[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/09/151206581-e1346735754800.gif)After three days watching the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, I’m thinking that America is in serious trouble. Not so much because we’re in some sort of inevitable financial decline, nor even because we lack the entrepreneurial spirit that has always been associated with American greatness.
America is in trouble because so many Americans are willfully blinding themselves to obvious truths, moral and economic.
The great clarifying moment of the convention came for me as I was leaving. I walked down the street outside the convention arena, past a sand statue of President Obama, grinning toothily. Fans snapped photos of Obama Ozymandias. Past thousands of conventioneers, all clad in Obama gear – not Democratic Party gear, but Obama gear. Past illegal street vendors who would never pay a dime in taxes, but who were happily selling t-shirts for a redistributionist president.
All of this had no effect on me. But then I walked past a group of pro-life protesters. These weren’t exactly the rational type – they were carrying around placards with Bible verses and blowing on ram’s horns. But they were carrying massive posters with pictures of aborted babies on them.
And past those pictures, smiling blithely, strode men wearing pins they had just picked up from Planned Parenthood. The pins read, “I Love Pro-Choice Girls.”
This was a stunning juxtaposition. These men were celebrating pro-choice women for a simple reason: they knew that if they had unprotected sex with these women, and the women got pregnant, the women would kill their unborn children.
None of them even glanced at the abortion pictures. There’s a reason for that: doing so would have ruined their day. That’s a simple truth of human nature: people will blind themselves to facts that ruin their day. If they like abortion in principle, they don’t want to be shown pictures of the results.
It was the entire convention in microcosm. I spent a fair bit of time walking around and asking delegates to the DNC three questions: what was the deficit? What was the unemployment rate? And how many net jobs had President Obama created? Not a single delegate got all three questions right. Most couldn’t even answer a single question correctly. But they cheered wildly when President Obama entered the arena, because knowing the facts would have ruined their day.
The same held true when asked about taxes. Most of the delegates at the convention weren’t fans of theft. They believed in private property. But they didn’t want to acknowledge that government confiscation of private property is legalized theft. And President Obama wasn’t about to disabuse them of that notion. Instead, he told them that he wanted to change the tax code so it would “ask” people earning over $250,000 to pay higher taxes. Of course, Obama wouldn’t be asking. He’d be telling. But Democrats didn’t care about that – it felt so nice to think that taxes were optional, and that they were more patriotic because they were volunteering the cash of others.
On Jerusalem, Jews around the convention were in total denial. After the DNC omitted Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from their platform – along with condemnations of Hamas, 1949 borders, and the so-called right of return – the Democrats tried to pretend that nothing was wrong with the platform. Robert Gibbs ignored the question completely when I asked him, insisting against all evidence that Obama was the most pro-Israel president ever. Then, when the DNC realized that its platform risked its political future, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tried to switch it – and endured three failed voice votes before steamrolling the platform change.
And still Jews at the convention refused to acknowledge the problem. When I asked one fellow, wearing a yarmulke, about which party was pro-Israel, he stared at me blankly for a solid five seconds. Finally, he said, “Same-sex marriage is a Jewish value.” Willful blindness.
It is willful blindness that will doom the United States if anything does. Blindness to consequences. Blindness to imminent bankruptcy; blindness to moral evil; blindness to anti-American actions. See, such realities ruin people’s day.
I recently had this conversation with Brian Whitman, my liberal co-host along with Heidi Harris on KRLA 870 The Answer. He accused me of wanting President Obama to fail. “No,” I answered. “I want reality to succeed. And the reality is that he is doomed to fail.” Brian didn’t like that answer – he still thinks Obama’s economic record is a good one.
But reality is the only true solution to America’s ills. Willful blindness is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, with half the population buying into Obamaism, our vision is growing daily dimmer.
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