Americans have spoken

I'm sitting here looking at the county-by-county break down of election results for the 2004 presidential election from Real Clear Politics. It's a sobering map. The entire New England map looks blue, except two counties in Maine, two in New Hampshire, one in Vermont, and one in Connecticutt. Two-thirds of New York is red, half of New Jersey, and most of Pennsylvania. Alabama is solid red, except for a blue belt that represents the "rust belt" of the state - the former steel-producing regions. The blue areas in every other state, from east to west, can be identified as being the home of a large city, radical unions, or a majority of people who vote based on extreme environmental convictions the rest of the nation doesn't share.

There's a lot to learn from this map, and a lot of people are uncomfortable with some of the lessons. Someone remarked that the Republicans represented people who voted based on "God, guns and gays". There's some truth in that, but not exactly what the spokesman meant. Mark Steyn quotes Brian Reid of the Daily Miror (you know, the one with the headline "How can 59 million people be so dumb?" in his London Telegraph article, claims that " "The self-righteous, gun-totin', military-lovin', sister-marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport-ownin' rednecks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong'."

What Americans did with their 2004 Presidential vote was to reaffirm the actions of our founding fathers, that governements are to "secure the rights" of Free Men, and are given only the powers needed to do that. They reaffirmed that the only legitimate source of power in this land is the power of the people, and that their representatives to government are to make laws, not the judges appointed to interpret and apply them. They recognized that we are at war, and only a strong military and a strong leader could win that war. They believe in the right to "keep and bear arms", not to hunt, or for sport shooting, but as the last check on an overreaching government. They once again acknowledged and affirmed that we are a free and sovereign nation, not dependent upon the approval of any other agency to do whatever we feel is necessary for our safety and security.

They once again affirmed that the American people as a whole are God-loving moral people, who believe there are limits to behavior, and that there really are things like "good" and "evil". Starr Parker calls them "inside-out" people - the core of their world is internal, based on religion and values, and is projected from within onto whatever is going on outside of themselves. These are opposed to the "outside-in" people, who let the external world affect what they believe, and whose belief systems change with the scenery. The majority of Americans don't hate gays, but don't want the gay agenda and the gay lifestyle crammed down their throats - by Hollywood, by New York, or by Washington, DC. The vote on "gay marriage" in eleven states, which was soundly defeated everywhere, expressed this unequivocally.

"The "non-passport-ownin' rednecks" comment is just another indication of how poorly the average European understands the United States. The entire European Union, plus Turkey and every other country in Europe save Russia, makes up less than 2/3 the land area of the United States alone. There's no need for the majority of Americans to own a passport in order to travel more than 3000 miles east-west, or 1800 miles north-south. Just to rub it in, however, I think that Europe would be surprised at the number of American that either have, or have had, a passport in the last 30 or so years. During the Cold War, the United States had more military troops in West Germany alone than the total population of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Andorra, Monaco, and the Vatican, combined. Each of these six nations issues, or at least issued, passports. The United States has a dozen National Parks larger than Luxembourg, and the total of the 52 parks listed on the United States National Parks home page contain more land area than Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, the Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, or Switzerland. In fact, the twelve largest US National Parks have a total land area larger than Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg combined. One National Park, Denali, is larger than Slovenia, and it's only one of eight national parks in that state. Thanks to border agreements with Canada and Mexico, we don't NEED passports to see more than one twelfth of the land area of the entire world.

We have always been a nation that believes in personal freedoms, personal responsibility, and the "pursuit of happiness" by everyone. We try to keep our government interference to a minimum, our productivity as high as possible, and our pleasures within the confines of the family. If given the chance, two-thirds of the world's population would be on our doorsteps tomorrow. If we don't want to follow the European Suicide Pact of declining family size, socialism, limited opportunity, and high unemployment, maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe instead of Europe turning up its nose at the United States, perhaps they should try emulating it. Our POOR live better than the middle class in most of the countries in the world, where there IS a middle class. Maybe instead of the rest of the world constantly harping on what we're doing wrong, they should look at what we're doing right, and try to copy it.

Middle Americans "get it". Europe, and America's left, are still lost in a fog of their own creation.