Written by: Beck
William F. Buckley can be very hit or miss. An
article written by him today for National Review Online falls under the hit category, making a number of good points. The concluding brace of paragraphs are especially worth the read.
Bush vs. Kerry? Looking back on Bush vs. Gore, Professor Joseph Olson of the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, gives us a shrewd perspective. Adding up the counties in the U.S. won by the two candidates, it was Gore 677, Bush 2,434. Taking the population of those counties, it was 143 million for Bush, 127 million for Gore. In square miles of land won, Gore 580,000, Bush 2,427,000. The murder rate in Gore counties, 13.2 per 100,000 residents, contrasted with 2.1 in the Bush counties.
This tells us how wrong it is to make facile generalities about the workings of democracy. How would the Iraqis themselves vote, if given the option between tranquilization under a Saddam successor, or months and years of terrorism? The United States suffers from the immaterialization of an objectifiable enemy: there is no Berlin, no Tokyo, no enemy fleet. There is just John Stuart Mill.