John Podhoretz of the New York Post writes about the way in which provincial liberals in the pundit class were shocked to find that their representatives who argued in front of the Supreme Court were clumsy, inarticulate and unprepared. And they were further shocked to find that many of the members of the court, including Justice Kennedy, apparently could think for themselves and could ask many questions that the defenders of Obamacare had not thought to ask themselves.
And this is indeed a major intellectual problem for the left. They live in a world in which they rarely, if ever, come into contact with ideas that challenge their own conventional wisdom. After all, most of the media is liberal. Television, movies, newsmagazines and newspapers are dominated by the liberal agenda with very few exceptions. In order to hear the conservative alternative, you have to make a concerted effort to seek it out. You can find the alternative viewpoint if you want, but as a rule it does not come to you. You have to go to it.
Liberals do not grok this fact. Thus, they are surprised when their assumptions are turned upside down with no prior warning. Liberal pundits who had been crowing just a week earlier, are now weeping into their soup. But they should not have been shocked. The conservative arguments against Obamacare and socialized medicine have been available for quite some time on the Internet and have been discussed in detail on talk radio. But the left tunes out talk radio and conservative web sites, so they never heard them. And so they were unprepared to defend the legislation that they assumed was unsinkable. It just didn’t occur to them that it might be otherwise.
