Day By Day

Monday, August 14, 2006

Barone on Wishful Thinking by the Left

Michael Barone has been on a roll lately. Now he suggests that the Left suffers from cognitive dissonance -- an ability to come to terms with reality.
What we are looking at here is cognitive dissonance. The mindset of the Left blogosphere is that there's no real terrorist threat out there. We wouldn't have any serious problem if we'd just do something different -- raise the minimum wage or reduce the number without health insurance (the first issue Lamont mentioned on election night), withdraw from Iraq or (as some Left bloggers suggest) sell out Israel.
This leads them to either discount or deny the reality of the British bomb plot.

But the threat is real and cannot be wished away or safely ignored. Barone writes:

Our Left criticized George W. Bush when The New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency was surveilling telephone calls from al-Qaida suspects overseas to the United States. Now it appears that the United States surveilled the British terrorists, and that they made phone calls to the United States. The Left cried foul when The New York Times revealed that the United States was monitoring money transfers at the SWIFT bank clearinghouse in Brussels. Now it appears that there was monitoring of money transfers by the British terrorists in Pakistan. On Tuesday, the Left was gleeful that it was scoring political points against George W. Bush. On Thursday, it seemed that the supposedly controversial NSA surveillance contributed to savings thousands of lives.

Joseph Lieberman is being criticized for saying, "I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us -- more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet communists we fought during the long Cold War. We cannot deceive ourselves that we live in safety today and the war is over, and it's why we have to stay strong and vigilant."

That view didn't prevail on Tuesday. But it sure made sense on Thursday.

Agreed!

Read it here.

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