"Useful Idiots" by Mona Charen

Excerpts from this excellent book. Print out and read at your leisure. There will be a test. I read the book and transcribed these myself. Buy it.

Useful Idiots How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First by Mona Charen Regnery Publishing, Inc. Washington, D.C. 2001

Page 8: Robert Heilbroner, a liberal academic…lamented that "the collapse of the Soviet system, hailed as a victory for human freedom, was also a defeat for human aspirations."

Ibid: New York Times columnist Tom Wicker: …"that communism failed does not make the Western alternative perfect, or even satisfying for millions who live under it."

P 9: Vaclav Havel to Congress in 1990: "The communist type of totalitarian system… a legacy of countless dead, an infinite spectrum of human suffering, profound economic decline, and above all enormous human humiliation. It has brought us (Czechs and Slovaks) horrors that fortunately you have not known."

P 10: And liberals were, almost without exception, inclined to excuse, justify, or ignore the grave sins of our adversaries while always calling down the harshest possible judgement on America.

P 14: Liberals thought they had convinced everyone who mattered that anticommunism was the thing to be feared, not Communism itself. And then along came Reagan suggesting that the Cold War was really a matter of good versus evil.

P 15: Journalist and Lenin admirer Lincoln Stefens famously pronounced in 1921, "I have seen the future and it works."

P 16: (Walter Duranty lied about the Russian terror-famine of the 30's.)

Ibid: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's naïve 1938 pronouncement after meeting Hitler that he had achieved "peace in our time" was viewed, in light of the terrible war that followed, as the most foolish and indeed cowardly act of diplomacy imaginable.

P 20: The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote…that the United States was a police state comparable to Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia.

P 22: Writing in 1996, liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman remarked: "…point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him."

…The fact that "McCarthyism" is invoked so authoritatively is testimony only to the mythmaking power of the Left.

P 29: Starting in about 1965…everything about American society – from its "materialism" to its supposed "militarism" – was decried and despised. …While leftist opinion had certainly held the United States in low regard for most of the century, in the mid-1960s, leftist anti-Americanism went mainstream. They condemned America for its poverty and at the same time for its consumerism. They demanded (and got) sexual license and grade inflation. They despise what they perceived as the drudgery of the bourgeois life.

P 30: The New Left was aware of Communism's failures, its treachery, its tortures, and its murders. Their sympathy for Communism (they usually substituted the word "socialism") was an outgrowth of hatred for the United States.

P33: (We had to destroy the village to save it" by Peter Arnett of CNN was a lie. The Village of Ben Tre was destroyed by Viet Cong mortar and artillery fire.)

P34: (American reporters wrote that Americans "accidentally napalmed" a village. In fact, it had been torched by the NVA.)

P35: (A south Vietnamese commander demanded an American air strike on a hamlet occupied by NVA. The village chief also insisted, knowing that Americans would rebuild their homes. An American reporter commented that Americans had destroyed a pro-American village, speculating, "Who knows how many civilians were killed or wounded by American soldiers today?" In fact, none were.)

P 37: ...the philosopher Bertrand Russell accused the U.S. of "barbarous crimes committed daily" . . . (My Lai was one. Can you name another? With all the journalists reporting on Vietnam, atrocities could scarcely have been kept secret, said Norman Podhoretz.)

P 39: Senator George McGovern, former bomber pilot from WWII: North Vietnam was "the most murderous aerial bombardment in the history of the world."

P 40: Ramsay Clark, in North Vietnam: "You can see no internal conflict in this country. I've seen none. You feel a unity in spirit."

P 46: In obedience to the wishes of her North Vietnamese hosts, Fonda heaped scorn on the notion that American POWs were being mistreated.

P 47: Harrison Salisbury, a New York Times columnist, traveled to North Vietnam in late 1966 and early 1967 and reported that the U.S. was deliberately targeting the civilian population.

Ibid: Noam Chomsky: "By any objective standard, the United States has become the most aggressive power in the world, the greatest threat to peace, to national self-determination, and to international cooperation."

P 48: The Democrats in Congress wanted the North Vietnamese to win. And they soon got their way.

