#rsrh I assume that VDH was writing rhetorically…

…when he asked:

Why is being appalled by Hanks’s infantile philosophizing a “right-wing” or “conservative” reaction? Would not liberals as well be angry that in blanket fashion, Hanks had reduced veterans’ efforts in the Pacific after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor (and to be followed by a magnanimous peace that fostered autonomous Japanese democracy) into largely a racist rage to annihilate?

(Background here.)

The answer, of course, is that mainstream conservatives do not generally allow people in their coalition to make puerile moral equivalency arguments like Tom Hanks’ without an immediate (and usually angry) challenge in reply; while mainstream liberals… do.

I’m truly sorry to have to write that, but it’s not my fault that the Democrats have ceded the battlespace on American exceptionalism in order to maintain a ever-more-fragile voting majority.

Moe Lane