Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee

New York Observer ^ | 10/9/02 | Ron Rosenbaum

[martin gibson]

WHOOO-HOOOOO!!

Nothing like walking in with six-guns ablazin'...

Rosenbaum needs to take a shower and then put as much intellectual distance as he can between him and his former National Socialist buddies.

Welcome home, Ron.

[Jonah Hex]

Five pounds of skin?

[Chemist_Geek]

When you get right down to it, the author seems to have realized much of the foolishness of the left, but is still unwilling to recognize that, on the issues he has discussed, if the left is wrong, the right must be right. He's afraid to admit that, and until he can, I see him as what the USSR would have called a "useful fool".

He's making progress. He used to be a useful fool. Let's see where he goes with this - I can see a move into the libertarian camp, for instance.

I'm glad for the progress that has been made - it's better than no progress whatsoever.

[Richard Kimball]

He's half way there. He's figured out his current philosophy is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Only question now is, what does he do with that God shaped hole in his heart?

[Chemist_Geek]

He doesn't have the guts to leave the temple and become a conservative.

Not yet. What was one expecting, though, a Saul-On-The-Road type conversion? ;-) Have patience.

[Cold Heat]

I have saved this to my data base. It is worthy and worth saving for posterity.

[marron]

The leftists listen to the evidence against Saddam and reply, "There is nothing new here".

And they are right. There is nothing new. We have known everything we needed to know for a decade. Anyone with access to public sources can research the slaughter of the Kurds, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands. The torture, the executions committed personally by Saddam and his sons.

But none of this is new. The left wants something novel to pique their interest. There is something pathological in the left's ability to compartmentalize truth, to see without seeing. I have been listening to their arguments, believe me, I am looking for a cogent argument as to why we shouldn't invade. It could be my son who doesn't come home. But from the left there are no cogent arguments because there is a very plain callous where the retina is supposed to be.

Discussion of the Kurds usually merits a one-line dismissal, OK, he gassed his own people, so what. But the gassing is only the smallest tip of the iceberg. By far the greatest part of the slaughter was committed using the old fashioned tools of artillery, and machine guns, and bulldozers, and famine orchestrated by the military.

Saddam is a mass murderer like none we have seen since Mao and Stalin. And he dreams of ruling the middle east. And France and Germany want to help him do it. If we, who have the power to take him down, do not do it, who will?

No one will.

[Cold Heat]

This guy is all over the map, with one confused mind.

He is a democrat who has been confused by his parties antics. IE: A future republican.

[alex]

If Jews will flee the Left, other minorities will follow soon.

[hosepipe]

RON;
Oh! SHUT UP, give it a rest, blah,blah,blah...jeese.
intern yourself to David Horowitz for 2 years then come back to talk to us.... the whine should not be sold before its time.

It's not easy to take the democrat out of the party BUT it is damned near impossible to take the democrat out of the democrat. All you end up with is a RINO{Republican in NAME only}- Himself

[lds23]

If it's the same guy, I do like Robert Graves' mythology compendium. And didn't he write the basis of "I, Claudius"? And "The White Goddess" bears reading, as well.

[Bob J]

He doesn't really want to leave the Roach Motel...

When leaving a room, one must first open a door.

[MinuteGal]

Oh, c'mon now. In this piece, all this phoney has done is to position himself with a leg implanted in each camp.

How quickly we embrace and slobber over leftists writers on the basis of ONE article containing words we love to hear.

He stated will never turn conservative so what good is his torrent of words? He's an irrelevant speck in the bigger world. His anguished self-examination is just another writing product which he sells for cash.

The best I can say for him is that he may have shed some core leftist principles, but since he has no core conservative principles, what the h*** good is he to us?

Sheesh!

Leni

[jalisco555]

And didn't he write the basis of "I, Claudius"?

Yep, he wrote "I, Claudius", my all-time favorite historical novel, as well as it's sequel "Claudius the God". Apparently, Graves saw a great deal of combat in the trenches and came out of the war a changed, cynical man as well as a fine writer.

[maica]

His argument is wordy, but this sentence is the Creed of the Left. If we understand that this is the bedrock truth for the Hillary crowd we can form our arguments in better ways.

Because America isn’t perfect, it must be evil. Because Marxist regimes make claims of perfection, they must be good.

The Left judge everything on Intentions.

[jalisco555]

...but since he has no core conservative principles, what the h*** good is he to us?

Well, Leni, it's a start. Give him time. He has a lifetime of liberal indoctrination to work through and discard and he lives in a Leftist Manhattan culture that makes it hard to think logically. I think he has already come surprisingly far.

[ClancyJ]

Although he finally says "goodbye to all that" on this one facet of his leftist beliefs, it is absolutely amazing to me that anyone could become immersed in such utter bunk in the first place. Looks like he grovels in a sewer of distortions, anti-American hatred, and only throws out small sections of those beliefs.

Yet - you notice how he too manages to find a way to slam President Bush on the intelligence tenet while proclaiming the radicals as intellectuals worthy of notice in the first place.

If a man cannot understand that it takes a great deal of intelligence to become governor for two terms and win out over all other candidates both Republican and Democrat to become president and then be very successful at the job, he does not have intelligence himself.

These people remind me of the religious belief seekers that disdain the mainstream religion as inferior and unworthy of their notice choosing instead the new offcenter distortions of religion as their chosen beliefs - no matter how ridiculous, unfounded, manmade or innane those beliefs are. They choose radical distortions over truth on an ongoing regular basis.

They are the ones with low intelligence - not elite intellectuals or they would see through the nonsense of their seekings and realize they are merely rebelling against what was given them by the prior generation.

[DoctorMichael]

Bump. David Horowitz-esque.

[lds23]

If I may, I'd like to elaborate on the author's point of willed, obtuse blindness

The left ignores the fact that 9/11 wasn't just an isolated incident. The jihadists had/have a much bigger death toll in store. They INTENDED to knock the towers longways, perhaps killing 250,000 (draw a circle around the towers and see).And they aren't done yet.

So basically, the left wants us to ignore a huge FUTURE death potential here in the US.

[E Rocc]

He condemns the Left without truly breaking from it.

At the very least, it's a step away from the idiot-Left. Leftism attracts so many morons that every so often intelligent and decent people that subscribe to some of its tenets (yes Virginia, they do exist) have to wash their beliefs out with soap. It's much like the steps the modern conservative movement had to take away from the racists and the Conspiracy crowd a few decades ago.

At best, its a movement towards reality. I'm sure at some point both P. J. O'Rourke and David Horowitz went through a stage like this.

-Eric