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The Left Has Lost Its' Moral Compass
Townhall.com | 10/28/2002 | John Leo

Posted on 10/28/2002 5:57:20 AM PST by JimRed

Everywhere you turn these days, someone on the left is denouncing President Bush as Hitler, Satan, a terrorist or a tyrannical emperor. A Yale law professor said Bush is "the most dangerous man on Earth." A famous editor referred to Bush as "a lawn jockey" and "Pinocchio."

Some of the angry rhetoric flirts with the fringe idea that the United States planned the terrorist attacks. A Purdue professor said "there is no ground to be certain" that America and Israel aren't behind the 9/11 attacks. A Columbia law professor compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany -- Bush is not responsible for 9/11, he said, but he exploited a national disaster to suspend civil liberties, just like Hitler. A Berkeley professor helpfully pointed out that some Indonesian groups think the U.S. planned the Bali bombing.

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

The left has lost its bearings, Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent, the leftist magazine he edits. His article, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" deplored "the barely concealed glee" of the left's reaction to 9/11, and the lack of "any visible concern" about how to prevent terrorism in the future.

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens," he wrote, "refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of Sept. 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

The favorite posture of many American leftists, Walzer said, is "standing as a righteous minority, brave and determined, amid the timid, the corrupt and the wicked. A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure." He said the left needs to discard its "ragtag Marxism" and its belief that America is corrupt beyond remedy.

Solidarity with people in trouble is the most profound commitment that leftists make, he wrote, but even the oppressed have obligations, and one is to avoid murdering innocent people. "Leftists who cannot insist on this point, even to people poorer and weaker than themselves, have abandoned both politics and morality for something else."

An example of that abandonment came two weeks ago (EDITOR: Oct. 12-14) at the University of Michigan's pro-Palestinian conference, which could not bring itself to criticize suicide bombings. Save us from moral appeals that leave room for blowing up families in supermarkets.

Journalist Christopher Hitchens caused a bigger hubbub than Walzer when he resigned from The Nation magazine after 20 years, citing its anti-war stance on Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote in his farewell column, is "a filthy menace" and "there is not the least doubt that he has acquired some of the means of genocide and hopes to collect some more." He thought The Nation had become "the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."

In another article, Hitchens wrote: "I can only hint at how much I despise a left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist. ... Instead of internationalism, we find among the left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism" and "a masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit."

Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer said Hitchens' departure from The Nation was sad because he "forced a lot of people on the left to confront their blind spot, their on-bended-knee obeisance to anyone in the Third World who posed as a 'liberator,' from Mao to Castro to Arafat and the Taliban."

Rosenbaum's comments came in an article on his own defection, "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove me to Flee." One trigger: a well-respected academic said he welcomed 9/11 because it gave Americans a chance to reassess their past honestly, as Germans did in the 1960s. "I couldn't take it any more," Rosenbaum wrote. "Goodbye to all that ... the inability to distinguish between America's sporadic blundering depredations" and Hitler's Germany. Goodbye, he said, to the refusal to admit that "Marxist genocides" slaughtered some 20 million to 50 million people in Russia, China and Cambodia. And goodbye to the "peace marches" like the one in Madrid where women wore suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. "'Peace' somehow doesn't exclude blowing up Jewish children," Rosenbaum wrote.

We owe a debt to Walzer, Hitchens and Rosenbaum. Now will they make any difference to our hyperalienated left?

©2002 Universal Press Syndicate


TOPICS: Editorial; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: left; moral
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The Left, a moral compass? Yes some of them did have it once; but not since the days of Humphrey and McGovern.
1 posted on 10/28/2002 5:57:20 AM PST by JimRed
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To: JimRed; Noumenon
As FReeper noumenon put it on another thread, "Liberals' dedication to the destruction of a free society renders them unfit to live in that same society".


2 posted on 10/28/2002 6:07:18 AM PST by Joe Brower
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To: JimRed
The Left...a "moral" compass??? Surely we are talking of two mutually exclusive terms here...

The "Left" never had a compass...much less a "moral" one. Remember...symbolism over substance with them. They go by their "Feelings"...nothing more than feeling... Sounds like a song don't it.

3 posted on 10/28/2002 6:09:06 AM PST by el_texicano
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To: JimRed
Madonna has lost her sense of modesty.
4 posted on 10/28/2002 6:10:51 AM PST by Plutarch
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To: JimRed
You can't lose what you don't have.
5 posted on 10/28/2002 6:12:40 AM PST by PBRSTREETGANG
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To: JimRed
The left has no moral compass. Leftists are morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt.
6 posted on 10/28/2002 6:15:14 AM PST by AlaskaErik
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To: JimRed; Roscoe; Kevin Curry; Texasforever; Libloather

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

The left has lost its bearings, Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent, the leftist magazine he edits. His article, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" deplored "the barely concealed glee" of the left's reaction to 9/11, and the lack of "any visible concern" about how to prevent terrorism in the future.

"Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens," he wrote, "refusing to identify with their fellow citizens, regarding any hint of patriotic feeling as politically incorrect. That's why they had such difficulty responding emotionally to the attacks of Sept. 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed."

