The Left's Fairy Tale

To the left, falsehood substitutes for reasoned argumentation. The following article is timely and appropriate considering two leftists just wrote ridiculous comments on this site full of errors so ahistorical and counterfactual as to represent an unreality. The article, The Left's Fairy Tale, written by Ben Johnson dissects the problem with the lefts' view of the Iraq war, parts excerpted below:

In simple terms, nearly everything the Left believes about the United States for the past eight years is a lie. Taken one-at-a-time, such misinformation is not necessarily corrosive. Taken as a whole, they erode a citizen’s ability to support his nation’s cause during a time of war, giving the enemy invaluable aid and comfort. Indeed, this is one of the lessons of the new book David Horowitz and I have written entitled, Party of Defeat.

The left-wing dream sequence begins with the election of George W. Bush – or rather, the election of Al Gore. The Left universally insists Al Gore won the presidency. Campaigning for the nomination he eventually won, Sen. John Kerry whined in 2003: “Florida is the place where America’s democracy was wounded.” His future running-mate, John Edwards, stated bluntly: “We had more votes; we won!” And former president Jimmy Carter – who vouched for the authenticity of Hugo Chavez’s electoral triumph – told American University students, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Al Gore was elected president.” Bush was permitted to “steal” the election, according to the Left, because the Supreme Court halted the (most recent) Florida recount (Bush having won more than one recount already).

However, the media put the lie to this shortly after the election. In 2001, CNN reported that a conglomerate of media groups, which sponsored its own recount, “showed that Bush's razor-thin margin of 537 votes – certified in December by the Florida Secretary of State's office – would have tripled to 1,665 votes if counted according to standards advocated by his Democratic rival, former Vice President Al Gore.” Some may counter that the recounters weren’t using Al Gore’s standard. CNN added, “If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.” The recount did nothing but postpone Bush’s inevitable inauguration – and prevent him from implementing the comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy, which reached his desk on September 10, 2001.

This lie leads to the next: after stealing his office, President Bush set about dividing America. Al Gore told an adoring audience of MoveOn.org members, “far from uniting the people, the president's ideologically narrow agenda has seriously divided America. His most partisan supporters have launched a kind of 'civil cold war' against those with whom they disagree.” However, Bush attempted in his first year to govern the nation as he governed Texas: a bipartisan champion. He allowed Ted Kennedy a hand in writing his education reform bill, straddled a moral divide on stem cell research, and for eight years has negotiated such pork-rich budgets that it cost his party control of Congress.

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One prevarication upon another, the Left’s contentions form an internally coherent argument that advances the enemy’s policy goal: to break Americans’ will to defend themselves, to retreat before al-Qaeda, and to give bin Laden his greatest propaganda victory since his allied dragged American bodies through the streets of Mogadishu 15 years ago.

That such falsehood substitutes for reasoned argumentation is an indictment of leftists’ reasoning capabilities; that it does so during a time of war, which many of those falsehoods’ progenitors voted to authorize, indicts their motives, judgment, and desire for self-preservation.

No doubt, liberalism is indeed the philosophy of the stupid.