It's "1918" all over again

“The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.”
– H.L. Mencken

President Bush has won the election outright, and this weekend all around Hell’s Kitchen, gross, indignant defiance simmers in a cauldron of idiot’s rage. To cite but one example:

At Carney’s bar off West 58th Street, a forty-something still exhibiting the grooming habits of prep school—a Massachusetts native, as it would turn out—reads The Wall Street Journal, a nearly finished pint of Bass within easy reach. He overhears the man seated on his right blurt the words “Bush” and “ecstatic” to a friend. He pays closer attention.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to switch horses in the middle of the fight,” the man continues. “Kerry’s own pollster [Mark Mellman] presciently observed ‘we simply do not defeat an incumbent president in wartime.’ And I’m fairly certain there’s precedent in that.”

The Massachusetts native sets his paper down and turns to the man, surmising yet another nut that voted for Bush.

“As a disgruntled voter and lifelong Red Sox fan, I take certain pleasure in telling you you’re wrong,” he intrudes, standing up. The ambushed Mellman sympathizer—a New York native, lifelong Democrat and Bush 2004 supporter, as it would turn out—is clearly taken aback.

The Red Sox fan/Kerry man grabs his coat and continues, “The incumbent was defeated in 1968. During the Vietnam War.” Pleased by his distorted gloat, he beats a hasty exit, his personal indignation avenged. Try that on for size, you misguided ignoramus.

Oh those Kerry supporters. Never sticking around to hear a little nuance with respect to their arguments.

As most readers of this blog will know, Nixon and the Republicans did indeed end the eight-year reign of Democrats in the White House in 1968. Giving the devil his due, the results of that election clearly voiced the misgivings voters had with an incumbent administration they rightly perceived as being hopelessly bogged down by a tragic war that had already cost thousands of US lives. But an incumbent president was not unseated in 1968. Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for reelection that year. Instead, it fell to the hapless Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s second in command, to take the fall.

The irony of the Democratic Party, besieged by antiwar protests, losing in 1968 should not be lost on us in 2004. Nor should the hubris of Kerry supporters—the big city liberals, academic elites, celebrity millionaire knee-jerkers and mainstream media—raging on against the dying of the light. The silent majority has weighed in on their self-righteous hysteria. It has mulled over “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And it is not amused. Now old-school New England–bred liberalism has 59 million reasons to fear “2004” becoming the greater nation’s permanent “1918” retort to its obsolete and out-of-touch ideas.

It’s high time the Democrats set about reinventing themselves before they’re swallowed up by their growing irrelevance.