In Praise of Gloating

John Derbyshire is doing a bit of gloating.

Oh, relax. Not at John Kerry, or John Edwards' expense. Not even at the media, or Hollywood.

But that leaves plenty of targets:

That still leaves us plenty of gloat-worthy targets, though. I am going to have no compunction about gloating at Michael Moore, who has done more to boost anti-Americanism world-wide than Farrah Fawcett did for big hair. I was talking to some young English people the other day. They didn't know much about U.S. politics, and half of what they knew came from watching Fahrenheit 911. They knew there was something fishy about that movie, and giggled in a slightly embarrassed way as they played back the opinions they had picked up from it; but those were in fact their opinions faute de mieux, and some of them will stick. In cultures yet further removed from our own — in China, in Latin America, in India, in the Muslim Middle East — Moore's poisonous brew is swallowed without a hiccup, and has become the stuff that "everybody knows..."

Nor do I have any reservations about gloating at George Soros, who has squandered stupendous sums of money in a lost cause.

Then there's the foreigners: the Guardian and Independent newspapers and the BBC in England, the French and the Greeks, Kofi Annan and Mohammed El Baradei...and of course that Friendly Giant to the North. How incredible it must seem to them, to these self-styled sophisticates, that a crude, swaggering boor like George W. Bush should retain the affections of his countrymen after all his crimes and blunders! Well, deal. You're stuck with an honest to God (literally) American conservative — and a conservative America — for another four years. Get used to it.

The big gloat, though, must be directed at our enemies. How they wanted Kerry to win! How they must be sunk in gloom in their caves and hideouts and seedy rented rooms! They knew that, for all his podium salutes and tough talk, Kerry would be another Jimmy Carter, another groveller, another guilt-addled cringing apologizer for America's sins, past and present. Now, instead of a boneless wonder, they are faced with a resolute and determined opponent, a commander-in-chief who actually inspires his troops, and who knows that, as Winston Churchill usefully noted, you can't win wars without fighting.

Derb's a better man than I. I'm tempted to lay a little smug smack down this morning...

...but I won't. This victory's just too sweet to sully with such churlishness.

(The hell it is. Ha ha, Atrios and Ollie Willis and Pandagon and Kos! Pffffft!)

Now, when we beat Dayton...

Posted by Mitch at November 3, 2004 10:21 AM | TrackBack