Nobody knows our Soros

The forthcoming presidential election in the United States crept up on us, not so much because we can’t read a calendar as because the year-long crawl to the first Tuesday in November seemed not to be going anywhere very fast.

Discussions of Democratic candidate John Kerry’s facility in French, smears on Richard Cheney, race-baiting jabs at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — it was an autumn that was forever August. But, conscious of how fast the date is approaching, we confess it: we hope for Bush’s victory in the next U.S. election.

Democratic administrations have, in recent years, been far less friendly to mining than Republican ones. That much, both sides would have to concede. And the present Democratic ticket — a career politician of Bay Brahmin lineage, and a lawyer from the Carolinas who made his fortune on contingency fees — offers more of the same.

And the Democratic attitude toward mining mirrors what the party has become since the days of Lyndon Johnson: it is no longer the party of working people, or of economic progress. It’s the party of the comfortably wealthy and the chattering classes.

In taking this position, just on the issues relevant to mining, we find we’ve put ourselves on the opposite side of most of the planet’s bigger noises. We do read the major English-language press, and it seems to be heavily on Kerry’s side both in the U.S. and out.

In truth, it’s not so much opposition as foaming excoriation. Move on over to moveon.org, bankrolled by the financial whiz George Soros, and you’ll see what kind of vitriol is being sprayed. You don’t have to go to street demos to see Bush portrayed as Adolf Hitler; Move On has already put that one up in a collection of advertising ideas on its web site, then pulled it when they were called on it. (It has been pointed out elsewhere that Soros himself made the comparison in an interview with the Washington Post about a year ago.)

And respected world leaders are out for Kerry too. Retired Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammad instructed American Muslims last month on where their duty lay: “[Bush] is the cause of the tragedies in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq. . . . All these are done with the approval of President Bush and his veto in the United Nations Security Council. . . . Even if you fail to unseat Bush, you can at least reduce his majority.” This wise elder statesman seems to have forgotten there are four other Security Council vetoes, and conflated Westminster parliamentary systems — where a prime minister might, indeed, have to deal with a reduced majority — with the Americans’ Electoral College.

Or pick up a copy of The Guardian, where freelance television columnist Charlie Brooker expelled anyone not actively opposed to Bush from the civilized world, and called on past presidential assassins to step up and do their stuff. (He then insisted that he had only been making an “ironic joke”; we suppose his editors were doing the same.)

Mind you, the typographically challenged voice of the British soft-left is still stunned by the eye-opening replies they got when they invited their readers to adopt a voter in Clark Cty., Ohio, and educate them how the world wants Americans to vote: “Please remember, too, that I am merely an American,” wrote a respondent in Dayton, whose sense of irony was perhaps as acute as The Guardian’s editors. “That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate, so please don’t use big, fancy words.” (Class dismissed.)

Not that overseas press are alone. The Columbia Broadcasting System — after either falling for, or deliberately peddling, a ham-handed forgery about Bush’s Air National Guard service, and after readying itself to run an 18-month-old story about missing explosives in Iraq on the Sunday before the U.S. election — has made itself look less like a news organization than a political action committee with some transmitter towers. And don’t forget those glorious tribunes of the people, Hollywood actors and geriatric rock musicians.

Yet none of them can quite decide whether Bush is an evil genius, the Moriarty of organized crime against humanity, or the dumbest chimp in the cage. Sensibly, they try and sell both portrayals, figuring the world may not notice.

That Bush is being so vilified by the Great and the Good of international finance and mass culture, not to mention the left-leaning chattering class, counts greatly in his favour. As a better commentator than us put it to his American readers, “the people who hate you are telling you to vote for Kerry and Edwards.”

So to our American readers: whatever appearances to the contrary, there are many that wish you well in the rest of the world. Go defy your betters on Tuesday; there is nothing they shudder at quite so much as common sense. And on Wednesday, permit your friends in other lands a small laugh at the discomfiture you have dealt them.