March 05, 2005

FIGHTING THE WAR OF IDEAS: THE NYTIMES RETREATS AND COUNTERATTACKS

        The buzzing in the liberal hive continues. How to account for the recent favorable changes in the Middle East? Having spent months promoting John Kerry as a subtle internationalist, by contrast with the simpleton George Bush, Roger Simon of the NYTimes, like Gail Collins and the Editorial Board, now pivots to endorse the changes occurring in the Arab world. Not that neo-conservative policy or George Bush had anything to do with it, other than to ignorantly impose change by brute force. Such an acknowledgment by Simon that Bush was correct, with its tacit admission of his own wrongheadedness would be intolerable, too much of a blow to the narcissistic self-regard that is crucial to membership in the church of Liberalism.

        Read this article carefully to discern the efforts of the Liberal mind to come to grips with the positive results of neo-conservative policies they fought tooth and nail for years. Some like Doris Kearns Goodwin argue that Bush has succeeded, to the limited extent she can admit, by dumb luck. Recent changes, though certainly related to our actions in Iraq, according to Simon, present dreadful new dangers. We can see that, despite the wrongheadedness of the NYTimes over many months, their newly evolving position is that we need their insights more than ever. In fact the new dangers require liberal nuance and subtlety to rescue us from hubris and Bushian triumphalism. Truth is, however, an alliance exists between NYTimes liberals like Roger Simon and our totalitarian enemies. They both fear and detest freedom. Freedom of ideas, which they both fight, one in the name of Islam, the other in the name of politically correct liberalism, might allow non-liberal ideas to prevail. Horror of horrors. Roger Simon sums up the modern liberal faith when he warns of the danges of Democracy. The following paragraph sums up the current state of the Liberal Mind: "President George W. Bush has argued that America's ideals are now synonymous with its interests; the spread of freedom will drain the frustration and rage on which terrorism feeds. The argument is beautiful in its simplicity. But it is precisely in democratic Europe that Mohammed Atta, a mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, lived for about a decade, and it is from Britain, scarcely a stranger to liberty, that Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami, hailed. Democracy can open the way for many things including illiberal opinion..."("Illiberal opinion= any opinion differing from the NYTimes politically correct utopianism)

        In one short paragraph, we're informed that Bush is simple mindedly naive, and that liberals like Cohen are far more sophisticated. Really Cohen's 'sophistication'is absurd. He seems to think that the fact that Mohammed Atta and Richard Reid lived in the West disconnects their Islamist fanaticism from its Middle Eastern sources. With sophisticated liberal thinkers like Cohen, we don't need enemies. Read it all here.