They'll Huff and They'll Puff

Andrew C. McCarthy has done more, much more actually, than his fair share fighting the good fight that is the War on Terror, both in and out of government. His efforts deserve not only our collective congratulations, they deserve, in fact, a standing ovation. But his soul-searching column at National Review Online today, a reaction to the standing ovation that, not he but, Mexican President Felipe Calderon received from congressional Democrats for the anti-American speech he delivered to a joint session last week, reveals a measure of abiding naivete that can no longer be tolerated by those of us on the political Right, nor, frankly, by any freedom loving American.

Calderon's speech and the Democrat's reaction to it forced McCarthy to conclude this:

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona — for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens’ lives and property — is slandered as a human-rights violator. And here is the excruciating part: As the Calderón spectacle demonstrates, these sentiments are not fringe sentiments.

The "now" to which McCarthy refers at the beginning of the paragraph represents, for him, the sea change that occurred with the election of Barack Obama and the Pelosi-Reid-run House and Senate. He's wrong about that. The change has been with us for some time. How, then, could he and so many others be fooled for so long?

If you're familiar with this blog at all, you know that I maintain that a Limousine Liberal is the only kind of liberal there is. The predictable hypocrisy of liberals on virtually every issue they otherwise champion can fool you into concluding that they don't really believe their rhetoric, that their posturing is but an act, that they're reasonable people after all. I mean, they don't want wind farms in their back yard, they buy and drive SUVs, they send their kids to elite private schools, they shelter their earnings from the tax man, etc., etc., etc..

But the thing is, they really do believe all this stuff and more, and do so in spite of their consistent behaviour to the contrary. How so? Human being are long-practiced and quite successful at living with cognitive dissonance. We all do this to one degree or another, but your average liberal has raised the practice to an art form. So when he tells you the country is fundamentally flawed, guilty even, and has much to learn from, for example, the People's Paradise in Cuba, believe him. Even if he doesn't book the next boat from Miami to Havana. Moreover, you must believe him because, as I often say, the stakes are simply too high. To give him the benefit of the doubt caused by his hypocrisy was always dangerous, but now it's undeniably so.

The title of McCarthy's piece is "The House Divided". In case you didn't know, it's a biblical allusion (Matt. 12:25) that was employed by Abraham Lincoln in a famous speech of his delivered during the run-up to the Civil War. While I do not think we are anywhere near a conflict of arms in this country, thank God, we are nonetheless "engaged in a great civil war, testing whether [this] nation...can long endure." As far as I'm concerned, this war began, more or less, with the onset of the Twentieth Century. For the Left it remained mostly a guerrilla campaign until the Sixties. Since then it has been nothing less than an all out frontal assault on most of that which we hold dear, which defines us as a people: Our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our overwhelmingly Judeo-Christian religiosity, our self-understanding as "exceptional", our proud history.

With McCarthy's loss of innocence, we've no doubt added one more very significant enlistee to the musters of the New Grand Army of the Republic. As Victor Laszlo says to Rick Blaine in my favorite movie Casablanca, "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win."