Monday, May 18, 2020

The Left Is What It Once Loathed

"What is the Left, then? Mostly a Jacobin party that operates ad hoc, without principle, or consistency. "

Victor Davis Hanson


. . . "Indeed, the ACLU was outraged at what the committee revealed. [liberal Senator Frank] Church  was deified as a liberal hero uncovering government abuse. About the worst thing a government could do, liberals reminded us, was to spy on its own citizens. 
"Then we were also warned that the scandal was the result of the government, for over 30 years, targeting mostly liberals on grounds of trumped-up suspicions that they were sympathetic to Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Yet in addition, the Left argued that the state had no business spying on any American at all, unless it had a certified warrant and ample criminal cause—or we found ourselves in a war with enemies at home among us.
"And now?  
"Russia is no longer a global Communist superpower rival. Yet the Obama Administration’s CIA, NSA, and FBI were every bit as obsessed with Vladimir Putin as had the old Right worried about Leonid Brezhnev—as if a contemporary kleptocratic thug lording over a failed and shrinking state posed the same existential dangers as a Communist dictator reigning over a huge postwar empire dedicated to destroying the free world. 
"Actually, at the behest of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. earlier had reached out to Putin in a naïve, flawed “reset” appeasement that failed. So, the Obama Administration’s about-face obsession with Putin the monster always was largely a convenient gambit of wanting to destroy the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency." . . .. . . "A free watchdog press? Again, hardly. According to early liberal monitoring of presidential news coverage, roughly 93 percent of the news has been anti-Trump. The media by its own admissions—remember the editorialization from those like Jorge Ramos, Jim Rutenberg, or Christiane Amanpour?—believes it cannot be disinterested, given the alleged existential threat Donald Trump supposedly poses to America." . . .

. . . "A free watchdog press? Again, hardly. According to early liberal monitoring of presidential news coverage, roughly 93 percent of the news has been anti-Trump. The media by its own admissions—remember the editorialization from those like Jorge Ramos, Jim Rutenberg, or Christiane Amanpour?—believes it cannot be disinterested, given the alleged existential threat Donald Trump supposedly poses to America.
"Race? The Left sanctions racial separatism, even to the extent of marking off racially exclusive spaces on campus or allowing students to veto roommates on the basis of their race.
"Feminism and Sexual Harassment and Assault? It depends. Statutes of limitations and he said/she said evidence are of no importance if it means stopping a conservative Supreme Court judge, but they most certainly do apply if they impair a Democratic presidential candidacy." . . .

Jacobin Dominican:  [French, from Jacobin Dominican; from the group's founding in the Dominican convent in Paris] a member of an extremist or radical political group  especially a member of such a group advocating egalitarian democracy and engaging in terrorist activities during the French Revolution of 1789

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