Never inner naughtiness.

Dennis Prager has written an especially insightful piece on the divide between the left and the [dastardly, devilish, radical] right. The Colonel suspects he's been a bit dense in the past, immersed as he was in the swill of recriminations from the left. The stuff just washed over us in the last 45 years and when some new depredation of the underclass or the crybaby Palestinians occurred, the gushers opened up with the usual nonsense.

We think Mr. Prager's taken George Orwell's thought to heart: "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious":

If you wish to test the thesis that the Left blames those blown up for being blown up by Muslim terrorists, have your son or daughter at college ask some liberal arts professors who is to blame for 9-11 or Muslim suicide bombers in Israel, etc.

In fact, one way to describe the moral divide between conservatives and liberals is whom they blame for acts of evil committed against innocent people, especially when committed by non-whites and non-Westerners. Conservatives blame the perpetrators, and liberals blame either the victims' group or the circumstances.

Mr. Prager poses three theories for why the liberals get it wrong about moral responsibility:

• Secular humanism sees men as basically good, therefore evil must come from some outside circumstance. [E.g., handguns, assault rifles.]


• Liberals view political reality as occurring along the strong-weak spectrum. The stronger the dominant group is the more excusable the actions and reactions of the weak. (We infer the additional point that the more power the dominant group has, the more reprehensible and suspect it is, and the more worthwhile and inherently virtuous the weaker group is.)


• Liberals are afraid of the truly evil.

We don't think the last point is accurate. Liberals are hardly the only ones who are afraid of the truly evil. The Colonel has known many conservative woman who refuse to go out with him.

"Why the Left doesn't blame Muslims for Muslim violence." By Dennis Prager, Townhall.com, 2/28/06 <--- "Excusing evil ." Bookworm, 2/28/06.