Add Congo to the List

Meanwhile, Africa continues in its doleful role as the most dysfunctional continent on the face of the globe. You've read about the terrors of being a Sudanese and perhaps you've heard of the crimes of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and how he has devastated that once beautiful and productive land. You've seen movies (Hotel Rwanda, Beyond the Gates) about the genocide in Rwanda and other films (e.g. Blood Diamond) about the horrors of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. You may have seen films such as The Last King of Scotland that give some insight into the thugocracy that afflicts these miserable people and you're also familiar, perhaps, with the ghastly gang warfare that plagues Somalia (see Blackhawk Down).

But have you read about what's happening in the Congo? If you haven't yet succumbed to compassion fatigue you might want to peruse a piece at the McClatchey web site that tells the awful tale: Five million deaths over the last decade, 45,000 refugees dying every month, and on it goes. If you've read one of these stories, you've read them all. Corrupt government, rebel militias, unimaginable cruelty and degradation, impotent U.N. and rampant disease and starvation afflicting tens of thousands of terrified refugees. It's the same awful litany of problems almost everywhere across the continent.

In his book The Bottom Billion Paul Collier suggests that the only way African nations like the ones mentioned above, as well as others like Chad and dysfunctional states elsewhere around the world (such as Haiti) will ever be able to achieve some level of normalcy for their beleaguered populations is via a concerted intervention - political, economic, and military - by the developed world. Of course, that means Europe and the U.S. since no other nation with the resources to help has much of a history of humanitarian concern, and unfortunately, because of the violence the radical Muslim world threatens to inflict as it seeks to establish global Islam, our energies must be diverted elsewhere.

It's such a tragedy to be able to help but to be unable and/or unwilling to commit the resources to do anything effective because radical Islamists have us tied down elsewhere. But even if that weren't the case I doubt that many Americans would have the stomach to send troops into Africa when our national interests are not at stake there. Instead we avert our gaze from the teeming mass of humanity that cries out for rescue from the tyrants and thugs and assuage our guilt at doing essentially nothing by sending a few vials of penicillin and a couple of crates of blankets.

The left deplored European colonialism in Africa as oppressive and exploitative, but the people of Africa were far better off under European rule than they are under the boot of the criminals who terrorize them now.

RLC

Jefferson on Public Debt

My friend Dick Francis passes along a crucially relevant insight from Thomas Jefferson:

"If we run into such debts as that must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses;

And the sixteenth [hour of labor] being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers;

And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train, wretchedness and oppression."

What would Jefferson be thinking were he alive to witness the last year of bailouts and President-elect Obama's talk of higher taxes to come?

RLC

Has Anyone Seen Bob?

Those readers who have been on a whale-watch know that you can spend a great deal of time sitting patiently over a spot in the ocean where a whale was seen to have "sounded", waiting eagerly for the creature to rise again from the depths and make its grand appearance as it breaks through the surface. Whale-watching and the sometimes long hours of anticipation, waiting for a whale to "breach", came to mind today as it occurred to me that it had been a long time since the junior Senator from my fair state of Pennsylvania has surfaced.

Two years ago Pennsylvania voters tired of incumbent Senator Rick Santorum, one of the finest men to have served in the senate - a man who fought hard on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the helpless both at home and abroad, a man who also saw clearly the threat posed by radical Islam, but a man tied too closely to President Bush - and chose in their wisdom to replace him with one Robert Casey.

Mr. Santorum is still involved in his various causes, but that election seems to have been the last anyone has heard from Mr. Casey. The newly-minted senator appears to have "sounded" and Pennsylvanians have been waiting patiently and fruitlessly for two years for him to resurface.

Perhaps it's time that someone file a missing persons report on the gentleman and possibly affix his photo to a milk carton or billboard. Who knows but that he's being held hostage somewhere, bound and gagged, until his term expires at which time he'll be trotted out again by the Democrat nabobs to stand for reelection so that he can once again disappear into the briney depths of political anonymity.

