Why are liberals so gullible?

American Thinker ^ | August 25, 2008 | James Lewis

[Hildy]

Because they make mortals their Gods....that’s what happens when you have no spiritual base.

[ETL]

Also see the “Useful Idiot” Syndrome.

[JasonC]

Good column, worthy of the Mencken he cites, and all true.

[wardaddy]

because much like every homosexual I have ever known....they too are neurotic.

it’s classic projection and transference of that neurosis that commands their leftist redress

[FlingWingFlyer]

“You’ve got stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.” - Aaron Tippin

[ETL]

Useful idiots
By Thomas Sowell

LENIN is supposed to have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in the Western democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry their partisanship in later years -- including our own times.

Stalin's man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust -- and Mao's man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in Communist China.

The most famous of these was the New York Times' Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Duranty assured his readers that "there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be." Moreover, he blamed reports to the contrary on "rumor factories" with anti-Soviet bias.

It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always identified in politically correct circles as "right-wing." Yet when the Soviets' own statistics on the deaths during the famine were finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.

Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20 million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier Soviet famine. One celebrated "expert" on China wrote: "I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famines." Horrifying as the pre-Communist famines were, they never killed as many people as Mao's famine did.

Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the gulags and after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez controversy, when she said: "To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I'm not going to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."

Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to reach Cuba.

Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives. Some were shot trying to get past the Berlin wall and hundreds of thousands of "boat people" were drowned trying to escape a Communist Vietnam that many useful idiots were celebrating from inside free democracies. Many who escaped from the Soviet Union to the West during the Second World War were sent back by American authorities, except for those who committed suicide rather than go back.

Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would be an "insult" to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral equivalence line.

Turner's instructions to the historian who put this series together was that he wanted no "triumphalism," meaning apparently no depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled "CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy," edited by Arnold Beichman.

Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into the useful idiots of the future.

JWR contributor Thomas Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is author, most recently, of The Quest for Cosmic Justice.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell090100.asp

[Gondring]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

[JennysCool]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

What would you have liked for an alternative at the time?

[Tzimisce]

They’re not gullible, they’re agenda driven which is a HUGE difference.

It’s not that they don’t know the truth in many cases, it’s that they deny it.

Examples: Surge Worked, Clinton Lied, 9-11 was done by terrorists....

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

“Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the intelligentsia in the West.”

This is a big part of it. It’s just too damned simple, this idea that people would risk their lives for freedom and opportunity, things the intelligentsia have for “free” and feel so guilty about having, while those poor ones do not. The whole theory behind the thing just isn’t complicated enough. It doesn’t have the intellectual depth the libs need to support their self-assumed intellectual-based righteousness.

Therefore, you have to be a dumb neanderthal reactionary conservative to think that way, that freedom is immensely valuable. It’s a piece of irresolvable cognitive dissonance for them. The elites have the freedom, but it’s free, so it’s not worth fighting for, nor is it worth getting misty-eyed about. And yet....if it’s free....and it just grows on trees....then how on earth can some folks be so crazy to want it enough to risk their lives to get it?

I’m serious. Even today, this minute, Mexicans flooding over the Southern border exemplify this perfectly. They are poor innocents to the elites; but in no way can any criticism of the Mex government be leveled. Nor can any appreciation of exactly what the illegals are striving for be acknowledged. Freedom is free, right? So WE must be the bastards for denying illegals that which is free.

[neverdem]

...as if many conservatives didn’t fall for Bush.

I volunteered for McCain in 2000. I volunteered for Bush in 2004. I was hoping for Thompson this year, so I changed my registration to pubbie. I'll continue to vote on the Conservative line most likely, at least until I leave NY. I can't see helping rats. The world is too nasty, and the left is too crazy.

[x_plus_one]

Liberals are sure that they can legislate morality. They are sure that with enough force we can all be made to give up our right to bear arms, our right to free speech and that the unborn never had any rights to speak of....

Those afflicted with the bossy older sister syndrome, the 'I know better than you' types and liberal academic superstars all cluster together to warm themselves with their mutual hot air. They absorb the light of life like massive black holes hungry for the next star to wander too close by.

[Califreak]

[cricket]

To be a Liberal; a willing suspension of the rational is required. After than. . .it’s easy.

[Christian4Bush]

mark

[neverdem]

I wouldn’t be so quick to confuse being gullible with short term memory impairment from reefer madness. Alzheimer’s starts with short term memory impairment. The war on drugs has morphed into the the war on guns & drugs.

[highlander_UW]

Because they think they’re smarter than everyone else and therefore immune to being fooled...which leads to their being fooled.

[Wpin]

“Fall for Bush”?

I didn’t fall for Bush, I followed and am damn proud of it. This man liberated over 50 million people, reduced taxes and did his best to remove democrat bigotry from our public education schools. He has brought prosperity, freedom, leadership, sound moral judgement, and integrity to our nation. It is no wonder that nation after nation in Europe is electing conservative leaders that are openly pro-American. It is also no wonder that with this brilliant mans war on terror strategy al qaeda is losing ground in it’s own home turf. Not just by us but by middle eastern folks who no longer believe in the terrorists cause. How dare you equivacate President Bush with the low life democrat scoundrels the author is talking about. And shame on you for putting down people like myself who believe in a courageous man who has stood up for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the best in world history. Perhaps you should look in the mirror to truly see who has fallen.

[BigCinBigD]

Because for the most part they are drug addled morons.