Weekly VDH worship

It must be done, and usually once a week, but Victor David Hanson is just too good to be ignored. In today's NRO column, he has this gem:

We may still rant about the American rejection of Kyoto. But is anyone alarmed over the hundreds of coal plants sprouting up in India and China to ensure billions of people that there will be enough energy for a possible future lifestyle of the type we now take for granted in Santa Barbara and Nantucket? In short, we will soon enter an age in which China may well change the world's environment, affect the price of oil, and govern the world's trade as much as the United States — and will care almost nothing about what Western liberals say, secure either that its fraying socialist veneer or sheer size and power will earn it a pass from the censure of Western intellectuals.

If we thought indigenous liberationist movements of the Islamic world — who have beheaded and killed to be free of Western religious tolerance, equity for women and homosexuals, and voting and human rights — put an enormous strain on the ossified Left, wait until Mao's old socialist utopia begins to send ultimatums to the democracies of the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. What will Earth First do when this socialist behemoth sprouts its oil rigs in the Arctic tundra and pristine seas?

This is what has always amazed me - the utter intellectual isolation in which many American liberals seem to be living in. While they view the American Great Satan as the source of all evil, they seem utterly unable to see REAL evil. The isolated offenses that occur here, somehow block out the widespread offenses elsewhere. One gay man can be murdered in the US, and it's proof that the whole country hates gays. In Iran, gay men get beheaded as POLICY (but it's just a different culture, you understand.) It will be interesting to see if the liberal line will change as China starts flexing it's world muscles. When China is the biggest polluter, will we see tree huggers in the trees in Beijing? I don't think so. Who, really, is the great Satan? Societies that allow their uniformed zealots to march in the streets, or those that just shoot into the crowds? When will liberals learn that it is the great FREEDOM that we have here, in America, that makes us different. Their freedom to be loony, and freedom for the rest of us to be productive and happy.