| | | ....... “Alan Dershowitz, who has made much of his friendship and fireside chats with former Harvard Law School colleague U.S. President Barack Obama, said he now doubts his friend’s promise to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.”
Any damn fool could have said the same. What is truly amazing is why it took a smart man likeDershowitz so long to figure it out. He is a textbook example of the sort of person I described visiting a hypothetical Dinosaur Island whose preconception of the T-rex’s gentle nature trumps his common sense. He stands on the beach watching destruction approach and can’t quite accept the monster is going to eat him even when its mouth is agape. The T-rex was gentle because … look it says so right here in the book.
Speaking on the sidelines of Israel’s Globes 2013 Israel Business Conference, Dershowitz said, ”Obama promised me in a personal conversation that Iran would not develop a nuclear weapon on his watch, and I believed him. Nonetheless, I am not sure that he can keep this. Therefore, Israel cannot outsource its security.”
And so the train thunders down the track. Conservatives by themselves can’t put the brakes on a runaway. To accomplish this they need a coalition with elements of the left; to make common cause among intelligent liberals.
But it won’t happen yet — won’t happen for a long time — despite the evidence of their senses, because they have an almost religious attachment to the Cause. The Left is a religion. It looks away from the obvious sins of its leaders the way earlier generations of churchgoers sometimes averted their gaze from the misdeeds of their own. The Left will abandon the Left around the time the Wahabis abandon Wahabism.
It is so central to them that life without it would be meaningless. Leaving the Left is like being a man without a country. It is easier to change your passport than to change your friends. As one person put, “If I had to choose between my country and my friends, I hope to have the courage to choose my friends”. The reason people on the Left can’t rebel isn’t because they cannot bring themselves to doubt Obama. It’s because they can’t bring themselves to stop going to cocktail parties.
That doesn’t mean the Left can’t change. It only signifies that the shift, when it comes, will be no ordinary change of mind. It will be more akin to a Pauline conversion than a matter of fact acknowledgment of a mistake. To non-ideologues being proved wrong is nothing important. You just admit to error and correct yourself. By contrast, because ideology defines the self-importance of ideologues, to confess you’ve been took is a humiliation beyond description.
The only thing likely to precipitate such a change is either some blasphemy by Obama against their creed or an existential danger so great that even family friends will break ranks. Any oppression of the hated right or hostile creeds by the Lightworker won’t anger anyone on the left much. Only when the precipice yawns before the train will people start to jump.
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http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/06/09/a-sudden-realization/ |
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