Right Wing Nation

Beth at Blue Star Chronicles makes some excellent points in this piece that questions why liberals are illogical. But the piece misdiagnoses — or understates — the problem when she gives examples (emphases and additional commentary mine):

I listened to a young woman tonight argue that the Battle Cry rally in San Francisco today was fascist. She hysterically claimed they were ‘brainwashing’, destroying gay rights, murderers, warmongers, etc., etc.

Video of the counter-demonstration showed a dozen or so people dressed up like cats or other such little outfits, holding signs asking, ‘Who would Jesus Bomb?’.

The poor girl in this ‘debate’ didn’t have anything to work with. Her only come back appeared to be on the line of, ‘Yeah, well, yo mama.’

She insisted that the Battle Cry group had no right to preach what they preach. I’m not that familiar with this group. But we do have free speech in this country - which is why SHE can say what SHE says. (that’s the part where the logic gets skewed somehow).

While she was ranting about how America doesn’t allow her to express herself as a lesbian - she is on national television expressing herself as a lesbian.

See what I mean? Illogical.

She said President Bush is a tyrant and doesn’t allow people to oppose him. She said he reigns over an oppressive regime that keeps women submissive and quiet. She says this while she’s opposing him on national television and as a woman was certainly not being submissive or quiet. [Two words: Condi Rice, a who is neither submissive nor quiet]

Illogical again.

. . .

They declare they are being denied liberties while exercising their liberties to the fullest extent [and on television in front of millions of viewers].

Logic is not the problem. Hysteria — and the privilege of having grown up in a free nation without having seen much, if any, evil — is the problem. It’s not that liberals are illogical. Liberals are completely disconnected from reality. They have their own little fantasy world in which the United States and white, Christian, conservative, heterosexual men of European extraction are the root of all evil, a fantasy world in which George Bush is at least as bad as Hitler, and the more poisonously one hates the United States and every principle upon which it was founded, the more “patriotic” one is.

Never mind that there are no white, Christian, conservative, heterosexual men of European extraction kidnapping and beheading hostages. Never mind that there are no concentration camps and Bush is not having rooms full of “oppressed” people gassed. Never mind that one cannot love one’s country and despise it simultaneously.

Have you ever sat in a room full of liberals? One will say something about Bush being a dictator, and somebody else will pop up and say that any day now, the police are going to start rounding up protesters and throwing liberals in camps. And somebody else will say that they already are, but the media is covering it up. And they quickly descend from merely paranoid to certifiably insane. The same liberal that says that Bush is destroying free speech one minute will turn around and insist that “hate speech” doesn’t count and should be outlawed the next.

It’s a fantasy world, and there’s no breaking through. Liberals only associate with other liberals, and when they spend time together, they feed each other’s insanity. Liberals have to find their own way to sanity. Liberals have to suddenly look around and realize that hey, there they are burning flags on television and demanding that Bush be beheaded, so they obviously don’t live in a police state. Liberals have to figure out that free speech only works if those they hate also have the same right.

But don’t hold your breath. Most won’t open their eyes anytime soon.