WHO WOULD HAVE BELIEVED IT?

I have been trying to make this same point repeatedly on Dr. Sanity (just pick a post at random, or see the posts in the week before 9/11), but James Lewis at American Thinker captures the moral rot at the center of the political left (read it all, of course):

The Left, the media, and the Democrats are still steeped in denial of those simple, stubborn facts. Maybe reality is just too frightening for them. Whatever it is, to live in such denial is to surrender any claim to moral seriousness. It utterly disqualifies one to be a decision maker. We can thank our lucky stars that Bush, Blair and Cheney are adults.

So we are left with the Cheney Criterion: If there is a one percent chance that leaving Saddam in power would subject the West to nuclear terrorism, we would choose to change his bloody regime. The US and UK acted in the full knowledge that we might be wrong about our facts about a closed regime—and if we were, we would be screamed at for years and years by the International Left—the New York Times, the WaPo, KozKidz, the Guardian, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and all the yellow bellies in Europe.

Bush, Blair and Cheney did not have the luxury of pretending that hard choices can be wished away. That is what Harry Truman meant about the buck stopping here, in the Oval Office.

The greatest disappointment since 9/11/01 has been the total moral vacuity of the Left—a complete and utter nullity—both here and in Europe. Today, five years later, psychological denial still rules the day, and the few Democrats who raise their heads above the screaming mob are chased out, like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller.

One-third of American voters are still being suckered by the left-wing media, who live in some sort of Toon-Town where you can Have your Cake and Eat it Too, where Lunches are Free and Health Care is Too, and where there are no ideological killer movements in this world, and to achieve World Peace you just have to point your finger at the “Warmongers” and scream really loud. The Left is now populated by “mewling, puking infants,” as William Shakespeare put it, utterly lacking an understanding of the world as it is.

It is a sad sight to behold. We need unity, not denial. As it is, the Left has become a Fifth Column, fighting the civilized world and busily explaining away danger. The New York Times can get away with sabotaging our fight for survival against the worst fascist movement since you-know-who. The Left is even descending to Nazi slogans and scapegoating Jews. A generation ago, who would have believed it?

Slowly and almost imperceptably, the liberal left has morphed into the lunatic left. They have abandoned most of the liberal legacy that gave them emotional consistency and moral clarity; and instead, they have embraced positions that would have been completely inconceivable to imagine just a few short years ago.

How did this happen?

I admit that the whole process was pretty much off my radar screen during the 90's, and it wasn't until I started to notice the behavior of the political left in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election--and even toward the end of the Clinton Administration-- that I noticed something in their behavior that had puzzled me greatly when I first observed a similar strain in my daughter's elementary school.

It took me a while to understand the connection between these two disparate observations, but some relevant observations about it are discussed in this post:

Observe how easily Islam has been able to subvert key Western values--such as freedom of speech and expression--with a degree of invincibility and outraged virtue, capitalizing on a tactical opportunity that they have never before had in history. And worse of all, many on the political left--particularly the remnants of utopian socialism-- are aiding and abetting the Islamofascists.

With that in mind, is it at all surprising that Islam is able to take maximum advantage of this Achilles heel within Western culture and use the vulnerability to optimize their own religious, political, psychological, and military objectives?

Multiculturalism and political correctness are two of the fundamental pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious tenets-- along with a third: radical environmentalism--that have been widely disseminated by intellectuals unable to abandon socialism even after its crushing failures in the 20th century. These tenets have been slowly, but relentlessly absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last decade or so--but primarily since the end of the Cold War.

All three have been incorporated into most K-12 curricula and all other learning environments. They have been at the forefront of attempts by leading academics and academic institutions to rewrite most of history and undo thousands of years of Western cultural advancement. And further, as the culture has been completely saturated with this toxic brew, any attempt to question the tenets' validity or to contest their value is met with hysterical accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, imperialism, bigotry, or--worse of all --intolerance or insensitivity.

It just so happens, that these tenets represent three of the four pillars that are the foundation of an evolving epistemological, ethical and political strategy that the socialist remnants in the world have developed and are using to prevent their ideology from entering the dustbin of history.

And, what is most interesting is that, even as they encourage and enable Islam with the first three pillars; the Islamofascists are aiding and abetting them by using the fourth pillar- Terrorism. We can think of the four pillars as the reason for both the socialist revival (particularly in the western hemisphere recently) and the rapid advancement of the Islamic Jihad.

You will have to go there to see the transformation of the traditional leftist/Marxist thought of the 20th century into the even more vapid postmodern philosophy of the lunatic left, which now permeates many aspects of our culture.

It is this philosophy, slowly absorbed, that is responsible for the left abandoning any pretense at traditional liberalism, which used to champion the rights of the individual over the state. And it is the illogical and irrational tenets of postmodern philosophy that are at the heart of the moral and intellectual rot that has poisoned the liberal left and allowed its lunatic fringe undisputed center stage. Is it any wonder that they are not only comfortable with, but consciously (the leadership) and unconsciously appease and enable Islamic totalitarianism?

Believe it.