The favorite posture of many American leftists, Walzer said, is "standing as a righteous minority, brave and determined, amid the timid, the corrupt and the wicked. A posture like that ensures at once the moral superiority of the left and its political failure." He said the left needs to discard its "ragtag Marxism" and its belief that America is corrupt beyond remedy.


The author could easily be writing about the moral-liberal Libertarians, as well.

7 posted on 10/28/2002 6:19:00 AM PST by Cultural Jihad
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To: JimRed
How can you lose something that you deliberately threw away 30 years ago?
8 posted on 10/28/2002 6:22:23 AM PST by theDentist
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To: JimRed
LOFL, when I read the thread title I thought this was a reprint of a column from the '70s. The "left", including primarily the Democrat Party and their enablers, are so far gone that they are now brazen in their lies and deceit, as if they understand fully that it really doesn't matter. They know that the parasite class will vote for them no matter what, because all they care about is big-government confiscation of their neighbors' money to pay for lots of "free stuff", and the working taxpayers who vote for them are obviously too stupid to know any better.

So the Democrats figure they may as well keep lying and hope to rope in some more ignoramuses. (Or is that "ignoramusi"?)

9 posted on 10/28/2002 6:24:27 AM PST by Lancey Howard
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To: JimRed
Here's just ONE indication of how much things have changed:

"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which has historically proved to be always possible."
Senator Hubert Humphery (D- Minnesota)

10 posted on 10/28/2002 6:37:31 AM PST by Dick Bachert
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To: Lancey Howard
"A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its
citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that
moment on, the majority who vote will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits
from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal
policies, always followed by a dictatorship."

Sir Alex Fraser Tyler
11 posted on 10/28/2002 6:37:34 AM PST by lizma
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To: JimRed
It's all about money. The academic left lives on crumbs dropped from the table of government. Anything that gives conservatives a political advantage threatens their livelihood, because conservatives are never going to be as generous as liberals.

I have been reading New Republic recently, and they seem to have had an integrity implant. There are major articles supporting the war against Iraq and a neutral-to-favorable review of a Ken Starr book.

12 posted on 10/28/2002 6:57:25 AM PST by js1138
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To: js1138
What I said in the previous post, plus a glowingly favorable article on Dick Armey.
13 posted on 10/28/2002 6:58:57 AM PST by js1138
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To: JimRed
The left's moral compass has always been iffy at best and downright nonexistant more often than not. What changes is the levels of depravity to which they sink, and they are in great danger of drowning in the cesspool of societal decay and degredation that they have spawned. Since the rest of us could very well expire with them, because of them, I take it very personally and seriously. I wish I believed that a newer more moral attitude would invade the political
scene, but I don't believe so. Not in the forseeable future.
14 posted on 10/28/2002 7:01:22 AM PST by wingnuts'nbolts
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To: JimRed
It actually sounds less like a moral compass and more like the left (hard left) has devolved into a bunch of nutcases who rentlessly attack the ONLY country in the world truly worth defending.

The mainstream left's use of fearmongering, lying, election stealing, hypocrisy as a strategy, and other Clintonian tactics is the proof of the mainstream's loss of a moral compass.

The left has devolved into power at any price demogogues in the mainstream and on the fringe a bunch of hateful mindless whackos undermining our will to defend ourselves.

All together, no less a threat than Islam.


15 posted on 10/28/2002 7:02:28 AM PST by republicman
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To: JimRed
THE ELECTION IS IN 8 DAYS
AND I CAN'T VOTE.

PLEASE, HELP TAKE BACK THE SENATE.
IT'S FOR THE PUPPIES!

TakeBackCongress.org

A resource for conservatives who want a Republican majority in the Senate

16 posted on 10/28/2002 7:08:41 AM PST by ffrancone
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To: Cultural Jihad
May your patron SAINT GERMAINE forgive your unreasoned hatred for libertarians, CJ.

You need to read again "A LESSON IN HUMILITY AND MEEKNESS" as it is written of her from your own home page.

17 posted on 10/28/2002 7:10:07 AM PST by tpaine
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To: JimRed
The Left morally demagnitize everything they touch.

They could have a monopoly on the "moral compasses" industry and what good would it do 'em?

jriemer

18 posted on 10/28/2002 7:13:08 AM PST by jriemer
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To: JimRed
The Left Has Lost Its' Moral Compass
The Left, a moral compass?
Wins my vote for oxymoron of the year.
19 posted on 10/28/2002 7:14:13 AM PST by philman_36
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To: JimRed
The paragraph that begins..... "Many left intellectuals live in America like internal aliens............. that is why they had such difficulty responding to the attack on Sept 11 or joining in the expressions of solidarity that followed"

That paragraph is speaking about my former liberal minister. Former because I have not been back to church since the Sunday *after* 9-11. The sermon that we wanted & needed at that time, he unable to preach & it was plainly obviously how conflicted he was.
20 posted on 10/28/2002 7:15:47 AM PST by Ditter
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