Amused Cynic

This will be a potpourri post, one of those catch-all/catch-up posts that I do after a weekend away. The title comes, in part, from Harry Stein’s excellent column, which appeared on my favorite page of my favorite section of my favorite newspaper: The Taste page in the Friday “Weekend Journal” section of the Wall Street Journal.

Stein’s column deals with Walter and Gwendolyn Meyers, the “Spies Next Door” whose trite “New Leftist” ideology led them to betray their country in the interests of their supposed “loyalty to humanity” by spying for a fascist dictator named Fidel Castro for more than three decades. As Stein notes, “One wag on the Web speculated that the couple would beat the rap by pleading insanity based on Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Jimmuh Derangement Syndrome is more like it—their treason extends back to the Carter administration. Maybe these “pro-abortion, pot-smoking environmentalists” were duped into supporting the Caribbean’s leading gulag by Cuban agents plying them with Billy Beer.

The disturbing point of Stein’s column, though, is that

What makes them [the Myers] clichés is that there are so many others like them. In left-of-center precincts across America, from the Upper West Side to the studio lot where Sean Penn is filming his latest movie, and including countless college campuses in between, Fidel Castro is even now regarded with understanding and, yes, something like affection. True enough, some have qualms about his abuse of political prisoners and, even more so, his treatment of gays and people suffering from AIDS. But, overall, people have a soft spot for the guy who not only took on the big, bad U.S., but did so with such élan. Castro would certainly be welcome at any dinner party — as opposed to, say, a Republican!

And we haven’t even gotten to that bona fide hero, T-shirt model Che.

Is Stein suggesting that we monitor all of our neighbors and relatives in case they might be the next Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, or Alger Hiss, or even our congressperson, who might be a latent Henry Wallace? Of course not….he asks and answers that rhetorical question here (this is one of those articles that’s very hard to excerpt….read the whole thing):

Would others among Castro’s legion of liberal admirers likewise be inclined to spy for Cuba? Probably not very many. But probably more than you think — if they were cultivated properly, as the Myerses were, and asked very nicely. Why? Because it would be cast as work on behalf of suffering humanity, in the struggle against the forces of rapacious exploitation.

This is the romance of the left. Many conservatives wonder how seemingly intelligent souls, who recoil at the horrors of the Nazi camps or the torture cells of a Pinochet, can regard the despots of the left, many of whose murderous totals are even higher, with apparent equanimity. It is because in the emotion-fueled world of liberalism, it is words that matter most, and professed intent, not the facts.

It has always been thus. Back in 1951, a former Soviet operative in the U.S. named Hede Massing, a key prosecution figure in the Alger Hiss case, wrote a memoir detailing her espionage work. “‘What about loyalty to my country?’” she recalls one prospective recruit to her network asking plaintively — an objection she successfully countered by arguing that “loyalty to humanity” takes “precedence over any other kind of loyalty.”

In various guises, such a sentiment is heard even more often today. Reportedly, the Myerses told an undercover agent they looked forward to sailing “home” — meaning to Cuba. It is the same word by which their foolish, starry-eyed predecessors used to refer to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

This was driven home for me as I sat at a table at a wedding reception on Saturday, hoisting a few with a cousin-by-marriage who is in the popular music biz. His parents are socialist, flower-child punks whose defining moments were their anti-war marches in the ’60s, and they’ve never gotten over it (divorced when the self-indulgent hippie husband felt the need to experience free love with strangers and marriage turned out a bourgeois construct, anyway…yes, he’s an academic with a hefty trust fund). As I listened to their young, charming, twit of a son mock “global warming deniers” on the basis of absolutely nothing other than his own demagogue-induced feelings, I couldn’t help but feel a real sadness at the evil in our midst. You can’t even have a reasoned conversation with these “Bush Lied, People Died” tropists. It is the mentality that produces such things as The Stoning of Soraya M, but they don’t see it….they lack the historical perspective to see that unthinking political advocacy—secular religion—is identical to what produced Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and on and on. Again, from Stein:

“Occasionally, he would voice frustration with U.S. policies,” noted the Washington Post of Walter Kendall Myers, the aging New Leftist recently arrested with his wife, Gwendolyn, on charges of spying for Cuba. “But to his liberal neighbors in Northwest D.C.,” the story continued, “it was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘We were all appalled by the Bush years,’ one said.”

In this account and others, the Myerses seem less like shady characters out of a spy novel than like some of the more adamant residents of the leafy, left-of-center New York suburb where I live. They, too, as the Post has it, manifest “a deep and long-standing anger toward this country,” and they certainly share Mr. Myers’s rage, as recorded in his diary, at America’s oil companies and health-care system.

