"Two monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation"

At a joint press conference with GW this morning, Afghan President Hamid Karzai criticizes Newsweek for irresponsible journalism for its role in triggering deadly riots last week. The demonstrations were a "political act against Afghanistan's strategic partnership with the U.S," he says, and any prison abuses that may or may not have occurred are "not a thing that we attribute to anybody else but those individuals [and] do not reflect at all on the American people."

"Something strange -- something approaching pathological -- something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," an inner voice whispered to Keith Thompson, the latest man of the left to be mugged by the reality of his fellows travelers' reflexive anti-Americanism. His heartfelt and heartening SFGate essay, "Leaving the left," is being hailed by Glenn Reynolds and the immediate blogosphere as a "must-read":   

The Iraqi election is my tipping point. I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary [northwest Ohio] hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

Natan Sharansky's fear-society model comes to mind [Doesn't it always? --ed], blogged here awhile back in "Fear societies, heavy and lite":

Sharansky's "mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society" are at work in those lofty intellectual bubbles just as surely as they were in the old Soviet Union and are today in the Arab tyrannies. A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control. The crushing of dissent brutalizes the human spirit.

As we wrote last fall re another former liberal mugged by post-9/11 reality, "Benjamin [Kerstein] perceptively identifies the liberal project with the intolerance of religious fanaticism. In their blind hatred of the West -- and particularly the Great Satan -- the Chomskyites and Islamic extremists are not far apart." The same idea -- it must be a meme by now -- appears in Mark Steyn's latest essay:

In a way, both the U.S. media and those wacky rioters in the Afghan-Pakistani hinterlands are very similar, two highly parochial and monumentally self-absorbed tribes living in isolation from the rest of the world and prone to fanatical irrational indestructible beliefs -- not least the notion that you can flush a 950-page book down one of Al Gore's eco-crazed federally mandated low-flush toilets.

Must we say it again?  Don't attempt to confuse these people with the facts.

Comments

[Tara]

I try to read your blog at least once a day..more if I can manage it..because this blog is a breath of fresh air amidst the insanity bombarding the MSM and the cable news channels...that masquerades as "news" .

I come here to read about Baby & Tiny too..I love the stories about their world and the pictures of both.I have 2 cats, Winston & Bud...

Anyway, thanks for well thought out posts about our current political situation ..which I find intolerable..blogs are now my sole source of information.I had to take shelter from the Michael Jackson,Scott Peterson,Runaway Bride stories...

[goomp]

I'm with Tara. Blogs and the WSJ are where are where I get my news. Yours is concise and to the point as in the above where you show your views by quoting the views of others who have given thought to the pathology of the "Intellectual Morons".

[Sissy Willis]

Thank you both. :)

[andophiroxia]

I find that the best insights come from the American people themselves. Right or wrong, good or bad, it gives you a much more realistic perspective of the US.

[Teresa]

I heard Keith Thompson earlier today on Rush Limbaugh's show - he actually called in and did a mini-interview which impressed me all the more (as most who claim to be distressed by the lib agenda would rather run back to the fold than exchange hellos with Limbaugh). I will try to remember to get over there tonight and link to it. On reading and listening to him, he sounds like a very thoughtful guy. I give him HUGE kudos for walking away from all the lunacy - it's a difficult thing to do!

As for Mr. Karzai... how much must it gall him to see the American news media basically putting his neck even further on the line! This is a man who has won my admiration - he's got one hell of a job. I just wish our own MSM wasn't actively trying to make his life worse just to make Mr. Bush look bad. *sigh*