A little early Christmas present in the form of a GREATarticle by Victor David Hanson (not a member of the Hanson Brothers, btw.) I have this little fantasy where Jeanine Garafalo is doing her schtick, and V. D. Hanson walks in and starts schooling her. I have other fantasies, but none of them involve Garafalo, and really don't pertain to the topic at hand.
But, back to the politics, the main thrust Hanson makes is that there are "fundamental flaws" in the left's current ideology. Flaws such as putting good intentions over truth, and forced equality over liberty and freedom. These flaws have led them to "virtual incoherence."
A few golden nuggets:
"So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian's head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward."
And this :
Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai's public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter's 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush's effort to topple Saddam Hussein as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.
As they say, read it all.
Posts
|