A Highbrow Take On Leftist Provincialism

Here's a very pleasant, literate read on the election result and the incomprehending hysteria it has engendered.

excerpt:

One of the things that has disturbed me about this past four years has been the refusal by so many of my fellow Democrats and liberals to listen to anything Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Rice or Cheney has to say. Taking it one step further, my friends will go into a kind of paroxysm of irrational rage when I say I enjoyed seeing Ashfroft kibbitzing with Larry King and Ted Olson, and the Attorney General singing and playing the piano. (Yes, I am a Phi Beta Kappa, but like all those ‘morons’ in the red states, this kinda stuff helps me to relax in the evening.)

When I read a particularly astute piece by David Frum in a London paper I forwarded it to my e-mail list. Irate recipients replied without delay: ‘How DARE you send me this filth?’ or ‘I will NOT read him.’

Fine. But if you will not read him, how do you know what the opposition is thinking? Time and again this past year, I have incurred the wrath of Democrats by saying how much I learned from a Rumsfeld briefing in which he explained the origins of the position of the civilian Defence Secretary from the days of the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution. ‘You would listen to that Fascist Nazi war criminal?’ Frankly, I found some of Rummy’s vintage briefings educational compared to the nightly dose of BBC reports about the brutal Israelis.

In the past four years during which we Democrats should have been working out what it is about these neocons that turns on so many ‘folks,’ I have made it my business to watch Colin Powell’s briefings and to try to catch White House press sessions and statements from the Justice and Homeland Security Departments. I have read every book that has come out of the Coulter-Frum-Perle camp as well as the Hersh-Woodward-Chomsky-Vidal literature.

What was it Yitzhak Rabin said? You cannot negotiate with your adversary unless you know him inside and out…

Also, the author at one point inadvertently illustrates what can happen when you use a PC euphemism for the word 'black':

The boxing promoter Don King hit it on the button, when asked by a horrified BBC interviewer the day after the election what African Americans would make of all this: he pointed out that the Bush administration, without fuss, had placed African Americans in positions of high authority on the world stage -- what other Western country has done so?

Well, I assume that other Western countries wouldn't have African Americans to put into positions of authority. African Americans are Americans right? Why would France or England put Americans into positions of authority? But maybe they ought to put blacks into positions of authority!