EARTH TO MAUREEN

Published October 21, 2005 | By Dr. Jack Wheeler

Due to time constraints, C-Span ended the broadcast of my speech last week, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Defending America , in the middle of my reply to a question about why most journalists are so liberal.

I explained that journalists are folks who see the world through words – concepts and abstractions – as opposed to, say, businessmen who deal with the world through actual real things resulting in a very real bottom line.

This predisposes a journalist to see people as abstractions – collections of people – rather than real live individuals. When a liberal journalist writes about an individual, it is usually how that individual is an example of some (oppressed or oppressive) group or collective.

I was about to use the New York Times liberal columnist Maureen Dowd as an example when C-Span switched to another event. This is because in February 2000 during the presidential campaign, I wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting on a column of Miss Dowd which was such a perfect instance of why liberals, and liberal journalists like her, really don’t care about individual people.

So to complete the answer you couldn’t see on C-Span, here’s the letter:

Maureen Dowd’s column of February 20, “Bricks and Mortars,” contains an absolutely exquisite example of why liberals are lost in space.

She recounts a “partially blind biology student” in Florence, South Carolina telling a campaigning George W. Bush that “she couldn’t afford a $400 device that would let her use a microscope.” Sneering that Bush’s “solution was to ask if anyone in the audience would pay for it,” Miss Dowd makes a smart-aleck put-down that is her trade-mark: “Noblesse oblige is not exactly a detailed health care program.”

Earth to Spaceship Maureen: This woman didn’t need a “detailed health care program” from Washington; she needed 400 bucks. Bush solved her actual real individual problem right on the spot. An audience member volunteered the money. The woman got her microscope device.

Yet – and here is the liberal key – Maureen is upset about it. Rather than the woman’s particular problem being solved, Maureen would have been happy if Bush had proposed some massive government program to regulate health care instead. The advocacy of such a program would have meant nothing to the woman – she needed the device for her studies now.

This is of no concern to Maureen, for individual concerns never are. Liberals only think of people in the abstract, as groups. This is why they are only concerned with group rights, of minorities, or women, or workers, or homosexuals, or whatever, and look at individual human beings only as members of various collectives.

Liberals are thus rarely advocates of individual liberty, the rights of individuals irregardless of whatever collective groupings in which they may participate. True reality, for liberals, only exists in a Platonic world of ideals and abstractions, while the existence of the concrete individual is illusory.

So Maureen and others of her intellectual tribe will continue to float off in bitterness and anger towards the Asteroid Belt, while George W. provides solutions to non-illusory flesh-and-blood Americans on earth.

If you’d like a video tape or DVD of the speech, you can order one direct from C-Span