The American Spectator

THE PROBLEM FOR ALL of these people, whether they are dealing with Chris Wallace, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, an elected President and his legitimately appointed political surrogates in the State Department, or in Thistlethwaite’s case the candor of a respected member of her own party, they are forced — forced — to deal with life outside the bubble. To confront the reality of those not swept up in the liberal mania.

The reaction is, literally, anger or hot letters of resignation or, in Limbaugh’s case, demands for same. It is never, ever a dawning reality that there is quite another world-view out there held by thoughtful and honest people who simply disagree in good faith. The liberal mania insists that what they know is equivalent to a revealed truth. Again, Buckley: “…it is usually necessary (for the liberal) to berate the person who brought the matter up.”

Exactly. And the considerable experience of conservatives since 1959 suggests that’s putting it mildly.

This is doubtless a revelation to Geraldine Limbaugh…ah…Ferraro. When Rush Limbaugh made essentially the same point Ms. Ferraro did about Barack Obama, except in a sports context, he was pilloried by a sports network that instantly revealed itself as infected with a serious case of liberal mania. If one waits long enough, goes the Chinese proverb, one will see the body of your enemy float by. In Limbaugh’s case the body in question would be any prominent American liberal, and to doubtless her own surprise that body turns out to belong to Ms. Ferraro.

Ms. Ferraro is no more a racist than Rush Limbaugh. But in a casual aside she made the mistake of doing what Limbaugh has educated a good bit of the American conservative movement to do quite deliberately — and what he did on ESPN: challenge the liberal conventional wisdom. Think outside the left’s bubble. Don’t get swept up by the liberal mania, whether in politics, sports or anywhere else. In doing so (presumably accidentally) a clearly startled and now quite furious Ferraro has found herself targeted as if she were a Klansman by no less than Obama himself, who, suddenly stripped of his cover by his minister, appears quite adept at playing the meanest of the old fashioned politics. One would hope that Ferraro, newly and thusly mugged, would both continue to hold her ground and realize the racial game that has been afoot in her party for some two centuries, first with whites and, since the 1960s, with blacks, Obama included. The game is even played at ESPN.

Much has been made of the importance of this election, and surely when it comes to Iraq or health care or judges or the economy it is. But there is something else at work here in this election, and perhaps Obama is right to open up a genuine conversation on race. It is time, past time, for the bursting of the liberal bubble, to see if it is indeed possible to halt the “hurtling irrationality” Buckley identified so long ago. To coax outside into the warm sunshine of honest debate those liberals on duty holding on desperately to an increasingly frightened, timid, stereotypical, reflexively mean-spirited and condescending philosophy.

The liberal mania.