Dean E. Murphy Is an Asshole
Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is plenty steamed about an article in this past Sunday's New York Times' "Week in Review" by Dean E. Murphy wherein Murphy is clearly wishing aloud for an "act of God" to put right last Tuesday's resounding defeat of John Kerry.

Got that? If you haven't, go read the damned thing. Right there in America's Most Influential Newspaper. Right there with the cute little cartoon of a bullying Republican elephant being smitten by an asteroid. Murphy strongly suggests that something along the lines of, oh, I dunno, President Bush's assassination might fix the problem of an incipient Republican-run theocracy for America's put-upon Democratic voters. As Johnson and his readers rightly point out in their response to Murphy's own response to the backlash his article has generated, an "act of God" is a natural disaster ---and not, as Murphy's horseshit response argues, something like the atrocities of 11 September 2001, which were obviously the deeds of subhuman garbage and not Mother Nature.

As a lover of History, I find myself unusually attuned to its abuses by asshole partisans and the Leftist professoriat they rely on for the academic authority that they would have you think validates their claims. Get a load of Murphy here, quoting the incredible commie asshole Sean Wilentz:

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, saw two instances in history when the American electoral landscape resembled that of today. "They are kind of scary examples," Professor Wilentz said. "One is 1860, and we know what happened after that one, and the other was 1896, the McKinley-Bryan election."

That contest, which seemed to herald a new era of Republican dominance, also started a chain of events that led to a disastrous schism in the party. William McKinley, a conservative Republican, defeated William Jennings Bryan, a populist Democrat, and won the first clear popular majority in 24 years. He beat Bryan even more soundly in 1900, but less than a year later, he was assassinated.

His death was a tragedy and a fluke, Professor Wilentz said, but it changed the course of political history. Had McKinley not been killed, Marcus A. Hanna, the political handler who was as instrumental to McKinley's success as Karl Rove has been to Mr. Bush's, would have pursued his dream of "creating a Republican machine that would go on forever," Professor Wilentz said.

What is happening in this exceptionally offensive piece of "analytical" garbage is Dean Murphy, who is an asshole, trying to make the connection between two previous Republican Presidents who were brought down by assassins and the current Republican President --- whom he clearly wishes might be dealt with in a similar manner. Why else bring up Lincoln and McKinley if not for the historical parallelism they (superficially) satisfy?

Murphy could have brought up the more recent and relevant example of John Kennedy's assassination as an event that changed the course of our history. Many people believe that his successor moved us deeper into Viet Nam and, thereby, even more deeply into the Cold War against the Soviets and the Chinese than we would otherwise have gone. Or, since Murphy believes that sneak attacks upon America are acts of God rather than the decisions of men, he could have reached back to Pearl Harbor as an event that obviously moved this country into a different mode. So why didn't he? Because those events involve three of the great heroes of the Democratic Party: FDR, JFK, and LBJ. Naturally, the trials and trends our country has faced during their administrations are not the consequence of any untoward designs by the religious Right.

Murphy continues with Wilentz's brilliant analysis of Mark Hanna's broken dreams of a New Jerusalem:

Instead, Theodore Roosevelt became president, and pursued progressive policies at home and power projection abroad. "What followed shifted the Republican Party in a direction it had not planned to go, and created the groundwork for 1912 and eventually the New Deal," Professor Wilentz said. When his successor, William H. Taft, turned back to conservatism, Roosevelt ran against him in 1912 on the Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket, and split the Republican Party, yielding the White House to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson.

What banality! What inanity! What major event in the life of any society doesn't "change the course" of its history? You know, that's the thing about History: just one goddamned thing after another. And 1912 set up 1932? Okay, well, 1772 set up 1787, which eventually "created the groundwork" for 1800. Oh, and don't even get me started on how 1820 and 1850 gave us a whole lot of 1861.

"One can't imagine what American history might have looked like had McKinley continued to the end of his second term," Professor Wilentz said.

What a pointless, masturbatory observation. Did Murphy catch Wilentz on his way out the door to a MoveOn.org commiseration party at Noam Chomsky's house? These guys have really got to start working harder to sell us dumbass Red Americans on their scholarly explanations for how much they hate the President and wish he were dead.

Please do read Murphy's article. It needs to be printed out, folded up, and tucked into the breast pocket of the corpse of the American Left just before they're planted in the ground.