RUV Justice

As a social conservative myself, I'd love to believe that the US election marks the first signs of the backlash against Liberalism. Of course, it's not just us who feels that way. Plenty of Liberals (and not a few Paleocons) want to ram home the message that this election result was down to bible-totting hillbillies. The Left loves this cover story as it allows them to indulge their elitism and to cast Conservatives as hicks but, more to the point, it distracts from the gaping hole at the heart of modern Liberalism.

One significant factor must surely have been the War and, more specifically, the many natural - even lifelong - Democrats who voted for Bush out of sheer disgust with their party's refusal to take the War seriously, call them Republican Until Victory.

There are a very large group of people who realise that the Democrats, and indeed Liberalism generally, have reacted to the world crisis by taking a hike to Venus. It's not that the Liberals advocate bad policies for winning the War, it's that they deny there even is one. Not even a world in flames can shake the essential narcissism of the Liberal.

There are plenty of right-wing objections to Dubya, for a start his 'quick, everyone, have some cash' spending policies, yet the right put aside it differences to stand solidly behind him. In contrast, the Left was unable to process the War as anything other than the continuation of its own obsessions by other means. The nadir of this attitude was when Senator Murray paid tribute to Bin Laden's role in building day care centres in Afghanistan - presumably to help all those women trying to manage career and family under the Taliban. That was an extreme case, but not qualitatively different from the rest of the Liberal approach to the War. True, Bin Laden may have been ranting about the humiliation of losing Al Andalus in the fifteenth century but what he was really talking about was Kyoto.

There can be no better proof of how unfit the Left is to deal with the War than the events of this last week. To listen to the media, Bush's victory meant Hollywood would be under siege by a torch-wielding mob of Christian fundamentalists, demanding they produce nothing more contentious than remakes of 'It's A Wonderful Life', and indeed a film maker was murdered by a religious fanatic even before the voting totals were in. If you spent your days fearing that failure to possess a bible would become a criminal offence - as all Liberals claimed to - then this should really have raised your hackles, except on closer inspection, it turns out the assailant was a……

Here was Liberalism in all its glory. Liberals constantly defame Christianity and its practitioners, all the while professing to be terrified by Christians yet when confronted with a cult whose adherents really do believe in killing the unbeliever, why, they think that's just a quirky bit of cultural heritage. This is the central psychosis of modern Liberalism, the belief that that which they wish was true, is true: Christians are crazed fanatics, while Moslems are noble savages, and don't none of you Nazi go pointing out any gaps in the Manhattan skyline.

This kind of post-modern insanity is not a new departure for Liberals, but the brutal reality of battle sure throws Liberal delusions into sharp relief. Clinton could claim that it depends what the meaning of 'is' is, but a murder in broad daylight demands better than these kind of word games. Indeed, there is a danger here for the Left. Given the sheer mendacity of the L3 approach to the war, how many RUVs will be lead to question how many other sacred cows turn out to be just so much hamburger ? Who knows ? But until the Left can deal with Bin Laden on his own terms, rather than as a mere stick to beat Bush with, they will all be - to coin a phrase - unfit for command.