More Lunacy on the Left

 

WashingtonTimes.com

Dedicated party-line liberals — “progressives,” they call themselves now that they realize they polluted the noble word “liberal” — look at the world differently than most people. They recognize the sins of their own country and see them as just as bad as the sins of other countries, however vile, and probably worse. It’s this skewed vision that enables professors and their students to go from a gay rights rally exorcising the “homophobia” of Christians to a rally praising Muslim jihadis for whom homosexuality is a capital offense. For them, there’s only a little difference, if any, in the values of the West and those of the patriots of the Islamic State. A crucifix or a beheading knife: What’s the difference?

It was this way of looking at the world that became the Cold War doctrine of “moral equivalence” between the West and the communist world. When Soviet spokesmen criticized U.S. society, culture or conduct at home and abroad, such liberals nodded in amiable agreement — they knew “we” weren’t any better than the denizens of the Evil Empire and were in many ways worse.

The communists exploited this naive foolishness, and tyrants continue to do so today. President Obama, who lived happily among those nodding liberal agreement with every attack on his country in the 1970s, has become an enabler of such foolishness since becoming president. Everything from his postinaugural “apology tour” of the Middle East to his remarks expressing sympathy with the motives if not the work of the mob in Ferguson encourages others to suggest that if America is not quite the Great Satan, it’s surely the Great Sinner.

In the wake of the Ferguson riots, the government commentators in Moscow and Beijing use the president’s remarks and observations to accuse the United States of hypocrisy for calling out Russia and China for their manifest abuses of their own people. The Chinese tell the United States to clean up its own house before it “interferes,” if only with criticism, into the internal affairs of the Middle Kingdom.

The idea that the events that set the mob to burning the town in Missouri is equivalent to China’s abuse of Tibetans or Uighurs within its borders is hardly short of insane, but the Los Angeles Times reports that a learned professor at the China University of Political Science and Law tweeted to someone in the West: “Isn’t it your country who likes to interfere with the domestic affairs of other countries?” The correct tweet in reply would have been a simple “no.” The Chinese professor may be auditioning for a tenured position at Harvard.

An official of the government of North Korea describes the United States as “a graveyard of human rights.” This condemnation comes from a dictatorship that has more than 100,000 of its own in concentration camps and 100,000 more in unmarked graves for the “crime” of trying to survive in a place where dogs must sneak into South Korea merely to bark and tree-bark soup with switchgrass salad is a staple of Pyongyang’s haute cuisine.

Only a distinguished divine like the Rev. Al Sharpton could appreciate such lunacy, but Americans have the right to expect greater intellectual prowess of their president. He should think twice before he practices punditry.