Posted on 10/01/2004 11:15:33 PM PDT by quidnunc
If the new hatred of George Bush is the natural expression of an elite that blurs truth and fiction, word and deed, then anger at a powerful America itself also is explicable in terms of the postmodernist paradigm. Because to the intellectual architects of the modern Left, the overdog automatically forfeits morality, the United States is in a particularly unenviable position as the world’s hyperpower. No absolute standards or recent history are necessary to place the mistreatment of prisoners in a proper context — not when televised pictures flooding our screens from Abu Graib show beefy, white uniformed Americans and poor, thin naked Iraqis. American misdemeanors of sexual humiliation and degradation by rogue soldiers and negligent officers are no different, as Senator Kennedy pointed out, from Saddam’s systematic efforts to institutionalize mass murder. The world watches every stray American mortar round in Najaf, as CNN centers its camera shots on a single fallen tessera from an interior ceiling of a mosque bristling with machine guns — in a way it does not much care about the leveling of Grozny or renegade Arabs’ mass murder of Black Africans in Darfur, Sudan.
Because the United States really is strong, its success so far in the present war of preventing a succession of ten or twelve 9-11-like mass killings has allowed elite liberals the luxury of their own truth — demonizing John Ashcroft without worrying in the last three years whether young males from the Middle East would habitually blow up their prep school children at St. Paul’s or Andover, calling Dick Cheney a Halliburton stooge without fretting about a nuclear device going off in Greenwich village, or voting for, then condemning, but never seeking to revoke the Patriot Act.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at victorhanson.com ...
Part Two: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1231141/posts
Part Three: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1232229/posts
FYI
Because the United States really is strong, its success so far in the present war of preventing a succession of ten or twelve 9-11-like mass killings has allowed elite liberals the luxury of their own truth — demonizing John Ashcroft without worrying in the last three years whether young males from the Middle East would habitually blow up their prep school children at St. Paul’s or Andover, calling Dick Cheney a Halliburton stooge without fretting about a nuclear device going off in Greenwich village, or voting for, then condemning, but never seeking to revoke the Patriot Act.
A Democrat from Wisconsin was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. 99-1! Yet, he's claiming that his no vote can be justified, while at the same time not seeking to revoke the Patriot Act.
If he truly believed that his lone wolf vote against the Patriot Act was good for America and Wisconsin, he'd seek to revoke the Patriot Act now.
99-1!
I love Victor...too bad he is so happily married...Drat all the good ones seem to be taken
My friend, Emilia, who enjoys dual Italian/American citizenship, but who thinks of herself as Italian only, informed me that the day of a single superpower was over. From now on, the UN would dictate world policy on all things. I mentioned the oil for food scandal in Iraq, Kofi Annan's son's sudden wealth, corruption, incompetence, etc.. She waved this off as specious. Didn't exist. The UN was spotless. Nothing dented Emilia's view of a perfect world under UN dominance. When I suggested that it wasn't a great idea to hand over our national security to UN nations who might not have our best interests at heart, she was speechless. How do we get through to idiots?
Excellent read.
Reminds me of an ad for a WWII vintage rifle: Italian carbine, perfect condition, never fired, thrown down once.
I think we can confidently rely on the terrorists to get through to them for us. Only pray that the next attack is with conventional weapons.
Hanson made this point in his article, the left especially here in Europe is oblivious to the threat of the next attack with WMDs.
We make our case and swiftly move on, devoting our efforts to ensuring that President Bush is re-elected.
That is so strange. I was just telling my wife the same thing, word for word. Which is even stranger, because I don't know what a "postmodernist paradigm" is.
Tell Emilia to shut up and go in the kitchen and cook something.
"Drat all the good ones seem to be taken"
Ain't that the truth!
You may want to ask Emilia what will happen when the countries they dictate to just ignore them. While an idiot would turn over it's security to a bunch of third world thugs, an ever bigger idiot would assume it it was a good idea. The UN has been shown repeatedly to be a bag of wind and it has absolutely no relevance to anything anymore. We ought to send it packing. Let some other country host those morons.
The french peasants had part of the right idea. Slay the elites every once in a while.
These are third world thugs that run the UN. They want to destroy this country.
I would suggest that if she thinks the leaders of the UN are so wonderful, why doesn't she go and live in one of their countries for a while and then see what the thinks. Maybe, Syria, Lebanon or perhaps Liberia, or maybe she would like to try Rwanda or Sudan for starters.
All she really needs to do is educate herself about these countries and their goals for the world.
Let me know if you want in or out
how to get through to idiots: I have found that you get farther with a kind word and a two-by-four...
Thus success hinges not on storming the beach, but on rooting out deep cells within the body fabric of the West itself—requiring patience, careful public exegesis, intelligence, surveillance, and counter-insurgency in battles whose pulse is often unknown to the public. But these tactics are precisely the bugaboos of the American Left that grasps that the public doesn’t yet really feel daily threatened by our bloodthirsty enemy. Successful surveillance that precludes mass murder earns the cheap calumny of McCarthyism; laxity resulting in slaughter on 9-11 is the subject of postfacto Congressional finger pointing. If young suspicious Middle East resident aliens are scrutinized and investigated, to the degree that potential terrorist cadres are broken up—precisely the situation since September 11—then the second-guessing Left has the convenient leeway to talk about a return of Janet Reno’s Dachau.
And if an attack happens here, what will we hear? IT"S ALL BUSH'S FAULT!!
What did Ashcroft know, and when did he know it?
Will Halliburton get the contract to rebuild?
Europeans like your friend are not idiots, they are just weak and, like their grandparents in the 1930s have decided that nonresistance is the safest course of action lest they provoke the enemy.
We need to be strong, and will probably lose Europe in the next 20-30 years.
ALl the more reason to occupy and reform Arabia and Pakistan, while we still can.
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