Estrich and the total unhinging of the liberal mind

The more consistently liberal liberals become, the more they lose touch with any principle of truth outside their liberalism, and so the more incapable they become of speaking with any rational consistency or honesty. In each situation, they say whatever they feel will advance and protect their liberalism (or their own power and well-being, which for them is the same as their liberalism), even if it grossly contradicts what they were saying just a short while before. Because they have no intellectual frame of reference external to their liberalism, they are often not even aware that they are doing this.

While Kerry’s endless reversals of his own previous positions are by now legendary, James Taranto at Best of the Web has uncovered an even more extreme example of this liberal irrationalism. In a September 1 column, Susan Estrich, in response to the Swift Boat vets’ attack on Kerry, urged the Kerry campaign to engage in an all-out war of personal destruction against the Republicans, including, for example, attacking Bush and Cheney as drunks and Bush as a draft dodger:

You have to fight fire with fire, mud with mud, dirt with dirt. … I’m not promising pretty…. After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history…. [H]ow about Dead Texans for Truth, highlighting those who served in Vietnam instead of the privileged draft-dodging president, and ended up as names on the wall instead of members of the Air National Guard…. Or maybe it will be Texas National Guardsmen for Truth, who can explain exactly what George W. Bush was doing while John Kerry was putting his life on the line…. Perhaps with money on the table, or investigators on their trail, we will learn just what kind of wild and crazy things the president was doing while Kerry was saving a man’s life, facing enemy fire and serving his country…. The arrogant little Republican boys who have been strutting around New York this week, claiming that they have this one won, would do well to take a step back. It could be a long and ugly road to November.

But in Estrich’s September 17 column, she indignantly scolds the Kerry campaign for doing the very thing she was telling them to do just two weeks before:

Am I the only Democrat who doesn’t quite get this National Guard business? Why are we wasting our time? … [F]or the life of me, I can’t figure out what the National Guard and the privileged son has to do with it, or how it helps John Kerry out of his Swift Boat swamp….

It’s different for Bush than it is for Kerry. Bush wasn’t running for re-election on the strength of his record in the National Guard. Did anyone ever think he was anything other than the privileged son of a rich Texan who did what he could to fly planes here and not risk his life in Vietnam? Did he ever deny it? Not that I heard.

So how much does it matter if he did or didn’t show up in Boston or Alabama, if there was or wasn’t sugarcoating, or pressure, or missed flight checks? What do you get if you win? Does it really raise questions about Bush’s competence to lead in the future, or only about CBS’ competence to report?…

Bill Clinton is right, as he usually is about politics. Enough about Vietnam. … The war is the measure of toughness. Not the war 30 years ago. This one. [Emphasis added.]

Why the 180 degree switch? There can only be one reason. On September 1, Estrich thought the campaign of personal destruction would work. By September 17, she saw it was a monumental disaster. But instead of admitting that she herself had been egging on the Dems to precisely the catastrophic course she now condemns, she comes on stage as the mature, thoughtful critic who is shocked, shocked, at the Kerry campaign’s self-destructive obsession with Bush’s 32-year-old military record.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 21, 2004 05:41 PM | Send