Allow me to paint a word picture for you:

You enter a room, quietly close the door behind you and sit in the rose colored easy chair next to the lamp on the south side of the room. Looking around, you take in your surroundings. The room is warm, and comfortable. You glance around looking at nothing in particular finally noticing a brightly colored square of paper on the coffee table. You pick it up and try to think of the name of the color. Forrest green you decide. No, wait, perhaps a deep emerald green. Yes, that’s it. You take the paper to your spouse and note the deep shade of green, scintillating in the light. Your spouse looks at you in confusion and says “No sweetheart, that is scarlet red.” Confused, you ask your children and they too say red. For a week, everyone you ask says “red,” but you still see green.”

The reality is that it doesn’t matter what other people say, your experience of the square of paper is green, that is your perception of reality and it matters not what other peoples reality is. The knowledge that you are colorblind, that you will always see one color when other’s see another matters not. In the case above, green is your reality.

So too it is with politics. It doesn’t matter a whit if you are a conservative or liberal, a communist or libertarian, a socialist or anarchist. Your perspective is colored by your world view. Now, to say that some world views, some political systems are more, shall we say, realistic than others ought to be a no brainer. And so it is. I am amused by liberals that proclaim that they are “Proud Members Of The Reality Based Community” as if by proclaiming that, they are the only purveyors of truth, justice and the American Way! Of course, the entire purpose of the Reality Based Community canard is to provide an internal boost to what must be a very lonely position, say that of seeing a green square of paper when most everyone else sees red. My real problem with liberals is that they see the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Their reality is not based in reality, but is completely colored by their perception, and too often, it is not a pretty sight. Take education for example. The liberal position is that we need a federal bureaucracy, more teachers unions, more money, longer school days; we need to fix the broken “structure” of education. It doesn’t seem to matter that the so called structure is the same as it has been for the last 75 years or so and that it worked pretty well in the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and with the advent of the professional educator the so called structure seemed to break down yielding 4 year olds being charged with sexual harrassment, a multitude of “pride” days and high school teachers being terminated for teaching real as opposed to say “culturally correct” history.

The coloring of politics has also entered the vaunted main stream media or MSM as we bloggers call it. I know, I know, the soi disant reality based community (shall we abbreviate this as RBC for the rest of this article?) maintains that the MSM is owned by corporations and thus must be “conservative” but that is reflective of their world view; all corporations are money grubbing conservative organs of the state who protects corporations via tax structure forcing the weak and the poor to feed their hard earned dollars to the fat cats. Of course, the “real” reality is that newspapers are owned by corporations but staffed by graduates of schools of journalism and anybody that believes that those schools are not “generally” bastions of left leaning thought are not only not thinking, they are not using one scintilla of their supposed brain power.

Thus, we get headlines like posted in the L.A. Times: “Monthly U.S. toll in Iraq at 2-year high”. The headline is the political view of an organization viewing casualties and other stories from Iraq through the liberal prisim, but it is the “green square of paper” we talked about above. The reality is (courtesy of Greyhawk at The Mudville Gazette):

Barring a New Year’s Eve plane crash, 2006 looks like a slightly better year in Iraq for US casualties

…the year total of 816 as of Saturday morning, is on course to be slightly lower than last year’s 846 U.S. fatalities. The number of U.S. wounded also declined this year, from 5,947 in 2005 to 5,676 so far this year.

(We should also note that the majority of troops wounded in Iraq returned to duty within 72 hours.)
O.K. Roper, this means what? Well, simply put the American people are getting a description of the War in Iraq as a massive US failure and George Bush as a bumbling idiot at best and a war criminal at worst. The reality, as opposed to the view of the RBC, is that the massive civilian casualties in Iraq are the work of Iraqis against other Iraqis. Sunni vs S’hia as it were. Some call it civil war, but that is a little misleading because it is sectarian violence by one tribe of Muslims against another tribe of Muslims. The common ground here is that many of the illegal combatants here believe their version of Allah is better than the other version of Allah and that alone gives them license to kill other Muslims.

Now, has United States policy played into this? Sure, somewhat. Back some time ago an arrest warrant was issued for Moqtada Sadr:

An Iraqi judge has released an arrest warrant for Moqtada Sadr in connection with the death of a moderate Shia leader, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, in April 2003, just two days after the fall of Baghdad. Moqtada Sadr strongly denies any role in the murder. His supporters have also clashed with followers of Ayatollah Sistani. He has visited neighbouring Iran since Saddam Hussein was ousted, meeting senior officials in Tehran.

Got that did you? I’ll repeat for any liberals reading this blog: “He has visited neighbouring Iran since Saddam Hussein was ousted, meeting senior officials in Tehran.”

Iran? Iran, you say? What does that have to do with the criminal liability of George Dubya? Well, it should show those in the RBC that the violence in Iraq is not necessarily the fault of GWB, but rather the involvement of Iran in an act of state supported terrorism. The same will go for the Syrian version of Wormtongue (with all due apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien). That the RBC cannot see this because it is a red square of paper should not be surprising. All they can see is the green because of their own inability to understand that their perception is not the so called real world.

There will, no doubt, be those who would challange this understanding, but that is OK, it is, again, their perception. The reality is, despite what the majority of the left would think, that the sectarian violence in Iraq is sponsored by two states, Syria and Iran. Oddly enough, those with clear eyes can see that, can see that Moqtada Sadr is a puppet with a famous name (his father, a revered S’hia cleric, was reportedly assassinated by Saddam’s orders).

So, if you do indeed have the ability to think, to reason beyond your own perceptions, think through who benefits from an unstable Iraq? Who is rapidly running out of the ability to bring their oil to the market because they have ignored their infrastructure from the beginning of the so called mullahocracy:

“They need to invest $2.5bn (£1.28bn) a year just to stand still and they’re not doing it because it’s politically easier to spend the money on social welfare and the army than to wait four to six years for a return on investment,” he said. “They’ve been running down the industry like this for 20 years.”

For 40 of my 60 years on this earth the MSM has been pissing on my shoes. I didn’t believe it was rain then, and I don’t believe it now, but then, my eyes aren’t blind to reality even though I see things through a conservative perspective.

CrossPosted at GM’s Corner

Said GM @ 5:56 pm | Permalink   

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