Moral Majority

The WSJ this morning has an article about how China, the Islamic world, and other parts of the world are developing new internets. The reason these are gaining some traction, rather than being technological toys, is the world's distrust of American control over the internet through ICANN, a distrust based on its hatred of Bush. In other words, out of a world population of, say, 5 billion people, 150 million support Bush, and the other 97% hate and fear him.

I do not think the hatred of the world, the nearly universal view of the Bush people as villains, derives from their policies per se. Of much greater importance, and danger to human well-being, is their systematic distortion of humanity's core moral values. That they often do so in the name of Christianity is simply hypocritical icing on their stinking cake. The distortions I am talking about consist of a publicly asserted and defended moral relativism that turns values like truth, charity, and justice into propaganda tools, to be used or betrayed as necessary to advance the user's personal agenda. They speak contemptuously of the "reality-based community," proclaim actions compassionate that injure the people they affect, and assert the right of the President to ignore the laws and Constitution when it suits him. These statements openly trivialize and debase the values they purport to use.

Even Richard Nixon, the last truly villainous Republican President, did not go so far. He tried to conceal or deny doing the wrong and immoral things that were eventually proven, but he never tried to deny that those things were in fact wrong or immoral. In other words, when he abused the powers of the Presidency his defense was that he didn't do it. Bush, by contrast, admits that he did it, and claims that it was right and proper for him to do so.

It cannot be truthfully said that terrible people like Bush et al reliably meet their comeuppance. More often than not they prosper from their behavior (except to the extent that they must live with themselves and their ilk), and when such people run political units, they create hell on earth for everyone caught in their web. Often these hells then last for decades or centuries. The good news is that we are still a democracy, with the power to stop and reverse the horrible policies these people are imposing on us and the world at large. The bad news is that every new day makes their impact more indelible.