The hard-line leftists I'm talking about--and before anyone here gets huffy, you know which groups and people I mean as well as I do--already inhabit a vacuum. The ones I've observed in the papers and elsewhere in the last few months have decayed into repetitive babbling and rote recitals of crap that was tired in 1969. Good grief, look what Gore Vidal is plugging:

"The Last Great Defender of the American Republic -- L.A. Times" Cripes.

The revelations in Iraq won't change minds like this. Their minds have refused to accept so much of the reality of what has occurred in the world, particularly the record of their philosophies as applied, that they have collapsed into self-referential mental singularities immune to outside forces. There is literally no evidence that will convince them they are wrong. Frankly, IMO, the leftists that were amenable to reason have long ago been selected out of the breed by the revelations on Stalin, the invasions of Eastern Europe, the Cultural Revolution, the Killing Fields, and the rest of the evidence of socialist philosophy in actual real-world demonstration.

It's about time the last wet, squirming bits of Marxism and its related obscenities were squashed into the dirt. "Das Kapital" has no more place in the modern world than "Mein Kampf." The more reasonable liberal opposition will still be around.