This ties into a theme I’ve been working on: secular leftists are moral absolutists. I’ve been trying to sharpen this into an essay but haven’t found the nub yet. I mentioned this idea in several comments upstream.

The Weekly Standard

Winning the “I Don’t Know” Crowd

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush have questions about when life really begins and don’t want to support a party that refuses to acknowledge those concerns.

Maybe the Americans who voted for Bush wonder just how much involvement between church and state constitutes an infringement on First Amendment proscriptions against state-sponsored religion. Maybe they are troubled by absolutists who want to wipe faith out of every aspect of public life.
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George Neumayr American Spectator

Normally Democrats urge their candidates to expunge God and morality from politics. Even the word morality grates on them. It is a far too judgment-laden term for their taste. How about the insipid term “ethics”? Okay, if you must — goes the attitude — but don’t use the loaded term “morality.” Yet what are we now hearing from the Mike Barnicles and Nancy Pelosis? That Kerry didn’t talk about God enough. That he failed to satisfy the public’s hunger for spirituality and morality. Like children who recently learned a new phrase, liberals are giving Kerry a post-mortem drubbing for not speaking to the “moral values” of America.
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Robert Novak (archive) November 4, 2004

WASHINGTON — No wonder that John Kerry, after conferring at his Boston mansion with Ted Kennedy in the wee hours Wednesday morning, did not immediately concede the election to George W. Bush before giving up nine hours later. Remote though his chance was of turning around the crucial outcome in Ohio, it seemed to provide a frail final chance of averting total disaster for the Democratic Party.
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By William J. Becker Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | November 5, 2004

If the American Civil Liberties Union committed itself to advancing the rights of Christians and Jews as tirelessly as it does to rooting out Christian and Jewish images in the public square, perhaps its civil liberties credo would not seem so duplicitous.

Sadly, the evolution of “civil liberties” has yielded a corresponding erosion of respect for those pesky “traditional values”–and the religions with which they are associated–that threaten the new pioneers of social engineering.

If religious tradition is to be recognized, say the pioneers, it is only the religious tradition of a distant culture that deserves our respect. Thus fealty toward heathenism, the religion of a conquered people, and to the conquered people themselves, is fitting, as is abjuring the Judeo-Christian heritage that formed, dominates and buttresses American society. Evidence of this truism is no more apparent than in Los Angeles, where three recent lawsuits highlight a preference for ancient religions and hostility toward the largest faith practiced in America.

Read the entire article on the Front Page Magazine website.

Thursday, November 4, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST Wall Street Journal

God bless our country.

Hello, old friends. Let us savor.

Let us get our heads around the size and scope of what happened Tuesday. George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States, became the first incumbent president to increase his majority in both the Senate and the House and to increase his own vote (by over 3.5 million) since Franklin D. Roosevelt, political genius of the 20th century, in 1936. This is huge.

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

November 1, 2004 — If President Bush is re-elected tomor row, the victory will have come de spite the best efforts of two erstwhile American journalistic icons — the Grey Lady of Times Square and Edward R. Murrow’s Tiffany Network: The New York Times and CBS News.

If nothing else, the notion that “objectivity” animates America’s media elite has been exposed this year for what it truly is — at best, a quaint myth; at worst, a pernicious lie.

Meanwhile, a new element has been injected into American politics: the Web-based truth-squadders who exposed Dan Rather for the sad partisan hack that he has become while deconstructing one elite-media hit after another throughout an agonizingly long election season.

Read the entire editorial on the New York Post website.