Jean-Léon Gérôme, Next Year at Airline Security, 1867, private collection.

I was appalled by the reactions of my classmates to news that the officialdom was responding internationally to the failed Christmas Eve underwear bombing by adding electronic strip searches to the pointless forms of harassment and humiliation inflicted on ordinary citizens of Western countries, in order to avoid singling out for special attention exotic representatives of the backward and benighted regions of Barbaria where the teachings of Mahound commonly inspire fanatical intolerance and a lust for blood.

There were all kinds of crude jokes about how trivial issues of personal modesty are by comparison to safety, and how happy they all would be to stripped completely naked in mixed company in order to avoid injury or death. This from a bunch of men over 60, who in general, doubtless, have plenty of reason for personal objection.

I thought myself that this particular measure represented a particularly apt metonymy for a number of the objectionable aspects of the contemporary liberal perspective: the eager submission and thoroughgoing surrender of everything, including personal dignity and privacy, to official authority; the elevation of egalitarianism to a position of absolute supremacy over any and every other value; cowardice and materialism; and limitless obeisance to the Other, combined with a complete disregard for either female modesty or human dignity.

The Telegraph reports that at least one modern leader actually is on the record objecting to the new full body scanners.

The Pope made his comments during an audience with airport workers held at the Vatican.

Although the Pontiff did not mention the words body scanner it was clear what he meant as he told the 1,200 strong crowd: “Every action, it is above all essential to protect and value the human person in their integrity.

“Respecting these principles can seem particularly complex and difficult in the present context.

“The economic crisis has had problematic effects on the civil aviation sector, the international terrorist threat which, precisely, has in its line of fire airports and aircraft to realise its destructive schemes.

“Even in this situation, one must never forget that respecting the primacy of the human person and attention to his or her needs does not make the service less efficient nor penalise economic management.”

Victor Davis Hanson admires the liberal double-standards by which Sarah Palin is a bumptious uneducated rube and John Edwards is a poor boy who made good, the war in Iraq was formerly a catastrophe and a failure and is now an major Obama Administration achievement, and locking up illegal combatants at Guantanamo was a crime against humanity, but increasing use of predator droneas in the role of judge-jury-and-executioner is perfectly fine. And he thinks he can explain.

So what explains the treatment of an Edwards versus Palin, or a war as lost versus one as necessary and well conducted, or Guantanamo for confessed terrorists as gulag but execution for suspected terrorists as legitimate, or Obama as principled hyper-partisan suddenly principled bipartisan?

The Usual Suspects

1) Egalitarianism and equality trump all—whether freedom, individualism, or personal liberty. Usually a great deal of education, or capital tends to convince us that in a perfect world, people like us who have money or have wisdom, could make others like us, rather than allow them to continue to suffer in poverty and ignorance.

This drive transcends the desire to contribute to charity, or to befriend the poorer neighbor or relative, but is cosmic in nature, overarching, all powerful, all-wise, and so by needs remote, So note here—and this is critical—the anointed utopian usually lives in a world—a better world— not subject to his own strictures. (Have Sarah Palin support abortion, call for cap and trade, or talk about the need for socialized medicine, and we would see inspirational stories of her fishing in waders to feed her below-the-poverty-line noble brood, not that she makes lots of money speaking).

Tax avoidance, ample square footage, ample energy use, networking, insider influence, prep schools for one’s progeny? All these are no more common or rare among crusading egalitarians than among elfish elitist conservatives. That raises the question—is utopianism naïve, or is it a psychological mechanism that serves not just to alleviate guilt, but perhaps even to contextualize one’s own privilege? E.g., “my riches are really used to help others and only incidentally provide me with an ample lifestyle, that of course, allows me to be an even more effective advocate.” Angels need ample wings.

The anointed ends always justifies contradictory means.

2) Power. The administration of mercy and compassion requires a properly gifted technocracy, often one well paid and quite influential. If hundreds of millions are to receive entitlements, millions must disperse them, and thousands must administer the millions, and hundreds must oversee the thousands—and that usually means a lot of money and power accrue to a very few. You object that those good billets only pay $150-200,000. Well, maybe, in theory, but there are perks, all sorts of tenure, and inside contacts that come with them—and none of the grief of running the furniture store or putting on braces all day. Big government can house all sorts of needy philanthropists.

