When Harry Make Believe Met Sally Reality.

Hat tip to Speranza.

Any of the people who knew me during my earlier years would probably be surprised with the grown up version. As a teen and even with my start into my college years, I was as far left politically speaking as was possible for someone not living in the Soviet Union. I went in for that whole give peace a chance meme, and even believed that the social welfare state was all about helping those who needed help. In short, my politics were ruled entirely by emotion, precious little attention was spared for trite little considerations such as consequences.

As with anyone living beyond the age of adolescence, I eventually started to learn some important lessons as a result of certain specific events in my life. One such event was a room mate in college who's father had been a math professor at the University of Wisconsin on the fateful date of August 24, 1970, verbally setting me straight on the notion that the hippies were peace loving benevolent people. Paul was 7 when the Army Math Research Center, other wise known as Sterling Hall, was bombed. His father, a math professor who's office and class rooms were in that building, was not injured during the blast, but somebody else's father was not so lucky.

Robert Fassnacht, a post doctoral father of three, was in the building after hours because in the world of science, when a long running experiment is ready to produce data, you have to show up then. In the make believe world, the hippies of the late 60's and early 70's were peace loving people who's passion and clearly superior sense of morality and conscience motivated them to legally and peacefully protest their government for its clearly illegal involvement in a war that we had no business being involved with. In the real world, leaders of the world wide Marxist movement centered at the Frankfort School found in our young college aged kids the useful idiots necessary to turn the cries for an end to the Viet Nam War into a vehicle with which to spread their Marxist ideology in a slow and covert process. In the real world, the hippies were largely a group of spoiled children who were used to having their entire existence supported by their parents and were never fully exposed to the real life consequences of their actions. In the real world, their sense of morality and ethics were replaced by the worst examples of moral equivalence and subjective interpretations of factual situations. In the real world, their protests were seldom peaceful, but more precisely acts of terror, thuggish, and often resulted in the orphaning of small children.

Paul lived over a mile from the blast, and remembers being awakened by the sound and then consequently feeling the shock wave. He knew the kids who lost their father. He brought it all home to me with one question. "How do you peacefully bomb a building, kill a farther of three, and injure three of his assistants?"

Many of those hippies became school teachers and went to work like busy little bees spreading their propaganda in our now cancerous Department of Education. Even when conservatives take their turn being in charge of the Executive Branch, the cancer spreads, and fact continues on its journey towards becoming subjective things in our post modern morally equivalent society.

The unfortunate thing for those who live in the world of subjective truth is that they can never indefinitely postpone the reality of the world of hard truths from crashing into their more comfortable existence. In every instance, when reality is kept at bay, the truth brings with itself greater amounts of pain in exponential proportion to the amount of time the truth was successfully kept at bay.

Examples of this phenomenon are plentiful. Twice during the 1970's the make believe world decided that we could institute price controls on oil and price supports on agricultural products. Those living in the world of make believe told of the need to protect American consumers from the evils of oil company executives who were motivated by personal greed and stealing wealth from ordinary people being ground under the rapacious boots of unscrupulous robber barons, and that the farmers were victims of unchecked advances in technology which threatened their very existence due to something ridiculously labeled as overproduction. When reality was met, despite the top down efforts to prevent this meeting, the results were two oil shortages that led to miles long gas lines and a famine in the third world that was so severe that George Harrison subjected an unsuspecting audience to an 18 minute long Sitar ensemble before the first in a string of, "benefit," concerts. (The word benefit is in quotes due to the fact that no actual money was donated to the Ethiopians as a result of Harrison's concert. The money was tied up in legal proceedings for such an extended period of time that the international boundaries had managed to change four times and the war which helped to perpetuate the famine had ended. Pakistan was born, became a U.S. ally, and had built a relatively vibrant economy exporting affordable textiles to the nations of the west. All of this happened before the aid money, all 12 cents of it, made its way through our legal system.)