P 49: Estimates of the numbers of people packed off to (reeducation) camps range between 200,000 and 1,000,000. Reliable reports put the number of executions at 65,000. ...daily diet of 7 ounces of rice mixed with small stones . . . overcrowding was extreme . . . skin diseases were rampant . .. water was strictly rationed

P 51: However corrupt the South Vietnamese regime may have been, it did not cause hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to leave their homes, their loved ones, and their native country to take their chances on the open sea. Communist Vietnam did. (800,000 of a nation of 20 million)

P 51-52: Paul Cleary, head of the international office of the National Council of Churches: (Reeducation camps) resembled "a small tropical resort area."

Ibid: Linda Ellerbee, commentator for CBS and ABC: "These boat people all want to go to America. Well I swear I don't know why, do you? . . . Clearly they have no more sense over there, than, say Mexicans who keep trying to get into this country . . ."

P 54: The shrill and vituperative attacks on a nation (America) that, however awkwardly, was trying to keep South Vietnam from the nightmare of Communist rule, were dishonorable and dishonest.

P 55: "To keep hope alive one must, in spite of all mistakes, horrors, and crimes, recognize the superiority of the socialist camp." - Jean Paul Sartre ...(Communist Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians) killed between 1.5 and 2 million out of a nation of 7 million.)

P 58: Overnight, the nation of Cambodia was transformed into one huge slave labor camp. If a starving person attempted to sneak a handful of rice into his mouth, he would be shot.

P 64: In 1975 there were more than five hundred doctors working in Cambodia. By 1978 only forty remained alive.

Ibid: Hanoi also kept at arms length international relief agencies attempting to feed and care for Cambodia's ravaged population.

P 65: Estimates of the total number of Soviet citizens murdered by the (USSR) range up to 20 million. Under Mao Tse-Tung, an estimated 765 million Chinese were killed by execution, torture, and starvation. Vietnam is held responsible for one million deaths. North Korea is believed to have murdered 2 million.

P 66: On April 13, 1975, just a week before the Lon Nol government fell, the New York Times ran a front-page story by (foreign correspondent Sydney) Schanberg saying, "for the ordinary people of Indochina...it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." P 69: U.S. senator Claiborne Pell, a Rhode Island Democrat: "There is some question as to how many people would actually suffer if South Vietnam came under Communist administration. [Not any more. Ask some of the 800,000 boat people.]

P 82: No nation on the planet had ever chose, through truly free elections, to be governed by Communists. ...Despite the clear evidence of history that Communists had never won a free election, liberals persisted in the argument that they represented the popular will and took communist regimes at their word when they claimed to be pursuing the "people's" interests.

P 86: ...around the globe, liberals consistently misinterpreted the nature of the Soviet regime, misread its foreign and internal policies, and projected onto Soviet leaders their own fond wishes rather than realistic assessments. ...ABC reporter Walter Rodgers explained in 1986 that the "Many soviets don't want Western-style human rights, which they tend to equate with anarchy." Dan Rather: "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy." [Whoever said that the press is liberal!]

Ibid: (Liberals provide tit for tat examples of American wrongdoing in response to each and every episode of Soviet criminality, hardening into a mindset of moral equivalence...)

P 87: New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, stationed in Moscow during Lenin's and part of Stalin's, reign, offered this assessment of Lenin in 1921: "Lenin has a cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities . . . devoting himself to rebuilding Russia on a new and solid foundation. Stalin is giving the Russian people . .. What they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort." But readers of the New York Times heard nothing of the ("terror-famine") from their renowned Moscow correspondent. (Despite the fact that Duranty was well aware of the misery being imposed.)

P 88: "(George Bernard) Shaw and other distinguished visitors testified that there was not, and could not be, a food shortage in the USSR" (said Malcolm Muggeridge).

Ibid: Literary critic Edmund Wilson: "Here (in Russia) the people in the park do really own it and they are careful of what is theirs." [We in America really do NOT "own the park"? Who then does?]

P 91: John Meynard Keynes in 1934: "Communism . . . is a protest against the emptiness of economic welfare, an appeal to the ascetic in us all . . ." ["Ascetic" means leading a life of austere self-discipline, especially as an act of religious devotion or penance. Communism is atheistic - anti-religious. Communist austerity creates austerity externally, involuntarily. Most humans do not choose "austere self-discipline" though they are surely free to do so in capitalist countries.]

Ibid: The Soviet Union was not so much a state as a vast criminal conspiracy. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natan Sharansky, and others are the great chroniclers of the grotesque inhumanity of the Gulag and Communist rule.

