Some answers to gnawing questions.

Todays's WSJ online "Opinion Journal", free to anyone at http://www.opinionjournal.com, featured two articles which coalesced in such a way to provide at least some answers to questions about liberals and the War on Terror that have bothered and confused many conservatives, myself included, since 9/11. The first question is why do liberals hate America? and the second is why can't liberals see the threat represented by the Islamic jihadist movement to our very existence? The first question is in part answered by Fred Siegel's article, "The True Politics of the Paranoid Style"( http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010322), and the second by Dan Henninger's column at http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110010324. In the "The True Politics of the Paranoid Style", Siegel describes how liberals conflated the assassination of JFK by a communist fellow traveller, Lee Harvey Oswald, with a "sick", racist and violent, American society. This incorrect conflation has led to conspiracy theories about JFK's murder and the paranoid attitude by liberals that the right wing anti-communist zealots in the U.S. will stop at nothing in their drive to take control of the country as the Nazis did in Germany during the 1930's. And thus we have today all the ranting and raving by liberals about Bush's attempts to use the threat of terrorists to roll back civil liberties in the U.S., and all the other imagined assaults on individual rights in the name of fighting a "handful" of insurgents. Dan Henninger's column describes the insidious, anti-western internet based propaganda campaign being waged on a massive scale by the Jihadists, and the clever way this campaign plays on the self loathing of liberals. Once one understands Siegel's point that the liberal mindset of America as a "sick" society, racist and violent, the obvious conclusion is they agree with the Jihadists and in their heart of hearts want the destruction of the American society as they now perceive it to be. What this all tells me is that those who believe in America, its basic goodness and role as a beacon for freedom in the world, need to expose and defeat not only Islamic Jihadists, but defeat the mindset of fellow traveller liberals as well, who wittingly or not, are abetting Jihadists aims. One is reminded of Lenin's, "useful idiots" comment used to describe those citizens living in democracies who supported the aims of the imperialist Soviet Union and communism.