A Tangled Web

The Friday Essay



CONSERVATIVES FOR KERRY!



There's a very pertinent old British press nostrum that begins:



You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

thank God! The British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do

unbribed, there’s no occasion to!



At this time of sustained liberal media attack on the Bush administration, which rather like the threat from Al Qu’eda is likely to increase in the months ahead, it is informative to read what prominent British conservatives have to say on the outcome of this year’s election.



Frank Johnson, a former editor of the conservative UK Spectator, spells out where he stands on the matter in his weekly column 29th May;



“We British Tories who believe that in the best interests of Britain - and Toryism – it would be good if Senator Kerry defeated President Bush look forward to the neoconservative and Republican right denunciation of a Kerry administration. Then we can accuse them of anti-Americanism”



Johnson is not alone in what he thinks.



Sir Max Hastings, a former editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph, penned a recent column entitled "I hate George Bush" (upfront if nothing else!) Sir Max denounced American conservatives as "lunatics" and proclaimed that "every single bleak forecast about their follies has been fulfilled." To back up these vicious arguments, Sir Max declared that America is a land of gun-toting religious zealots; that the Bush administration thinks that democracy can be marketed in the same way as Enron shares. He then urged his readers to pray for John Kerry's victory in November!



This new phenomenon of British conservatives joining up to help Kerry beat President Bush is not limited to the predictable spineless media elite. (One must remember that sixty years ago the British media joyfully endorsed Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.)



Conservative MP Alan Duncan has said he is prepared to work for the Democrat campaign of John Kerry to prevent a second Bush term in the White House. This British Conservative “constitutional affairs” spokesman says he feels that Neo-Conservatives such as Defense secretary Mr Rumsfeld are making the world a "more dangerous place" because of the way they are dealing with the threat from international terrorism.



Meanwhile another Tory MP, Simon Burns, said he too supports Mr Kerry's bid to win power. "I am probably a bit of an aberration in the Conservative Party in that I have always identified with the Democrats, but there may be a shift of emphasis going on in our attitude to the current administration,"



Earlier this year, George Osborne, a Conservative member of Parliament, took a straw poll of legislators from his party. The subject was President Bush. The results were not pretty. "George Bush scares the hell out of me," one Tory said, according to an article by Mr. Osborne. Another told him: "Bush is a man who might wail at the moon. I don't feel comfortable with him." A third said that while he would vote for Bush in November if he could, "I think Anglo-American relations would be better if Kerry won."

This was long before the liberal feeding frenzy over Abu Ghraib. And the people Mr. Osborne polled were all Conservatives, by tradition and temperament the Republican Party's natural friends across the Atlantic.



In Britain, America's staunchest ally in the war in Iraq, a poll of 1,007 people taken last month for The Times of London by the British polling company Populus found support for Senator John Kerry over President Bush by a margin of 56 to 22 percent.



The Express, a British tabloid, for instance, ridiculed Mr. Bush's news conference last month in an article titled, "The President's Brain Is Missing," saying his performance had revealed him as a "bumbling embarrassment." The Daily Mail, another right-wing UK conservative newspaper, has also joined in the attacks on the US administration.



All of this is profoundly disturbing to those British conservatives who realise that George Bush’s cause is our cause. Defeating the Jihadists should unite all decent people. Al Qu’eda wants to kill us all and so we must bring them to justice first. Our lives depend on this. It is all about right triumphing over wrong and our future liberty depends on us comprehensively winning this war on militant Islamic terror.



Each of those British “conservatives” that now cheer-lead for Senator Kerry brings dishonour on their once proud Party led by political giants such Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. Both those distinguished conservatives understood the value of standing by the United States in times of crisis. Sir Winston Churchill got it right when he said, "To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.”



Times change and this is the time for the United Kingdom to be standing at the side of the United States by supporting war leader George W Bush. Alas those wretched Lilliputians in the contemporary British Conservative Party who salivate at the prospect of the amelioration of US military power and the subjugation of US sovereignty to the corrupt United Nations are unfit to even call themselves conservatives.