You reject me? No, I reject YOU!

In the face of libraries of contradictory, first-hand evidence, some highly placed liberals stubbornly consider America to be more evil than Soviet Russia and Communist China. This pathological Weltanschaung resembles a faith-based religion, and as such is resistant to logic. Most inexplicable and disturbing.

Disturbing Faith." David Govett, commenting on "Born in the USSR." By Julia Gorin, Wall Street Journal, 10/10/05 (emphasis added).

Clearly, Mr. Govett gets it. Not that the Colonel can't improve on any damn thing they is . . . .

We've noted TripleNeckSteel's observation that strident opposition to one's own society can be a manifestation of an irrational sense of entitlement (paraphrase). To which we add the phenomena of opposition based on

• society's failing to recognize plain and simple inherited genius;
• having an overly developed sense of compassion that fixates on unrepresentative instances; and
• just being really stupid.

TipleNeckSteel puts his finger on the irrational sense of one's inherent worth as a human being, which goodness the world should reward with periodic gifts of cash and trips to Disney Land. Failure to provide said reward is prima facie evidence of the depravity of the society.

Our first point is that some people think that because they can pronounce "Renoir" (reh-NOYER) and know Percy Shelley's middle name they should rule the world as Certifiable Wise Men. If no one listens to such people, everybody else must be either corrupt, stupid or evil.

Our second comes from the Colonel's friendship with a nice liberal woman who seemed to see any one of life's unfortunates (or dropouts) as none other than herself. She seemed not to be able to objectify what she saw and upon making eyeball contact with an unfortunate/dropout she became that person -- Human Pain and Folly R Us.

Because of the powerful emotional underpinning for this view, even an intelligent person simply cannot hear or see anything that lessens the powerful experience of identity with any suffering human being encountered. Failure to send that suffering man to Harvard is ipso facto societal failure at a fundamental level. (And here we thought we were doing him a favor!)

The last category is what explains what Mr. Govett was writing about. You can show some people a mound of evidence higher than the Seattle Space Needle and the response will be either "Huh?" or "Yes, but . . . ."

So now we have the following four factions of liberalism:

1. Gimme it, I so fine;
2. Listen, O Low-SAT Swamp Dwellers;
3. Lo, it is I asleep on yon steam grate; and
4. What Khmer Rouge?

You can see, as the man said, liberalism is a disease.

Update: Jack Wheeler believes liberals are strongly motivated to avoid envy (which, btw, drives communism, fascism, and jihadism), and so liberalism is not a political ideology but "the politicalization of envy-appeasement." And, "the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement." In the final step, self-humiliation or self-loathing is shifted to the group to which one belongs. Thus, liberals do not want their own culture, race, or nation to prosper or prevail. They want these to wither, be subjugated, or die.

This a bit convoluted but maybe there's something to it. Frost was on the same wavelength when he observed a liberal is a man who won't take his own side in a fight. Heck the man's got a "Dr." in front of his name and that's good enough for me. So he get credit for number five on our list:

1. Gimme it, I so fine;
2. Listen, O Low-SAT Swamp Dwellers;
3. Lo, it is I asleep on yon steam grate;
4. What Khmer Rouge? and
5. I ain't nothin' special, you de man.