He couldn’t make Harriet a Supreme Court justice, but at least he could make Karen his ambassador to Islam

Mark E. writes:

Parade Magazine had an interview with Karen Hughes in its January 28 issue. Note where Hughes affirms that “Islam is part of America.” Since when, Mrs. Hughes?

And see her damning admission of the futility of our efforts to make the Arab-Muslim desert bloom into Western civil society: ‘Hughes acknowledges that today the U.S. is fighting just to be heard: “In the Cold War, we were trying to get information into largely closed societies where people were hungry for information. Today, no one is waiting to hear from us. With satellite TV, there are about 250 different channels available in the Arab world. We’re competing for attention and credibility.”’

To read the online reader comments by left-wingers is even more depressing. These are people who say, “America is bad for being in the Middle East at all;” but then if you said to them by way of agreement, “Yes, America and the West should totally separate ourselves from the Arab-Muslim world,” they would slam on the brakes and call you a racist. Have so many people ever before in history had such a mass will to self-extinction, held as a moral virtue? Have so many people ever held so many wholly contradictory ideas, and so passionately, at one time?

LA replies:

I’m not sure that it’s contradictory. Liberals don’t want America asserting itself or making itself right, as has happened under President Bush. Therefore they don’t want us to intrude ourselves in the Muslim world. But they don’t support separation from the Muslim world either, because that would imply that there is something objectionable about Islam from which we have the right to protect ourselves. Instead, it is America’s duty to serve Islam self-sacrificially. We should turn ourselves into nothing, while sending them welfare, allowing them to immigrate here, not judging them, and so on.

The consistent set of ideas entertained by liberals about America is as follows: that America is guilty; that whatever advantages it may possess, it possesses unfairly and has an obligation to give to others; that what is most objectionable about America is its power; and that the criterion of the goodness of any political act is that it reduces American power.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 30, 2007 05:45 PM | Send