Leftist cognitive virulence.

Gagdad Bob tackles one of the Great Mysteries.

In the 20th century, the world stood knee deep in a lake of blood filled by every manner of leftist policy and inherent excess -- revenge; torture; exploitation; starvation; the elevation of psychopaths (Che), drunks, and peasants; subversion (Armand Hammer); assassination; execution; organ harvesting; concentration camps; aggressive war; arbitrary justice; subservient courts; sponsorship of terrorism; diplomatic support for cretins and monsters; and pursuit of ideas of human nature and economics that would have been laughable if they hadn’t been pathetic and murderous.

But this was, from the beginning, invisible to leftists. They were convinced that the highest human good was (a) to support any unanchored freaks who could fit the words “brotherhood,” “justice,” or “capitalist pig” into every second sentence and (b) to pull down any structure erected by our ancestors to encourage the triumph of reason, to transmit knowledge, to encourage free inquiry, to restrain arbitrary government, and to liberate women and the poor from bonds legal, customary, and economic.

With the grisly record of leftism and liberalism there for all the world to see, what did, say, American liberals do? Did they attempt to atone for all the ways in which they had facilitated the tyrants of this world and their horrors? Did they join in in attempts to teach the lessons of total state power and the danger of even slow accretions to state power? Hell, no.

What really goaded the left was the long-dead history of slavery here and the host of minor failings of a country that was, in fact, the envy of the world for its wealth, it opportunity, its fairness, and its orderliness. Outrage over this but a projection of leftists' own sense of failure and inadequacy, and a guarantee of a stunning inability to assess proportionality.

The Constitution spoke of blacks as 3/5 of white people? What an absolute pustule of a country!!! What? Only 2,678,435,402 incremental reforms and ameliorations of the lives of Americans? Well, here’s one still begging to be addressed by the corrupt, racist patriarchy . . . excessive library fines! There! It's out in the open.

Something very sick infested the bosom of the left that required an unbalanced, intellectually fraudulent view of the United States. To defend the lies at the heart of leftism, leftists had to become masters of the lie, the evasion, the obfuscation, and the personal attack.

However, to compare us to the Taliban, or to Jim Jones' leftist Peoples Temple, again reveals one of the ubiquitous features of the left -- that is, since they are so naive about the nature of evil, they elevate the patently non-evil to the status of evil. Imagine if leftists were as angry with the real Taliban, or with real torture! That's what's so ironic: they make excuses for the actual Taliban (or terrorists and other monsters in general) and then refer to us as "Taliban," as if that's a bad thing in their world. Why don't they really honor me, and call me a Palestinian, or [Castro] lover?

The cognitive dissonance with the left is always cranked up to 11. Just a couple of weeks ago, they were blaming conservatism for the murder of three officers in Pittsburgh, on the same day they were lamenting the cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal's loss before the Supreme Court. Every leftist knows him on a first name basis, but how many know the names of Daniel Faulkner and the widow he left behind?

We shouldn't call it "cognitive dissonance." We should call it "betrayal of what is best in man."

"Guilty With An Explanation: Defending My Indefensible Blog." By Gagdad Bob, One Cosmos, 4/20/09.