I, Oracle

One of the places I post regularly is the Bartcop Forum, a satellite of the pro-Democratic site Bartcop. Needless to say, things were grim there after election day, 2004, so I did something I'd never done before -- start a new topic -- to try to cheer people up.

"Bush won the election like the Americans won the Tet Offensive"

November 4, 2004

Bush's victory over Kerry -- and for the sake of argument I'm giving the election numbers the benefit of the doubt -- should be compared to Nixon-McGovern in 1972 and Reagan-Mondale in 1984 before it is assessed. Those were 49-state landslides. Bush barely survived.

In Vietnam the Tet Offensive was defeated by the Americans, but the real story was that it happened at all. The official narrative of the war was shattered.

That's what happened to Bush, though characteristically he will act as he got his 49-state landslide anyway, hoping this will make it seem as if he did. Instead of a blue elite besieged by a red majority -- the official narrative of the conservative revolutionaries -- we now have blue forces that are almost equal and potentially superior to the red. In retrospect, despite a few more years of political war, in which the red forces wield superior weapons like the Supreme Court, the 2004 election will be remembered as the turning point in the conservative revolution, the moment it became obvious that it would fail.

There were no replies, and my post drifted quickly into obscurity. Yet it records one of those moments of perceptiveness that I almost always fail to leave any record of, so I hope you'll forgive me for bringing it up myself.