One Step at a Time

Here in Washington State we had our primary yesterday. The result? Sen. Patty Murray is in trouble, since her vote about pegged equal with the Republican vote. And three Dem districts are in play, the 2nd with Koster against incumbent Larson, the 3rd, an open seat, and the 9th, maybe, with Muri against the incumbent Smith.

If a couple of those seats turn Republican then we'd get a 5-4 GOP advantage instead of a 6-3 Dem majority in the House delegation.

I said it back in 2008. The only way you get to win in politics is by letting the voters get a taste of the other guys. Disgust, the psychologists are finally realizing, is not just about avoiding rancid meat, but avoiding rancid ideas.

With President Obama we have the world set upside down. We have a war on the American economy, with a breathtaking program to seize a huge chunk of the economy and parcel it out to Democratic Party supporters. And we have a president who wants to pass on the great clash of civilizations, the question of whether the West shall prevail or Islam. It is all laid out today by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in The Wall Street Journal.

The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept [his] invitation to be friends.

The president is a One Worlder, a devotee of the fashionable idea that the fall of Communism meant the "End of History" according to Francis Fukuyama. No it isn't, wrote Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations, and Ali agrees.

The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations. most seriously with Islam and China.

The future of the West depends upon a successful defense against these challenges, according to Ali. Ordinarily, as far as Islam is concerned, it shouldn't be a problem, since the Islamic countries are "ruled by despots of various stripes."

China is a bigger problem, but here there is hope--that China is reinventing itself as a Christian country. Huh? Here is a Chinese Christian describing to David Aikman in Jesus in Beijing how China has looked at the West over the last two centuries.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

There are thought to be about 100 million Chinese Christians in house churches in China, but nobody knows, because the house churches are more-or-less underground. So China may in fact be in the process of modeling itself on the West, rather than challenging it.

The great thing about the Obama administration is that all the ideas that the center left has been pushing for the last half century are going to be utterly repudiated by the American people in the next few years. Not because the American people will have done an exhaustive analysis on them, but because they are associated with Obama and the failures of the Obama administration.

And it all starts in the House districts in play this November in Washington State and elsewhere.

Because we are looking right down the barrel of an 80 seat pickup for Republicans in the House. That will be the biggest pickup since the 75 seat swing in 1938, and it will change the rules, starting on November 3, 2010.