http://www.family.org/cforum/citizenmag/coverstory/a0041657.cfmLeft Behind
9-11 was terrible for America. But it’s been devastating for liberals.
by Dennis Prager
For all its tragedy, at least one good thing came out of 9-11. It exposed the Left’s incapacity to deal with evil.
A defining characteristic—not merely an unfortunate aspect—of the Left is its inability to recognize evil and its opposition to confronting it.
....
A major source of leftist anger at America, especially the America of George W. Bush, is that this America confronts evil. ...
....
Virtually the entire Left’s inability to label as thugs the minority rioters during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles was another example. Instead of condemning the looters, arsonists and even murderers, the Left condemned the Los Angeles Police Department and the Simi Valley jury that acquitted the police who had beaten King, a career criminal who had led police on a high-speed chase through populated neighborhoods and resisted them when apprehended.
....
The greatest weakness of the Left is this inability to recognize evil and its simultaneous hatred of those who do fight evil (such as America, Israel, and Tony Blair’s Britain).
....
The reasons are not only psychological (fear of confrontation, fear of fighting, fear of dying, loathing of authority figures whether parental or divine, etc.). They are ideological. The Left has different values from the rest of us.
....
That is one reason the Left constantly maintains that America is in Iraq “for oil” or,even more hallucinatory, to personally enrich George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and companies such as Halliburton. They see the world through an economic prism. It is a prism that profoundly distorts reality. But its worst feature is that it is essentially amoral; it is oblivious to the question of good versus of evil.
....
Finally, the Left hates talk of good and evil because it smacks of traditional Judeo-Christian religion, and the Left either loathes Judeo-Christian values or redefines them. The Left adores Western Europe because it is a welfare society (fewer rich people, less social inequality) and because it is secular. The latter means a great deal to the Left. The Left regards itself as on a much higher intellectual and moral plane than the religious. And the thing that they most loathe about the religious is their belief that there are moral judgments to be made and that there istherefore a standard of good and evil to which everyone is accountable.
....
All this leftist aversion to talk about evil has come to the fore since 9-11. In that sense, 9-11 was a catastrophe for the Left. It told most Americans exactly what the Left does not want Americans to believe: that there is major evil in the world which only America can truly fight; that America is not the Great Problem and, even worse, that the Great Problem regards America as its primary enemy; that sometimes only moral violence can end immoral violence; that people do terrible things for reasons having nothing to do with economics; that the U.N. is morally worthless; that America really is exceptional, and that there really is such as a thing as evil and those who fight itare better than those who fight the fighters.
9-11 was terrible for America. But it has thus far been devastating for the Left. That is one reason the Left so hates George W. Bush; and why, in their hearts, they have to hope he—andthereforewe—lose in Iraq.