Federal Court Makes Major Ruling on Ballot Verification in Pennsylvania
Jon Stewart's Skewering of Trump in New York Civil Fraud Cause Just Blew...
Did the Hosts of 'The View' Do Their Homework When They Invited This...
Actually, Kate Middleton Does Have a Body Double...Sort of
Checking the Black Box
Democrat Flips Republican District in Alabama Special Election. Here's What She Campaigned...
Here's What Trump Had to Say About RFK Jr.'s VP Pick
VDH Explains What Any 'Normal' President Would Do About Border That Would End...
Yes, a Terrorist Attack Is Coming to America
Americans Can Tell the Difference Between Rosy Economic Data and Reality
Time For Another Bizarre, Easily-Disprovable Lie From Joe Biden
Did Jamaal Bowman Just Help His Primary Challenger?
Fani Willis Calls Jim Jordan's Investigation Into Her Office 'Politically Motivated'
Tyson Foods Fires U.S. Workers, Exploits Illegal Aliens for Profits
We Must Return to a 'Peace Through Strength' Foreign Policy
OPINION

The Times Square Surprise

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

WASHINGTON -- As I read the news about this Pakistani jackal who admits to planning a cowardly assault on hundreds of innocent people in New York's Times Square, a thought that occurs to me is, how endlessly interesting history is. Often things take place that one never would have imagined.

Advertisement

For most of the last decades of the 20th century, America girded its loins to defeat world communism, at the time led by the Soviets and the Chinese. We lived in fear of nuclear holocaust. We feared Soviet domination. Once our partners in thwarting Nazi domination of the West, the Soviets had replaced the Nazis as our enemies. Their war machine was even deadlier. It could bring down on the globe eternal night. We expended up to 9 percent of our gross domestic product annually to protect ourselves. We devised policies to neutralize Soviet aggression. Finally, when President Ronald Reagan faced down the Soviets with a vast arms buildup and a resolute, albeit flexible, foreign policy, his liberal critics warned that we faced nuclear world war.

Michelle Malkin

Of a sudden, the Soviet Union collapsed. And what was the liberals' response? Well, it was one of history's surprises. The liberals announced that the Soviet Union had been a paper tiger all along. It had been destined to collapse from day one. All our military appropriations were a waste of money. Oh, yes, and one other surprising detail: It was not Ronald Reagan's vigilance and resolve that ended the Cold War, but Mikhail Gorbachev's good sense -- though practically every one of his policies and policy pronouncements was a failure. In, say, 1985, if you had asked me what the national response in America would be at the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade, I would have predicted national jubilation. I would have predicted that liberals (many of whom, certainly up through the Johnson administration, were vigilant opponents of communism) would join with conservatives in a general feeling of good will. Both could take credit for their successful defense of democracy against tyranny. Instead, the liberals told us that our efforts against the Soviets were a waste.

Advertisement

Surprise, surprise -- yet the liberals' response to Islamofascism surprises me more. Islamic terror is anti-Western, anti-democratic, fundamentalist, reactionary, nihilistic and repressive of some of liberalism's supposedly favored groups, women, gays and household pets, namely dogs living indoors. It is also fascism with a Quranically prescribed beard and burqa. Yet the liberals do not even want to use the term "Islamic terror." The mosque is about the only house of prayer for which they have any sympathy. They depict the tea party movement as more troubling than fundamentalist Islam protesting in the streets.

Just hours after this Islamic brute attempted to kill the peaceful denizens of Times Square -- many of whom were doubtless followers of Islam -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated to the press that the perpetrator of this attempted atrocity was "homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something." Later, there was more. He would not tolerate "bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers."

Now the mayor was manifesting the liberals' time-honored suspicion of his fellow Americans. Those of us who have studied the liberals' bugaboos as they pollute our political culture (we call the phenomenon Kultursmog) are familiar with this idiocy. We saw it during the Cold War, when suspicion of communist infiltration of government was described by many liberals as a senseless "Red Scare." With the release of the Venona files and of research from the KGB's archives, we now know many of the accused Reds were in fact communist spies. We also saw the liberals' suspicion of ordinary Americans -- or at least conservative Americans -- when their first suspects after a communist assassinated President John F. Kennedy were Dallas conservatives unnamed. Now the mayor's first suspects upon the discovery of a bomb in Times Square are opponents of the health care monstrosity.

Advertisement

Returning to the liberals' sympathetic treatment of fundamentalist Islam, let me proffer an explanation. Liberals are sympathetic to it because it is anti-American and anti-Western. In fact, that is the only explanation. Liberals such as Mayor Bloomberg are not very comfortable with their fellow Americans. That is one of history's surprises.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Recommended

Trending on Townhall Videos