We Are The Real Pro-Americans

Today's Telegraph piece, on which comments are welcome over there as well as here:

Remember when we were supposed to be the anti-Americans? Apparently, we still are. It seems that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama was not merely bewildering, but somehow anti-American. Even though, and you may need to brace yourselves for this one, Obama is the President of the United States. To the remaining cultists of his predecessor, the world only still makes sense if Obama is not the President, indeed is not really an American at all.

Who voted for Obama? The people who, on the same day, voted in California and Florida to re-affirm traditional marriage, Obama’s own view. Who, on the same day, voted in Colorado to end legal discrimination against working-class white men, allegedly the hardest people for Obama to reach. Who, on the same day, voted in Missouri and Ohio not to liberalise gambling. And who voted for Obama from coast to coast while also keeping the black and Catholic churches (especially) going. Those last, at least, have been rewarded with the kicking of the Freedom of Choice Act into the long grass, and the enactment of the Pregnant Women Support Act is set to follow instead. At that point, Obama will move from being merely no more pro-abortion than any main party nominee since Jimmy Carter, to being the most pro-life President since 1981. None of his pro-abortion votes in the past ever made the slightest difference. He was on the make within the Democratic Party. But now, he has made it.

The Pregnant Women Support Act’s sponsor, Senator Bob Casey, endorsed Obama against Clinton. So did almost all of the most morally and socially conservative Democrats: Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Bart Stupak, et al. Do they sound to you like part of a Marxist putsch? Does General Jim Jones? Do the hardly liberal Republicans Dick Lugar and Chuck Hagel, both more or less open supporters? Does Christopher Buckley? Does the conservative Catholic constitutional scholar Douglas Kmiec? Does Donnie McClurkin, the ex-gay gospel singer whose presence on the Obama team infuriated the Clinton camp? Bill Ayers is nowhere near the running of anything. It was Bush who was surrounded by veteran Trotskyists. Yes, there was a sectarian Leftist coup, several decades in the making. It happened in 2000. Its Manchurian Candidate was Bush.

But that is the past now. The real America has reasserted herself. The America of traditional marriage, non-discrimination against working-class white men, heavily regulated (if any) gambling, and the reduction of abortion through support for pregnant women. The America of big municipal government, strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, very high levels of co-operative membership, housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, small farmers who own their own land, and the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. The America that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. And the America that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.