Opinion/Mark Steyn: Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to mid-December.
These are serious times and the Senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's lesbianism (Kerry's for it, I think) and Laura Bush's curriculum vitae (Mrs Kerry isn't impressed by it) than on the central question of the age.
There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively"). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it.
As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, two and a half years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness Monster, who at least does us the courtesy of showing up as an indistinct grey blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up.
But, even if he weren't, that's a frivolous reductive way of looking at this war. He's not a general or head of state; he can't sign an instrument of surrender and make all the unpleasantness go away.
The enemy is an ideology that appeals to various loose groupings from the Balkans to Indonesia, as well as to entrepreneurial freelancers like the shooter who killed two people at Los Angeles Airport on July 4th, 2002. If Kerry's oft-repeated "outsourcing Osama" crack is genuinely felt, it shows he doesn't get this war. And, if it's just cheapo point scoring, it's pathetic.
Almost everything falls into that category. Iraq's messy. So? What isn't? The ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War Two or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. They'd be part of a Greater Canada, with the Queen on their coins and government health care.
Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again it's "prescription drugs from Canada" - the literal panacea in any discussion of US health care. I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada.
Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? US pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise.
The war against the Islamists and the prescription drugs are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on election day because he's committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be". The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds.
By "demographic", I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic", I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shrivelled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical", I mean that, if you think the UN and other international organisations are antipathetic to the Americans now, wait a few years and see what kind of support they get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialised health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the province of Quebec's health department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital.
In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery and might have woken up the next day swimming in diarrhoea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene - by unionised, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number: unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will attribute your death to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, say, Iraq's.
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border.
It helps to keep a sense of perspective about all issues. Still, if one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.