What Leftists Revel In: Shame — Shame for Being American, Shame for Having the Audacity to Speak Out, etc…

According to emails quoted by CNN's Jake Tapper (thanks to InstaPundit), freed POW Bowe Bergdahl is said to have vilified his country and deserted, while his "selfish act" caused seven deaths among the comrades who were trying to save him from his Al Qaeda captors.

"The future is too good to waste on lies," Bowe wrote to his parents [in 2009]. "And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting."

Bergdahl wrote to them, "I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting."

If so, was the army sergeant (whose last name, incidentally, means mountain valley in Scandinavian) saying anything differently than the (admittedly slightly more diplomatic) woman who now lives in the White House? (That would be Michelle "for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country" Obama.)

Like Michelle, father Bob Bergdahl went on TV to praise his relative's superiority to the average American (soldier).

Notice that on his battalion's Facebook page, the moderator asked for "more respect to be shown":

I challenge any one of you who label him a traitor to spend 5 years in captivity with the Taliban or Haqqani, then come back and accuse him again. Whatever his intent when he walked away or was captured, he has more than paid for it.

We have seen this before: it is (or it is akin to) the leftists' typical shame-you-into-silence stance.

That amounts to a whole lot of shame coming from the left side of the aisle…

As Glenn Reynolds has quoted Richard Fernandez saying,

It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation.