Hypocrisy?

From a CBS News Story:

Early on the morning of 9/11, Mohammed Atta and another hijackers appeared at the U.S. Airways counter in Portland, Maine. Tuohey checked them in for the 6 a.m. flight to Boston.

…

What ran through his mind, Tuohey told Teichner, was, “if this guy doesn’t look like a typical Arab terrorist, nobody does. I thought that. I actually thought that. And then I gave myself a mental slap for being, you know, stereotypical.”

President Obama in the aftermath of the Fort Hood massacre:

“We don’t know all the answers yet and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”

Michael Bloomberg’s $0.25 theory:

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer:

There are a lot of people who want to use terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way …

From a column by Robert Dreyfus:

It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking. That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s licence [sic] plates were stolen.

From an ABC News Story:

Instead of ammonium nitrate, the kind of fertilizer used by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the person who abandoned the van on the crowded New York City street had a metal gun locker full of a harmless fertilizer, New York City Police Department spokesman Paul Browne said.

…

Police are looking for white male in his 40s who was seen leaving the area near the SUV and shedding a dark shirt, revealing a red shirt underneath, about a half block from where survellance [sic] cameras saw the vehicle entering Times Square at about 6:28 p.m. Saturday, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

…

Kelly said “no evidence” supports the Pakistani Taliban’s claim of responsibilty [sic]  for the bombing, but he said investigators had not yet ruled out either domestic or international motives for the attempted attack.

“Clearly it was the intent of whoever did this to cause mayhem and create casualties,” Kelly said. “It was just a sober reminder that New York is clearly a target of people who want to come here and do us harm.”

Then there was this comment by a giddy leftist on the CNN news blog:

It is a white guy in his 40s on the surveillance tape. Can you say teabagger? The car had everything you would find in a redneck’s shed.

The same people who urge us to avoid stereotyping, go to ridiculous extremes to protect and excuse the inexcusable. They refuse to acknowledge evil even when it’s looking them in the eye.   Then they proceed to stereotype conservatives in exactly the same way they warn against.

So, how does any of this tie in with the founding of our country?

There is a philosophical difference between those who founded this country and the left.  This difference goes right back to the time of the founding.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …

That statement is the crux of the difference between conservatives and progressives.   This country was founded on the belief that all men, as individuals, have value.  Their value is not something earned. It is not something that government bequeaths.  It is inherent.  It is God-given.  Progressives, on the other hand, believe that the group or society is preeminent.

In Woodrow Wilson’s words:

… the eternal, natural embodiment and expression of a higher form of life than the individual, namely, that common life which gives leave to individual life, and opportunity for completeness, – makes individual life possible and makes it full and complete.

Hence the irony – it is actually progressives who stereotype groups of whom they disapprove, thus tarring disparate individuals with a monochromatic brush.. They constantly label and deride people, ostensibly in favor of other groups (also stereotyped) they think worthy of protection.  I don’t recall hearing any news pundits suggest “gee, part of me hopes it’s not a white guy.”