P 93: (Stalin executed millions of Russians, and yet was defended by leftists, like Upton Sinclair.)

P 95: (Itzhak Feffer, Jewish Communist poet, was betrayed by American communist friend, Paul Robeson, who called Feffer's imprisonment a malicious slander. Robeson told the real story near the end of his own life, guilty with remorse.)

P 96: (Armand Hammer was impressed by the execution of two officials after the delay of a train ordered to pick up Cheka director, Feliks Dzerzhinksi. Hammer pointed out that after their execution, the trains ran more efficiently. )

P 98: (In 1977, Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, lamented) that tax dollars had been spent "not to develop, not to feed the hungry, but essentially as part of an apparatus of repression in many places on the face of the earth." [America-> "repressive." Communist murderers and torturers -> good guys. This is liberal thought, word, and deed.]

P 99: The reason the Soviet Union and every other Communist country that ever existed had trouble providing the people with the basics was allegiance to a false and utterly disastrous theory of economics. The truth, which liberals were slow to recognize, was that even if the Soviet Union and other communist states were judged purely on the grounds they preferred, namely the quality of life for ordinary people, they were vastly inferior to the free, prosperous West. [Liberals were not "slow" to recognize this truth. They were, and are, impervious to it.]

P 100: In 1920 Russia experienced a very bad harvest. Despite this, the Bolsheviks decreed that "all grain stocks, even the seed for future harvests, [be] seized."

P 101: In 1921 and 1922, five million people starved to death. Later, it would get worse.

P 104: In the 1985 edition of his popular college text on economics, Paul Samuelson wrote this of the Soviet command economy: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for growth." ...Four years later . . .MIT economist Lester Thurow praised the "remarkable performance" of the Soviet economy and asserted that, "Today it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

P 105: Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University confidently asserted in 1981 that "the Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis." A decade after Bialer's prediction, the Soviet Union was dead.

P 108: As for the idea that having an intellectual as a leader is cause for optimism, history doesn't suggest so. Among those who could fairly be described as intellectuals were Lenin, Trotsky, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse-Tung.

P 111: CBS's Bruce Morton, too, reported that the Soviet people were happy with Communism: "All of these services are part of an explicit bargain with the Soviet workers have made with their government. They are less free than workers in the West, but more secure." ...In what form was this bargain struck? Where was it spelled out? How was it monitored and enforced?

P 112: Mary McGrory, a columnist for the Washington Post, gushed, Gorbachev had a "blueprint for saving the planet." .. Speaker of the House Thomas ("Tip") O'Neill...found Gorbachev "easy and gracious."

P 115: (Reagan's) administration restricted high technology and dual use exports to the Communist world, backed anticommunist insurgents as well as democratic resistance groups throughout the Soviet Empire, rebuilt America's conventional and nuclear forces at a clip the Soviets could not match without disastrous domestic consequences, and maintained a spiritual offensive by calling the system by its proper name - evil. While Reagan's anti-Soviet rhetoric won him contempt from liberal opinion leaders in the West, it was greeted with relief and even joy in the Communist world.

P 116: Oleg Kalugin, a former general in the KGB, and Yevgeny Novikov, a former senior staffer of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, confirmed that "American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union."

P 120: (Ronald Reagan): It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and dignity to its citizens. It is also in deep economic difficulty.

This kind of language embarrassed and infuriated many Americans and Europeans. (Acknowledged by everyone today) they were considered dangerous and foolish at the time.

P 128: (The "peace movement" criticizes only the West, never repressive nations, like the Soviet Union or Iraq.)

P 129: To be labeled an "opponent of arms control," as Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was on a routine basis, was to be branded as an opponent of simple decency and common sense. ...The democratically elected governments were thus forced to prove their peaceful intentions (to their own domestic constituencies), while the tyrannical Soviet Union, having no domestic constituency to placate, could simply push for its own advantage.

P 131: Following the USSR's demise, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze admitted that the phased array radar at Krasnoyarsk was an "open violation" of the ABM treaty. (Soviet) Admiral LaRocque said, "We're very comfortable with war. I would go so far as to say we love war in this country."

P 132: Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown: "we build weapons, they build. We stop, they continue to build."

P 135: "The fact is," Mondale declared, "that four years of Ronald Reagan has made this world more dangerous. Four more will take us closer to the brink." ..."Every time (Reagan) says we're weak, he literally weakens us."

