RNC @ MSG: Zell Miller

Senator Zell Miller’s speech is impossible to excerpt, because every last syllable of it was pure gold.

I urge everybody to watch and listen. Simply reprinting the text doesn’t do it justice.

Since I last stood in this spot, a whole new generation of the Miller Family has been born: Four great grandchildren. Along with all the other members of our close-knit family, they are my and Shirley's most precious possessions.

And I know that's how you feel about your family also. Like you, I think of their future, the promises and the perils they will face. Like you, I believe that the next four years will determine what kind of world they will grow up in.

And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family?

The clear answer to that question has placed me in this hall with you tonight. For my family is more important than my party.

There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that man's name is George W. Bush.

In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America "all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger."

In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man. He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time. And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died, he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the latter.

Where are such statesmen today? Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?

Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our Commander in Chief.

What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?

I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny. It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pushed the Red Army out of Iran, who came to the aid of Greece when Communists threatened to overthrow it, who stared down the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by flying in supplies and saving the city.

Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter.

But not today. Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today's Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators!!!

Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers. Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers. Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt a military of liberators, not occupiers.

Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier. And, our soldiers don't just give freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home.

For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.
No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn't believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.

But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

It is not their patriotism - it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking.

They claimed Carter's pacifism would lead to peace - they were wrong.

They claimed Reagan's defense buildup would lead to war - they were wrong.

And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry!!!

Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror.

Listing all the weapon systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security but Americans need to know the facts.

The B-1 bomber, that Senator Kerry opposed, dropped 40 percent of the bombs in the first six months of Operation Enduring Freedom; the B-2 bomber, that Senator Kerry opposed, delivered air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein's command post in Iraq; the F-14A Tomcats, that Senator Kerry opposed, shot down Khadifi's Libyan MIGs over the Gulf of Sidra; the modernized F-14D, that Senator Kerry opposed, delivered missile strikes against Tora Bora; the Apache helicopter, that Senator Kerry opposed, took out those Republican Guard tanks in Kuwait in the Gulf War; the F-15 Eagles, that Senator Kerry opposed, flew cover over our nation's Capital and this very city after 9/11.

I could go on and on and on: against the Patriot Missile that shot down Saddam Hussein's scud missiles over Israel; against the Aegis air-defense cruiser; against the Strategic Defense Initiative; against the Trident missile; against, against, against.

This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces? U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?!?

Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric. Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.

Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations. Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending.

I want Bush to decide!!!

John Kerry, who says he doesn't like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security. That's the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world? Free for how long?

For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure.

As a war protester, Kerry blamed our military. As a Senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our troops in harms way, far away.

George Bush understands that we need new strategies to meet new threats. John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday's war. George Bush believes we have to fight today's war and be ready for tomorrow's challenges. George Bush is committed to providing the kind of forces it takes to root out terrorists, no matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under.

George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip; from John Kerry, they get a "yes-no-maybe" bowl of mush that can only encourage our enemies and confuse our friends.

I first got to know George Bush when we served as governors together. I admire this man. I am moved by the respect he shows the first lady, his unabashed love for his parents and his daughters, and the fact that he is unashamed of his belief that God is not indifferent to America.

I can identify with someone who has lived that line in Amazing Grace, "Was blind, but now I see," and I like the fact that he's the same man on Saturday night that he is on Sunday morning. He is not a slick talker but he is a straight shooter and, where I come from, deeds mean a lot more than words.

I have knocked on the door of this man's soul and found someone home, a God-fearing man with a good heart and a spine of tempered steel - the man I trust to protect my most precious possession: my family.

This election will change forever the course of history, and that's not any history. It's our family's history. The only question is how. The answer lies with each of us. And, like many generations before us, we've got some hard choosing to do.

Right now the world just cannot afford an indecisive America. Fainthearted self-indulgence will put at risk all we care about in this world.

In this hour of danger our President has had the courage to stand up. And this Democrat is proud to stand up with him.

Thank you.

God Bless this great country and God Bless George W. Bush.

Like with parts of Governor Schwartzeneggar’s speech Tuesday night, this was a relentlessly substantive tour-de-force tongue-lashing that no Republican could have delivered because only an old-school Truman/JFK/Scoop Jackson Democrat like Zell had the moral authority to do so convincingly. To say nothing of the fact that its resemblance to an old-time “dangle ‘em out over the fires of hell” Southern Baptist sermon would have sent even Jerry Falwell fleeing in panic at the prospect of assuming the role of Big Media lightning rod.

Sure enough, the Democrats in and out of the press blew their collective cookies in the sort of solipsistically self-righteous outrage that only autistically oblivious left-wing hypocrites can.

It was “worse than Buchanan in 1992.” Matthew Yglesias of The American Prospect, dripping with nuance, denounced the speech as a ‘fascistic tirade.’ The New Republic openly compared Miller to Joe McCarthy. Jonathan Cohn explained that Miller was much worse than Buchanan because ‘Buchanan's speech, after all, was an assault on decency. Last night Miller declared war on democracy.’ Time’s Joe Klein declared on CNN, ‘I don't think I've seen anything as angry or as ugly as Miller's speech.’

Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor at The New Republic and a highly regarded blogger, noted the contrast between the Boston Dem’s keynoter, Barak Obama — ‘a post-racial, smiling, expansive young American’ — and the Republicans’. ‘Then you see Zell Miller, his face rigid with anger, his eyes blazing with years of frustration as his Dixiecrat vision became slowly eclipsed among the Democrats. Remember who this man is: once a proud supporter of racial segregation, a man who lambasted LBJ for selling his soul to the negroes.

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

But they didn’t always feel this way.

[A]s governor [Miller] was willing to take the politically courageous step of removing the Confederate Battle Flag from the Georgia state flag. Indeed, Sullivan’s magazine dubbed Miller ‘as reasonable a Democrat as there is.’ And Miller’s stem-winder of a speech at the Democratic Convention in 1992 — which grilled the first President Bush (‘If the ‘education President’ gets another term, even our kids won't be able to spell potato’) — didn’t provoke any assaults on his humanity.

IOW, the same old liberal one-way street. Left-wing hate and vitriol against Republicans and conservatives is simply “the righteous calling out evil,” but the occasional stiff criticism from right to left is the friggin’ end of Western civilization. They’re the anointed holy ones, we’re the benighted devilspawn. They’re the white hats, we’re the black hats. Them good, us bad.

But it’s more than just that, I think. If it had been a Republican who said what Zell did, the way he said it, they could just have smugly trundled out their “there go those religious fundie theo-kooks again” template and perhaps stood an outside chance at putting over the “It’s Buchanan all over again” spin. But this was a Democrat who blistered his own party’s hindquarters so badly that a political colonoscopy couldn’t be performed without removing several feet of carbonized intestine. One that they thought maybe was a dissident, or a “maverick” (kind of the “anti-McCain”), or a curmudgeonly old coot, but still, even nominally, one of their own. And they acted precisely like a jilted lover who walks in on his/her significant other in mid-whoopie with the milk courier.

To which there are two obvious retorts. (1) It’s cosmic justice for the Jim Jeffords caper; and (2) Miller doesn’t give a shit, as Chris Matthews found out a short time later.

But what about what Zell actually said? What was so horrible about it? All he did was what John Kerry invited the entire country to do in Boston a month ago: judge him on his record. The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth spent the past month doing so on his overhyped Vietnam exploits and their pro-Hanoi aftermath. Senator Miller simply picked up where they left off, and after having made sure he did his homework, ripped every last scrap of flesh from the bloated carcass of the Boston Balker’s Senate national security/intelligence record like the great white shark devouring a screaming Quint at the climax of Jaws. Every last bit of it was factual. And you’ll note that not a single horrified, enraged quaffed talking head is challenging the substance of Zell’s assertions, but, in tiresomely classic fashion, going after him personally instead. And he’s giving as good as he’s getting.

The relevant question being asked is how it played across the country. And the reflexive media/Dem personal counterattacks on Senator Miller’s character and reputation as “angry, bitter, McCarthyist, racist, etc.” suggest to me that they’re deathly afraid that it not only played well, but that most of the country was reacting with roaring, fist-pumping approval. And, according to the focus-grouping results I’ve read, as well as anecdotal evidence here and there, that was precisely the case.

Polling in the next week or two will tell one way or the other. But I believe that the tone, even more than the content, of this address was desperately overdue. From Zell Miller we finally got the righteous indignation that the Bushies themselves have never voiced over the past year-and-a-half’s unparalleled left-wing campaign of personal vilification against the President. Finally somebody spoke up. Finally somebody stood up. Finally somebody fought back. Finally somebody exclaimed, in the words of Robert Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy half a century ago, “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” And he did so with the “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more” passion that provided a mass catharsis for many of us on the right-hand side of the aisle.

And in the end, the essence of Senator Miller’s Jeremaic lament boiled down to one simple question: “Where is the bipartisanship in this country when we need it most?” The answer is that that kind of bipartisanship died with the wing of the Democratic Party Zell embodies like an endangered species. Ever since then “bipartisanship” in Beltwayese has come to mean “Republicans capitulating to Democrats.” Dems can be as partisan as they want, but heaven forbid that ‘Pubbies refuse to go along with it. Indeed, the definition of “partisan” in Beltwayspeak is mirroredly hackneyed and just as cynically and lopsidedly epithetical.

It’s like the Georgia firebrand says in his book, A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat:

And so, Mr. Miller went to Washington. I wish I could say the experience has been like Jimmy Stewart’s in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I wish I could say that I found Washington all I had ever dreamed it to be, the place where the great issues of the day are debated and solved, and great giants walk those hallowed halls. I so wanted Robert Louis Stevenson to be wrong when he wrote, ‘It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.’

Unfortunately, what I discovered in Washington was truth, and truth did not set me free. It simply made me mad. It filled me with anger on behalf of Americans. You might still ask why I would want to take my own party to the woodshed. The answer is simple: My conscience made me do it.

After watching the rude, frosty reception Joe Lieberman got after his speech at the Boston Bacchanalia, I wrote the following:

I know that Senator Lieberman, just like John McCain, has firmly and unequivocally denied that he will ever switch parties. But you have to wonder about the Connecticut Democrat, who is a rarity in that party anymore, a good, decent, and honorable man. He really did seem to be addressing the wrong convention.

Zell Miller is another good, decent, and honorable Democrat.

And, praise be to God, he addressed the right convention.