The progressive impulse is often tied to career advancement.

3) Words matter, deeds don’t. The talking heads, the lawyers, the professors, the actors, the politicians the journalists, like the background of the president and most of his cabinet, mostly all work with words. If they sound smart, presto, they must be. Take a brilliant tongue-tied engineer and he is an ignoramus compared to an idiotic smooth talker. Much of the apparent hypocrisy derives from the best and brightest being smart because they advance that impression so well. John Edwards and Barack Obama are cases in point; they exude ignorance so smoothly. And that, in this often zero-sum game, beats real intelligence and experience that are so often hidden.

Abstract utopianism is best advanced is theory by those who worry less about implementation.

4) The tragic view is, well, tragic and hard to endure and does not excite. The notion that humans don’t surprise us in their selfish appetites is nothing to become excited about. The Enlightenment notion that we are all good and prove ourselves so with education and capital is something to sing, even yell, slander, and slur for. In contrast, accepting the need for military preparedness and deterrence, or removing the incentives for humans to become idle, is not something to write enthusiastically about. What teen-ager wants to hear from his dour father that you can’t print money, and that he must pay back his maxed out credit card?

It is fun and nice to be therapeutic, unpleasant and mean to accept tragedy.

Add all this up, hypocrisy vanishes, and revolutionary pigs walk on two legs in the farmhouse—an Edwards is mellifluous, puts his energy on behalf of those in the “other nation”, and is devoted to promoting a society where we are all about as wealthy as John Edwards, who uses his wealth for proper contemplation and preparation for further good deeds, and thus needs a castle of compassion. Given that, who cares that he is a congenial liar, lives one way, lectures another, helped destroy the practice of obstetrics in his home state, and took a great deal of money for doing very little? The former considerations alone count, the later are mere right wing talking points.

Gerard Alexander, an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, identifies four liberal methods of denying the legitimacy of conservative political victories which are still consistently employed to avoid intellectual engagement.

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It’s an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation — as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a “Bolshevik plot” — and the country’s failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. “We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government — and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Read the whole thing.

Charles Krauthammer finds the liberals explaining to themselves that they are losing only because the American people are so dumb, and conservatives are so evil.

A year later, after stunning Democratic setbacks in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, Obama gave a stay-the-course State of the Union address (a) pledging not to walk away from health-care reform, (b) seeking to turn college education increasingly into a federal entitlement, and (c) asking again for cap-and-trade energy legislation. Plus, of course, another stimulus package, this time renamed a “jobs bill.”

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid, and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it [health care] more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda that the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them. …

Part Two of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement, and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

People used to think he was a Lightworker.

Fellow Yale conservative John Brewer writes to a private email list:

How many of you remember the wacky column from ’08 that said inter alia:

“Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment.”

Do I see some hands? It was pretty notorious at the time.

Well, in any event the very same columnist (Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle or at least its website) has now put out a column bitching and whining about totally unproductive ungrateful and unrealistic liberals who don’t understand how the world really works and ask annoying questions like “Why the hell can’t he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms?“

Bird Dog, over at Maggie’s Farm, asks a question which has often occurred to me.

At what point do American Liberals become Conservatives? I mean, at what point would government and government control and redistribution be sufficient to satisfy them so that they would cease seeking more, and just stop and try to freeze it in a Conservative fashion, as happened in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and China?

One of the things that converted me to Conservatism years ago was that none of my Liberal and Lefty friends could or would answer that question. I liked to ask them what arguments they could make against free food, socialized legal insurance and auto insurance, free nose jobs and boob jobs and IQ injections – and free PhDs in Social Justice and Peace Studies for all.

Of course, we know the answer.

There is no end point. Once there is Social Security, there must be Medicare and Prescription Drug Benefits for the aged. Then there must be National Health Care for everyone. And once they get that, there will be something else.

