Traitors are Patriots

We Fools have it all wrong. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are not traitors; they're merely dissidents. Therefore, they're actually patriots!

Well, by that reckoning, I guess we Fools had better petition the Church to canonize Judas. If traitors are patriots, why can't they be saints?

Power Line has the story of our Reasonable mouth-foamers' latest:

Rago's brief report on the event -- "Rosenberg reruns" -- opens a window onto the mentality of the left and its enduring hostility to the United States as well as its tortured relationship to the truth. Consider that the guilt of the Rosenbergs has been established beyond a reasonable doubt at least since the publication in 1983 of The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton. See also Radosh's New York Sun column "Filling in the gaps in the Rosenberg file."

It's hard to believe that the Rosenberg case has a continuing impact on the left today, although the syndrome on display at the conference seems to represent the heart of the contemporary left -- in Rago's words, turning treason into dissent and then patriotism. Kushner and Doctorow speak:

Mr. Kushner argued the Rosenbergs were "murdered, basically." Mr. Doctorow went further, explaining that he wanted to use their circumstances to tell "a story of the mind of the country." It was a mind, apparently, filled with loathing and paranoia--again, never mind the truth of the charges against the Rosenbergs or other spies of the time. "The principles of the Cold War had reached absurdity," he continued. "We knew that the Russians were no threat, but we wanted to persuade Americans to be afraid" and so impose "a Puritan, punitive civil religion." Pronounced Mr. Kushner: "Our failure to come to terms with a brutal past, our failure to open up the coffins and let the ghosts out, has led to our current, horrendous situation."

Rago notes that when it came time to ask questions, the moderator instructed any "Cold War warriors" not to ask any "disrespectful" questions.

The love affair many Reasonable Individual Absolutists have with communism continues to this day. A Nanny State to ease all of our social conscience allows us all to pursue the One Thing that Matters without care. Therefore, Marx's dream and Stalin's nightmare must become the Law of the Land. Any Reasonable person can see this. All the Rosenburg's did was further this noble goal, which is obviously in America's best interest. Therefore, they must be patriots of the highest order. To paraphrase that famous military spokesman from the Vietnam Era, they had to destroy America in order to save her.

With carpet-slobbers like this driving the far left's maniacal grip on the Democratic party, it's little wonder the Donkeys lose. Joe and Jane Six-Pack will keep sweeping these curs out into the cold until they either grow up or fade away. And these Reasonable elites will never get that.