RLC

The Butterfly

The other night I watched a lovely French film entitled "The Butterfly". The movie tells a delightful story about a lonely septuagenarian lepidopterist named Julian (Michael Serrault) and a young girl of eight named Elsa (Claire Bouanich) who is pretty much ignored by her mother. The girl lives in the apartment above Julian and attaches herself to the grandfatherly butterfly collector, somewhat to his dismay. She even manages to persuade him to allow her to tag along as he journeys into the French Alps in search of a rare species of butterfly (it's actually a moth, but no matter) called the Isabella. For those who like stories about how relationships develop this movie will touch your heart.

There is a line where Elsa tells the old man an off-color joke which one might wish were not in the film, but aside from this it's a wonderful movie. You might want to add it to your Netflix queue.

RLC

Without God: Concluding Thoughts

So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads logically to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they lead us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God. In other words, the existence of God is the best explanation for the data of human existence. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair that her worldview pushes her toward. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to defend the claim that the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God. If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice. We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope of life beyond death and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence. Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me, at least, to understand.

RLC

Civilian Security Force?

Perhaps Senator Obama meant nothing sinister by the remarks he made in a call to service speech he made at Colorado Springs before the election, but I would like to know what he meant by his call for a national security force as powerful and well-funded as the military. Given the history of such security forces, and the fondness that thugs and tyrants have had for such enforcement mechanisms, it's a little unnerving.

Exactly what does Mr. Obama have in mind?

RLC

<i>Getting it Right</i>

For political junkies who like a little modern history with their politics, especially those who may have some familiarity with the work of the late William F. Buckley and/or National Review (I hope I haven't narrowed the field too much) I'd like to recommend a novel titled Getting it Right. It was written by Buckley about four years ago and it tells the story of the three-way struggle between Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and the crowd at National Review for the soul of conservatism.

It's a fascinating account beginning in the 1950s and ending with the Goldwater defeat in 1964. Buckley does a masterful job of allowing Rand to skewer herself in its pages, making her look like the megalomaniacal genius that she was. It also provides a fascinating account of how the John Birch Society got started and how it came a cropper. Along the way you meet many of the key players of the time, including Buckley himself. It's a good read, especially for conservatives eager to bone up on the details of this critical gestation period of American conservatism.

RLC

Things to Come

Quin Hilyer of The American Spectator advises conservatives on what we might expect from Obama's minions and other disciples of Saul Alinsky who will run the government come January. The comments which follow add a few other cautions. It's not pretty and I deeply hope Obama will not do what Hilyer predicts, but I confess I have very little ground for that hope.

Everything he and the Democratic leadership have been saying for the last couple of years conforms to Hilyer's frightening augury. Read the article at the link. It's not long.

RLC

Making a Difference

A student recently mentioned to me that as a science major he thought it a shame that philosophers study stuff that doesn't make any difference in peoples' lives. He was giving me a little dig and said it with a smile.

I returned the smile and told him that actually the questions philosophers deal with are among the most important we can imagine. Questions about God, meaning, morality, justice, human nature, mind and soul, love, etc. These are questions that bear on how we should live and how we can achieve a good life.

I then asked him what string theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, cosmogeny, biogenesis, paleontology, exobiology, much of astronomy, and pure mathematics have to do with most peoples' lives. Not much, I suggested. So why are think the study of these to be somehow more noble or more worthwhile than the study of philosophy? More smiles.

RLC

Jolly Old St. Barack

What was the source of Barack Obama's appeal among the masses? Perhaps it was the conviction that he was really Santa Claus in a business suit:

This isn't just one woman speaking, I'm afraid. Ms Joseph is the whole country - financially troubled state governments, corporations, institutions, individuals - everyone has their hand out and expects everyone else to pay for their gas and mortgage. In American politics it has come to this: If you want to win an election just promise to give more people more goodies than does your opponent.

Ms Joseph's excitement over what she thinks Obama will do for her and the rest of us reminds me of the words attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: "America will last until the populace discovers that it can vote for itself largesse out of the public treasury."

