Thoughts on policy, history, faith, baseball when I get around to it, waterfowl, and life in general by a junior attorney who'd much rather have Jonah Goldberg's job. Or possibly Darin Erstad's.

 
Having recently surveyed a selection of hard-left web sites and publications, and having also discussed politics with some generally pleasant liberal acquaintances of mine, I've come to the conclusion that the combination of President Bush's close election, with the constitutional flukes in Florida, and his adminstration's response to September 11 have pushed left-liberals completely over the edge. They are actually enraged in their hostility for Bush and everything he stands for, to the point that they accept and perpetuate patent falsehoods about administration policy without a moment's thought of engaging the critical-thinking faculties on which they tend to (generally unjustifiably) pride themselves.

The "Bush lied about WMD" refrain, for example. Granted, when they've been wrong about virtually everything about the war in Iraq, it's hard to fault human beings for clinging to the one straw they think they still have. But while perceptive conservatives concluded early on that President Clinton was, with respect to his personal character, a pig, we tended not to be quite so vehement about calling him a liar in the particular circumstance of l'affaire Lewinsky until we actually saw his ... er, evidence on her blue dress. For one thing, when you accuse someone of lying and you turn out to be wrong, you look not only petty but stupid, as Bill Simon found out when he thought he had ironclad proof Gray Davis lied about accepting contributions in the governor's office. (He hadn't.)

Not only that, but conspiracy thinking is running rampant on the left. And that's what strikes me as being the real evidence of real danger: The left is approximating the anti-government far right of the early nineties. There are already hard leftist "direct action" groups that commit violence against property. The way the left is moving, it may be only a matter of time before there arises a left-wing Timothy McVeigh.*

*Not that Timothy McVeigh was entirely free from leftist ideology himself. Along with his anti-government hatred, he also had a beef with powerful corporations and was apparently somewhat into "animal rights," both of which things are generally associated with the left. Interestingly enough, a certain German who resembled Charlie Chaplin also combined his generally far-right ideology with these far-left ideologies. posted by Thomas at 5:13 PM