Buck Up, You Lefties!

Justin Raimondo writes:

While the Latte Liberals are sitting around the café lamenting their beleaguered status as internal exiles, the "liberated" peoples of Iraq will bear the full brunt of the election results. We will "feel their pain," so to speak, from a safe distance.

Not that John Kerry would have given them a moment's respite from American state terrorism. How long, one wonders, before the Latte Liberals stop blaming the American people for being too dim to embrace Kerry as their savior and start reexamining what was possibly, if not the worst, then certainly the most passive political campaign in American history?

Remember the Democratic convention – where antiwar signage and sentiment was verboten? – that cravenly sought to mimic Republican militarism? Boston signaled the death wish of the Democrats: after all, why vote for Bush Lite, when the real deal is already in office?
When Bush's minions defamed Kerry's military record, smeared his supporters, and implied that a Kerry victory would be followed shortly afterward by the nuking of major American cities, the Democratic candidate … did nothing. Better to lose the election than that the word "chickenhawk" should ever pass the lips of a Boston Brahmin.
As Kerry sunk in the polls, and the possibility that he was deliberately throwing the election to the Republicans began to be bruited about, somebody must have woken up over at Democratic party headquarters, because – in a complete reversal – Kerry began pounding away at the president's conduct of the Iraq war. Not that he came out in opposition, yet, as I have pointed out before, he appropriated antiwar arguments in the final weeks of the campaign – and immediately began surging in the polls.

But it was too late, and, aside from that, the Republicans had a superior organization, fueled by the zeal of Christian fundamentalists who believe the president's policies are a divine writ from God. What sort of emotional-ideological fuel fired the Democratic machine – hatred of Bush? Whatever it was, it wasn't a love of Kerry's fabled nuances, and – more importantly – it wasn't enough.