The left browbeat and crushed the stodgy old men who preceded them; the left got tenure; the left took over schools; and in 2008, the left took over the government. With the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Obama’s decision to place females in combat, they can’t even claim to be unfairly treated by the military. They run the IRS, they run police unions, they control all the universities, and they own the soul of a United States president who is itching to bomb Syria for some reason.
Of course, people on the left, including a number of my colleagues, are going to protest like damsels shocked — shocked! shocked! — that someone they supported would be willing to lie and kill people in Syria for no good reason. But their protestations are all the more offensive because they come so late and sound so pathetically clueless.
Conservatives have been sounding the alarms about Barack Obama since 2007, especially when news broke about Jeremiah Wright. We noticed that Obama’s viewpoints were inconsistent, his stories changed, and he had a cold, calculating attitude that couldn’t be trusted. Even the one controversy that leftists always flagged as evidence of conservative quackery — the birth certificate row — didn’t reflect well on Barack Obama. He had circulated a brochure from his literary agent indicating that he was born in Kenya. Even if the birthers were quacks, what does that say about him?
The academy is a microcosm of the larger left that has glutted itself on self-serving strategy. (Brent Bozell wrote an engrossing column about the weakness of the antiwar left in the face of Barack Obama’s warmongering over Syria.) Yes, I am bitter about having been perennially dismissed by a left in directionless decadence — comfortable, rude, snobbish, tenured, and totally incapable of taking responsibility for the monsters it has unleashed.
But I am also mournful. Had I been born twenty years later, and wandered back to college after similar scandals, to find this left waiting for me, I wonder how my life would have been different. There are debates we conservatives will never have, because the once-great left stopped talking to us and then infected itself with some fatal intellectual palsy and simply choked on its own undigested vomit. How sad.