Etalkinghead

That our civic taxonomy has become a slave to liberalism’s sacred pact with political correctness is undeniable, as is the left’s antagonistic view of confrontation or, for that matter, anything that demands intellectual discipline. Senator Jon Kyle (R-AZ), writing in the Christian Science Monitor, makes a convincing case that we haven’t learned from the gross miscalculations of thirty years ago when America and the West exhibited a pattern of moral cowardice.

Quoting from the speeches of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mr. Kyle provides credible evidence that the misguided concern for the rights of historical belligerents has resurfaced in the left’s abiding preoccupation with those of the Islamic terrorists. Nothing in President Bush’s post-9/11 initiatives has compromised the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens, only individuals who are either non-citizen enemy combatants or those suspected of terrorist affiliations.

Yet many on the left and a handful of libertarians are decrying the tactics employed to pre-emptively disrupt the terrorists, fundamentally characterizing government intervention as an abridgment of our civil rights. We must ask why it is that many Democrats and nearly all liberals have such a profoundly different perspective concerning this evil in our midst.

At its heart, liberalism is a polity that instinctively eschews responsibility, on the one hand by establishing a different metric of behavioral expectations of entire ethnic and economic classes of people, and, by extension, effectively ceding to real or would-be aggressors a strategic advantage that is tantamount to a pre-emptive surrender.

If we naively misappraise our enemy, it inevitably leads to a foreign policy that is more concerned with their response to our diplomatic and strategic posture than with our ability to achieve a situational advantage favorable to subjugating them. Indeed, the very notion of U.S. pre-eminence is anathema to most liberals because it connotes to them a lack of humility, which, in their rendering of the notion, is truly more akin to self-loathing.

For some inexplicable reason, every strategic move the Bush Administration makes in order to safeguard American citizens is seen as suspect by the left. Concurrently, to figuratively look this enemy in the eye and pledge its destruction is contrary to every fiber of their being. Indeed, their goal, with everything from common criminals to genocidal despots, is to somehow understand them and then to work towards a peaceful co-existence.

The notable exceptions of this self-imposed rule include capitalists, in particular well-compensated CEOs and highly profitable multinational corporations, which, in their cynical view, are on a par with the world’s pariahs.

At the end of his editorial, Senator Kyle again quotes Mr. Solzhenitsyn:

“The fight, physical and spiritual for our planet, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started.”

That was almost thirty years ago.

Mella is Founder and Editor of ClearCommentary.com.