John Murtha's Solipsistic Logic

Power Line continues its admirable work today exposing the defects in the Democrats' current "cut and run" and "cut and run lite" lines on withdrawal from Iraq, exposing, as usual, the 'Rats' entire lack of seriousness. John Hinderaker, highlighting yesterday's underreported ABC News poll highlighting good news for the Bushies, makes the following observation:

...most Iraqis view the occupation exactly as President Bush and most Americans do: they want our forces to stay until the Iraqis can maintain reasonable security on their own, then leave. The ABC News poll released yesterday found that only 26% of respondents want coalition troops to "leave now." Further, only 10% list the withdrawal of foreign troops within the next year as a "high priority."

Murtha's conviction that American troops are the problem in Iraq, not the solution, and that things woud be better if we would only leave, exemplifies the childish solipsism so often seen on the Left, where American actions are generally seen as the causes of all events—or all bad ones, anyway.

"Solipsism" is a good way to describe the defective reasoning that is currently spreading like a pandemic throughout the American left. Nearly all observations from this political spectrum are self-referential. They never involve the careful consideration of outside opinion (other than to sneer at it), and are condescending in the extreme to not only the average American but especially to conservatives (who actually do think, unlike perpetual adolescent Howard Dean). Such reasoning, or lack thereof, reflects a party line time-warped in the era when the Stalinist-Gramscian control of ideas and message began to infiltrate the American and European left "intelligentsia" in the 1950s. Then, as now, even the slightest deviation from party-line thinking will result in the irrevocable expulsion from the intellectual and literary life.

Such thinking, or lack thereof, also reflects the inherent childishness of the left—which is an increasingly uncomfortable place for thinking men and women to reside. There's plenty of room on the right, and plenty of diversity, too, no matter how the MSM tries to convince intellectuals otherwise. Their choice is increasingly clear: permanently give in to the left's neverending demand for mind-control, or join the new free expression clubs that are springing up on the right. The secret password is: integrity.