Sunday, February 12, 2006
Resolving the Crisis
In their appearance this week on Lehrer, Shields and Brooks discussed resolving the crisis of Muslim mobs killing, burning and rioting. This is what Mark Shields said:
There is two things: First of all, this is not the first time infidel has been used in the Middle East. I mean, you recall the crusades were about the infidels and those weren't organized by Muslims…
And secondly, I'd say that there is in the part, legitimate grievance about double standards. I mean, we oppose any nuclear ambitions for any Muslim state. And yet we never mentioned fact that Israel has nuclear capacity and that is just totally ignored. And I think that remains a sticking point and a very sore point that sends a double standard that is applied to them by no way condoning, justifying, excuse the violence…
So, for Shields and many like him, the crusades and Israel are a “legitimate grievance about double standards”. Using the logic and language of thugs, Shields thinks he is expressing “understanding”. Shields ignores the true “double standards” : Hypervigilant, hypersensitive Islamists behead innocents and remain silent about the slaughter of other Muslims; the failed societies that have bred these riots cynically deflect, once again, from their own illegitimacy — then claim moral outrage about cartoons. Apparently Shields shares this depraved hypocrisy.
Shields' moral equivalence has diminished much Progressive thinking — cluelessly enabling the brown shirts of the world. The Paleo-Right, greedy and anti-Semitic (Pat Buchanan its poster boy) finally self-corrected into what are called neocons, but really are Hamiltonian conservatives; the Paleo-Left, which Shields exemplifies, without a cogent message, cackling and sanctimonious, has yet to emerge with a coherent equivalent to the neocons; there are centrists like Lieberman, but they are marginalized by the Left; maybe Obama can find some colleagues and create a coalition of the honorable Left to give a true alternative to the neocons. The sooner the Democratic party rejects dinosaurs like Shields the better off it will be.