The problem of the assumed moral superiority of the Left is fairly widespread. Unfortunately, a great many people believe that past moral crusades of people wearing the leftist label has earned leftists a presumption of good intentions and good will.
This presumption, unfortunately, has relaxed the intellectual standards that leftists use as the minimum level necessary to avoid embarrassment. The results are sad. You can bash the Bush administration for missing the boat and not spotting that something has changed but professional corruption or more specifically professionals engaging in a corrupted policy process where economists are putting out propaganda, not analysis does go beyond the pale.
It happens time and again. It is not enough that the center-right is mistaken or their solutions don't work. They want to starve people, kill them, burn down churches, and stage domestic coups. And because of the banked up good feeling of a great many honest, middle-of-the-road americans, they have often gotten away with it in the past. Such charges, and the lack of repudiation by others in the left, are marks of the rise to prominence of an indecent, immoral left. They will say any charge, repeat any lie, if it staves off their collapse due to their intellectual bankruptcy. The only thing more horrifying to these people than being outside the halls of power is having to sit down and rethink basic premises of what an honest left should be about now that socialism has been proven a mistake.
Posted by TMLutas at March 15, 2004 11:15 AM