The Glade 4.0

The hypocrisy of the American left
By JOE SCARBOROUGH | 3/29/11 4:44 AM EDT

Self-righteousness is a dangerous vice. It breeds arrogance and moral blind spots for those who come to believe they are superior to those who share different worldviews.

Televangelists have fallen prey to this feeling of superiority, until the time they are caught crawling on the ground outside a hooker’s hotel room. Politicians have also wallowed in the grandiosity of their moralistic worldview, until they too fall prey to the hypocrisy that eventually snags all self-righteous moralizers.

For a decade now, we have been told of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s moral failings. They have been regularly compared to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and every other tyrant of the past century. Bush has been damned by the ministers of the far left as a war criminal, a fascist and a Nazi when labeling his policies as overly ideological and deeply flawed would have sufficed.

But that was never enough for the carnival barkers on cable news or the blogosphere. For the American left, Bush had to be condemned as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil.

That extremism required that the Bush years be filled with images of CODEPINK protesting on Capitol Hill, anti-war activists clogging the streets of New York City and left-wing commentators beating their chests with the self-righteous indignation of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

But in the morally murky afterglow of the Obama years, the certainty of these secular saints has melted away.

President Barack Obama bowed to his generals’ demands by tripling troops in an unending war. CODEPINK did nothing.

Obama backed down on Guantanamo Bay. Anti-war protesters stayed at home.

America invaded its third Muslim country in a decade. The American left meekly went along. Without the slightest hint of irony, liberals defended the president’s indefensible position by returning again to a pose of moral certainty.

Democrats streamed to the floors of the House and Senate to praise the president for invading Libya. It was, after all, a moral mission that would stop the slaughter of innocent civilians. Whether protesting for peace or calling for war, these liberals once again convinced themselves of the moral superiority of their positions.

While one can make the moral argument that countries can be attacked strictly on humanitarian grounds, that argument is laughable when it comes to Libya.

How can the left call for the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi for the sin of killing hundreds of Libyans when it opposed the war waged against Saddam Hussein? During Saddam’s two decades in Iraq, he killed more Muslims than anyone in history and used chemical weapons against his own people and neighboring states.

With the help of his equally despicable sons, Uday and Qusay, Saddam devastated Iraq, terrorized his people and destroyed that country’s environment. By the time American troops deposed him in 2003, Saddam had killed at least 300,000 of his own people — and human rights groups say that tally does not even include the million-plus casualties his invasion of Iran caused.

If Obama and his liberal supporters believed Qadhafi’s actions morally justified the Libyan invasion, why did they sit silently by for 20 years while Saddam killed hundreds of thousands?

And how do they claim the moral high ground in Libya while not calling for the immediate invasion of Syria? The monstrous Bashar al-Assad regime is slaughtering his own people by the hundreds. More killings are sure to happen as that corrupt regime teeters on the brink of collapse.

In Yemen, the situation is no better. Government snipers shoot unarmed women and children from the rooftops of Sanaa. Should we follow Obama’s example in Libya and invade that country in the name of humanitarian relief? Or should we step into the breach in the Ivory Coast, where a terrifying civil war has led to a million refugees fleeing that country. And why do we not enter Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered over the past decade in a civil war of horrifying proportions?

Katrina vanden Heuvel, one of the few liberals to take a principled stand against what America is doing in Libya, has written in The Nation that the anti-war left has been silent since Obama took office because they don’t want to hurt the president’s reelection chances.

In defending Obama’s Libya offensive, they are compromising their own morals. The American left is also making it abundantly clear that it does not find all wars morally reprehensible — only those begun by Republicans.

A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.