ADULT OPPOSITION:

The End of Childishness (Bruce Thornton, December 30, 2008, FrontPageMagazine.com)

The last eight years have seen the political left, from the loony moveon.org fringe to Democrat Congressional leaders, engage in destructive juvenile invective and surreal fantasy rather than in the sort of useful political criticism the Founders had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment. In the next four years, conservatives will have an opportunity to show the country how adults do dissent: offering criticism based on philosophical coherence, an awareness of the lessons of history, and a respect for the world as it is rather than the world of our fantasies.

The attacks on President Bush and his policies were striking in their childish ignorance. The slogan “No blood for oil,” for example, was remarkable in its disconnect from the real-world functioning of oil markets and the mechanism of supply and demand. And even if the left had been right about oil being the prime mover of the war in Iraq, such an idea collapses before the scrutiny of mere common sense. For if insuring a supply of cheap gas for greedy Americans and their SUV’s had been the President’s aim, then cutting a deal with Hussein that relaxed the sanctions in exchange for access to oil––what France and Russia were trying to do––would have been fiscally and politically cheaper than going to war.

Indeed, sheer ignorance, as much as willful distortion of fact, typically laced the assaults on the President.

This is where the phenomenon that all humor is conservative really shows itself. Where the Left was raging at W at this point in 2001, the Right is laughing at Barack Obama. His opposition to Life is obviously a deadly serious matter, but the rest is rather amusing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 3, 2009 9:35 AM