Liberalism and terrorism: Different stages of same disease ANN COULTER

THE NEW YORK TIMES editorial page was in a snit with the Supreme Court this week for its first ruling on the Bush administration's wartime security procedures. Despite the hysteria at the Times for the assault on "constitutional rights" by Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Supreme Court ruled for Ashcroft.

For now, at least, deportation hearings of suspected terrorists will not be open to the public. This, the Times said, was "troubling." Sadly, the Constitution does not require that national security be compromised.

Like everything liberals oppose but don't have a good argument for, all reasonable national security measures are called "unconstitutional." Whenever liberals are losing on substance, they pretend to be upset about process.

Through their enervating dialogues and endless concerns with constitutional process, liberals have made themselves incapable of feeling hate for the enemy. Refusing to take sides in this war, they busy themselves wailing about every security precaution taken by the Bush administration.

Ashcroft has been incessantly attacked on the op-ed page of The New York Times by the same columnists who are now angrily demanding to know why the Bush administration didn't imprison all Arabs before Sept. 11. He has been compared to the Taliban. (And you're not a patriot in this war until a liberal has compared you to the Taliban.)

Bill Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights called Attorney General John Ashcroft the Constitution's "main enemy." (As Andrew Ferguson said, evidently Osama Bin Laden comes in a close second.)

Sen. Patrick Do-Nothing Leahy has complained about Ashcroft's "disappointing" failure to run all internal guideline changes past the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, Sen. Do-Nothing said, "we're presented with a fait accompli reflecting no congressional input whatsoever."

Ashcroft was probably worried Leahy would take as long with procedures for investigating terrorism as he is with Bush's judicial nominees. If Speedy Gonzalez Leahy were required to review Justice Department guidelines, America would be an Islamic regime before Leahy got around to it.

No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent. Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with "unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass." This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America. Like all cartoons specially featured in the Times, there was nothing remotely funny about the cartoon. Its point was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans.

While hooting with laughter at patriotic Americans, liberals prattle on and on about the right to dissent as the true mark of patriotism and claim their unrelenting kvetching is a needed corrective to jingoism. (It's not jingoism, and the only people who use that word are fifth columnists.)

After Sept. 11, liberals are appalled by patriotism with an edge of anger because that might lead America to defend itself. True patriotism, they believe, should consist of redoubled efforts at attacking George Bush.

Movie director Robert Altman (who won the Golden Globe for best director for "Gosford Park") said, "When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke. This present government in America I just find disgusting."

Columbia professor Eric Foner said: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." I think I know the answer! Thousands of our fellow countrymen dying in a fiery inferno, I'm pretty sure, is "more frightening" than the rhetoric emanating from the White House.

Liberals are angrier at John Ashcroft for questioning angry Arab immigrants applying for crop duster permits than they are about the terrorists. These people simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens. If you can rise above that, if you can move on from that, you weren't angry in the first place.

During World War II, George Orwell said of England's pacifists: "Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively, the pacifist is pro-Nazi."

To paraphrase Orwell, in this war, those who cannot stay focused on fighting the enemy are objectively pro-terrorist.

When I was in my late teens (many,many, years ago), I too believed a lot of that leftist rot. It's the desire of many normally good and well-intentioned people to want to believe in a society where the rich do not have more (power, money, whatever) than the poor.

What changed my mind in my early twenties was reading facts about history, especially Solzhenitsyn's Gulag trilogy. That destroyed forever my belief that socialism was good and capitalism was evil. I knew that Stalin was evil, but like other fools I wanted to believe that socialism could be reformed. Von Hayek and Solzhenitsyn proved that it was a deadly evil, and the worst done by greedy capitalists does not approach the evils done in the name of socialism.

"The main thesis of the book is that National Socialism was indeed socialism, indeed of the left."

If you are so sure about this you should ask the present-day adherents on National Socialism whether they consider themselves part of the political left or not.

Von Hayek and Solzhenitsyn proved that it was a deadly evil, and the worst done by greedy capitalists does not approach the evils done in the name of socialism.

And neither of them are read, taught or even mentioned on the American university campus of the 21st century. What does that tell you?

If you are so sure about this you should ask the present-day adherents on National Socialism whether they consider themselves part of the political left or not.

First, I don't make a practice of looking for a chance to interrogate such people. Second, to hear Hitler and Stalin tell it after they started fighting, there was no similarity between them--even tho if you or I had lived under one system and then under the other, we would have said there were distintions but not a dime's worth of difference between them.
Terms such as right, conservative, even liberal depend on context so much that I consider it a sterile discussion. I probably won't hold the discussion you suggest, since I would expect such a language barrier that it would be hard to make sense out of what they said.

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