North Star Writers Group

It seems these days that the liberal left is getting further detached from reality, purporting to create policy for a nation that simply doesn't exist anywhere but in their minds. What's more, any attempt to reason with them, to shine a little light of truth on things, results in ever stronger denial. This unwillingness to consider alternatives and to explain away the inconvenient, stubborn facts with ever more fanciful stories is, as much as I don't enjoy employing the term, downright cult-like behavior.

Liberals are sure that if we pull out of Iraq, everything will be just fine. Now, a great many things may happen as a result of an American withdrawal from Iraq. I, for one, would not bet on peace and a newfound respect for America amongst radical Muslims being two of them. What will happen is that some entity will step into the power vacuum we leave behind. The only questions are whom, and after how much chaos and carnage. Whether it's Shia, Sunni, Al Qaeda or Iran, none of those alternatives are a good outcome for either the Iraqis who are glad to be rid of the monstrous Saddam Hussein or the American soldiers who gave their lives to make it happen. And it is unconscionable for those who sanctimoniously pat themselves on the back for being so "caring" and "compassionate" to needlessly inflict this outcome upon so many innocents.

But don't try to tell liberals that. Just as they disavow responsibility for the slaughter of over 3 million and the pathetic spectacle of "boat people" that followed American withdrawal from Vietnam and Cambodia – interesting that, as awful as Vietnam was for so many years, only after we left did it get so bad that people took to turning their homes into boats in order to flee – so too will they make like so many Pontius Pilates and wash their bloodstained hands of this one. They'll insist that President Bush is entirely to blame, even though withdrawal and the horrific consequences thereof would be entirely their doing. They’ll insist Saddam was just fine to keep around, even though he was about to have the U.N. sanctions lifted and certainly would have matched Iran's nuclear capability if he could have, and that withdrawal will bring peace and American popularity since going into Iraq is what made radical Muslims hate us, even though they've been taking us hostage and blowing us up since 1979.

How else can one describe a group so thoroughly disconnected from reality that they react to the possibility of being wrong the way Dracula does sunlight?

Liberals are certain that global warming is man-caused, an imminent threat, and that government can fix it. Please explain the Earth once being tropical enough to support dinosaurs. Or, for that matter, cold enough for woolly mammoths 100,000 years ago. The plain truth is that the Earth's warming and cooling is a natural cycle upon which man has very little effect, if any at all. As such, it is not an imminent threat, at least not any more or less than at any other time in history. What is an imminent threat is the damage that would be done, possibly to nature and most definitely to your freedom, by letting arrogant politicians try to "fix" what has never been broken.

Even if, by some fluke, the global warming fanatics are correct with their diagnosis, their prescribed treatment is likely to be worse than the disease. The sheer egomania it takes to think one is able to, can and should control the weather and climate is virtually incomprehensible. At a minimum, the arrogance with which they approach the issue is unlikely to portend a successful outcome. Like the curators of "Jurassic Park," they're so excited in the belief that they can, they don't even want to consider whether they should. And just as their hubris turned people into dinosaur food, so too will an attempt to "fix" a non-existent "problem" turn out equally ugly.

But don't waste your time trying to use this common sense on the global warming true believers. If you dare to point out things like the California citrus crop freezing or Tucson getting snow, they'll just claim that cooling is another symptom of warming. (No matter what the weather is, they're right.)

Perhaps you're thinking that "cult" is too strong a word. But I'm hard-pressed to come up with another that's more applicable. How else to more accurately describe those who have no interest in plainly obvious facts when they tend to disprove their established beliefs, and who lack the simple humility to even consider the question, "What if I'm wrong"? And whose answer to everything, including the examples above, is always to gather ever more power unto themselves? If liberalism has not become a cult, then what meaning does the word have left?

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This is Column # DKK46. Request permission to publish here.