The FHer style of polemical exchange

Great Mona Charen column today at Townhall on the reception NYC police commissioner Raymond Kelly got at Brown University.

The episode encapsulates so much about the way the Left engages the right in this country.  The students / thugs felt free to prevent him from speaking - and thereby expressing the view that he was an inherently illegitimate and racist public figure - because, as Charen points out, the faculty and administration had their back.

Then there's the fact that stats bear out the effectiveness of his policies and the fact that minorities have been the biggest beneficiaries:

Consider that Kelly has presided over a policing regime in New York City that has resulted in poor and minority neighborhoods seeing victimization drop to levels not seen since 1963. New York's crime rate is the lowest among big cities in the United States. The most dangerous neighborhoods, which are majority black and Hispanic, have seen the greatest improvements in quality of life.

As Kelly noted on "Meet the Press" last summer, during the past 11 years, there have been 7,363 fewer murders than during the preceding 11 years. Based on victimization patterns in New York, that means there are about 7,000 more black and Hispanic young men alive today than would have been the case absent Kelly's leadership. The homicide rate for Chicago teens, for example, is four times that of New York.

The gossamer thread by which civilization hangs is perilously frayed not because of anything the Right has done, but because, out of the Left's fear of the rectitude of our policies, it is willing to foreclose the possibility that a curious public might find that out.

Need another example?  In that hyper-testy Facebook comment-thread debate I mentioned a few posts ago, I got a little too close to the essence of what's going on in the push for Freedom-Hater-care: driving insurance companies out of the health care coverage business so that people have nowhere to go but the government and a single-payer arrangement is achieved by fiat.  The next comment from one of the FHers ganging up on me made some vague, inflamed reference to the Westboro Baptist Church and jihadism.  When I asked what the flip either of those things had to do with the economics of health care, I got a direct ad hominem attack.

I guess the old New Age "transformational" maxim that the truth needs no defense is a dead meme.