Bill Quigley, at Huffington Post, says US actions “magnified the harm” caused by the earthquake in Haiti.

How’d we do that?

Well, as a rebellion was advancing on Haiti’s capital in 2004, the United States evacuated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to safety. (He later accused the United States of kidnapping him.) Relations between Aristide, the US, Canada, and Europe had been frosty since he gained power for the second time in 2000 via flagrant election fraud. Mr. Quigley obviously takes the view that stealing elections makes the winner “democratically elected.” (Hey! It works in Chicago.)

And he proceeds to attribute responsibility to the US for Haiti’s current woes, because the failure of the International Community and the Bush Administration to deliver financial support to a hostile socialist kleptocracy is obviously to blame for a shrunken public sector in Haiti.

———————————————-

Danny Glover reaches even further: “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you know what I’m sayin’?”

2:20 video

Hat tip to Tim Blair.

No money for socialist regimes, no money for Gaia, you get earthquakes. Stands to reason, if you’re a leftist.

The Roosevelt Administration did not send Nazi saboteurs landed in Long Island during WWII over to Foley Square for civilian prosecution. It gave them a secret military trial and then executed 8 out of 10. The other two got lesser sentences (which were ultimately commuted after the war) in exchange for cooperation.

The Telegraph reports that once Farouk Abdulmutallab was lawyered up, we lost a potentially extremely useful intelligence source.

President Barack Obama is under fire over claims that the Christmas Day underwear bomber was “singing like a canary” until he was treated as an ordinary criminal and advised of his right to silence.

The chance to secure crucial information about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen was lost because the Obama administration decided to charge and prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an ordinary criminal, critics say. He is said to have reduced his co-operation with FBI interrogators on the advice of his government-appointed defence counsel.

The potential significance became chillingly clear this weekend when it was reported that shortly after his detention, he boasted that 20 more young Muslim men were being prepared for similar murderous missions in the Yemen.

And that’s why putting National Defense in the hands of ultra-liberal idealogues like Barack Obama and Eric Holder holds the potential for disaster.

The Supreme Court held in Ex Parte Quirin:

…the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.

Excitable Andrew Sullivan quotes an email he received from one of his readers, which I think represents a classic example of liberal analysis.

It is quite possible (in fact I think probable) that the people who planned this event, and used the young man from Nigeria as a tool, were aware that due to security measures in place, there was no way they could actually get a bomb through that would actually work. The detonation equipment needed would have been detected. The same applies, by the way, to the shoe bomber.

Again, think about it. If you wanted to blow up a plane, would you attempt it from your seat, where somebody could quite possibly stop you? No, you would go to the washroom where you could set off the bomb without disruption.

Of course, if it failed to go off, then people wouldn’t necessarily know what you were trying to do. Therefore you have to make sure it is one in the open, or the very failure is perceived as a terrorist attack. The fear result is the same whether or not the bomb goes off.

In addition to the torture lovers advocating a return to waterboarding, the administration sets up more stringent guidelines for air travel (most of which are unlikely to be effective at all) and other people call for the resignation of the head of DHS. In other words, the response is what al Qaeda and other terrorist groups want.

Al Qaeda has lost a lot of its prestige and influence in the Muslim world. They need something to get it back. How better than to do something that creates a reaction on the part of the US or Great Britain that shows just how bad we are and how we are so anti-Islam.

In ABC video of federal test, 50 gr. of PETN destroys airliner

For liberals, a well-formed argument is everything. Facts are fungible and analysis constitutes simply a matter of choosing the propositions necessary for one’s argument work. Analysis is a lot like Interior Decorating.

It becomes easy to deride Western counter-terrorist efforts, if one argues that Al Qaeda can’t really smuggle a bomb that would actually work onto a plane in someone’s shoes or underwear. The jihadis knew all along those bombing attempts would never work. They just intended to win tons of publicity, frighten Western officials into making air travel even more miserable, and panic us into picking on innocent Muslims.

Except as the government test shown in this 2:57 ABC video demonstrated Richard Reid’s 50 gr. PETN shoe bomb could have blown an airliner into pieces very nicely. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was carrying 80 grams.

Additionally, we know that the attempted bombing of Flight 253 was part of a suicide bombing campaign begin last August when a suicide bomber using the same kind of infernal device concealed in his underwear successfully did detonate a bomb which wounded, but failed to kill, Saudi Counterterrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

Clever reasoning. Unfortunately, yes, Andrew, these kinds of bombs can be successfully exploded. The failures of Richard Reid the shoe bomber and the Flight 253 underwear bomber were the result of good luck and happenstance.

As found in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) by Neoneocon commenter Jim Sullivan:

It’s OK to kill things as long as you use a bow and arrow and not a gun or missile.

Teh Interwebz au Naturale of the Allmother (or whatever the f*** the Giganto-smurfs called her) beats the technology of a species that has harvested the power of the atom, is capable of celestial travel, and has armored the unholy f*** out of everything. Also:

It’s a much better way to call up your bizarro world rhino and pterodactyl allies (the ones that previously wanted to eat you) than a Tarzan call or a Conch shell. But, you still have to send the Dire-pony express to the Four Corners of the world to rally the tribes.

Soldiers are bad unless they are A) not Caucasian or B) handi-capped. All other soldiers are A)psychopaths B) mindless myrmidons or C) nameless cannon fodder (or in this case arrow fodder)

Even shallow, selfish, homicidal savages are good because they’re…savages and therefore inherently and unquestionably noble.

The best way for primitive screw-heads to fight off a technologically superior, militarily sophisticated force is to fight the superior force on their terms. Asymmetric strategy, insurgent tactics and guerrilla warfare couldn’t possibly even the odds. Not in a million years.

All scientists are compassionate and resent the very soldiers prepared to die to protect them. This is completely reasonable and in no way intellectually dishonest. Hollywood decrees it!

Subjugating other species is wrong… unless you are able to have mind-blowing ponytail intercourse and biologically hack into their brain. Then it’s OK.

When you encounter a new mineral that floats and causes whole mountain ranges to float, the coolest, catchiest, most marketable name for it is Unobtainium. After you succeed in mining it, it semantically transforms,a la magma/lava, into HaHaHa!It’sAllMine-ite.

When the nobly savage Giganto-smurfs, the Emo-scientists and their Land-networked planetary defense menagerie evict the eeevil military-capitalist Gestapo from their idyllic floating mountain paradise back to their ecologically dead world, the nature frolickers all live happily ever after. There’s no chance in hell that those same military-capitalists will return with a full blown invasion fleet. Never happen. Hollywood decrees it!

Hat tip to Vanderleun via the Barrister.

Eric Holder and Barack Obama

A.J. Strata argues that it was not just random luck that nobody did anything to stop Major Hasan before the Fort Hood massacre and not just one of those things that Abdulmutallab was given a US visa and never promoted to the no-fly list, counter-terrorism effort has been slackened by the current administration and liberal pieties prioritized above saving American lives.

This new, liberal leaning administration took the high tempo of a heated war against a dangerous, evil enemy and turned into a cautious criminal investigation of ‘extremists’ who cause ‘man made disasters’. This change had consequences – intended and otherwise. War means ‘whatever it takes’, crime investigation is slow and cautious and shrouded in personal protections for the ‘accused’.

They also legally threatened those who were tirelessly defending this nation 24×7. Where people were once willing (and rewarded) to go the extra mile, make personal sacrifices, spend the extra time to ensure a lead was not the next 9-11, the new administration deflated that drive and made our defenders more concerned with their own security than national security. …

We have growing evidence Team Obama made changes in our national security posture which could easily have resulted in the Nigerian bomber getting through our defenses. First from a career State Department source:

This employee says that despite statements from the Obama Administration, such information was flagged and given higher priority during the Bush Administration, but that since the changeover “we are encouraged to not create the appearance that we are profiling or targeting Muslims.

