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Wow, does Ponnuru not get it
Post Mortem [Ramesh Ponnuru]How ridiculous. That’s like giving liberals credit for their “good intentions” when they nationalize a country’s industries, or when they institute destructive busing schemes to achieve racial diversity, or when they rewrite the Constitution for the sake of equality, or when they coddle criminals, or when they seek to double or triple the numbers of obviously unassimilable immigrants whom we are admitting into this country … Uh, whoops, that is what Ponnuru just praised Bush for trying to do, isn’t it? If “humane and generous instincts” are always to be praised, then every ruinous thing that liberalism has ever done or attempted to do ought to be praised. Which of course is the liberal attitude par excellence. Liberals never mind making ruinous mistakes, because their concern is not to secure the objective good of society, but to demonstrate their own moral goodness. They never have to learn lessons from their hideous errors, because from the liberals’ own point of view they never make any real errors. Since the real purpose of their actions is to demonstrate their good intentions, their actions by definition are ALWAYS successful.
By failing to understand this, Ponnuru shows the extent to which he himself lives within a framework of unquestioned liberal premises. Such is the conservatism of today’s National Review Email entry |