Give my head peace

Tomorrow the citizens of the United States of America shall vote for their favoured candidate in the presidential election, although some will doubtless vote not for a particular favourite but for the lesser of two evils.

Melancholicus will be heartily glad once the wretched election is over, the result has been announced and the inevitable squawking and flapping in its wake has finally died down. For at this stage he is heartily sick of hearing about it, every imaginable news medium being saturated with detailed coverage of every move and counter-move, every speech, every act, every prank, every embarrassment or potential embarrassment, the colours of their ties, Sarah Palin’s shoes... good Lord, is there no end to this wretched circus?

But that which irks Melancholicus more than anything else is the totally unapologetic, blatant, in-your-face bias of the Irish media, a bias which has completely polarised the understanding of the Irish public with respect to the merits and demerits of the candidates; across the water, an identical bias is unmistakable among those who broadcast for the BBC and similar outlets.

This is surely illustrative of how completely dominated are media in the comtemporary west by left-wing fanaticism.

For if Barack Obama were standing in Ireland, he would be elected in a landslide. Melancholicus is at a loss to know why the Irish generally are so keen on Obama; he surmises that Obama must represent to them the fullest embodiment of the thoroughly secularised post-enlightenment Weltanschauung, in contrast to what is perceived as the reactionary, hide-bound, backward, even religious world-view of those who vote Republican. For if there is anything universally loathed by the great and the good in modern Irish society, it is religion—or at least a religion that is taken seriously enough to affect one’s approach to political office.

Of course socialism is a religion in itself, and a dangerous one at that, but in the current climate that it hardly likely to do Obama anything like the harm that Sarah Palin has suffered from her adherence to Christianity.

The relentless gushing on the airwaves about Obama’s countless virtues does have the effect of making him seem attractive to the untutored listener, who cannot be expected to distinguish fact from hagiographic propaganda, or to recognise the consequences that must inevitably issue from this or that particular policy. Similarly, though Melancholicus does not have much time for the Republican ticket either, he must conclude that continuous and concerted media hostility directed at the vice-presidential candidate has made her look infinitely more ridiculous than she must surely be in reality.

But as far as Obama is concerned, Melancholicus is amazed that no Irish news medium has seen fit even to notice the fifty-ton elephant in the room, namely Obama’s voting record on life issues, and his unequivocal support for abortion—which is a good deal more than merely support for abortion.

For Barack Obama is the single most anti-life politician that Melancholicus has ever encountered. He is not one of these lily-livered tortured souls trying to steer a fine line between the Catholic bishops and the liberal left; his anti-life stance is firm and unequivocal. Abortion on demand, for any reason whatever, at any time of gestation; partial-birth abortion; even infanticide. Obama even goes so far as to oppose allowing babies who survive the abortion procedure to live. The man’s view of human life at its beginnings is so thoroughly twisted that Melancholicus cannot doubt its serious implications for the continuance of Roe v. Wade, the heavy toll in innocent blood that will be spilled, or the further erosion of the right to life extended to the elderly, the infirm, the sick, the mentally incapacitated... the list goes on.

Are they really at peace with this, those smug, cocksure Irish journalists that beam out their support for Obama every day of the week in the newspapers and on the airwaves? Can it be that they are ignorant of it? Or do they simply not care?

The right to life must surely be the most fundamental of all human rights, for it seems to me that if one has no right at least to life, one has no business claiming any other rights either.

Melancholicus does not believe Obama to be literally the “Man of Sin”, heralding the imminent collapse of what little is left of civilisation; but he is no Messiah either. At best Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and his presidency will see to it that our inverted society not merely remains inverted, but becomes more so.

As Melancholicus must relocate to the left coast of the United States after his marriage next year, he will be in the somewhat unenviable position of being able to report on an Obama presidency at first hand... but let us hope it will not come to that.

In any case, as God wills, so be it done.