The leftist Prime Directive.

Nothing has been more integral to leftists’ intellectual work than their extraordinary effort to cover up the true nature of totalitarianism. These efforts occur because of a willful desire to conceal, a willful blindness to the truth, an insufficient intellectual ability, or mental illness.

Consider a New York Times reporter at the inception of one of the most monstrous regimes in human history and also what every anti-war activist scumbag in the United States refused even to contemplate as the inevitable outcome of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam -- and the Congressional betrayal of the anticommunist cause:

Sydny Schanberg of the New York Times completely failed to apprehend the nature of the Khmer Rouge and his leftist compatriots baying for American withdrawal from Vietnam

In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that "it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." Mr. Schanberg added that "it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over."

A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.

All in all, America's withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos's Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.

I contemplate the history of the 20th century merely up to 1945 and conclude that no sane, decent person can do otherwise than entertain complete skepticism when claims are made for the benign nature of government power. The burden of proof is massively on any advocate of greater government power to show that the benefit to be achieved is worth the danger to life and liberty involved.

But the left is indifferent to the warnings derived from the last century. What matters to the leftist is whether or not some marginal Good Thing will result from the proposed increase in government control. In short, what matters to the left is expediency.

No doubt the left was amazed by what happened in Cambodia. “How could this be?!”

But here is the definition of a liberal -- A liberal is someone who is always surprised when he finds chewing gum under the seat.

"Surely man is different from this stark evidence before me of indifference and contempt! No. I will only believe what my eyes tell me here if my investigations unearth 10,000 instances of this behavior."

See the AP photograph in Mr. Stephens’s article. Even what you see there isn’t enough to open leftists eyes.

It never is.

No.

What the left proposes never has a downside. Leftist pipe dreams are safe at any speed.

"From WikiLeaks to the Killing Fields. Liberals contemplate withdrawal from Afghanistan, heedless of the consequences." By Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 7/27/10 (edits by Mr. Stephens).