OMG, A liberal intellectual has made the astonishing discovery….

…that there are liberals who don’t think!!!!!!!!!

I got that in this email this morning:

I am waiting for this book from the Duluth public library, which I requested that it order. Maybe, as a suspected member of The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I will better understand “liberals” after I read it.

So what revelations does this self described “liberal” who did not have the intellectual curiosity to explore what liberals were suppose to believe now have to say about liberalism?

Unlike so many of his colleagues, however, Mamet began to question the shibboleths and doctrines he had long taken for granted. In four years, the 64-year-old moved inexorably from left to right, like the hour hand on a clock. In The Secret Knowledge, his latest collection of essays, he confesses that “I examined my Liberalism, and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and time again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws.” But there was a profound difference; the gambler hurts primarily himself. “The great wickedness of Liberalism, I saw, was that those who devise the ever new State Utopias, whether crooks or fools, set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.”

The world is full of David Mamets who wake up one day and discover that they’ve lived on mental auto pilot. Frankly, I think think this playwright is looking backwards at where liberals were decades ago. His description of the evils of liberalizm hardly matches the current “liberal” President that Republicans accuse of being just shy of Joseph Stalin. Ironically, Mamet’s critique of “dogma” blinded people would be far more accurate if leveled at the Dittoheads in the GOP.

Mamet is nothing new. After Ronald Reagan got elected there were scores of Democratic Congressman who became Republican Congressman. (Kind of like a bunch of insecure girls abandoning their girl friend who didn’t get elected Homecoming queen)

One of the most stunning conversions took place early in the Reagan reign. They were a couple of editors, Horowitz and Collier, for the notoriously leftist Ramparts Magazine which my anti-war, moderate Republican father subscribed to for a year or two.:

Horowitz was writing scathing critiques of liberalism forty years ago. I guess David Mamet was too busy winning Tony Awards to notice.