Did Kerry Cheat?

Drudge has video of Senator Kerry flagrantly violating the rules of last Thursday's debate which explicitly prohibited the use of any notes, etc. The rules stated that "No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by either candidate.... Each candidate must submit to the staff of the Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate, and the staff or commission will place such paper, pens and pencils on the podium..." Go to the video and see for yourself.

Whether these smuggled notes, if they were notes, helped Kerry or not is really beside the point. The question is, if he was in fact cheating, as it certainly appears that he is, what does it say about the Senator that he can't be trusted to do what he agreed to do in the negotiations for this event? If he feels compelled to cheat in a venue like this what kind of a man is he?

Those Ignorant Christians

Novelist Philip Roth, in speaking of president Bush, says that "born-again Christianity is the ignorant man's version of the intellectual life."

Let us pause a moment to pity the poor benighted believer bereft of the pleasures and satisfactions of Roth's intellectual life. The Christian serious about his faith will likely never know the joys of ending one's life slowly in chaos and dissolution as so many intellectuals have, or quickly with a bullet to the brain as have others. Instead he's destined by fate to plod through life finding his happiness in the company of family and in the toil of work. He'll never have a great idea like, say, socialism, and he'll never know the immense satisfaction that accompanies the publication of smutty novels.

He must resign himself to the paltry fulfillments of being a hero to his children and an inspiration to his co-workers and friends. When he dies there'll be no lengthy obituary in the New York Times with an enviable list of literary accomplishments, just a notice in the local paper that he was loved and admired by all who knew him. No one will ever say of him that he was a fine artist or thinker, they'll never be able to say that he spent his life creating things that no one has any use for. They'll have to be content with saying something insignificant about him like "he was a good man who spent his life trying to make other people's lives better." It really is too bad that those ignorant Christians will never know how great it is to be an intellectual like Phillip Roth.