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December 31, 2004

New Year, arriving

Tonight, as good conservatives gather to celebrate the lawful reelection of President George Walker Bush, they will tell many jokes, and play many games such as Pin the Cloven Hooves on the Democrat. A few may imbibe, and (one trusts) fewer still will imbibe too much. And I hope that their hosts will gently filch their car keys and call for a cab, because these are the ones we need more of. Not the overdrinkers, I mean, but conservatives.

What we won’t need are the Michael Moores and the George Soroses and the churlish little swine from Move On Out of Our Parents Basement, or the panty-sniffing sociopaths over at Demozombie Underbelly. I’m also hard-pressed to think of any earthly reason to keep the American Communist Loony Union around, or People for the Socialist Way. But most of them will continue to waste good oxygen, and that’s just the way it is. Bartender? Another round for the libs. Make it a double. And let them find their own way back to whatever hole they crawled from.

This is December 31, and with it the tradition that we all are enjoined to follow, enumerating our successes and assessing our shortfalls, and clearing our mental slates for the new year ahead.

At the end of this year, we saw justice triumph over evil not only at the ballot box but in the courthouse, though the appeals aren’t over for killer Scott Peterson, and probably won’t be until they drop the hammer on him and pump him full of pain-free death, so totally unlike what he dealt his victims.

Yasser Arafat got less than what he deserved, this year, but at least he got dead (and good riddance). Yeah, better late than never, but what can we say? The search is still on for the billion or so dollars Arafat stole from the Paleswineans, but at least his not-so-grieving widow can find solace in her millionaire digs outside of Paris. The poor of France so obviously need her money more than the PLO need Arafat’s.

In Ohio, George Bush is still the winner, though it cost millions of dollars to recount those ballots and they got fewer than 400 more for the treason artist and phony war hero, Hanoi John Kerry. But the system worked here, and Mr. Bush still won, so that’s all that really matters.

Despite a media which went to extreme lengths to prove its bias, the cowboy in the white hat won. Cue the cheerleaders. Halliburton, Halliburton, rah, rah, RAH!

Was there bad news? Of course. Almost a year to the day after the Bam, Iran earthquake, another came along, which will probably claim a million lives from disease as much as injuries. The nations which can do something are doing something — although the media is reporting it as some sort of macabre fundraising contest, and not the generous desire to help fellow human beings that it is. How many will we find still alive in the Maldives? Nobody knows. But it won’t be many and it won’t be soon enough, but no one nation can take any blame on that part because of the remoteness of those islands. CBS Evening News and the Jayson Blair Gazette will still surely try.

We sit here comfortable tonight, waiting for Regis to babble while the glitter-ball descends, and if things went well today (as they did for me) you too have seen a few friends and shaken a few hands and wished a Happy New Year. But what do you say when what amounts to an entire nation has been wiped out, all from a single unpreventable event? What will we say when we reach the Maldives? Not much. A million dead is unthinkable numbers, inescapably huge yet impossible to grapple with. So we stick to the safe subjects instead, feeling guilty if we do and fearful of jinxing 2005 if we don’t.

Are we being unreasonable to personalize this week, trying to find more good than bad in a year of phenomenal weirdness? If we're going to ignore the victims (as the leftists always do), does that mean we celebrate the killer — in this case the quake? No, of course not. Let the Dems feel sorry for the Saddam Husseins and the Fidel Castros and the other tyrants. Let the left forget those trenches of dead in Iraq, or those still being slaughtered in tribal genocide in Africa.

These were the same airheads braying that “Y2K” would bring us global ruination, five years ago this night. We’d be living in caves and hunting mastodon with stone-tipped spears, just watch, if they were deprived of the internet. The same gang who screamed about holes in the ozone layer giving us global warming were the same ones about twenty years ago who darkly predicted a new Ice Age. And they’re the ones who cheered when multiple felon Rodney King got a cash award (which he quickly spent), as they instantly forgot Reginald Denny. These are the humanitarians who want to run the relief effort after this tsunami. These are the ones who are a natural disaster.

No, forget those clowns. We have earned four more years without a Democrat in the White House, and there is so much to be positive about in the time immediately ahead.

Me, I’ll focus on the good side, thank you.

And no, I’m walking, so you may not get to take my keys.

Posted by Weaselteeth at December 31, 2004 09:58 PM