Hump Day Musings

And Democrats still think he's stupid!

Think about it. In 10 short years, George Walker Bush has won not just one but three high-profile political races that most able politicians would have lost.

In 1994, with no real previous political experience, he beat a popular incumbent governor in the nation's second most populous state. Six years later, he beat a sitting vice president during a time of peace and prosperity. And last week, with a mediocre economy, an unpopular war and a well-funded and unified opposition, he not only won his race but also helped increase Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

And all of this while his opponents derided him as a brain-dead chimp.

WHY 'WAITRESS MOMS' DIDN'T VOTE FOR KERRY

Mark Steyn, in the Telegraph:

I'm convinced that any red-state county knows more about business than your average Massachusetts senator, tenured Harvard professor or Boston Globe editor. When John Kerry gets his hair done at Cristophe's in Washington for somewhere north of $75, that high-priced stylist is an employee. If he'd ever stopped to have it done for $10 by DeeDee in a hair salon in a small town, he'd discover that she's a one-woman business.

When he goes to his favourite restaurant in Washington, the waiter's an employee. When he drops by a diner on Main Street in some nowhere burg to pretend to eat a hot dog for a photo op, the waitress might well be like the lady who served me lunch on Sunday: she has her own house-cleaning business, but does some part-time work at the local school and a couple of shifts at the diner for a bit of extra cash.

She's a small business, and she knows more about her tax return than Teresa Heinz Kerry knows about hers. Mrs Kerry farms it out to the best advisers money can buy, and they do a grand job: she's one of the richest women in the world and she paid 12 per cent tax last year. It makes no difference whether the tax rate is 20 per cent, 50 per cent or 88 per cent: the Kerrys of the world will still pay 12 per cent.

The American people don't want to be condescended to by ketchup heiresses, billionaire currency speculators, $20-million-a-picture Hollywood pretty boys, and multi-millionaire documentary-makers posing as bluecollar lardbutts.

The Democrats keep talking to people as if they're like John Edwards's 40-year mill-workers, but that's not what work is any more, and a 23-year-old hairdresser can know enough about starting and running a business to be unimpressed at a few footling tax credits dangled in front of her by a 60-year-old lifelong "public servant" lucky enough to be living a grand old life thanks to his billionaire wife's first husband.

From Captain's Quarters

All Hail The New Victims – Democrats

Just when I thought it was impossible for Democrats to sink any lower in their post-election tantrums -- after all, it's hard to top secession as a political strategy for the arrested-development set -- now they have their very own psychological disorder, according to the Boca Raton News:

The Boca Raton News reported Tuesday that Palm Beach, Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

"We're calling it 'post-election selection trauma' and we're working to develop a counseling program for it," said Rob Gordon, the Boca Raton-based executive director of the American Health Association.

I have a theory that Democrats are secretly thrilled to have lost this election to George Bush, and this report confirms it. Nothing makes a Leftist happier than to belong to a victim class, and now they have created one that may exceed any that came before. It makes them feel more complete than even an official apology would. Next up, of course, is forcing employers and health-care providers to recognize it as a disability under ADA.

I would have thought that such a report could only be published by the Onion, but unfortunately this may be the least irrational reaction by Democrats this week. We've had MS-NBC's Lawrence O'Donnell call for secession, his colleague Keith Olbermann proclaim the election rigged (while providing no evidence whatsoever), and massive requests for immigration information from Kerry supporters to everywhere except, oddly enough, France.

So far, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are anything but; in order to support democracy, one has to accept when their candidate loses as well as when they win. I'd like to ask how it feels to be less committed to democracy than the Afghanis, whose opposition candidates readily accepted their election results despite numerous hardships and difficulties. It's embarrassing when mainstream voices in a major party call for the breakup of the United States, and it's an insult to the men who gave their lives to keep the Union together less than 150 years ago, especially since the stakes are so superficial and petty.

At least they gave the "illness" a good name. Post-election selection trauma, or PEST, describe these summer patriots to a T.

Zapatero: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Americans

The Sun (UK) reports in its typically urgent prose that Spanish PM Jose Zapatero has declared that the EU will become the dominant power in the world within 20 years, and pledged Spanish partnership with France and Germany to create the new hyperpower:

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero brazenly declared the ultimate aim was to challenge America.

He declared: “Europe must believe that it can be in 20 years the most important world power. We want to arrange the European future at the side of France and Germany. Spain sees itself with France and Germany as never before.” ...

Zapatero was quizzed by German magazine Der Spiegel about the EU’s continuing need for US troops to deal with crises in the Balkans under the Nato umbrella.

He said: “Naturally it will still last some time, until we develop a closed defence policy. That can happen only after the agreement on a common foreign policy. The EU constitution is an important step in this direction.

“In 15 to 20 years we will surely have a foreign service for the EU.”

The Sun lambastes Tony Blair for signing onto the new EU constitution, claiming that it creates difficulties for Britain in maintaining its close relationship with the US. (The Sun also claims that George Bush refused to take Zapatero's congratulatory phone call after the election results became clear.) But the only problem Bush and Blair will likely have is restraining their laughter at the notion that Europe's three largest socialist economies could combine to form any kind of military power, let alone a hyperpower that could cow the US and undo the Anglo-American alliance.

One of the reasons that France and Germany have been able to create the socialist paradises they have now is because they have been able to avoid spending much money on defense for the past fifty years. Even though France withdrew from NATO, Paris has always relied on the deterrence that NATO provided against that other extreme socialist entity, the Soviet Union. American taxpayers footed the bill while France and Germany created the social programs that now threaten to bury them economically as their birth rates fall and the necessary new workers to create funding have disappeared. France and Germany have failed to implement the modest economic reforms demanded of their EU membership; where exactly does Zapatero think the new money will come from to transform the decaying economies of the Big Three into the powerhouses needed to fund this massive military buildup?

Zapatero has a habit of making wild prognostications, so taking him seriously may be a bit of a fool's errand anyway. The Spanish certainly covered themselves in glory when they elected this reluctant warrior, the man who predicts military glory after bugging out of Spain's pledges to help reconstruct Iraq, the first opportunity he had to make Spain militarily irrelevant. France and Germany so far have remained quiet on Zapatero's ambition. Perhaps they're tired of giving the world so many reasons to laugh at them. (from Captain’s quarters)