Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Pajamas Media:

The second wave of backlash to Polanski’s arrest consists of a majority of leftists joining the right, all raging against Hollywood’s defense of his behavior, relieving parents everywhere that the despicable “Free Roman Polanski” petition is anomalous to the left-leaning — not at all representative of the philosophy as a whole.

They shouldn’t relax too much. It’s farce. Leftism owns that petition, no matter what it says to divorce itself from its amoral horror.

The left isn’t misrepresenting its position on Polanski, but just as surely they aren’t remotely upholding honesty. You simply don’t get to draw lines and make stands when you’ve made a career of relativity. You don’t get to do that and redefine good and bad based on the tides and expect to be embraced beyond the tide change.

The majority of the left doesn’t now stand for rape-rape, or even sorta rape — they say it’s not ever permissible or excusable.

No sir, and certainly not today.

That is all you should let yourself conclude after flitting through those same leftists’ prior work. When they allow themselves to move the uncrossable line, calibrating right and wrong to the news cycle, you only get to take solace that the left thinks Polanski a monster now, until a more favorable comparison arises.

Left-leaning and despise Polanski and the petition? Check your archives.

Ever apologize for a terrorist? Ever empathize with a suicide killer or his cause, researching the struggles of his upbringing while that special breed of emergency personnel was still washing his victims’ organs from the pizza parlor? Death by shrapnel is a worse fate than Polanski’s victim suffered, don’t you know, and Polanski witnessed unspeakable horror prior to his crime, too.

What did you write when “Tookie” Williams was executed? Were you kinder to him than Terry Schiavo’s folks?

Did you see the good and the bad with Arafat? Ever call Bibi a hardliner and Abbas a moderate?

You drew a line on Polanski’s case, yes, but which word narrows your pupils: Guevara? Or Malkin?

Does a Bill Ayers’ nail bomb seem a more palatable agent of crime than Larry Craig’s foot? Did you treat it as such?

The “Free Polanski” list is leftism’s monster, no matter how many leftists claim to disown it. No such list could ever be compiled by conservatism, classical liberalism, objectivism, or any other related creed built around natural law and it’s unalterable ethical code. Only leftism allows one to stand for Polanski, and another to stand against him, and both be definable as authentic believers of the philosophy.

It’s piffle. You’re not talking sense or being intellectually honest any more now than ever, as long as you’re still trailing that wake of subjective reasoning. You don’t just get to join a common-sense backlash against Hollywood, and think it means a whit about women and rape, when you still ascribe to a philosophy that does not allow you to scratch a permanent line in the dirt. All you get to say is that you despise Polanski’s behavior except when you do not, if your archives contain anything at all parallel to the above.

Either purge them, recant, and commit yourself to objectivity, or just sign the damned list. Because it’s not like it means anything, anyway.