As someone who’s been opposed to legalized abortion for so long, I’m pretty resistant to liberals posturing that they’re more compassionate than the rest of us, or care more about preventing suffering in others. They aren’t. They don’t. Their sermons to me about how much they care about the poorest of the poor are wasted, when their most heartfelt battle-cry is for the unrestricted right of a strong, healthy mother to slaughter her far poorer and weaker child simply for being unwanted.
The current outrage about the way Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah were interrogated has nothing to do with liberals’ profound compassion for these terrorists as fellow human beings. Nor does it prove they walk a higher moral road than the rest of us, in spite of President Obama’s breathtaking charge that before he came along the country had lost its “moral bearings.”
Saddam Hussein ran one of the world’s cruelest torture regimes right up until the end, and the closest the Left ever came to taking that seriously was when they sponsored American youths to go there as human shields to protect Saddam, Uday, and Qsay from being stopped. When fellow human beings are in the way of what they want, the Left can be as icy, cold, and heartless as their worst feverish fantasies about poor Dick Cheney. Whether it’s the murder of Terri Schiavo, or the rape of South Vietnam in 1975, or the present-day abuse of women (and girls) in Muslim countries, or the slaughter in Rwanda, or the stealing away of the educations of a few poor kids in Washington, D.C., or the forced abortions in China, or the heinous infanticides of George Tiller in present-day Kansas, or the celebration of the murdering police state of Fidel Castro, there isn’t a moral bearing left in the liberals’ tool kit.
Like all participants in political struggles, the Left makes its decisions based on a balancing of interests, always wanting the scales heaviest on the side they’re most committed to protect. That’s why the President, when an Illinois senator, could justify keeping legal the practice of denying a newborn survivor of a botched abortion “health care” and letting it be discarded to die in a trash bin. It’s not that Obama hated babies. It’s just that in his political calculus, he valued so much more the love and political support of pro-abortion radicals, who do happen to hate babies, (or anyone else who might stand between them and their rights under Roe v. Wade).
You may just happen to agree with Obama on that calculus. But if you do, don’t try telling me it’s because you love humanity more than I do.
It’s going to be more of the same with what the leftist media is already referring to as the “torture memos.” (For a short history of media accuracy in naming things, see the “Duke rape case.”)
Opposition to the Bush administration “torture policy,” just like opposition to “domestic spying,” “Bush’s war in Iraq,” “outing Valerie Plame”, “the so-called war on terror,” “tax cuts for the rich,” and on and on, wasn’t really being driven by the exquisitely sensitive conscience of liberals, even though they’ve sickened half the country with their smugness. Those decisions were made by the cold political calculation that a weakened, or better yet, failed, Bush presidency would better guarantee them a return of the White House, in 2004 or 2008.
Okay, so I guess that’s politics. As one of those quotable sorts said once, politics ain’t beanbag. But at the same time, it ain’t Sunday School, either, and I wish the Left would stop acting as if they were Elijah and John the Baptist, Now With Religion.
When history handed to George W. Bush America’s first chance to make a proportional response against jihadist provocation in 200 years, America was united for about six weeks. That ‘s all the time it took before Democrats figured out that Bush and the Republicans would be unstoppable if America saw them actually roll back global Islamic jihadism.
That made the number one mission of the Democrats to do everything in their power to keep that from happening—from marshaling the media to undermine morale at home, to hamstringing our efforts abroad, to criminalizing military and intelligence advisers doing their best to stay within the rules while protecting the country.
It isn’t exactly that the liberals wanted the terrorists to win. It’s that they wanted the party most identified with fighting the terrorists to lose. If success in that resulted in terrorists winning, that’s not their fault. They’re only doing God’s work. Similarly, it’s not that Obama is trying to destroy the free market system in America and wreck the economy. It’s that he feels empowered to fix things so that highly successful Wall Street-CEO-Industry types aren’t making too much money. If that mission results in capitalism being crippled, don't blame him--blame his magnificently lofty principles.
It ought to be apparent by now that when liberals demand “action,” and “change,” they don’t sweat too much about the consequences of those actions or that change.
Witness that tea party exchange with CNN Susan Roesgen, where she acts so dismayed that a citizen could scorn the tax rebate Obama was giving him for the sake of some gun-nut fantasy that his liberty was at stake. (You’d give up $400 for liberty?!) And when Obama was asked if he still planned to raise the capital gains tax even knowing it would reduce government revenues, he said yes, because it would be fair.
There's a reason fairness is the appropriate scale of morality in the schoolyard: children haven't had enough experience to deal with the heavy work of right and wrong in a grown-up world. Fairness was the criteria Solomon pretended to apply when he offered to cut that baby in half. You’ll recall the false mother was enthusiastically in favor of it. Better a dead baby than tolerate a disparity between the maternal haves and the have-nots.
Now Obama’s running a foreign policy apparently no more “nuanced” than just to do the opposite of whatever his evil predecessor did. If that results in America becoming weaker and our enemies stronger, that’s not his fault. Bin Ladin only attacked us anyway because we were “arrogant”--and now we’re not. Besides, people like us better this way.
Surveys by both Gallup and Rasmussen surveys show that bestowing Geneva Convention protections on captured Al Qaeda killers polls particularly well among women who support late-term abortions and life-long college students driving 1989 Subarus with “Mean People Suck” bumper stickers.
We can all expect a hurricane of Democratic self-righteousness now of Katrina proportions. They will try to get as much mileage as they can out of this issue, mugging for all they're worth on each other’s programs about how incomprehensible it is that America could have sunk to this low level.
Meanwhile, the next most heinous crime the Left will go after is that of a Miss USA contestant for not thinking gay marriage is such a great idea.
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