P 136: (Madelyn Albright scorned American weapons, like the MX, as "destabilizing, the B-1 unnecessary, and missile defense unrealistic. Soviet weapons were never so characterized by the left.)

P 139: Father Francis X. Winters, a professor at Georgetown University: "Our security. . . is compatible, though arduously so, with military defeat. ...Security may dictate surrender.

Ibid: MIchael Novak inserted some common sense: ...it is the American deterrent that has kept the nuclear peace. Renouncing that deterrent would be as sure a way of bringing about war as one could devise.

P 146: Certainly any adult with common sense should understand that the mere wish for peace, untethered to realistic self-defense, is not a safe posture in this world, and further, that signaling weakness to a bully is probably the most dangerous course possible.

P 153: (Prior to World War I) ...the German ambassador was quick to warn the Kaiser: "A conservative government...would represent a very real danger for us... We should do all in our power to keep the Liberal party, to which all peace-loving elements in England adhere, at the helm."

P 154: (Hitler's) blatant military buildup, domestic repression, and hate-inspired propaganda frightened some in the West and led them to counsel appeasement. In the aftermath of the war, the policy of appeasement was rightly regarded as cowardly and dishonorable. In the aftermath of the Cold War, no less can be said of those who counseled appeasing the Soviet Union. [No less can be said today of those who counsel appeasing Iraq.]

P 155 But liberals were very, very frightened and made it their business to frighten everyone else.

P 156: Just as the baby boom generation seemed to believe it was the first to discover sex, many of its members also seemed to think they were the first to discover the horror of war. . . . And yet sensible human beings throughout most of history have understood that the best way to ensure the peace is to prepare for war. Further, war, while undeniably terrible, is not always the worst evil to be feared.

P 157: Communists…actual conduct differed very little from that of the Nazis. [And yet leftists decry fascism and support communism.]

P 165: (In 1986 ) Al Gore said: "There is a group of extremely hard-line conservatives who see in SDI a means for destabilizing the arms race by deploying defenses to protect our missile silos. . . . The Soviets have always found the rubles to match our military escalation… To assume that they're the ones who would buckle is madness."

P 169: The arguments of SDI opponents were self-contradicting. They said that SDI was a fantasy that would never work and at the same time that it was dangerous and destabilizing. How could it be dangerous if it would never work?

P 172: (LA Times Robert Scheer visited North Korea in 1970 and found it paradise and Kim Il-Sung great.)

P 174: (Norman Mailer in 1958): "So Fidel Castro, I announce to the City of New York that you gave all of us who are alone in this country . .. some sense that there are heroes in the world.

P 176: In his will, (Che Guevara) praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines." Such was the power of the Communist idea that sympathizers truly did call black white and good evil.

P 179: As Richard Grenier reported after a visit (to Cuba) in the early 1990's: "Cubans have no soap, no detergent, no cooking oil…hardly any meat, chicken or fish…[and] only one tiny loaf of bread a day. Absolutely everything is rationed, and just because your ration book says you're entitled to something doesn't mean much. Stores are empty. …Almost no cars, and few bicycles. Oxen till the fields.

P 180: Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric visited Cuba in 1992: "…terrific health-care system" and praised the standard of living as "very high for a Third World country."

Ibid: (Don Podesta of the Washington Post): "If nothing else, the Cuban revolution has eliminated abject need. . . . When Castro speaks of the need to defend the gains of the revolution, he means a level of social welfare rare in the underdeveloped world."

(Peter Jennings, Kathleen Sullivan, host of CBS This Morning, Cathy Booth of Time magazine all praise Cuba.)

P 183: Jennings comfortably identified Batista as a dictator, but somehow that word has never crossed his lips regarding the man who has held power for forty-four years without an election. (Fidel Castro)

P 185: Over a million Cubans fled to the United States during the 1960's, "voting with their oars." That represented one in nine inhabitants of the island. Only the most intolerable conditions will drive people to leave their homes and risk their lives to escape. In one Communist country after another, millions have fled. And yet some who think of themselves as enlightened and humanitarian on the American Left have found ways to ignore or excuse this damning fact.

P 186: Still, the Congressional Black Caucus adores Fidel Castro.

P 188: (Six Caribbean nations requested that the U.S. free Americans and restore law and order in Grenada, seized by Marxists.)

