Right Wing Nut House

The bodies strewn in the street at Euston in London as a result of a bus being blasted to smithereens weren’t even cold when the first of the “Blame Bush” threads at Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground appeared. The tone of the commenters was triumphant, cheering each lurid detail of the attacks and speculating about what this dastardly deed, apparently carried out by a European offshoot of al Qaeda, would mean for the President and Prime Minister Blair’s political support for the War in Iraq at home.

There was also an obscenely unhealthy dose of speculation that the attack was planned and carried out by President Bush in order to (wait for it) distract the people from Karl Rove’s supposed outing of Valerie Palme as a CIA agent in the Joe Wilson imbroglio.

After wading through this conspiratorial muck, I felt unclean - almost as if I had crawled on my hands and knees through a dank basement full of cobwebs and roaches. The bile rising in my throat resulted in a post where I highlighted several of the more disgusting comments from the left on the tragedy.

But then last night, I got a comment taking me to task thusly:

Nearly 4 years after 9-11 Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization commits wholesale murder in the capital of a major Western power, and all you can find to talk about is what people are saying on blogs?

It’s a good question and I’d like to respond to it.

The reason it’s important what the left is saying is that their reaction both to the War in Iraq and the terror bombing in London is part and parcel of the overall War on Terror. This is a war fought on many fronts and one of them is right here at home. Not with terrorists, but with the terrorists primary enablers; the far left in Europe and America who are so besodden with defeatism and paranoia that it has deadened their natural instinct for self-preservation and endangered the lives of the rest of us.

What is driving this impulse to self destruction? I believe it to be a self-loathing so profound that it manifests itself as a pathological hatred for the very things that you and I love about America and admire in Western Civilization. It’s isn’t just flush toilets and electric lights. It isn’t the material largess which drives many to strive to better themselves and all of us to enjoy a level of comfort undreamed of since the time mankind crawled out of caves to organize themselves into civilizations. It isn’t even the unbridled freedom - freedom to speak our mind, worship our god, to read, to write, to breathe, to choose, to dream.

At bottom, the left’s hatred reflects a lack of trust in the ability of ordinary human beings to live their lives according to their own lights unencumbered by the dictates of a government or the diktats of an overweening superset of wise men whose self important worldview allows them to believe they can meddle in the lives and life decisions of everyone else.

True, this tendency is not confined to the far left. Many on the far right are also afflicted with the malady of self-righteousness. But I would argue that the culture war being waged between the two is, at its heart, a battle for the human soul. And while the methods and personalities on the right can sometimes grate like a fingernail being run slowly across a blackboard and I violently disagree with many of the the cultural conservative agenda items, I believe that in toto, the right is generally on the side of the angels. Not so much in their desire to legislate a morality or behavior, but in their effort to pull civilization back from the brink the left has pushed us toward.

That said, the left’s compulsion to ally itself with the radical Islamists - either knowingly or through stupidity, unknowingly - is the greatest challenge facing Western Civilization in its War on Terror. The very people who should be leading this fight; the intellectuals, the educators, the editorialists, the journalists, and the literati are absent without leave in this life and death struggle. Instead, we find a an overwhelming majority of the left trying to “explain the root causes” of terrorism instead of getting up on their hind legs and fighting it. And instead of drawing clear, unmistakable intellectual and moral battle lines - a function their ancestors fulfilled more than admirably during World War II and much of the Cold War - we’re treated to an exercise in moral equivalency so profoundly disturbing in its sophistry and intellectual cowardice that our enemies don’t know whether to laugh before they slaughter us or simply shake their heads in bemused silence.

When otherwise reasonably intelligent people can find an intellectual justification for wholesale murder (”We’re killing civilians in Iraq so why shouldn’t we be a target?”) it’s time to start asking some very tough, very pointed questions directed at the purveyors of such twaddle. Who is killing civilians in Iraq? What would have been the consequences of doing nothing about Saddam while he bought off our European “allies” with Oil for Food bribes so that he could reconstitute his WMD programs? What alternative strategy should we follow in the middle east in order to not contain, not lessen, not simply fight, but win the war against the Islamists?

Hard questions these and no answers have been forthcoming nor will any answers be given soon. A gigantic pair of blinders has been placed over the eyes of the western left. And if the obstruction were to be removed, they would find themselves poised precariously on the edge of a moral precipice with nothing with which to hang on to. They have abandoned the traditional anchors of Western Civilization found in religion and reason and instead indulged themselves in a Bacchanal of hatred and loathing for the society that nurtured them. It has left them marooned on a barren wasteland of an island with no rescue in sight and no way out of the intellectual morass they have made for themselves.

The kind of moral equivalency that can blame the United States for the attacks in London yesterday is as much a part of this war as the car bombs and homicide bombers butchering the citizens of a free Iraq or the secretive men hiding among us planning the next attack.

What will it take to clear their heads and awaken them to the mortal danger in which we find ourselves?