Election 2004, and 2008

Orson Scott Card comments on what happened in the last election, and what we may expect in the next one.

In fact, however, the election would not have been this close if the media had actually treated both candidates with identical standards.

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The reason this election was close was because the Leftist establishment -- university professors in non-rigorous subjects, the artistic/literary/entertainment elite, and the dominant media -- did its level best to keep Americans from learning the truth about either candidate.

Bush was held responsible for the ordinary messiness of war -- as if he should have personally been inspecting weapons deposits and standing guard over them. Stories were slanted, invented, or timed in order to have maximum impact on the election. Students at our universities were subjected to a constant stream of propaganda and those who tried to speak against that propaganda were ridiculed, vilified, or ostracized into silence.

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Make no mistake about it. The Democratic Party's invective, deception, and vituperation were absolutely provoked by George W. Bush.

Not because he was divisive. A truly divisive Republican candidate could have been left alone to destroy himself.

The only reason they had to scream about Bush's supposed faults was because if they hadn't, nobody would have noticed them, because they didn't exist.

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My remaining fear, now that President Bush has been reelected, is that so many Americans have been brainwashed into hating and fearing a decent man that some wacko will decide it's his job to do by force what the American people declined to do by vote: Get George Bush out of the White House.

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What a British reporter said as a "joke" is bound to be said with more seriousness by others; I have already heard reports of another joke, whose punchline is, "But I guess we'd have to get Cheney, too." Not funny, folks. Nobody wants to live in the kind of country where elections have their outcomes revised with bullets.

I pray it never happens. But if it does, I will regard Michael Moore and the other propagandists of the insane Left as accomplices and agents provocateurs. If their target had been Adolf Hitler, it is difficult to imagine how their rhetoric could have been more extreme than what they directed against George W. Bush.

One point Dennis Prager has made, in the context of calling abortion murder, comparing abortion clinics with Nazi death camps is that if someone takes this rhetoric seriously, there is no reason not to bomb the clinics and kill the doctors. Words mean things, and words provoke feelings, thoughts, and actions.

We may not be able to hold people legally responsible for the effects of their rhetoric, but they should be considered morally responsible.