily courageous struggle against the Soviet and Cuban take-over of his country, and the Communist tyranny established by the Sandinistas. I also came to have a great affection for him personally, as a man of unpretentious warmth and straightforward integrity. Enrique was assassinated in 1991 on orders from the head of the Sandinista Gestapo, Tomas Borge, but the US left-wing Sandinista-sympathizing media assassinated his character way before then. The smears were unending as the left spared no effort to demonize him and the Contras. Now the left is busy doing the same to Enrique’s daughter.Claudia Bermudez was born in Nicaragua, grew up in San Francisco, and while her father was fighting for freedom in Nicaraguan jungles, she was in college in Hawaii. She clearly has her father’s moxie - because she’s running for Congress on a boldly conservative platform as the Republican challenger of the most left-wing House Member there is, Barbara Lee, in the most left-wing Congressional District in the country, California’s 9th centered on Berkeley and Oakland.