We spend a lot of time on this blog trying to convince our friends on the right that leftists aren’t necessarily all cowardly anti-American terrorist appeasers. Many of them are very good people, but the problem is that they have so much devoted in their own images of themselves as sophisticated geopolitical strategists that they just come off sounding like cowardly anti-American terrorist appeasers. Please go watch AEI’s Danielle Pletka dismantle Bill Maher and Ben Affleck on Real Time – and count how many times either Maher or Affleck talk about how complicated the world is. The trick is that you have to track how their tone increasingly goes from condescension to faux “will this woman just stop making us look stupid” exasperation. Now don’t get us wrong – the world is very complicated, and trying to navigate through it requires delicacy and genuine sophistication. But there’s a strange disjunct – Maher and Affleck are the ones who are insisting most loudly that the world is complicated, yet they seem to know significantly less about the world than the average high school debater.
It’s not that they don’t know anything about the world – it’s that everything that they do know seems to fit perfectly into their predetermined ideologies. And it’s not even that everything that they do know seems to fit perfectly into their predetermined ideologies – it’s that this convenient, strange consistency doesn’t make them suspicious that maybe they’re not getting the whole story. Here’s a hint: if everything you hear or see in the world just confirms to you how smart and right you are, it may be that you’re not exactly looking hard enough for disproof.
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