Culture of Choice Creates Self-Induced Blindness

Mortman notes:

Peter Beinart, a liberal, has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post: “Admit It: The Surge Worked.” It’s about Iraq. But buried in the piece is this fascinating swipe at Stephen Colbert:

Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the “Colbert Report,” the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right. It’s a characterization of the premise of Colbert’s show — and by extension Jon Stewart’s? — that’s worth considering, at least in the context of what these comedians will find funny over the next four years.

Much more here on the whole idea of duping one's self to fit in with the "cool kids."

They hit Bush for everything — for the way he mangled syntax, for the books he read, because he worked out too much. Note now that the buff Obama is taking office, stories gushing about Obama's daily workouts flood the channels. Oh, yes, and the same people who belittled Bush for sending troops to war even though he only served in the National Guard somehow do not seem to notice Obama's utter lack of military experience . . .

"Growing into intellectual maturity has been, for me, largely a process of becoming free of the need to have my choices validated by the brothers," concludes Lowry: After many years I have come to understand that, until I became willing to risk the derision of the crowd, I had no chance to discover the most important truths about myself or about life — to know my calling, to perceive my deepest value commitments, and to recognize the goals most worth striving toward.

Right on.