Interesting analysis, once again, at Belmont Club:
Four apparently disconnected events in the past few days have served as the bellweather in the crisis called the Global War on Terror, a name now too narrow to be apt, because it has entailed a confrontation not only between terror and civilization but also Muslims and Christians, Left and Right, Democracy and Facism, the Old World and the New and much else. The four events are the George Galloway testimony before the US Senate; the survival through questionable constitutional tactics of the Liberal Government in Canada; the retraction by Newsweek of its Koran-flushing story and finally, the events in Uzbekistan.Some comments are very cogent:
The thread common to Galloway, the manuevers of the Canadian Paul Martin administration and Newsweek article is the extent to which the once-magisterial Left is now resorting to the shrillest and cheapest tactics as defensive maneuvers.
People who want George Galloway for President are all the way into Oswald Mosely territory. (The British Nazi leader of WW2) What's not so great is the implied crash that will occur when all the bills come due after this radicalization process is over. The Newsweek incident reminded me, for some strange reason, of the failure of the compromise before the Civil War. It felt like some line had been crossed; an indication that some problems were now beyond retrieval; that some things had to go on to their inevitable and tragic conclusion.Ominous.
At each critical juncture in the past, people saw the train wreck coming as clear as day. Whether the onset of Atilla, the rise of Napoleon, the Civil War, Hitler, the Cold War. None of them was a surprise. But Cassandras never convince the citifolk in time to prevent the sack. That is the everlasting and sad lesson of history. Every ruin is testimony to it. There's been a valiant effort to manage the wave that is sweeping over the world today; and because of it much will be saved; yet it will not wholly avert tragedy. There are fires out there that have yet to burn themselves out.
And,
Moreover, though--and this gets to another thread running through most of your post--is the sheer inability to form a coherent argument using facts, logic, reason and experience. Those I know on the Left (just as George Galloway did) repeatedly make such fallacies as: appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, tu quoques, ad hominems, non-sequiturs and invalid syllogisms, all the while habitually begging questions and generally not making any sense. I won't even go into the "4th Estate's" total unfamiliarity with any form of statistics, probability or game theory, or lower-order calculus--any one of which could have been used to disprove both the Rather-Guard Story and the Koran-Flushing Story.
Is this stuff actually taught in college these days? I mean, I really want to know. How do you put two and two together and get not four, or even three or five, but...a banana. This is bloody madness! Is there no trace of intelligence left on the Left?
