A Hole in the Dam
Jeff Jarvis, riffing on a David Brooks column, sounds the wake-up call to the liberals still on the left:
My visits to East Berlin as a teen-ager taught me that "liberal" and "left" are hardly the same thing. When I went back to West Berlin after a two-year hiatus, a lot had changed. When I went back to East Berlin, nothing had changed.
Watching the convulsions in the Middle East reminds me that "right" and "conservative" aren't identical, either. If you're going to really stay committed to liberal values, you have to be willing to change sides politically.
If we liberals were smart, we'd be co-opting the issue of freedom and human rights -- the way that conservatives coopted it from us ... and the way the Bill Clinton coopted fiscal responsibility from conservatives.
Agree or disagree about how we got here. Agree or disagree about what comes next (read Brooks' column: even Wolfowitz says that Iraq must be the military exception). I don't even care if you don't want to give credit to Wolfowitz and Bush; I just don't want to see the fruits of their strategy rejected just because it is their strategy.
There's a hole in the dam of tyranny in the Middle East and freedom is flowing. Damnit. We should be holding the United Nations accountable for spreading freedom and not standing in the way. We should be figuring out how we can support movements of freedom -- without invasion -- in Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain.....
My visits to East Berlin as a teen-ager taught me that "liberal" and "left" are hardly the same thing. When I went back to West Berlin after a two-year hiatus, a lot had changed. When I went back to East Berlin, nothing had changed.
Watching the convulsions in the Middle East reminds me that "right" and "conservative" aren't identical, either. If you're going to really stay committed to liberal values, you have to be willing to change sides politically.