P 189: Representative Ted Weiss, a New York Democrat: "In ordering the invasion of Grenada, Ronald Reagan has adopted the tactic of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the new American standard of behavior."

…Barbara Boxer: "God knows where tomorrow . . . we may well be cheering on American forces in dozens of countries all over the world.

…Pete Stark of California: "…this insane Reagan foreign policy . . . He loves to throw American weight around . .

P 191: Democratic senator Pat Leahy of Vermont: "We'd like to have another country to invade, but they can't find one small enough."

Ibid: Walter Mondale compared our liberation of Grenada with "what the Soviets have done in their brutal intervention in Afghanistan, in Poland, and elsewhere."

P 193: (Democrat Congressman Ron Dellums of California deeply admires Fidel Castro.)

Ibid: (Military documents seized in Grenada from Marxists made reference to) "Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. … Airport will be used for Cuban and Soviet military."

P 195: Never in history was a Communist regime voted into office. Further, it is revealing that those on the left rarely if ever argued that the answer to poverty and misery was free enterprise, free trade, and political pluralism. As Jack Kemp put it, "The Democrats were not soft on Communism, they were soft on democracy."

P 197: (Re: El Salvador) Like other Democrats, Senator Kennedy presented the issue as a contest between peace and war rather than choosing sides between communists and noncommunists.

P 203: Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (on Nicaragua): "Whether Ronald Reagan is capable of accepting it or not, state-sponsored terrorism is reprehensible whether committed by us or by the Russians. [Has the Left ever accused Bill Clinton of sponsoring "terrorism"? After all, he did send troops to Haiti, and to Bosnia, and to Panama.]

P 206: (In 1979) One of the "commandantes" said later "Our strategic allies [i.e. Cuba] tell us not to declare ourselves Marxist-Leninst…[Nicaragua] will be the first experience of building socialism with the dollars of capitalism."

P 207: (Many Democrats support every communist/socialist revolution and never support democracies.)

Ibid: Humberto Ortega, Nicaraguan defense minister and brother of Daniel, the Sandinista president, affirmed that "our revolution has a profoundly anti-imperialist character, profoundly revolutionary, profoundly classist; we are anti-Yankee, we are against the bourgeoisie...we are guided by the scientific doctrine of the revolution, by Marxism-Leninism."

P 208: As in every other communist country, the Sandinista regime intimidated, harassed, and tortured labor leaders. (Sandinista communists were anti-Jewish and anti-Israel.)

P 210: (Sandinistas harassed churches.) They beat Protestant missionary, Prudencio Baltodano, slit his throat, and sliced off both of his ears before leaving him tied to a tree to die. But he survived and escaped to tell his story.

P 212: Like all other Communist regimes before it, the Sandinistas also produced the one, most reliable product of communism – refugees. About one in ten Nicaraguans fled their homes in the face of Sandinista repression. (Repressive, totalitarian tyranny and friend of terrorists.) …

None of these attributes gave liberal and leftist fans of the Nicaraguan regime any pause.

Ibid: (Playboy Correspondent): "Wherever we went, people were young, singing political folksongs, and chanting 'Power to the People.' One night there was even a Pete Seeger concert in town." Of course there was.

P 213:(Supporters of this murderous communist regime included): Betty Friedan, Abbie Hoffman, Ed Asner, Kris Kristofferson, Michael Douglas, Mike Farrell, and Diane Ladd.

P 217: (Ted Kennedy blamed Reagan for repressive policies of Sandanista communists.)

P 219: …the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek..devoted five times more coverage to stories about Salvadoran government (non-communist) human rights violations than to Sandinista (communist) offenses. P 222: Unsurprisingly, (Congressman Christopher) Dodd diagnosed the problem in Central America as poverty. "If Central America were not racked with poverty, there would be no revolution."

P 224: And negotiation backed by implied force – as in Frederick the Great's dictum that "Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments" – always seemed to strike liberals as needlessly warlike.

P 227: Peter Jennings told viewers, "For the Bush administration and the Reagan administration before it … After years of trying to get rid of the Sandinistas, there is not much to show for their efforts." [The Left – always wrong, but never in doubt.]

Ibid: Further, the Left found it hard to believe that the Communists were not as popular in Nicaragua as they were in Washington, D.C., and New York City. …Violetta Chamorro …won a resounding victory with 55 percent of the vote.

