House of Eratosthenes

Via Caerdroia, via Instapundit, via Ace, via the notorious Huffington Post…let us allow the words of Russell Shaw to speak for themselves. Heavily edited for brevity, but the conscious sentiment is being left unchanged, I think all would agree.

I hope and pray we don’t get hit again, like we did on September 11. Even one life lost to the violence of terrorism is too much.

If I somehow knew an attack was coming, I wouldn’t pause for a second to report it in order to prevent it from occuring.

But on the other hand, I remind myself that…If the Nazis had prevailed, tens, if not hundreds of millions more would have been killed.

That realization has led my brain to launch a political calculus 180 degrees removed from my pacifist-inclined leanings…What if another terror attack just before this fall’s elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost?
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If an attack occurred just before the elections, I have to think that at least a few of the voters who persist in this “Bush has kept us safe” thinking would realize the fallacy they have been under.

If 5% of the “he’s kept us safe” revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate and be in a position to:

Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists;

Be in a position to elevate the party’s chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would:

Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care;

Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;

More enthusiastically address the need for mass transit, the greater availability of which would surely cut highway deaths;

Enact meaningful gun control legislation that would reduce crime and cut fatalities by thousands a year;

Fund stem cell research that could result in cures saving millions of lives;

Boost the minimum wage, helping to cut down on poverty which helps spawn violent crime and the deaths that spring from those acts;

Be less inclined to launch foolish wars, absence of which would save thousands of soldiers’ lives- and quite likely moderate the likelihood of further terror acts.
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If you knew us getting hit again would launch a chain of transformative, cascading events that would enable a better nation where millions who would have died will live longer, would such a calculus have any moral validity?

Any at all?

I didn’t know raising the minimum wage and supporting mass transit had anything to do with preventing deaths. I wonder how many pro-minimum-wage pro-mass-transit people feel that way.

Now this other stuff might be thought of as life-saving stuff, I imagine, at least in the minds of Mr. Shaw’s peers who support them. Abortion laws leading to saving the lives of women who would otherwise turn to illegal, back-alley abortions…pretty far-fetched, but I’ve heard it before. Cleaner air preventing deaths…that’s been said outright, and might have more favorable treatment from the facts available, than any of his other theories.

But like Vito Corleone said in the first scene out of The Godfather: Let’s be frank here. Liberal policies aren’t about saving lives. Liberal policies represent a means unto their own end. Liberal policies are all about liberal policies. They’re all about that smug sense of satisfaction liberals feel when everything is done their way.

This is easily proven through an exercise of, simply, getting down to “brass tacks” and looking at the commonality amongst the liberal policies. Letting gays into the military doesn’t have an awful lot to do with getting more babies aborted, does it? No, it doesn’t. And what does universal health care have to do with making it illegal to hire someone for less than seven bones an hour? Nothing. Even in the minds of the liberals who support such policies, there is no common theme.

It’s just a big ol’ mish-mash of baby-killing soldier-spitting Heather-has-two-mommies poor-schoolteacher-retaining job-outlawing segregationist anti-semitist ponytail-waving dictator-appeasing progressive-taxing Birkenstock-wearing Clarence-Thomas-bashing mediocrity-promoting liberal goodness.

I wonder how many progressives are represented by this guy. He’s on a path to self-delusion, clearly, if he thinks banning certain types of jobs leads to saving lives. And his delusion stretches to the extent that in his mind, maybe another 9/11-type attack would end up saving more lives than it would at first cost — IF such an attack would lead to that hated George W. Bush and his cronies being tossed out of power, so the big ol’ baby-killing job-outlawing mishmash can be installed.

So there is a faction of progressives, I infer, evaluating the “cost-benefit” of another 9/11 attack. And concluding the evaluation, they’re leaning toward the benefits outweighing the costs.

How big is the faction? Who knows. Who’s to say. It’s probably not inclusive of “all” liberals. Probably not. But we know it’s there. We know it; it’s an established fact.

One of the liberal causes is to invent new rights for terrorists. Invest in those terrorists, the rights our Constitution affords to American citizens, even in cases where the terrorists are clearly not American citizens.

Liberals want to give terrorists legal rights in court, that the terrorists don’t even have. And they want another 9/11 style attack, because they figure the political benefits of such an attack, for them, would be worth the death toll.

Hmm.

Am I reading something into that, that I shouldn’t? All who think so, tell me so; support the thesis with a proof. Can’t wait to see it. Can’t wait.

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