And then comes the eschaton.

RLC

Working for WALNUT

Hot Air's intrepid correspondent Jason Mattera goes underground yet again, this time to get signers on a petition for ACORN's sister organization WALNUT. WALNUT is petitioning for the right of oppressed peoples to be allowed to vote twice. It's pretty funny. Here's part I. Part II follows:

For more Jason Mattera go here.

RLC

Without God (X)

As we continue our series on the existential inadequacies of the atheistic worldview and its inability to conform to the way the world is we might consider this: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. If our self just is our body, as the atheistic materialist believes, since our body is constantly changing we're continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I", only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God, transient physical flux is all there is.

Nevertheless, we seem to be convinced that there is an enduring self, an "I" which exists through time. Either this conviction is an illusion or there's more to us than just a physical body. If we do have a soul, an eternal essence, an identity that exists in the mind of God, then there is something about us which is not transient and which justifies the sense that we are a coherent, enduring self.

In other words, our belief that we have a permanent identity is more compatible with the belief that there is a God than with the belief that matter is all there is.

Finally, human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair. If death is the end then life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." If death is the end then human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is indeed the end if the materialist is right. Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

Karl Marx is said to have called the belief in an afterlife a narcotic which anaesthetized the suffering of people in this life and which kept them complacent and subdued so as not to rebel against their bourgeois overlords. But as Czech writer Czeslaw Milosz says in Roadside Dog it's the belief that there is no afterlife that is the real narcotic. He recalls Marx's phrase that religion is like opium that dulls the pain of life and then goes on to counter that: "And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged." (emphasis mine)

God and the promise of eternal life are necessary beliefs if our deepest existential yearnings and the nature of the world itself make any sense. Atheism may be true, but we have no reason to think it is and a great deal of reason to think, and hope, that it is not.

RLC

Uncivil War

Ever since John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate there has been an "uncivil war" brewing in the Republican party. Elite Republican pundits like David Brooks ("Palin is a cancer on the GOP"), Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, and others have been sniping at Palin as soon as she uttered her first "You betcha'". Now that the election is over McCain staffers are taking their shots as well. David Frum thinks the staffer responsible for the leaks is Nicolle Wallace.

In any event, one might wonder what's going on here. It seems that there's a struggle taking place between two factions of Republicans, the conservatives and the moderates. Palin is a hero to the former so the moderates are trying to short-circuit any influence she may have as the GOP seeks to reformulate itself for 2010. Sarah Palin is a force of nature and this scares the moderates who act as if they believe that the best way to serve the country is to remain in the minority.

It's odd that attacks from the McCain camp on Palin are much more personal and vicious than anything they were willing to say about Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. They completely ignored Obama's associations with some pretty sordid characters, they completely ignored the chuckleheaded string of remarks by Joe Biden, they never commented on Obama's geographic shortcomings or the fact that he thinks there are 57 states in the union. All of that was out of bounds during the campaign, but now they want to hammer Palin for not understanding African geography and for answering her door in a bathrobe.

No wonder they lost.

RLC

When Human Life Begins

Robert P. George addresses himself to the faux question of when human life begins in a recent National Review article. It is, as George points out, a question about which there is, in fact, no mystery. To pretend there is simply obfuscates a matter about which there is no confusion at all. George begins:

When does the life of a human individual begin? Although the question is of obvious importance for our public policy debates over abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research, politicians have avoided it like the plague. Of late, though, things seem to be changing. Recently some of our nation's most prominent political leaders, from the Speaker of the House to both contenders for the office of president, have weighed in on the question.

Faced with the complicated and not-very-widely-known facts of human embryology, most people are inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed by Speaker Pelosi, who has stated "I don't think anybody can tell you when... human life begins."

Yet is Speaker Pelosi correct? Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins?

No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.

Read his response to the question at the link, and thanks to Jason for passing the article along.