That the Myerses’ politics appear indistinguishable from today’s garden-variety left-liberalism has not been lost on conservatives. One wag on the Web speculated that the couple would beat the rap by pleading insanity based on Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Here’s the shocking part (kidding),” noted Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft. “A Walter Myers from Ashburn, Virginia donated to the Obama Campaign this past year.”
[Espionage then and now: Hede Massing (above) and Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn.] Reuters

In fact, the alleged spooks are walking clichés, their every political and social attitude reflecting the mix of self-righteousness and naïveté that is the basis of post-1960s liberalism. Hugely privileged — the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, Mr. Myers went to prep school and sailed a 38-foot sloop — the couple idealized the poor. Seamlessly, they moved from antiwar activism to pro-abortion activism and then, in the fullness of time, along with everyone else, to environmentalism. He was an academic — enough said. She got into politics, like so many others, via the McGovern campaign. They grew pot in their basement. And, yes, they spied on behalf of Castro’s murderous regime not for the money but on principle. They’d been searching for a sense of meaning.

What is so troubling about this is the fervor with which these misguided souls believe their indoctrination. There is no reasoning with them. There is no sense of logic. These same people who support Obama for “not meddling” in the affairs of an oppressive regime that permits women to be stoned to death, and gays strangled, sees nothing wrong with Obama’s “meddling” to support a rogue president who was attempting an extra-legal extension of his term in Honduras. That is something that should give us all pause…our “timid” foreign policy president lining up with Chavez and Ortega and Castro. Time to wake up, people. These people who believe this stuff so fervently see nothing wrong with sneaking things past you, as the Obama/Ayers/Alinsky administration is doing right under your nose. It’s their “loyalty to humanity,” don’t you know. Trumps everything else.

Bernie Madoff got 150 years today. Good. May the Myerses get the same sentence, and live it out right next door to him. What they helped Castro do to others should be their own fate.

I’m reminded of Judge Irving Kaufman’s remarks as he sentenced the Rosenbergs:

Citizens of this country who betray their fellow-countrymen can be under none of the delusions about the benignity of Soviet power that they might have been prior to World War II. The nature of Russian terrorism is now self-evident. Idealism as a rational dissolves . . .
I consider your crime worse than murder. Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed. In committing the act of murder, the criminal kills only his victim. The immediate family is brought to grief and when justice is meted out the chapter is closed. But in your case, I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.
No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day–for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack. Nor can it be said in mitigation of the offense that the power which set the conspiracy in motion and profited from it was not openly hostile to the United States at the time of the conspiracy. If this was your excuse the error of your ways in setting yourselves above our properly constituted authorities and the decision of those authorities not to share the information with Russia must now be obvious . . .
In the light of this, I can only conclude that the defendants entered into this most serious conspiracy against their country with full realization of its implications . . .
The statute of which the defendants at the bar stand convicted is clear. I have previously stated my view that the verdict of guilty was amply justified by the evidence. In the light of the circumstances, I feel that I must pass such sentence upon the principals in this diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation, which will demonstrate with finality that this nation’s security must remain inviolate; that traffic in military secrets, whether promoted by slavish devotion to a foreign ideology or by a desire for monetary gains must cease.
The evidence indicated quite clearly that Julius Rosenberg was the prime mover in this conspiracy. However, let no mistake be made about the role which his wife, Ethel Rosenberg, played in this conspiracy. Instead of deterring him from pursuing his ignoble cause, she encouraged and assisted the cause. She was a mature woman–almost three years older than her husband and almost seven years older than her younger brother. She was a full-fledged partner in this crime.
Indeed the defendants Julius and Ethel Rosenberg placed their devotion to their cause above their own personal safety and were conscious that they were sacrificing their own children, should their misdeeds be detected–all of which did not deter them from pursuing their course. Love for their cause dominated their lives–it was even greater than their love for their children.”

RELATED: Neo goes tinfoil, and I say “welcome to the club.”

…our own president, despite his original refusal to “meddle” in the affairs of Iran, has attempted to meddle mightily in Honduran affairs in order to save Zelaya. The manner in which Obama tried to interfere highlights both his own hubris and his misplaced faith in the power of “dialogue”[...]A year ago I might have considered the statement I’m about to make to be a slide into tinfoil hat territory. But now I believe that Mr. Aguilera may be giving Obama way too much credit. I suspect that Obama understands exactly what dangers Chavez and Castro pose, and that he either doesn’t care or that he actually approves.

Obama has said that he is “deeply concerned” by the news of the removal of Zelaya and that he calls on “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the Inter-American Democratic Charter.” So far it seems, however, that it was actually Zelaya who was violating those rules of law. It also sounds as though Obama’s definition of “democratic norms” might include “one person, one vote, one time.”

Zelaya was determined that Honduras follow in the footsteps of that stellar democracy, Venezuela, which not long ago (see this) paved the way, in a similar referendum, for Hugo Chavez to become president for life.

A democracy can vote for tyranny—but that’s what constitutions are designed to prevent.