American Idiots

Those who blindly cheer for the fall of Mubarak and the rise of anything else in Egypt are the same as those who cheered the fall of the Shah in Iran. Question their motives.

The Great One, Mark Levin, tweeted attention to this post about an email from Salim Mansur to Claire Berlinski. The email’s purpose was to call Claire’s attention to Mansur’s latest column.

Here’s what Mansur says as an aside:

I am more convinced now, as I wasn’t when Paul Kennedy wrote about the rise and fall of great powers, that the West has gone over the tipping point in its terminal decline. That intelligent people, or people who claim to be intelligent, (I have in mind the talking heads in the U.S. media such as Chris Matthews or Fareed Zakaria) cannot make the difference between the sham of the Muslim Brotherhood talking about freedom and democracy and the generic thirst in man to be free. These are the people who have like the Bourbons learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They are glibly about to put the Lenins of our time into trains heading for Moscows of our time, they find nothing odd that they are pushing for the Muslim Brotherhood to be taken into governing when everything needs to be done to keep the Muslim Brotherhood out even as one carefully negotiate the long historic transition of Arab societies from tribal autorcracy and military dictatorships to representative rule and constitutionally limited government.

The intellectual type that Mansur describes is a dangerous lot. They believe, not only that they are more intelligent than than everyone else, but that everyone else’s thoughts, knowledge, experiences, and feelings mean nothing. They use ridicule in lieu of reason, believing commoners unworthy of reason.

Yet, these sophomores insulate themselves from any critical thinking. Any at all. They parrot the bland, brainless one-liners of their heroes, penned a century ago, and call it thought. They confuse erudition with long, boring conversations with people who believe precisely and only what they believe.

And here’s precisely what our intellectuals miss: that Obama and the Democrats aspire to Mubarak’s autocratic government:

Mubarak’s Egypt, in the language of political science, fits the description of the authoritarian-bureaucratic state in which military officers and civilian technocrats hold the commanding heights of the economy and security.

Mubarak, in other words, is Obama with 30 years experience. The American left should be flying to Cairo to join the protests on the government’s side.

Except for one, nasty truth: the reason America’s leftist intellectuals oppose Mubarak is because what follows will work to destroy Israel and America. And that’s what the left lives for.

I’d much rather be a low-brow tea partier who sees things for what they are than an intellectual American idiot whose self-hate clouds his reason and jeopardizes his future.