Forwarded from Wild Bill

The Missing Middle Ground

Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2005

Among the sour-grapes comments from the sore losers who can't accept the victory of President Bush is that he failed to keep his promise to bring us together.

That's garbage – sophistry at its worst. Simply put, you can't unite people whose political and moral opinions are diametrically opposed. Anyone who thinks that's possible is either prevaricating or dreaming. Apples are not oranges and no amount of coaxing will make them so.

When George Bush made that promise, he was utterly sincere in the hope that he could persuade the American people to put aside petty differences and unite for the good of the nation. But what he failed to recognize was that the differences that divided us were far from petty. In assuming the presidency he was walking headlong into a battleground where the issue is between what is right and what is wrong.

Someone once said – I think it was Abraham Lincoln; it sure sounds like him – that we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by those who would have us believe that there is some middle ground between right and wrong.

Yet the only way to unite those who uphold what they believe in their hearts is right, and those who they are convinced espouse that which is wrong, is to arrive at that elusive middle ground between the two, and it just plain does not exist.

One of the burning issues of our times is abortion. Roughly half of the American people believe that the killing of the unborn is not only wrong but also wantonly atrocious, while the other half think it's a perfectly acceptable way for a woman to solve the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

Where's the middle ground here? How can you bring together people who regard abortion as murder and those who either deny that it is murder, or worse, insist that it doesn't matter if it is? A woman's right to choose to kill her unborn child simply trumps the right to life of an unborn human being. Period.

How can you bring together the two sides of this issue, which is, no matter how you put it, a matter of life and death? Did George Bush fail here? Well, if he couldn't do what is clearly an impossibility, you could say he failed. But you'd have to be Michael Moore or some other disingenuous fool to buy that nonsense.

There are genuine issues that divide this nation, and in almost all cases they involve matters of Judeo-Christian morality vs. the secular doctrine of anything goes. Most Americans, for example, adhere to the ancient doctrine that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. But the media and a large number of moral misfits insist that marriage should also be recognized as a union between a man and a man or a woman and a woman – an absurdity on its face.

This has been called a culture war, but it is far from that – it is a war where what is at stake is the nation's soul. We are either a Godly people adhering to a moral code as spelled out in the Ten Commandments, or a godless people wedded to the idiot notions that if it feels good, do it, and if it works, try it.

There is no middle ground here. There is right and there is wrong, and never the twain shall meet.

Writing in the current Weekly Standard, P.J. O'Rourke played ghostwriter for President Bush's inaugural address and he hit the issue head on.

"My Fellow Americans," he had the president saying, "I had intended to reach out to all of you and bring a divided nation together. But I changed my mind. America isn't divided by political ethos or ethnic origin. America isn't divided by region or religion. America is divided by jerks. Who wants to bring a bunch of jerks together with the rest of us? Let them stew in Berkeley, Boston, and Ann Arbor.

"The media say that I won the election on the strength of moral values. If the other fellow had become president, would the media have said that he won the election on the strength of immoral values? For once the media would have been right.

"We are all sinners. But jerks revel in their sins. You can tell by their reaction to the Ten Commandments. Post those Ten Commandments in a courthouse or a statehouse, in a public school or a public park, and the jerks go crazy. Why is that? Christians believe in the Ten Commandments. So do Muslims. Jews, too, obviously. Show the Ten Commandments to Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, or to people with just good will and common sense and nobody says, 'Whoa! That's all wrong!'"

O'Rourke has it right. On one side are the great mass of the American people whose heads are screwed on right. On the other are the jerks, the self-appointed elitists who think the majority of their fellow Americans are an illiterate bunch of yahoos who live in flyover country, probably in trailer parks or shacks with hound dogs living under the front porch, and whose opinions are not worth listening to.

The jerks are the intellectually superior class who think they can bring a president down by using forged documents on a TV news show and get away with it. The jerks are the politicians who lie to senior citizens that the president's attempts to solve the looming Social Security problem are really meant to cut benefits of those retirees now getting them.

The jerks are the people who would like to see the greeting "Merry Christmas" outlawed and that sacred holy day driven into obscurity. The jerks are the people who want to convince us that the universe and those within it created themselves.

Does anybody really want to be united with the jerkery?