And then there were these massive organizational changes to a system that was protecting us:

Obama fundamentally altered the culture and risk-taking incentives of the intelligence community with policy and personnel changes. The sense of urgency is gone, and he’s made it uncool to call the war on terror a war at all. If he wants to treat terrorism like a criminal act, rather than an act of war, we should not be surprised when the results look a lot like the bureaucratic foul-ups that happen all the time in law enforcement. He gutted the Homeland Security Council coordinating role, he diluted the focus of the daily intel brief, he made CIA officials worry more about being prosecuted for doing their jobs than capturing terrorists. … He’s made it his business to turn much of the national security apparatus set up by Bush and Cheney upside down and has succeeded …

…

Richard Clarke was a thorn in the side of President Bush for years after 9-11. He was in the Clinton Administration on the National Security Council. He is also quite accurate in his assessment of what happened inside the Obama Administration that led to these incidents (Ft Hood Massacre and Flight 253):

“It points to something fundamental,” said Richard A. Clarke, a former top counter-terrorism official in the Bush and Clinton administrations. “No matter how good your software is or how good your procedures are, at the end of the day it comes back to people. And if people think that this is a 9-5 job and they’re not filled with a sense of urgency every day, then you’ll get these kinds of mistakes.”

That is the distinction between fighting a war and the job of investigating crime. That is the difference between being rewarded for extra effort instead of scrutinized and threatened for it. Same tools, different attitude. Are we surprised in the different results?

Large Tub of Kool Aid, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978

Bryon York wonders aloud why Congressional democrats continue to pursue efforts to ram through a health care bill with aggregated poll numbers showing a 53-to-38% negative public approval. They must realize that they are going to pay a price at the polls in 2010, so why are they so bent upon political suicide?

I put the question to a Democratic strategist who asked to remain anonymous. Yes, Democrats certainly understand that voters don’t like the current bills, he told me, and they are fully aware they will probably pay a price next year. But they have found a way to view going ahead anyway as the logical thing to do, at least in their eyes.

You have to look at the issue from three different Democratic perspectives: the House of Representatives, the White House and the Senate.

“In the House, the view of [California Rep. Henry] Waxman and [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi is that we’ve waited two generations to get health care passed, and the 20 or 40 members of Congress who are going to lose their seats as a result are transitional players at best,” he said. “This is something the party has wanted since Franklin Roosevelt.” In this view, losses are just the price of doing something great and historic. (The strategist also noted that it’s easy for Waxman and Pelosi to say that, since they come from safely liberal districts.)

“At the White House, the picture is slightly different,” he continued. “Their view is, ‘We’re all in on this, totally committed, and we don’t have to run for re-election next year. There will never be a better time to do it than now.'”

“And in the Senate, they look at the most vulnerable Democrats — like [Christopher] Dodd and [Majority Leader Harry] Reid — and say those vulnerabilities will probably not change whether health care reform passes or fails. So in that view, if they pass reform, Democrats will lose the same number of seats they were going to lose before.”

All those scenarios have a certain logic (even if the Senate calculation undercounts the number of potentially vulnerable Democrats). But each scenario is premised on passing an unpopular bill that hurts the party. Even if there’s a strategic rationale for doing it, why are Democrats dead-set on hurting themselves?

“Because they think they know what’s best for the public,” the strategist said. “They think the facts are being distorted and the public’s being told a story that is not entirely true, and that they are in Congress to be leaders. And they are going to make the decision because Goddammit, it’s good for the public.”

Of course, going forward has turned out to be harder than many Democrats thought. And now, with various proposals lying wrecked along the road, the true believers are practicing what the strategist calls “principled damage control.”

But still, does it make sense? In the end, perhaps the most compelling explanation for Democratic behavior is that they are simply in too deep to do anything else. “Once you’ve gone this far, what is the cost of failure?” asks the strategist.

At that point — Republicans will love this — he compared congressional Democrats with robbers who have passed the point of no return in deciding to hold up a bank. Whatever they do, they’re guilty of something. “They’re in the bank, they’ve got their guns out. They can run outside with no money, or they can stick it out, go through the gunfight, and get away with the money.”

That’s it. Democrats are all in. They’re going through with it. Even if it kills them.