John Leo vs. "It's All Our Fault" Thinking

The anti-American lunacy of the Left gets the beatdown by this well-reasoned and spot-on piece at USNews.com.

In the wake of the London bombings, New York City is now searching the bags of subway riders. As you might expect, this is provoking the usual cluster of perverse reactions. Someone on Air America, the liberal talk radio network, suggested that riders carry many bags to confuse and irritate the cops. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, normally a sane fellow, has ordered that the searches be entirely random, to avoid singling out any one ethnic or religious group. So if someone fits the suicide bomber profile--young Muslim male, short hair, recently shaved beard or mustache, smelling of flower water (a preparation for entering paradise)--the police must look away and search the nun or the Boy Scout behind him. What's the point of stopping a terrorist if you have to trample political correctness to do it? Besides, the New York Civil Liberties Union opposes all bag searches. No surprise there. The national American Civil Liberties Union still opposes passenger screening at airports. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, historian Fred Siegel said that the Democrats, pegged as the party of criminals' rights, are in danger of becoming the party of terrorists' rights.

After 9/11, Michael Walzer, one of the most powerful voices on the left, warned about "the politics of ideological apology" for terrorism. In the June 2005 issue of the American Prospect, he returned to the theme. "Is anybody still excusing terrorism?" he asked. "The answer is yes: Secret sympathy, even fascination with violence among men and women who think of themselves as 'militants,' is a disease, and recovery is slow." Though the argument has shifted somewhat, he wrote, the problem is "how to make people feel that the liberal left is interested in their security and capable of acting effectively. We won't win an election until we address this."

Walzer's analysis is a strong one. The Bush administration has botched many things, but large numbers of Americans go along with the president because he displays what the left apparently cannot: moral clarity and seriousness about what must be done. When the ideas of the left come into view, the themes often include the closing of Guantánamo, attacks on the Patriot Act, opposition to military recruitment on campuses, casual mockery of patriotism (a whole art exhibit in Baltimore was devoted to the theme), and a failure to admit that defeating terrorism will require some trade-offs between security and civil liberties. Is this a serious program? Real security, Walzer says, will depend on hunting down terrorist cells, cutting off the flow of money, and improving surveillance at key sites. He writes: "The burden is on us--nobody else--to make the case that these things can be done effectively by liberals and leftists who will also, in contrast to today's Republicans, defend the civil liberties of American citizens." Good argument. How will the left respond?

To hear some on the left tell it, terrorism is exactly what the West deserves for its many sins.

That last bit is the damned truth! On 9/11, not a half-hour after the first WTC tower had fallen, killing unknown thousands of people, one asstackler on a forum I frequent posted, I kid you not, that the attacks were due to "...the coup by the Supreme Court that put Bush in power..." The entire country was staring at their TV sets in horror as a 110-story building disintegrated before their eyes in a cloud of dust and this motherf*cker's first reaction was to blame it on the fact that his guy hadn't been elected!!! THAT is the rotted, feral mindset of the Left in a nutshell!!!

Whenever I quoted this steaming load back at him, people would PM me "Is that for real?" Some people allied with the Dem side still had a shred of decency to be shocked by such bitter rage. They're in short supply now.