Isilion

The sad thing is, Putin didn’t need to be that much of a genius, given the feebleness of his opponents. He took a quick glance at the Europeans, with their unionized, gay-friendly armies and their groveling accommodations to Muslim invaders, and dismissed them from his mind. He looked a little longer at America’s leaders, saw how they had dedicated all their national wealth and strength to propping up cynical gangs of bazaar carpet-sellers in Baghdad and Kabul, listened to their infantile babbling about “ridding the world of evil” and “spreading democracy,” heard the clink of devaluing dollars … and dismissed America from his mind. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize a fool.
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Liberalism does not allow tangible failures to cause a reevaluation of the liberal hierarchy of values, because that hierarchy defines failure in advance as either growing pains or an improvement over the racist, exclusionary past. Iraq is one example. Gutted black-ruled American cities like Detroit are another. But the best example of this is Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia. It was once a nice, orderly place you might want to visit. Unlike South Africa some blacks could vote. Even those that couldn’t lived reasonably well compared to every other African nation. Under Ian Smith, the country’s government achieved all of the goods we expect of government and fought a good fight against Soviet-supported terrorists, but that regime was minority-ruled by the whites and wealthier blacks. Today, Zimbabwe is a hell-hole that is about to experience mass starvation. Yet for liberals, the past was worse than this, because the exclusion of the ignorant black peasantry from political power offends liberal principles of equality, while its present descent into anarchy and starvation do not.

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