Dialectical Disaster: Inside Blowback

Mark Steyn is one of my favorite authors and I haven't been featuring his work nearly enough. In fact, it's inexcusable that I haven't quoted him at all on this blog.

So let me overcompensate by stealing in its entirety a concise home run on Van Jones he just posted:

Powerline notices the evolution of Van the Truther's views. On September 13th 2001, as the towers still burned and the lampposts of lower Manhattan were plastered with flyers for missing loved ones, Van Jones spoke at a rally "against racism and war":

A recurring theme of the speakers was the brutal violence committed by or supported by the United States government on a daily basis. "The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City," said Van Jones, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, who also warned against forthcoming violence by the Bush Administration. "The US cannot bomb its way out of this one. Safety at home requires justice abroad."

Gotcha. Blowback. America had it coming.

That was Van Jones in the fall of 2001. A couple of years later and suddenly it's the 9/11-was-an-inside-job routine.

Traveling through the Middle East about six months after 9/11, I was struck by the number of Arabs, from Egypt to the Gulf, who simultaneously believed (a) the Mossad were behind the attacks and (b) it was a great victory for the Muslim world. Van Jones would seem to be an American variant of the same phenomenon: a man who believes 9/11 was (a) blowback for the actions of the US government's war machine and (b) an inside job by the US government's war machine.

No wonder the left derides those boorish enough to bring this stuff up: Why, surely all sophisticated persons know these positions are little more than lifestyle accessories or fashion hemlines. One season, everyone on the catwalk is agreed 9/11 was blowback by Jihadists for Social Justice. The next, everyone is equally agreed that Bush called up the White House Steel Melting Czar and buried the whole thing under "miscellaneous" in the budget.

This is just a beautiful portrait of why lefty loons and Islamic nutjobs are soulmates, no? Their logical faculties are so deficient that they routinely believe entirely irreconcilable things simultaneously.

Good Marxists are the very embodiment of dialectical disaster.

And in general they are nuttier than A.D.D. riddled Cuckoo Clocks.