Taking a cue from George W. Bush, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said of the Times Square bomber, “We will not be intimidated by those who hate the freedoms that make … this country so great.” This was the mantra after Sept. 11. We are hated not because of what we do in the Middle East, but because of who we are: people who love freedom and stand for women’s rights. And that is why they hate us — and why they come to kill us. In a way this is a comforting thought, because it absolves us of the need to think…

(Or) American’s toxic culture may be a reason devout Muslims detest us. It is not why they come here to kill us. Mohammed Atta’s friends did not target Hollywood, but centers and symbols of U.S. military and political power. U.S. Marines were not attacked by Hezbollah until we inserted those Marines into Lebanon’s civil war. No Iraqi committed an act of terror against us before we invaded Iraq. And if the Sept. 11 killers were motivated by hatred of the immorality of our society, what were they doing getting lap dances in Delray Beach?…

By Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Looking at America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Maj. Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Shahzad decided that what we call the war on terror was in reality a war on Islam.

All decided to use their access to exact retribution for our killing of their fellow Muslims. We are being attacked over here because we are over there. [Bolds mine—R]

This line of thought seems to be one of the more controversial in recent memory, which is probably why so few public people outside of academia voice it. I could leave my house this moment and easily round up a dozen or more people who realize this simple cause-and-effect relationship, but these are not people whose voices get airtime. No, public personalities who speak out loud this provable, painfully obvious sentiment get called “weird” or “radical” or “unpatriotic” (see Paul, Rand, and the Campaign for U.S. Senator from Kentucky, 2010).

Taking a hard look at American policies is simply uncool, for politician and pundit alike; whether it’s the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (patriots vs. anti-Semites), the abortion debate (respecters of women vs. intolerant chauvinists), or tax policy (Reaganomics/Clintonomics/Obamanomics vs. anyone who admits out loud that Social Security, Medicare and/or military spending will have to be drastically cut in the near future)… the question is never “what exactly is wrong,” but “which side is right?”

Wrong, wrong, wrong… all wrong. It’s why so many people are fed up with politics, and why I haven’t bothered to blog about it for so long. The conventional wisdom is what people are expected to discuss, from either the “conservative” perspective or the “liberal” one. Problem is, the conventional wisdom is rarely wisdom at all. It’s just so much bumper-sticker boilerplate, and the only one who benefits from it (aside from the bumper-sticker printers) are the politicians who rely on it to keep them from having to make any difficult decisions on anything of significance.

PS: Other anti-conventional-wisdom posts I’ve appreciated recently include the following: Ross Douthat’s “Myths of the Supply Side,” Daniel Larison’s “Questioning Our Assumptions About Iran,” and James Antle’s “Run, Ron, Run!”