I once had a conversation with a prominent and influential New Left-era individual about what the possible roots of our vast ideological differences between the two of us. I reasoned that my conservatism is more then anything else a product of my patriotism, especially after 9/11 – which in turn leads to my rejection of (and often anger at) New Leftism and it’s contempt for patriotism and America’s interests, which I find to be insulting. He took this into account and explained that in their view “America is flawed just as any other nation is, and the less powerful it is the less damage it could do to the rest of the world”.

But isn’t that view contradictory toward it’s stated ends? Look at what happened to the world when American interests withdrew from it in the late 1970s. Are the of Iran better off now then they were under the Shah? Are the people of southern Vietnam and better off then they were when they were people of South Vietnam? And today, are the people of Gaza better off then they were under the Israelis?

Now that I finally got around to reading that much talked about article Norman Podhoretz wrote for the Wall Street Journal, some of this makes more sense.

Mr. Obama was a genuine product of the political culture that had its birth among a marginal group of leftists in the early 1960s and that by the end of the decade had spread metastatically to the universities, the mainstream media, the mainline churches, and the entertainment industry. Like their communist ancestors of the 1930s, the leftist radicals of the ’60s were convinced that the United States was so rotten that only a revolution could save it.

But whereas the communists had in their delusional vision of the Soviet Union a model of the kind of society that would replace the one they were bent on destroying, the new leftists only knew what they were against: America, or Amerika as they spelled it to suggest its kinship to Nazi Germany. Thanks, however, to the unmasking of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare, they did not know what they were for.

Exactly right! That is why they only PRETEND to care about people in Cuba, or Venezuela, or Iraq, or the Palestinian territories. That is how a supposed peace group sends money to Al Qaeda in Iraq. That is how a Human Rights group could have a supporter of Saddam Hussein and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre as it’s Middle East chief. That is how Arafat could win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Podhoretz goes on to discuss how the New Left “had pulled off the incredible feat of taking over the Democratic Party behind the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972”, and

Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and when Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton (the only two of the six who won) tried each in his own way to govern in its spirit, their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.

Nobody nobody tells this story like David Horowitz. See for yourself.