Robert Spencer: Juan Williams and the Left's Intellectual Bankruptcy

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/10/spencer-juan-williams-and-the-lefts-in...

"This general refusal to engage their opposition's arguments is a sign that the Leftists and Islamic supremacists feel keenly their own intellectual vacuity. They know that in light of it they can do nothing but ignore, mock, or try to bully people who speak the truth. Even the Soviet Union under Stalin was confident enough that its own people were sufficiently cowed, and that it had enough useful idiots among the intelligentsia abroad, that it was able to mount high-profile show trials of dissenters and Stalin's political rivals in the 1930s.

But by the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet regime had grown sclerotic, and had lost the assurance that its own people were still terrorized enough to keep silent, or that it could still count on a foreign intelligentsia willfully blind enough to defend the regime. And so instead of mounting flashy show trials, it packed off its opponents to mental hospitals under the cover of darkness. They simply didn't exist any longer. It was an effective tactic in the short run, as it certainly silenced their opponents of the day; in the long run, it was an expression of exhaustion, an admission of defeat."