P 228: The outcome in Latin America contradicted every favored liberal myth - …

P 231: The tide of history has washed over them in a flood, yet they've (leftists) stood their ground – scarcely noticing that they are all wet.

P 232: ABC's Jerry King: (East Germany is) "the victim of an overdose of capitalism." …(Liberal) hearts fluttered at the idea of a "guaranteed job for everyone." (in East Germany)

Ibid: Bert Quint of CBS Evening News: the transition from communism to capitalism is making people more miserable every day…"

P 233: Connie Chung of CBS in 1991: "In formerly communist Bulgaria, the cost of freedom has been virtual economic disaster."

Ibid: CBS Bob Simon: "Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall."

P 234: ABC's Jim Bitterman from Hungary: "So far, capitalism is just making them (unemployment and homelessness) worse."

Ibid: CNN's Steve Hurst from Moscow: "Many don't like the prospect of their nation becoming just another capitalist machine."

Ibid: Tamara Jones of the LA Times in 1991:…"in many ways, democracy has set them (women) back forty years."

P 235: And in 1994, ABC News was still attributing the miseries of post-communist societies to capitalism.

Ibid: You must harbor a deep animus toward the United States (to frame the story as ABC News did.)

P 238: The Reverend Joan Brown Campbell, a leader of the National Council of Churches: "If you look at the Nazi regime, you see in it the philosophy of Christian superiority."

P 239: NBC's Katie Couric offered this waspish comment: "Some suggested over the weekend that it's wrong to expect Elian Gonzalez to live in a place that tolerates no dissent or freedom of political expression. They were talking about Miami …"

P 242: Larry King asked Tipper Gore (If Elian wasn't safer going to school in Havana than in Miami.) [No vouchers then. Keep American kids in such dangerous schools. That's the liberal way.]

P 245: (Three days after September 11, leftist demonstrators condemned "U.S. violence" carrying placards saying "No Eye for an Eye")

P 246: Novelist Barbara Kingsolver in the San Francisco Chronicle: "In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoveling the Constitution through a paper shredder. Who are we calling terrorists here?"

P 248: Just as with every other conflict the United States has been engaged in over the past forty years, many liberals stood ready to cite poverty as a justification for any outrage – even terrorism.

Ibid: (Liberal exception) Sean Wilentz, Princeton professor: "[Terrorists are not the oppressed, but they are the parasites on oppression." …based on the biographies of the September 11 attackers, the logical inference would be that "money, education, and privilege" cause terrorism.

Ibid: Joel Rogers of the Nation: "…our own government, through much of the past fifty years, has been the world's leading 'rogue state'. The U.S. has taken the lives of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocents, most of them children…"

P 249: Michael Lerner: "we've learned to close our ears when told that one out of every three people on this planet does not have enough food…" [Do Hollywood's Limousine Liberals know that!]

Lerner takes it as an article of faith that all suffering everywhere is somehow America's fault – even if only because we don't feel anguished enough about it.

P 250: (After September 11) David Westin, president of ABC News, cautioned his on-air talent against wearing American flag lapel pins as this would constitute "taking sides."

P 252: Michael Moore: "We have orphaned so many children…with our taxpayer funded terrorism" that "we shouldn't be too surprised when those orphans grow up and are a little wacked in the head."

P 254: The fire department in Berkeley, California, was forbidden to fly the American flag for fear of inciting the America-hating denizens of that city. A chorus of disapproval forced a reversal of policy.

Ibid: Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University: "which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."

P 255: Professor Richard A Berthold told his University of New Mexico class on September 11, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote."

Ibid: Duke University shut down a professor's website because he posted an article that urged a strenuous military response to terrorism.

P 257: Liberal views, forged in Vietnam and tempered in Central America and beyond, got the world all wrong. Even worse, they got America all wrong.

P 260: What these stories prove is not just that liberals failed one of the two great moral tests of the twentieth century, but that they still do not know they failed and have not grappled with the implications of that failure.

P 261: Quick: try to think of a single movie about the horrors of Stalinism. This is not a failure of imagination. This is a moral meltdown.

P 263: That some precincts on the Left – even now – can find reasons to blame the United States for the hatred directed against it, is evidence that the rotten kernel of their appeasement and weakness throughout the second half of the Cold War was America-hatred. …in light of the sanguinary history of the world and the shining place America deserves on any list of humanitarian and civilized nations – it is a grotesque injustice as well as a sign of moral delinquency.

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