In the world of make believe, we have been able to convince ourselves that somehow, windmills and solar collectors are currently capable of replacing coal burning and nuclear powered electric facilities, both in terms of efficiency and in terms of the raw amount of energy needed to run our massive, energy dependent economy. we convinced ourselves of this despite the objective fact that there was absolutely zero evidence of this, even after 50 years of heavy governmental subsidization with only mediocre verifiable results. When reality made its inevitable entrance this summer, people began to notice exorbitant electricity bills, rolling blackouts in some markets, and the closures of a large percentage of our electricity producing grid, thereby guaranteeing for an extended period of time increased energy costs for both domestic and industrial usage. The latter of course will only serve to damage further our beleaguered manufacturing base.

Since 1924, the land of make believe has told us that by leading by example, and showing how really really nice we actually are, the Muslim world would eventually follow suit and lay down their weapons and stop this centuries long quest to inflict themselves as the leaders of a world wide dominion known as the Islamic Caliphate. Each and every time they struck another type of blow in what for them, has been an obvious war, we have pretended that they were simply disaffected and disenfranchised people who did not truly understand the benevolent feelings we held towards them. After 19,592 more acts of Islamic Terrorism world wide since the ancient date of September 11, 2001, that pretense has not changed. The reality that should be readily apparent now that we have close to two dozen embassies in flames across most of North Africa, and a good piece of the Middle East, is that we have been 180 degrees out of phase with what has been going on in the Islamic World since Thomas Jefferson and John Jay suggested we declare war on the entirety of the Muslim Faith in 1793.

True to form for the world of make believe, even after reality destroys the myth, we get to see examples of the proponents of make believe still clinging to their alternate reality. Barack Obama campaigned on his personal belief that his mere presence on the world stage would force the Islamic fist to unclench. Unfortunately for those people buying into that particular piece of make believe, this particular enemy is not all that concerned with the prospect that we may not be fighting back in the war that they are currently waging against us.

Caroline Glick has an interesting take on this phenomenon in the Je...  Even as the reality of the situation set in this week, our national leaders took to the airways to tell us that this was simply a case of the Muslim Street justifiably reacting to a piece of internet trash. That this trash was evil enough to spark off yet another Muslim temper tantrum in which dozens would unfortunately lose their lives and plenty of buildings, which have hurt no one would be bombed and burned to the ground. In fact, the internet film's producer serves as the very first American Citizen, in our nation's history, to be rounded up and arrested for committing a thought crime.

Let's analyze, for just one moment, the possibility that this really was a spontaneous reaction.  Does that help Team Zero and his take on foreign policy at all?  Is it really true that this is not a sign of American weakness, that this is simply some aberration in behavior sparked by a random abuse of our Constitutional Right to express ourselves freely?  How can this policy of, "leading from behind," be considered successful if the first time someone gives the equivalent of a political sneeze, half a continent erupts into a murderous rampage?

Then of course, there is another little piece of reality that will tell us the truth is only we take the time to pay attention.  As it turns out, many of the protesters were paid thugs.  This one little fact alone, as if we needed one, tells us all we need to know about the Obama White House's explanation for recent events.  It is quite simply false.  This protest was in the works for quite some time, and our rush to lawlessly shred our Constitution, more specifically our First Amendment Rights in order to perpetuate the myth that the Middle East is awash in Unicorns will not help, nor will it make the existence of Unicorns any more real.

I actually have friends who claim to be mostly conservative, that have taken this turn of events as a catalyst to actively support Barack Obama.  If I lived in the world of make believe, I would see the logic in their arguments, that somehow Mitt Romney's very accurate statement that our current foreign policy of appeasement and disengagement has and will continue to lead to disaster for America and the world at large was just beyond the pale of any type of electioneering ethics. (By the way, while stating this, they simultaneously ignore Barack Obama's libelous accusations of felonious activity and tax evasion on Romney's part, the statement of which really was beyond the pale of ethical behavior during an election.) In the real world though, I realize that Barack Obama's foreign policy of appeasement and disengagement has and will continue to lead to a disaster for America and the world at large.  In the real world, Mitt Romney is right to point that out, and he is also right to use his campaign to highlight that his Administration will not continue in this direction.  In the real world, the American people absolutely have the right to know just how spectacularly our President's foreign policy has failed. 

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.