Friday, February 04, 2005

Generally speaking, it seems that the American political Left just doesn’t get it yet - why they keep losing. Dr. Joyner has a great post that touches on “Fascists and Nazis, Republicans and Democrats.”

On Fascism:

“Islamo-fascist" is not used merely to describe a set of ideas with which, presumably, virtually all Americans disagree. Rather, it describes the political credo that motivates a terrorist movement and its sympathizers. The facist label is used because the fascsist ideology, like Islamism, required an absolute fealty to a dogma issued by a central leadership, a totalitarian worship of that idea, and terroristic violence to kill or intimidate the opposition.

On Janeane Garofalo/Nazism:

“The inked fingers was disgusting,” said Garofalo, who is one of the hosts on the Air America radio network. “The inked fingers and the position of them, which is gonna be a ‘Daily Show’ photo already, of them signaling in this manner [Nazi salute], as if they have solidarity with the Iraqis who braved physical threats against their lives to vote as if somehow these inked-fingered Republicans have something to do with that.”

Given that, if Garofalo’s policy preferences had been enacted, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, this is an odd position indeed. All taxpaying Americans had something to do with the Iraqi vote, in that we financed it. Congressional Republicans have more to do with it than most, given that they supported the policies that led to the Iraqi elections against considerable political opposition at home.

He includes a bonus link to Victor Davis Hanson, who says:

If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation’s governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America’s power — as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East? Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert’s show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge — a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.

[...]

Perhaps the result of this frustration is that European intellectuals damn the United States for action in Iraq, but lament that they could do nothing in the Balkans. Democrats at home talk of the need for idealism abroad, but fear the dirty road of war that sometimes is part of that bargain — thus the retreat into “democracy is good, BUT...” So here we have the global throng that focuses on one purported American crime to the next, as it simmers in the luxury of its privilege, education, and sophistication — and exhibits little power, new ideas, intellectual seriousness, or relevance.

Ouch, indeed.

Go read the whole thing, as they say.