With heroes like this, who needs villains?

Nothing brings into sharper focus the enmity the American Left has for their own country than the case of US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing reams of classified documents to the anarchists at Wikileaks. Since his arrest nearly a year ago, leftist bloggers have taken up Manning's cause, and at least one Democratic member of Congress has jumped on the Manning bandwagon. Most recently, a group of Manning supporters paid big bucks to attend an Obama fundraiser just so they could interrupt the President and sing a song about Manning:

Twenty-one members of the Bradley Manning Support Network—some donning shirts that read "Free Bradley Manning"—interrupted the president's speech at a $5,000-a-seat event at the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco.

They broke into a song protesting his treatment in military custody: "Alone in a 6x12 cell sits Bradley / 23 hours a day is night / The 5th and 8th Amendments say this kind of thing ain't right / We paid our dues, where's our change?"

For all their posturing about due process, Constitutional rights and allegations of mistreatment of Manning, it's clear that this is really all about the fact that in the eyes of his supporters, Manning did nothing wrong. To them, what Manning is accused of doing is honorable. If all they were concerned with was due process and his treatment before a trial, they'd have taken up the cause of these guys, too, right?

Required reading: Leftism is NOT liberalism

Twitter user @vermontaigne tweeted a link to this article yesterday, in which a self-described "secular humanist Enlightenment liberal" separates "leftism" from "liberalism" like white from yolk.

It's long, but well worth the read. Michael Strong first establishes his liberal cred, then describes how classic liberalism has been co-opted by leftists, particularly on university campuses. Here's a stand-out paragraph:

But despite the healthy, productive, and necessary debate concerning global economic history and contemporary policy measures, often the loudest and most aggressive voices in academia do not represent healthy, positive or informed debate. The anti-globalization movement, anti-Americanism, and lingering communism that are common in some academic departments do not offer a useful, positive, or well-considered means of making the world a better place. Hatred and bitterness are no substitute for intellectual coherence. The social and intellectual atmosphere at most universities (and, significantly, the two cannot be distinguished) continues to support views that are better described as “Leftist” than as Liberal. It is not socially acceptable in the humanities departments of most universities to suggest that Hong Kong and Singapore are economically successful today in large part because they had the good fortune to have inherited classical liberal principles as a legacy of British colonialism, or that free trade is the best means available of alleviating global poverty today, or to debate whether FDR or LBJ was the most destructive U.S. president in the 20th century.

Strong offers a checklist to determine whether classic liberalism has returned to college campuses:

1. Are most students and professors aware that under 19th century free market capitalism in the United States and Britain that it was not true that “the rich got richer and the poor got poorer?” i.e., that the working class standard of living steadily increased under laissez-faire capitalism?
2. Do most students and professors understand that wealth is created almost exclusively by private enterprise (given a framework based on the rule of law)?
3. Are most students and professors aware that Marxist governments murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century, vastly exceeding the loss of human life due to the Nazis?
4. Do most students and professors acknowledge that those humanely-motivated academics who self-identified as Marxists should, indeed, accept responsibility for having advocated a repeatedly murderous ideology? (“We didn't intend those outcomes” is not an adequate excuse after the fourth totalitarian Marxist regime, predictably enough, committed mass murder.)
5. Do most students and professors understand public choice theory?
6. Do most students and professors understand the necessary relationship between economic freedom, on the one hand, and creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, on the other?

You go read now.