The Quiet Conservative May 17, 2007
The Leopard and the Liberal
The following African folk tale was taken from The Book of Virtues and is called The Leopard’s
Revenge. It's been modified it a bit.
Once a leopard cub strayed from his home and ventured into the midst of a great herd of
elephants. His mother and father had warned him to stay out of the way of the giant beasts, but he
did not listen. Suddenly, the elephants began to stampede, and one of them stepped on the cub
without even knowing it. Soon afterward, a hyena found his body and went to tell his parents.
It is a dangerous world out there. It is easy to avoid facing that because we have a history of being
lucky. That luck failed on 9/11 and we have to face up to the fact that it might fail again. The
dangers aren't something new. After World War II the conflict of good and evil continued under the
guise of a cold war. Totalitarianism, or Socialism, has always battled freedom and the value of the
individual. The Iron Curtain that descended over Eastern Europe, the missiles being installed in
Cuba, the attempt to crush South Korea, the loss of Southeast Asia, the face-off in the Gulf, all are
events that might have gone differently. Most times through effort and luck, we passed through
undisturbed at home. On 9/11 we didn't. It brought a face to a different form of totalitarianism that
seeks to destroy us.
“I have terrible news,” he said. “I've found your son lying dead in the field.”
The mother and father leopard gave great cries of grief and rage.
“How did it happen?” the father demanded. “Tell me who did this to our son! I will never rest
until I have had my revenge!”
“The elephants did it,” answered the hyena.
September 11th should have brought the nation fully awake to the dangers of Islamic
fundamentalism. It did not bring the left wing of the Democratic Party awake at all. In their minds it
was, and is, the US that is at fault. It is our policies that have brought us here. The culmination of
years of provocation is dismissed. From the Iran hostage crisis through the Marine barracks bombing
in Lebanon, from the first World Trade Center bombing through the recent Fort Dix plot, the Islamic
terrorists have wanted to kill as many Americans as they can. But the effort, the drive of the
Democratic Party, is to run away from Iraq and Islamic terrorism, and the topic in general. In an
interview with the New York Times magazine in 2004, Senator John Kerry was quoted: “We have
to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a
nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're
never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it
isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that
you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.”
“The elephants?” asked the father leopard, quite startled. “You say it was the elephants?”
“Yes,” said the hyena, “I saw their tracks.”
The leopard paced back and forth for a few minutes, growling and shaking his head.
“No, you are wrong,” he said at last. “It was not the elephants. It was the goats. The goats
have murdered my boy!”
And at once he bounded down the hill and sprang upon the herd of goats grazing in the valley
below, and in a violent rage killed as many as he could in revenge.
So the Democratic Party constantly attempts to have us withdraw from Iraq and the worldwide war
on terrorism, and instead focus on what they perceive as the greatest threat to us all: Global
Warming! Forget about the reporter getting his head sawed off on the Internet. Forget about the
attempt to blow up airliners with shoe bombs. Forget about flying commercial airlines into office
buildings. Forget about the hatred and intolerance of fanatics that want to kill you and your children.
Forget about the rhetoric of Iran that has pledged to see you drown in a sea of fire and is driving
ahead with a nuclear program that can make it possible. Forget about their increasing missile
technology that may allow them to deliver those nukes.
Instead, focus on how it might be two degrees warmer in a hundred years. After all, we have the
theoretical computer models to show it. We made up the criteria ourselves so you know you can
trust the results. However, we don’t like it when it is pointed out to us that thirty years ago we told
you we were all going to freeze. But trust us this time; we're all going to fry.
Ignore the fact that Greenland used to be green, (Hence the name) and Vikings used to farm the
land there. Ignore that the Romans once grew grapes in England and then later after a cool spell the
English did too, before it got too cold. If you ignore these historical facts, like the Medieval Warming
Period, then you might also ignore the Democratic led House Armed Services Committee trying to
stop the missile shield installation in Poland. If you ignore the fact that the heating and cooling
climate is, oddly enough, tied to fluctuations in the sun, then you might ignore the cuts in the Future
Combat System by the same House Dems including our own Nancy Boyda. Pretend that warming
hasn't been on observed on the other planets in the solar system from Mars to Neptune and it
becomes easy to pretend that China isn't engaged in stealing military secrets and rapidly building up
its navy; Russia isn't renewing its military from funding taken from its nationalized oil; and Iran isn't
racing to produce a nuclear weapon and the means to deliver it to Western Europe or America.
Some stories are timeless. In this case an African folktale feels right at home in the Washington
beltway.