Proud to be an American

This interesting piece from the Belmont Club makes one wonder if there's any meaningful difference in the minds of our troops between CNN, CBS, et al. and Al Jazeera. In summarizing the fight against Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi army there's this:

In what was probably the most psychologically revealing moment of the battle, infantrymen fought six hours for the possession of one damaged Humvee, of no tactical value, simply so that the network news would not have the satisfaction of displaying the piece of junk in the hands of Sadr's men.

Another important detail comes in the next sentence:

'Squeezed into a few downtown blocks, Sadr militants began using children to shuttle ammunition,' soldiers said. Youngsters carrying large plastic bags darted from corner to corner, and the soldiers would not shoot them. 'We all grew up knowing you don't hurt women and children,' Taylor said. 'And they used that to their advantage.' The US estimates that 20 civilians were killed in operations around Najaf. The Najaf hospital claims 81. When the Russians retook Grozny after a disastrous first foray, they returned to the operational formula of Marshak Konev in Berlin and rained down 8,000 artillery shells per hour on the town, killing perhaps 27,000 before attempting it again. The vastly more powerful Americans did not, yet triumphed.

The comparison between the American view of war, and their skill at fighting it, and that of other nations, both today and throughout history, is truly gratifying for anyone who embraces just war doctrine. Read the whole analysis. It makes one proud of our men in our elite military, though certainly not of the civilians in our elite media.

Take That

Hindrocket at Power Line suggests that in light of the minor stir Vice President Cheney has created by his impolite advice to the good senator Pat Leahy on the floor of the senate the other day, perhaps what Cheney should have done was cut off his head. Then the media would have buried the story.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Matt Drudge has Al Gore's speech from yesterday. It really is hard to take seriously a man who would imply that the Patriot Act and the incarceration of enemy combatants and suspected terrorists is a greater threat to democracy than terrorism itself. I wonder if the people in the World Trade Towers, seeing those planes coming toward them, would have agreed. This criticism of the Bush administration is coming, moreover, from a man who served as vice president in an administration which secretly collected confidential FBI files on anyone deemed a political threat. Al Gore called the president responsible for this invasion of privacy one of the greatest presidents of the twentieth century.

In his speech Mr. Gore referred to "America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq". How can anyone at this point honestly call Iraq a strategic catastrophe? It may ultimately turn out badly, but indications at present point to the Iraqis as being, by almost any measure, better off than at anytime in the last twenty years. See Belmont Club for a much more trenchant analysis of our strategic position in Iraq and Chrenkoff for a sweeping picture of the military, economic, and social situation in Iraq.

Mr. Gore proceeds, exhibiting profound symptoms of short term memory loss: "President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein," he scoffs, even as the evidence mounts that Mr. Bush was correct (see here and here) that Saddam was indeed plotting terror attacks against the U.S.

Parenthetically, it seems that whether the terrorists actually call themselves al Qaida or not is irrelevant, especially to their victims. Why Mr. Gore and others are so obsessed with this point escapes me. One doubts whether Paul Johnson and Nicholas Berg really cared whether the orcs who were sawing their heads off were actually members of a group called al Qaida or some other group of psychopaths. The term al Qaida has come to be a generic designator for terrorists in general and the Bush spokespeople may have been using the term in that sense. I don't know why that little molehill should be elevated into such a mountain.

Mr. Gore continues: "If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al Qaeda. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick." The former VP, however, needs to check his own previous speeches before making such intemperate remarks. Power Line has done the research and here's what they turned up:

IN 1992, AL GORE ATTACKED PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH FOR IGNORING IRAQ'S TIES TO TERRORISM. SEN. AL GORE: "[W]hen George Bush took office, he should have reevaluated what our relationship was with Iraq ..." CNN'S LARRY KING: "Well ..." GORE: "Let me finish, just briefly. Instead, he stepped up the foreign aid to Iraq, and he looked the other way when there were repeated incidents of terrorism in which Iraq had a part, terrorists operating openly in Baghdad, and repeated warnings from our national security people telling the Bush administration that Saddam was on a crash program to develop nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and other weapons of mass destruction. And he overruled a lot of his advisers and extended another billion dollars of foreign aid, and the U.S. taxpayers are right now having to bail out Saddam Hussein for almost $2 billion. Just like the savings and loan bailout, now it's the Saddam Hussein bailout, and it shouldn't have taken place." (CNN's "Larry King Live," 10/5/92)

IN 1992, GORE SAID BUSH ADMINISTRATION WAS "CODDLING" SADDAM AND IGNORING HIS PURSUIT OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. "Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore Tuesday attacked what the Bush campaign views as its strongest asset, as he charged the president caused the gulf war by 'coddling' Saddam Hussein. .. He said recent evidence - including published reports and documents from congressional hearings - contradicts Bush's assertions he did nothing to enhance Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction before Saddam invaded Kuwait. Gore said both the Reagan and Bush administrations received regular intelligence 'warnings' that Saddam was aiding terrorists and was bent on building such weapons." (Sam Vincent Meddis, "Gore Assails Bush On Iraq Policy," USA Today, 9/30/92)

Mr. Gore, throwing shame to the winds, added this: "The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was ... Richard Nixon...."

