I don’t think liberals are the only ones guilty of intellectual arrogance. But liberals are wrong in thinking that their positions are justifiable through an appeal to universal reason alone, and that those who disagree are somehow irrational or prejudiced or both, or they are not putting enough effort into doing what should be done or what reason dictates, and that is all success requires. Hence their explanations for why things are not going as they should be in Iraq and so on.

Here is the true victory of liberalism, the true defeat of conservative thought, not in the policy specifics but in assumptions of how things are and how the world works. It takes the liberal worldview that one knows better than others what’s good for them to spawn a Project for a New American Century, or that Iraq and the whole Middle East would be better remade in our image and likeness (or one sufficiently “western” and “democratic” for our tastes) or that anyone on earth would greet an invasion force as liberators because they mean well….

Conservatives know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, liberals think good intentions absolve every error.

It reminds me of that Jefferson quote about fearing for our country because God is just.

I’m given pause, rather, by the loopy conspiracy theories and the apparent failure of a preacher of black theology to speak to the sins that prevail among his own ethny. Would Obama appoint a Special Prosecutor to seek out the formulators of HIV?