RLC

Capt. John Ripley, RIP

Most heroes are people whose deeds are unheralded and largely anonymous. When we come across accounts of incredible bravery we want to do what we can to let the world know about it. Byron passed along a story by Keith Pavlischek written on the occasion of the death of a Vietnam vet named Capt. John Ripley who received his country's second highest award for valor. You can read how he earned the award here.

It's worth a minute or two of your time.

RLC

Loyal Opposition

I was listening to Glen Beck on the radio this morning, and I really appreciated what he had to say about how those who feared an Obama win on Tuesday should react to his victory. Listening to him I thought of the hatred, ugliness and the acid-in-your-face rhetoric that followed Bush's 2000 win and which dogged him throughout his presidency. I thought how contemptible it was, and I hoped that those who oppose Obama would act with a lot more class and civility toward him and his supporters than many of those who opposed Bush treated him and his supporters.

As Beck said, we have to behave like we're all Americans. We can't afford divisiveness just for the sake of hurting an Obama presidency. If we love our country we have to hope and pray that he does well, that he solves our problems, and that he turns out to be a good leader. It would be crazy, literally, to hope that he fails and to hope that the challenges he faces prove beyond his abilities to meet.

This does not mean that we should docilely accept whatever medicine he prescribes for our ills, especially the more radical stuff, but it does mean that we pray for his success, we support him issue by issue as long as we think he's on the right track, we give him credit for doing the right thing, and we let him know of our displeasure when he's doing the wrong thing in civil and respectful fashion.

This means we avoid name-calling and vituperation. It means we give him the benefit of the doubt whenever that's possible and plausible. It means that, as hard as it may be, we regard him as our president, deserving our loyalty and respect insofar as we can give it without compromising our principles.

We may not have much influence with Obama and Congress even if we do conduct ourselves with Christ-like maturity, but it's for sure we won't have any influence if we don't, nor should we. At some point someone has to break the pattern of the out-party acting as though the president were the incarnation of Lucifer. Let that someone be us. God keep us from being anything remotely like the Bush haters of the last eight years.

RLC

Anti-Christian Poet

Hot Air's Jason Mattera goes undercover to interview an anti-Christian pro-abortion protestor/"poet" at Denver's Planned Parenthood facility:

How does he find these people? Maybe the more troubling question is whether these people are that easy to find that he doesn't really have to look very hard. For more Jason Mattera madness go here.

RLC

Without God (IX)

Continuing the argument that our existential condition makes more sense if theism is true than if it's false we might consider our longing for justice, a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence.

We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die. Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure.

In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it ultimately doesn't matter whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

Another aspect of the human condition, of course, is the craving of a meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but death nullifies everything and renders it all nugatory. In the absence of God there's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do. Some day the earth will burn up in a solar explosion, and there'll be not a trace that humans once existed. What will all of our striving matter then? All our efforts are like the furious running of a gerbil in his wheel. Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

Consider these depressing reflections:

"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Jean Paul Sartre

"In all of our searching the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other." Contact

"If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for...Now the answer is plain but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning." Somerset Maugham

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do matters at all. If, on the other hand, we have been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a basis for hoping that there is one. Indeed, if there is a God (and only if there is a God) then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.

RLC

Experience Matters

Throughout the recent campaign Republicans tried to persuade the electorate that experience matters and that a freshman senator with no relevant experience should not be seated at the controls of the country. This video illustrates, in astonishing fashion, the importance of having an experienced pilot at the controls. It's hard to believe the skill and presence of mind in the midst of crisis that you'll see here.

Imagine what would have happened had a rookie been at the controls.

RLC

Reflections on Yesterday

The American electorate put all their chips on a complete unknown and rolled the dice. Now, for better or worse, Barack Obama is president. It's both remarkable and encouraging that a nation with our history can elect an African-American to the presidency. For that we can rejoice. It's just too bad that it happened to be this particular African-American who has broken the barrier.

Obama's victory was a triumph of intuition over knowledge, emotion over reason, race over qualification, style over substance, hope over plausibility, and youth over experience. Perhaps now Michelle Obama can at long last be proud of her country.

