Another Must-Read from Mary Steyn

He’s simply the best columnist working today.

On real Brownshirt behavior in this election:

Out on the street, meanwhile, angry white men have burgled Republican offices in Spokane, Washington; lobbed cinder blocks through Republican offices in Flagstaff, Arizona; shot up Republican offices in Knoxville, Tennessee; assaulted female Republican students handing out flyers at the Gophers football game in Minnesota; and are currently bullying early voting Republicans at polling booths in Florida. If this campaign went on another two months, they’d be seizing GOP county chairmen and beheading them on video.

On Kerry’s ability to fight terrorists and those who think that he’ll be forced into it:

The question now is whether the electorate is closer to the 2002 or the 2000 model. Andrew Sullivan and the other moulting hawks claim that, whatever his inner agonising, a President Kerry will have no choice but to fight the war on terror as robustly — if more smartly and multilaterally — than Bush. This rather overlooks the fact that the strongest force in global affairs is inertia. It seems most probable that, underneath the newly restored polite veneer of international relations, everyone’s attention will wander and the league of nuclear rogue states will expand and so will the list of freelance players in their Rolodexes; and, while John’s hosting Jacques at some summit to celebrate the new Franco–American entente, something will happen and we’ll have to learn the lessons of 9/11 all over again.

So, taking a flyer on a guy who’s spent 30 years siding with the Vietcong, the Soviets, the Sandinistas, the Commies in Grenada and — vis-à-vis Kuwait in 1990 — Saddam Hussein? No thanks.

And finally, on what message a Kerry victory will send about our country:

Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism — that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism.

Finally, Steyn says that if his prediction is wrong and Bush loses, he’ll quit writing columns.

I think his job is preatty safe, myself.

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