Blogs For Victory

There is a discussion over at NRO’s The Corner as to whether or not the GOP’s scale-down of the convention yesterday indicates we are becoming a rather wussy nation. Here’s a sample:

…saying, basically, that the country has become hopelessly wussified, to be blunt. (I said “Oprahfied,” which is more indirect.) Many have pointed out that, hurricanes aside, we’re at war, in two different countries. They have also said that conventions were held in 1944: when many Americans were engaged in an awful, titanic struggle.

And I thought you might like to read this:

Jay,

Let me give you another example of hardiness. My grandmother is a Holocaust survivor. She was born on September 11, 1912. We live in New York City. In 2001 for her 89th birthday we had planned to go out for a big dinner for her. Needless to say, the day didn’t turn out as planned. But we as a family decided to carry on. Even with the ruins of the WTC still smoldering in the distance, we took our grandmother out to dinner. We found one of the few restaurants on the Upper East Side that were open, and we celebrated.

As my grandmother said, she had been through worse in her life, and had made it this far. As far as she was concerned, they could bring it on, because at this point she wasn’t going to back down or let anything stop her.

I could relate much more — citing different examples from different readers — but you more than get our drift…

There is something to be said for this theory, but I don’t think that this really indicates a nationally mushiness as much as a nation besieged by lies in our modern Age of Lies.

The reason President Bush skipped the convention and the GOP de-facto did nothing on the convention’s first day is because President Bush and the GOP were blindsided by a series of lies surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The facts of Katrina didn’t matter in 2005, and they don’t matter today – all that matters is that back then the MSM in conjunction with Democrats made it out that Katrina was the worst thing which ever happened and that President Bush and the GOP were responsible for the catastrophe. That Katrina wasn’t even close to the worst disaster we’ve ever suffered and that President Bush and the GOP had absolutely nothing to do with the governmental failures during Katrina is irrelevant. Because the lies about Katrina stuck, the President and the GOP had to act as if the lies were true, and thus set things up so that President and party could come out on top of the Hurricane Gustav situation. And do keep in mind that its not like President Bush and the GOP will gain credit for the fact that Gustav blew through without any serious mishap – no, not at all; when dealing with lies, things don’t work like that. The only thing Bush and party get out of this dance to the liar’s tune is no further damage on the issue.

Those who say the GOP show should have gone on as scheduled are right in the sense that the truth of the matter is that President Bush couldn’t do any more about Gustav as it made landfall than he could about Katrina when it made landfall. Furthermore, that this or that speech/celebration went on in Minnesota would also neither harm nor help any efforts of the people affected by Gustav. But to have had President Bush give his speech and to have had the GOP in a celebratory mood would have allowed the liars a firm foothold to bash President and party over Katrina, even though Gustav largely fizzled. The truth will out, as they say, but there’s no saying just when it will do so – and the truth about Katrina might be a long time coming, and may have to wait until this generation passes away. This is not a new thing, by the way – our Age of Lies goes back quite a bit, and the most infamous early case of it nearly derailed Churchill’s political career with the lies spread about the British disaster at the Dardanelles during the First World War.

What are we to do about this? Nothing in the immediate sense. In the longer term: keep winning at the ballot box. The lies are put out by the left in service of leftwing political goals…the longer we keep the left out of power and the more we can reform things so that the left has less and less influence, the weaker will be their ability to make a lie take hold and become part of the national memory. The Age of Lies didn’t just spring up – it grew and grew over a century and only came to fruition in the 20th century…it may take just as long to clear it out. But, meanwhile, we have to be careful in what we do – careful to do things in such a way that the truth can come out, and the liars are prevented as far as possible from confusing the issue.