The Wrong Debate-College conservatives-why their liberal classmates won't talk about terror

Newsweek ^ | 4-9-04 | Ryan Gorsche

[Mark]

College conservatives are wondering why their liberal classmates won't talk about terror Ryan Gorsche says college liberals don't get it WEB EXCLUSIVE By Ryan Gorsche Newsweek Updated: 7:22 p.m. ET April 09, 2004April 9 - Dartmouth conservatives breathed a sigh of relief last week after national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice’s strong performance before the 9/11 Commission. For weeks, the news had been dominated by former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke's unfair and inaccurate portrayal of the Bush administration’s actions before September 11. With her testimony, Rice finally set the record straight. Even before the attacks, Rice told the commission, President Bush had grown tired of previous administrations shadow boxing with terrorists. Bush understood then what the recent upswing in terrorist activity in Iraq proves: America can't treat terrorism as a matter for law-enforcement alone. Understanding this point, conservatives on campus are supporting the president in his efforts to fully dismantle the terrorist threat.

But Dartmouth's liberal majority doesn’t seem to get it. These students believe that America's reaction to the terrorists is the real threat. The Dartmouth Free Press, the progressive paper on campus, has been quiet about Rice's testimony both in its print edition and on its blog.-----excerpt

[Viking2002]

They won't talk about terror because they're appeasers, collaborators, and effin' cowards.

[Spruce]

My wife is a bar tender at the local place where all the old-timers and families eat. I've gotten to know most of the kids that work there. Mostly high-school kids, some grads.
NONE of these kids has ever read the constitution.

[Trust but Verify]

It's hard to debate when all you have in your arsenal are bumper-sticker slogans

[sheik yerbouty]

Weenies, commies, and jihadists.

[Seruzawa]

Evil people are compulsed to carry out evil acts unless someone stops them. People who are too timid to face up to evil thereby are complicit in the evil acts that occur that the timid ones could have stopped. This results in a guilty conscience. Thereafter whenever anyone else steps up and says, "Look at that evil! We must stop it!", the timid ones attack those who are pointing out the evil acts. You see, it's safe to attack those who are trying to stop evil since they aren't evil.

Liberals are too afraid of evil to do anything about it. When conservatives try to do something about evil the libs attack the conservatives due to their own guilty consciences. They don't want conservatives to point out the results of the liberals' timidity. They call conservatives evil, knowing full well that conservatives aren't evil. If conservatives were truly evil then liberals would never have the courage to attack them. Liberals only attack when it is perfectly safe for them to do so.

[Dr. Frank fan]

I believe one thing that underlies leftists' distaste for talking about terror (even: a difficulty acknowledging that terror is a legitimate problem, or granting that this or that person is a 'terrorist', etc) is that on some instinctive level they identify with all terrorists.

I do not mean that they share their goals but that they envy their methods. To be a leftist is to be in a perpetual impatient state of desiring radical change. For obvious reasons of morale (leftists are only human after all), leftists *need* to believe that whatever radical change they desire is actually possible within their lifetime, which means that they must instinctively resist attempts to put radical activities (of which terrorism is, after all, an extreme example) "out of bounds" so to speak.

It's not that leftists favor Islamofascism any more than anyone else does. At times their appeasement tendencies can seem to be rooted in fear and couched in defeatism, but I never get the sense that the fear is "real"; leftists don't *seriously* believe that our military warring against Islamofascists halfway around the world will get them attacked as they sip their three-dollar coffee - it's almost the opposite in fact (if they *did* perceive the terror-threat as real they would not be indulging in their leftist fantasies during wartime).

Because primarily it's that leftists, if only subconsciously, wish to leave the Islamofascists' methods on the table if at all possible. Strong-willed efforts against terrorism on the part of Western capitalist republics make leftists despair for the twin reasons that (a) it delegitimizes radical behavior altogether, which is precisely what leftists would like to reserve the right to engage in (if Necessary) and achieve significant effects by doing so; (b) if successful a war against terror strengthens the country, making implementation of whatever flavor of left-wing ideology both less appealing to others, and (not coincidentally) less feasible in the first place.

[rocksblues]

What the F?

[Dr. Frank fan]

What what the F?

[Seruzawa]

Made sense to me. Sorry if the concept didn't communicate that well.

[rocksblues]

I understood your premise and may have got sidetracked by the following post!

[rocksblues]

What the F are you saying? It is Ok because they don't understand?

[CGVet58]

Sir, with all respect, i believe you give the left too much credit.

Our universities have been co-opted by the left; universities are where the intelligentsia live in their soft-skill world; the intelligentsia soon becomes the self-anointed elites; elites always know what's better for the rest of us untermenschen then we ourselves do.

So they rant and rail away, never wanting to accept the historical and factual evidence that if they actually get their "revolution", they are the first voices of "opposition" (to the new, progressive, totalitarian leadership) to be silenced.

They are the enemy within.

[adam_az]

"It's hard to debate when all you have in your arsenal are bumper-sticker slogans"

I saw one today that said "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." My thought was, you should poke out both of the bastards eyes and end it right there.

There is a saying in the Jewish Talmud... it says that those who are kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.

[rocksblues]

1918!

[Dr. Frank fan]

What the F are you saying? It is Ok because they don't understand?

Is what Ok because who doesn't understand?

What the F are you saying?

Can you elaborate your question please, in more comprehensible English?

[rocksblues]

troll alert!

[rocksblues]

You are obviously a well educated person, yet your post #7 is a talk down to the rest of us uneducated people. What the F was the point of your post?

[AngieGOP]

Liberals don't talk about terror because they do not want to acklowledge that terrorism is a true threat to our existence. To the mind of the liberal, if terrorism spoken about or acknowledged then it does not exist.

[Viking2002]

Their dysfunction makes them as guilty as the animals that perpetrate the crime.