Forward Not Backward

Forward, not backward. Up, not down. Better, not worse. New, not old. Equality, not inequality. Peace (sort of), not war (sort of). Good, not bad. Positive, not negative. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. Money. A New Direction™. My opponent. A New Direction™. Money. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. Thank you. God bless.

Last night I went to a little private grip-n-grin with Bob Casey, Jr., the pro-fetus, anti-Arab, Democratic senatorial candidate in Pennsylvania. His brief speech is reproduced above.

I didn't get a chance to ask him how he plans to accomplish what his web site calls "peace in the Middle East based upon Israel's security needs." Based on Isreal's security needs? I'm just sayin.

Anyway, it was another extraordinary example of the ineffectuality of liberalism in America: liberals do not field candidates, but they sure do vote for Democrats. I'm not a liberal myself, but you could probably persuade me to support one in an election, given the alternatives. Yet in state after state, you end up with your Bob Caseys and your Ned Lamonts, promising vaguely to ask "the tough questions" about Iraq and to "demand answers" and "accontability" from "this administration."

But what does any of this mean? We've asked the questions. We know the answers. This, more than anything, is a persistent misconception of the left. We don't need Senators who will hold hearings to discover what we already know, which is that the war on terror is a scam to expand the police powers of the state, the war in Iraq likewise, with an added soupçon of misapplied millennial political theorizing as part of the grand, hydra-headed Straussian project to lock the full scope of human endeavor in a Camp X-Ray-style cage and badger it with loud music and freezing showers until it tells us precisely what we've already decided we want to hear. We know these things. We don't need someone to ask the questions or get the answers.

We need someone who will repudiate in absolute and unequivocal terms the practice of waging aggressive wars, who will repudiate in absolute and unequivocal terms the practice of torture, and who, at this late date, will reaffirm that yes, indeed, the Great Writ is the foundation of our much-vaunted, little-practiced Western ideal of justice and the law. Believe me. Bob Casey is not this man.

Bob Casey is a man who must instead concentrate on disconfirming his constiuents' suspicion that his undoctrinaire, but nonetheless unshakeable, fidelity to a medieval concept of uterine ensoulment that damns to hell as murders the practitioners of abortion may possibly kinda sorta affect his public policy making. (Let them die of natural causes, and let god sort 'em out, he seems to be saying of the abortionists.)