Equivalence

A friend sent the following email last night:

"On the plane ride from Costa Rica to Atlanta my girlfriend started conversing with another woman. The woman related that she’d been bitten by a tarantula while in Costa Rica. The clinic she went to was awesome – they waited on her almost immediately, it was cheap, they sent her away with three pills and she was fine – what a contrast with the US health care system. She also told us that she lived in Cambridge for years. Based on that, her appearance, and the Costa Rican vacation, I'm guessing that she’s liberal. She also mentioned, by the way, that a tarantula bite is not poisonous, just painful.  One might wonder why she needed any care at all, but no matter, the care was awesome.  

"If I’d been quicker on my feet I would have responded with the following story: We spent a lot of time with David, our primary host for the surf camp. At one point he said his ear had been hurting on and off for a year. He described his symptoms,which were consistent with swimmer’s ear. David had gone to a Costa Rican clinic a while back. He was seen almost immediately, and the visit was inexpensive, but the doctor told him there was nothing that could be done for him and he should take ibuprofen. [My girlfriend] recently had swimmer’s ear and had the medication with her. She gave it to David and after three days his pain was gone."

I guess the moral of the anecdote is that the US health care system is overpriced but more competent than those in Third World countries. But the email got me to thinking: why is it that liberals always try so hard to look for the worst about the US and the best about other countries? 

This is not a brief for how everything here is wonderful: there is plenty wrong here, including overpriced health care. But the way liberals struggle so desperately to talk up Third World countries is actually comical.

The same people who rave about the artistry that goes into a clay pot or a wood carving would never be caught dead praising the intelligence which went into, say, designing a space station.

The same people who rave about the ecology-friendly lifestyle practiced by the Yanomamo Indians -- in stark contrast to our own -- would never dream of mentioning their penchant for cannibalism.

The same people who pride themselves on being "open-minded" in fact keep their minds closed to all the the most rigidly leftist mindset: socialism (though not by that name) is better than capitalism, race is a social construct, etc. etc.

I once heard a liberal use the following phrase: "a really horrible person, you know, like Richard Nixon or Idi Amin." The liberal actually thought he was demonstrating his fair-mindedness by including Idi Amin, a black man, in that horrible company. 

Nixon was not a saint, but he didn't gain power through a coup, he never personally tortured political opponents, didn't keep the heads of his enemies in his freezer, and never killed his wife for having an abortion. But, evidently he and Amin were morally equivalent.

You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to insist that there are no differences between people (or peoples), just as you can when you try to insist that there are no differences between countries, other than the moral ones which show us in a bad light. 

I guess the direction our country will go in next depends largely on who our next President will be -- someone nice and smart like Barack Obama, or someone horrible like Mitt Romney or Jeffrey Dahmer.