Liberals and, well, Everything.

I've made the point before that liberals are emotional thinkers and conservatives are rational thinkers. Emotional thinkers can only think in the very narrow focus of now; it is impossible for a liberal to consider the long-term affects of anything because it's not possible to have a genuine emotional reaction to something that hasn't happened yet. You can attempt to think about how you will feel when a loved one dies based on past experience, but it doesn't work because thinking and feeling are distinct and autonomous functions. Until something happens you cannot have an emotional feeling for it.

That's why the future costs of all Democrat proposals are meaningless to them. They can't react to something until it has an emotional impact, which is why liberals always frame something in terms of its effect on people. We've all heard about people with autism who can do store all sorts of abstract information in their heads but if you ask them what a new house costs they would say $1. In that sense, autism is just a sever form of liberalism. You could also say that all liberals are "pre-autistic." :)

When considering the issue of enhanced interrogation tactics, or "torture", liberals can only define what they think today based on how they feel about the effect of the interrogation of the subject. They hear that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was "tortured" by simulated drowning, and they are horrified. There's no context - nothing that binds KSM to the deaths of thousands of Americans, only the isolated instance of the waterboarding event. So naturally they are appalled and cry out for justice - Bush and Cheney must pay a heavy price!

(BTW, "waterboarding" is when a subject is restrained on a board and tipped back and then water is poured over his face for exactly 45 seconds. One would think the drowning effect could be easily thwarted by simply holding one's breath.)

On NPR today the discussion included 3 "experts" in related fields, and one of the "experts", a woman, claimed that the "ticking time-bomb" situation, where information must be extracted from a likely subject immediately or something very bad happens, has never happened, so we must always view interrogation in the lens that whatever information there is to be gained should be gathered without time-constraint.

This argument is obviously ridiculous, because the natural implication that the ticking time bomb has never happened is that nothing bad has ever happened in the world - no terrorism or war or hurt feelings. It's delusional. There is always some period of time before a terrorist event which a reasonable person would obviously say is time-critical. Always.

The problem is that the good guys never know when that is - only the bad guys know it. So either you patiently work over a subject with the expectation that nothing bad will ever happen, or you actively and aggressively mine them for what you believe is time-sensitive information about the next big terror event.

A rational thinker understands that, because we cannot predict the future, we must always assume that, based on history, a terror attack may be imminent. Failure to do so is the only failure there is.

An emotional thinker fails to understand the potential for future events based on current action or lack there of because they have no emotional attachment to those potential events.

This is why liberals should never be in charge of the national security, why they don't get it when it comes to interrogation techniques, and why they need to be voted out of power at the earliest possible interval before their lack of foresight destroys what democracy remains for future generations of Americans.