Vonnegut going senile?

It's very sad to learn that the brilliant mind that crafted the world of Harrison Bergeron, with such scathingly humorous insight, has atrophied into the cliched amoral grey matter of the feverswamp Left.

Although he was always a darling of the Left, Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story, Harrison Bergeron, expresses a conservative perspective, not a liberal one. (In some people's formulas the inconsistency qualifies him as a moderate.) At least in 1961, Vonnegut had a moment of clarity about the foolish and unjust pursuit of equality-as-a-virtue to be valued above freedom and excellence. The liberal dream to "level the playing field" knows no end, and doesn't acknowledge or factor-in differing degrees of individual talent, effort, and goals. Although anyone who reads the story would recognize the cruel madness of the Bergeron's 2081 world, liberalism, as it's manifested today, would be the seed from which such a brier patch of twisted logic would sprout.
The opening sentence, "The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal", sounds like a liberal utopia.
The satirical story stealthily embraces and promotes the very essence of liberty: being allowed to follow your talents and determination as far as they can take you, and to reap the fruits of your labor.
It was a brief, isolated excursion into reality for Vonnegut. But I digress...

This "grand old man of American letters" (as David Nason calls him in the story from The Australian) has compared our government, or rather, the Bush Administration, to Hitler's Reichstag, in which Vonnegut sees Bush taking unaccountable power unto himself and abusing it.

Interviewed in his own publication, "In These Times", the 80 year old socialist said " I myself feel that our country has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities."

Implying that President Bush is one of these psychopathic personalities ("P.P."), Vonnegut says ""With a P.P., decisiveness is all. Or, to put it another way, we now have a Reichstag fire of our own."
Translation: BushCheneyRoveRumsfeldWolfowitz and the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy were behind 9/11.
Paranoia will destroy ya.

"..I'm mad about being American", he says, and "I don't want to belong to a country that attacks little countries. I don't want to belong to that kind of a country." So, is that the criteria he chooses to define Iraq? Little? By that measurement, the police should never go after anyone littler than their department. It isn't fair; it makes them bullies, I guess.
Vonnegut said of the captured Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf War: "Those men are my brothers. All soldiers are". Regardless, apparently, of whose side their on, and for what cause they'll kill.

Referring to the Islamofascist terrorists we're fighting, he says it was "sweet and honorable" to die for what you believe in, and said "I regard them as very brave people". "He rejected the idea that terrorists were motivated by twisted religious beliefs". Also, according to Nason, Vonnegut "equated the actions of suicide bombers with...Truman's 1945 decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima". And in 2003, reports Nason, Vonnegut wrote that "the US was hated around the world "because our corporations have been the principal deliverers and imposers of new technologies and economic schemes that have wrecked the self-respect, the cultures of men, women and children in so many other societies".

True to form for so many "enlightened" and "progressive" liberal hypocrites, Vonnegut doesn't hold women, in general, in very high regard, either. Referring to psychopathic personalities, he says "Women are attracted to them. I mean, this is a defect, but women are attracted to them because they are so confident. But this is a serious defect..."
I thought Lefties were supposed to be such great feminists? Those don't strike me as very respectful sentiments.
And on a related note, he describes Gordon Parks as "a black genius". Why mention his skin color? Is his pigmentation related to his genius? Should he be more admired for it?

Finally, while comparing Socialism's ideal of "economic justice" to The Sermon on the Mount, Vonnegut claims that "the religious right will not acknowledge what a merciful person Jesus was."

Kurt Vonnegut better hope that He is.

Brad