We don't take a poll to determine what is right

POWERLINE has a great post on the current battle in Congress over the intelligence overhaul bill that was written as a result of ther 9/11 Commission Report. Two Republicans - Sensenbrenner and Hunter - backed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and charged by Congress with the constitutional oversight - are holding the whole thing up because they believe that a few provisions of the bill need to be fixed. IMPROVED. The Democrats are attacking them. WHY!?

POWERLINE asked it this way: "what reason is there to believe that Tom Kean, Lee Hamilton, and the others have a monopoly on good ideas for combating terrorism? Why should their opinions automatically trump those of serious elected officials like Rep. Duncan Hunter and Rep. James Sensenbrenner who are leading the opposition to the Commission's proposals?"

Here's the reason:

The Left - and the Democrat Party they dominate - prefer the 9/11 Commission's proposals to anything else because the Commission proposals were arrived at by consensus - across party lines. The Left believes that interventions into the status quo must be done ONLY after a consensus is reached across the "values divide" (a divide that can be political - as it is in this case - or cultural or national - as in the case of the UN, for instance).

The Left's belief in (and overvalue) of consensus is based on the fact that their meme is dominated by post-modernism - which denigrates Natural Law and universalism, and valorizes moral relativism.

Consensus is ersatz universalism for Leftists.

This is also why they think it was okay for the UN not to intervene in Rwanda (and Bosnia and elsewhere) because no consensus could be found. That's why the Left condemns the Iraq War: because no consensus could be found. Without consensus there is no "right thing to do" for the Left.

This is also the basis for the Left's revulsion of Bush: Bush has a conviction that there are such things as right and wrong, and good and evil. So do Hunter and Sensenbrenner.

We should all do what is right, not just what is popular. The right thing is not always the popular thing, and you can't always get a consensus to do the right thing. It was WRONG for the UN not to intervene in Rwanda with force - and failing to get a consensus is a poor "U.N.ACCEPTABLE" excuse.

Failure to find consensus is no excuse for failing to do the right thing. We did the right thing in Iraq, and Sensenbrenner and Hunter are doing the right thing now.

UPDATE: Deacon of POWERLINE linked to this post! Thanks! And Deacon made an important additional note in his link: the core problem with the Left - the basis of their dependence on consensus (as ersatz Universalism) is their MORAL RELATIVISM - which is at the core of post-modernism.

Our Universalism makes us look like fundamentalists to the Left - (to Leftists, only a simpleton could believe that such things as good and evil are real, and aren't subjective or culturally defined).

But - more importantly - the Left's moral relativism actually makes them incapable of doing the right thing when it requires an unpopular international intervention - which cannot find a consensus. In my mind this makes Leftism a morally bankrupt political philosophy. And, I'd rather be called a simpleton and intervene internationally to stop genocide, than be called a sophisticate and stand idly by as millions perish - as they did in Bosnia and Rwanda, and the Sudan, and for too long in Iraq.

(To POWERLINE readers: take a look around at my other posts - and HAPPY THANKSGIVING!)