Last night's result has buried several myths about the American people: First, that they're generally moderate to conservative and, secondly, that they're corporately wise. Whether the gamble turns out lucky or not, it was exceptionally foolish to have taken such a risk in the first place. Moreover, several other election results are hard to reconcile with the notion that the electorate is either conservative or wise: The facts that John Murtha was reelected in western Pennsylvania and that, as I write this, Al Franken, a self-admitted pornography consumer who shares his taste for pornography with his son, may yet be elected to the U.S. Senate, are incomprehensible if the notion is true. In addition, congress under Democratic leadership has a 74% disapproval rating, but notwithstanding such contempt, the voters who so strongly disapprove of congress chose to award more Democrats with high office. Finally, it's incongruous that a moderately conservative electorate would vote for a party and a candidate that wants to remove all restrictions on abortion, legalize gay marriage, raise taxes, and increase public handouts.

Another myth this election should have exploded, but probably didn't, is the myth of racist America. Obama is our next president because whites voted for him in large numbers. Even those who voted against him did so because of his ideas rather than his race. There may have been a fraction of the anti-Obama vote that was inspired by race, but it was small and insignificant. Indeed, there was at least as much evidence during this campaign of racism in the black community as there was of racism among whites.

At any rate, whoever got our vote, we need to give President Obama our support when we believe he's doing the right thing and speak out on those occasions, which I fear will be frequent, when we think he's not. We also need to remain well-informed because much of his agenda, particularly its more radical elements, will be promoted under the radar and with media connivance.

As for the Republican party perhaps it has learned some very important lessons. The party has to stop nominating aging moderates to contend against younger charismatic liberals. Three of the last four GOP standard bearers - Bush '41, Bob Dole, and John McCain - fit this description, and they all lost to younger, flashier opponents (Clinton, Obama). Secondly, Republicans have to learn that politics is not just about enjoying the status elected office confers or benefiting personally from the emoluments that come one's way, it's about actually serving the country by doing what's right and not what's expedient. Although GOP corruption and fecklessness is no worse, maybe not even as bad as, that of the Democrats, voters expect it of Democrats and give them a pass. Among Republicans, however, corruption is a seen as a symptom of hypocrisy, a sin sure to cause a Republican to find himself in the cross-hairs of the media guns.

Thirdly, Republicans have to find a way to educate the public about the differences between liberalism and conservatism. One of the most distressing things about the last eight years was the inability of George Bush to rally people to his support because he largely left it to others to make the case he should have been making. One of the distressing things about the campaign just ended is how John McCain threw around pejoratives like "socialism" without explaining to people why "socialism" is a bad thing. He acted as if people just know what socialism is and why it's corrosive. They don't. The public, or large swatches of it, have no idea what socialism, fascism, capitalism, or Marxism entail. They need to be educated and that takes leadership.

So, if Republicans ever want to return to the place where they can do good for the nation, they have to seek out candidates who are principled conservatives and who, preferably, don't look like they're ready for a retirement home. They also need to find people to run for congress who are both intelligent and morally virtuous, who see government office as a form of public service rather than self-service, and who know how to both educate and lead.

Unfortunately, this may be difficult to accomplish in the years ahead because a lot of the best people in the GOP may opt to leave it in disgust after seeing how it squandered the opportunity it was given when it held a congressional majority from 1994 to 2006 and the presidency for the last six of those years.

In his book Slouching Toward Gomorrah, Robert Bork tells the story of how he was lamenting to a friend how the United States seemed to be in an ineluctable cultural decline. The friend agreed but he told Bork not to lose heart because such declines take time and in the interim it was still possible to live well. It's my hope that as we slouch under a President Obama toward, if not Gomorrah then at least toward Sweden, that enough talented, principled conservatives will rise up not just to slow the decline but to reverse it. It can be done, but it will take people with vision, integrity, courage, intelligence, talent, energy and determination. Are such people out there?

RLC