Post-Election Blogger Roundup

Just a few of the post-election reflections that I found amusing, interesting, or appealing.

• Jeff Jarvis offers some good advice his fellow Democrats: "suck it up and repeat after me: He's our President, too."

• Mark Shea: explains why the Left is losing hearts and minds: "They don't know what's killing them. They cannot conceive of a world where those who disagree with them are not evil, stupid, or insane."

  Case in point -- this message from John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace:

  It's hard to know what to say. To see Bush re-elected with the first electoral majority since his father's first election is an emotional blow. He seems to have secured a mandate based on his policies of pre-emptive war, war on the environment, crony capitalism, veiled racism, homophobia and a fundamentalism that would make the Taliban proud. This despite the largest "Get out the Vote" effort in the history of progressive causes in the United States.

• Meanwhile, Instapundit comments on some photos of sore losers voicing their discontent at a post-election rally in San Francisco: "The Democrats are going to have to distance themselves from stuff like this, if they want to carry swing states."

• William Luse: "small blessings, Biblical proportions":
  And the Lord God in His mercy looked down upon the earth and searched in His might from the Ohio River to the shores of Lake Erie, and found stuck somewhere in the midst of the vastness one TS O'Rama, and announced to the assembled heavenly host growing impatient with Ohio's slothfulness at counting votes in a timely manner: "Behold, any man who can pray, drink German beer, and watch election returns at the same time is a man worth saving.

• Prof Bainbridge concludes they really do hate us, and cites a revelatory passage from Christopher Lasch:
  [T]he new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension. In the United States, "Middle America" -- a term that has both geographical and social implications—has come to symbolize everything that stands in the way of progress: "family values," mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, retrograde views of women. Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing. (p. 28 Revolt of the Elites).

• Peggy Noonan wants us to savor the moment:
  George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

• Powerline on Dan Rather's "blame it on the bloggers" remark:
  "This from a guy whose network coordinated an attack on the president, based on forged documents, with the Democratic party and the Kerry campaign?"

• The New Criterion's weblog on the Democratic interpretation of "moral values":
  . . . to draw a line from "moral values" to "gay marriage" is to misread this response completely. "Moral values" do not necessarily represent an "issue" distinct from terrorism, the Iraq war, domestic issues, gay marriage, and so on. Moral values inform the approach one takes to those issues. What voters may have seen in John Kerry is a man without convictions or values--at least, without any he made very clear. Voters may see just the opposite in Bush--and respect what they see, even in cases where Bush's convictions and values lead him to decisions with which they themselves disagree.

• Jeff Miller ("Curt Jester") how to really annoy liberals:
  Since many liberald said that Bush stole the first election and that they had to work to re-defeat Bush I propose we go along with them. Four years from now we have President Bush run again since he first four years were an electoral mulligan.

• Bill Cork responds to Garry Wills and Thomas Friedman's laments on the Bush win with a lesson on the foundation of American freedom.

• Phil Dilon, a self described "prairie apologist, transplanted Bostonian and Kennedy Democrat who has found refuge in the Kansas Flint Hills," provides an excellent roundup of Democrat hand-wringing over Bush's victory, with a focus on their latest epiphany that in order to win the votes of Middle America, they must speak the language of Middle America. Unfortunately, says Mr. Dillon, In Order To Be Sincere, You Must First Really Be Sincere.

• Andrew ("The Backseat Philosopher") writes a letter To My Fellow Democrats. Probably the best advice for Democrats ever offered in a single post on this election. Read it.