Day By Day

Friday, January 06, 2006

Lies Of the Left, Redux

I earlier blogged on the duplicity of left-wing scholars on the subject of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. [here]

Jonah Goldberg over at NRO uses it as a platform for a general discussion of the lies of the left, including the Rosenbergs, Hiss, Huey, Mumia, Matthew Shepherd, Tookie, Tawana, The Hollywood Ten, etc.

The key point:
It's difficult to find many liberal martyr-saints who haven't been burnished by deceit.
Read the whole thing here.

I suspect that the propensity of the left to indulge in fabulation is of a piece with its weakness for utopian ideals and demands for "fundamental change." Quite simply, they have trouble coming to terms with reality.

Many semi-educated journalists have over the years cited Bobby Kennedy's famous statement, "I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'" as an exemplar of the liberal imagination. But even here you encounter deceit. Kennedy stole the line, without attribution, from George Bernard Shaw's satirical play, "Back to Methusela." Shaw, himself a Fabian socialist well acquainted with the self-delusions of the left, was canny enough to place those words in the mouth of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. As Shaw understood, the dream of the left is a seductive lie.

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