This has already been excerpted on Instapundit and Vodkapundit, and has been commented on by Ed Driscoll and Charles Johnson, among others: Tom Junod's "The Case for George W. Bush" in this month's Esquire. Go read it before reading any of my blather--read it instead of my blather, if you're pressed for time.
The piece is a concise and intelligent description of the peculiar Bush hatred that has gripped so many in this country, written by someone who is himself afflicted by it, and who perfectly captures why that hatred is so balefully stupid:
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.
Junod also handily dismisses the fatuous, morally bankrupt romanticism which animates the conception that privileged nihilists like Michael Moore have of terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere:
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
That's what it's all about, people, right there: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all.
You can see the consequences of the loss of that ability every time Linda Ronstadt sings "Desperado" and dedicates it to Michael Moore; every time Janeane Garofalo splutters into cooly ironic incoherence on television; every time the activist flakes of the left organize a puppet show and call it political action. The loss of the ability to properly discern evil, and the reluctance to declare oneself superior to it, is subsequent to the loss of reason, the discerning logos that makes politics possible.
You can also see the consequences of that loss and reluctance in the frail words of the hopeful Senator Kerry, who passively promises us that "Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response," but cannot bring himself to commit to actively shaping the world to prevent such an attack; who offers us the pablum of "We just need to believe in ourselves;" who, by declaring his intention to "bring back [the] time-honored tradition [that] America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to," demonstrates that he has little comprehension of the exigencies of victory, or even of the actuality of the war itself.
Iraq is not the war. Iraq is a campaign in the war. And John Kerry's way of winning that campaign will be to "reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers [...] and bring our troops home."
Then what? Turn America into a fortress? Hunker down? Wait for the next inevitable attack on American soil, spend years waiting for intelligence that will never be certain because of its very nature, then do nothing because it doesn't meet the UN's evidentiary requirements?
It's about real moral certainty, Senator Kerry. It's not about nuance, or intellect, or animus disguised as conviction. You're relying on all three, because you think that this election is about Bush.
It isn't, and you're going to lose.
