Good Day for a Funeral

The news was pretty much all in before I got to sleep last night. The only good news was that Tim Pawlenty retained the Governors seat in MN. It may mean that those of us that work for a living can keep a tiny percentage of our paychecks.

I really did go to a funeral today, an uncle that lived a mile up the road from me in my youth. Eighty eight years old and went pretty fast when he went, lived in his home with his wife right up to the last few weeks. The end doesn't get all that much better, lots of family and freinds at a church where he faithfully attendeded. A good life, a fairly quick end, and hope for a better life in heaven. There are worse things than the right kind of a funeral.

Was the Republican loss "the right kind of a funeral". Sorry to say, I really don't see how a thinking person would draw that conclusion, but from the MSM and lefty reactions, it is clear that many mostly feeling people "feel different". The Democrats and MSM didn't run on anything but anger and wishful thinking, so the election didn't really decide anything other than "going 100% negative with no agenda can work".

The Democrats are basically the party of human nature, which is often the same as the party of doing what feels good, or wishful thinking. For a century, they were the party of slavery until Lincoln and the Republicans ended the scourge, but at the very high price of 600K lives. The Democrats sought new lower ground and became the party of Jim Crow for the next 100 years.

They followed that act with some overlap as the party of surrender to communism. Counting the USSR, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and China, communism took something in the 50-100million lives at least. Could it have been stopped earlier? It is always hard to tell, but Reagan and the Republicans got it done yet again. Now we face global Islamic terrorism, and the Democrats have found their calling as the party of surrender to a new menace. Yesterday the odds of victory without the loss of millions of lives went down severely. Surgery for cancer is costly even early, it is usually far more expensive or terminal when we wait and "hope for the best".

Something like 80% of Americans were in favor of the war in Iraq when we went in. Osama and company felt that we were weak in Vietnam, Lebannon, and Somalia, and that we would be weak in Iraq. Some of us thought that we would be different after 9-11. More like the WWII generation. Yesterday we proved that Osama is right, we are going to cut and run, and we will pay the price now, the question is just how high it will be.

Some will say "we were lied to". That kind of thinking is beyond wishful and falls to the most human of natures that says "I won't accept responsibility for my own thoughts, decisions, and actions since it makes me feel better to blame someone else". The idea that Bush KNEW that we wouldn't be able to find WMD is simply beyond the pale. Every piece of evidence and rational conjecture that we have says that he acted on the best information he had, as did the CIA, the congress, and indeed the 80% of Americans that felt that we simply couldn't take the risk. The odds that any of our houses will be destroyed by fire are exceedingly low, yet we almost all carry fire insurance. The odds that Saddam harbored WMD were exceedingly high, and seeing him use them or allow others to use them was very beleiveable. WMD wasn't found in the quantity that we expected. Saying that we are CERTAIN that meant he didn't have WMD is like saying that it is certain that there are no fatal car crashes since we have never witnessed one. However, even if he didn't, the VAST majority of Americans, and virtually ALL of our leadership agreed that it was a risk that we could not accept. It is an abdication of responsibility now to suggest that we are not willing to pay the price for carrying through on what in a democracy is a shared responsibility, yet that is what has happened.

Being a Republican means that one is forced to look at reality, but also that we believe in higher good than human nature and therefore hope. It is human to fall short, and Republicans are just has human as anyone, we just try not to worship at the alter of man and praise vice as virtue. Americans voted on emotion. That is very understandable, but also often very expensive. Let us pray to God that undeserved mercy may be ours and the cost in lives is held lower than would be expected by a hand greater than our own.