context and subtext

The great European thinkers have decided that instead of doing another four years of lame Bush-is-a-moron cracks they're going to do four years of lame Americans-are-morons cracks. Inaugurating the new second-term outreach was Brian Reade in the Daily Mirror, who attributed the President's victory to: “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'.”

Well, that's certainly why I supported Bush, but I'm not sure it entirely accounts for the other 59,459,765.

That's Mark Steyn (who else?) in London's Sunday Telegraph—proving once again that the British press are nothing if not unrestrained.

But perhaps our own should be so honest. Consider this NYT article from the same day: Can History Save the Democrats?

A little more than a month before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln stood at the east portico of the Capitol and delivered his second inaugural address. It was a brief speech with a distinctly religious message: he twice cited biblical verses, and made a dozen references to God, most strikingly in assessing the opposing sides in the Civil War.

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Lincoln said. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

The address was roundly criticized in some newspapers for overstepping the bounds separating church and state. But Lincoln was using God to debunk government-by-God.

Now, with George W. Bush's re-election, God and a newly triumphant Republican president are once again in the headlines. And there are signs that the present national divide, between the narrow but solid Republican majority and a Democratic party seemingly trapped in second place, may be hardening into a pattern that will persist for years to come.

Democrats, especially, are left to wonder: What will it take to break the pattern - an act of God?

Included under the category of said divine interventions are “deep schism in the ruling party, the implosion of a social movement under the excesses of its own agenda or the emergence of an extraordinary political figure.” And, by the bye, presidential assassinations: half the piece concerns the political and cultural aftershocks of the Lincoln and McKinley murders.

True, the Times article does not don the guise of “irony” in a call for President Bush's assassination, as did London's Guardian not quite three weeks ago. But the subtext is clear enough.

Professor Wilentz of Princeton said that even if the 2004 victory was an incremental one, that should not comfort the Democrats. He said Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush now have a chance to do what Hanna and McKinley never did: Lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance.

“The Republicans are basically unchecked,” Professor Wilentz said. “There is no check in the federal government and no check in the world. They have an unfettered playing field.”

Until the next act of God, that is.

As Jeff Goldstein asks: Now can we question their patriotism?