The Day the Enlightenment Went Out?

The NY Times has a piece by some Professor, Gary Wills whose main point seems to be that the reason Bush got elected was because people are fairly uncritical and Faith, or misinformation triumphed over fact. Naturally he is wrong. That article was pathetic. The election does not symbolize a triumph of belief over fact. I would be willing to bet anything that your average redneck, if told by Bush himself that there was no connection between Quaida and Iraq would still vote for Bush. Could you see him going to church on Sunday in his pick-up truck saying that he no longer can vote for Bush because he found out this interesting fact, that Iraq and Qaida are not really connected? Or he is going hunting with his friend and he just shoots a deer, and in their quiet moment when they just got finishing gutting their kill, he tells his friend that he is not too sure about how much he actually believes in the BS that the good reverend Billy Bob spouts every Sunday. You think he will then decide, well, as long as I am having religious doubts, I will go back to standard working class values like socialized health care, legalization of weed, and gay marriage, and then go vote Democrat? These people do not vote for Bush because they believe in some nutty things. They believe in those nutty things because they are they type to vote for Bush.

This was a very pathetic article spouting the standard crappy lines that let the left keep feeling good about itself. It allows the left to retain its self-righteousness by saying that everyone who doesn't agree with them is a medieval, backward, racist, and that the reason why their country did not win is not because people evaluated the merits of the candidates and more people liked their opponents. But rather because there are more nuts out there than sane people. That happens to be true, but they forget that they are just as nutty for believing these political dogmas, as these other types are believeing academic dogmas. If you tell a Kerry supporter that Iraq did sponser terrorism to the tune of $25,000 per suicide bomber, thus make Saadam Heussain a major sponsor of terrorism he will simply counter that there was one terrorist group that we have no evidence that he supported, namely Quaid. Thus it is bad to want him ousted, because we have no evidence he supported our particular terrorist group. . . . The economic dogmas that lefties believe make even less sense.

I hate these fucking NY Times writers who have a mandate to write whatever sounds good to their lefty audience regardless of how little sense it makes, and what is even worse is that smart people read it and get suckered in to thinking it makes sense. This guy probably told the same thing to his history class back at Northwestern, and they all probably wrote it down, and it will probably be on their final exam, and we will see the rise of another stupid and uncritical generation of students.

However, and we see this in the end of Professor Wills' piece, I do suspect that now we will start seeing a lot of begging for favors. They will all take the same form: Bush is a miserable fanatic. BUT, to prove he is a uniter and not a divider, and to heal this country, he should really do what the democrats want him to do. Naturally he can't do that because he got elected precisely because he said he would not do those things.

So as much as I want Bush to change his backward ways about many things, the democrats put him in a corner where he had to appeal to those who would never let him change. I do take solace in the fact that it is usually the right who takes the bold and often unpopular steps toward Justice, and conciliation. (eg, Nixon going to China, signing Title IX, getting out of Vietnam. Reagan making MLK day a federal holiday, Begin making peace with Egypt. Sharon Pulling out of Gaza. . . ) The left never has a mandate to do these things. They are generally supported by the fanatics and strongly opposed by the right and the moderates. The right is generally unopposed except by people farther to the right than them, and NOONE will ever care what they think.