Actually, the last time we had a president who thought he was above the law was about six years ago when Mr. Clinton thought he should be able to perjure himself and bend campaign finance laws with impunity. Mr. Clinton, recall, is the man Mr. Gore obsequiously named one of the best presidents of the twentieth century.

Finally, Mr. Gore builds toward a denouement: "The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon."

This raises a question. If this is, indeed, what men of honor do, why didn't Mr. Gore himself resign from the Clinton administration when it became obvious that Mr. Clinton had committed perjury?

Mr. Gore's speech was a screed. There were no positive proposals as to what should be done on the war on terror, no policy suggestions for handling terrorist suspects, no specific evidence to support the allegations he makes. The whole thing amounts to squeezing one's eyes tight shut, clenching one's fists and teeth and hissing, "Bush is evil" over and over until the mindless audience, mesmerized by the mantra, goes wild with approbation.

With every appearance Mr. Gore diminishes himself as a serious spokesperson for the Democrat party. He has transmogrified himself into the incredible shrinking man. He seems to have accepted the unseemly role of keeping Howard Dean's followers in the Kerry fold while Kerry pretends to be a more moderate, well-reasoned voice within the party. What a circus.

The Religion of Peace

If you have a strong stomach read this outstanding piece by Australian Andrew Bolt (Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip). Bolt finds a putative interview on an Islamic web site with a leader of the recent terrorist atrocities in Saudi Arabia. The man's name is Fawwaz bin Muhammad al-Nashami, and he's one of the terrorists who managed to escape after participating in the slaughter of innocent foreign workers. Bolt quotes him as he recounts the psychopathic violence:

The terrorists then stormed a second compound, and found an "American infidel".

"I shot him in the head, and his head exploded. We entered another office and found one infidel from South Africa, and our brother Hussein slit his throat. We asked Allah to accept (these pious acts) from us, and from him."

The terrorists then killed guards at a third compound, where al-Nashami says they found Johansson: "Brother Nimr cut off his head and put it at the gate, so that it would be seen by all . . ."

They caught other workers and checked their religion. "We found Filipino Christians. We cut their throats and dedicated them to our brothers the Mujahideen in the Philippines. We found Hindu engineers and we cut their throats, too, Allah be praised . . ."

There is much more, but this is enough to give one a sense of the horror these sick people were willing to inflict in the name of God. As Mohammed at Iraq the Model so eloquently puts it the terrorists' victims are much closer to God than are these "pious" Muslims. Their offerings and praise of Allah must be a stench in his nostrils as must be their very lives or else Allah has nothing important in common with the God of Christians and Jews. Indeed, if this sort of cruelty and bloodthirstiness is pleasing to Allah then Allah is the devil.

As Sullivan suggests, it's ludicrous to argue, as some have, that the savagery of Islamist terrorists is more political than religious. They are driven by their interpretation of Islam to do what they do, not by political ideology, and the Koran, as Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis points out in his book The Crisis of Islam, need not be twisted all that much to be made compatible with their interpretation.

In any society, brutes and thugs seek power. If they attain it they will strive to impose their interpretation of the guiding myths of their society on everyone else, and theirs is almost certainly going to be the most brutal interpretation of all the alternatives. This is the history of twentieth century Europe and of the contemporary Middle East.

The Islamists are fascists, to be sure, but they are Muslims first and foremost. If other Muslims wish us to believe that the jihadis do not represent Islam they better start shouting their condemnations from the high spires of their mosques. It may be that the thugs have the "moderates" intimidated in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Muslim world, but that shouldn't stop the Imams in America from proclaiming their fatwas and execrations against those who perpetrate such unspeakable crimes in the name of God.

Bolt ends his column with a discussion of the media's reception of the findings of the 9/11 Commission. A few excerpts:

"This week also saw the release of two interim reports by the commission US President George W. Bush set up to investigate al-Qaida's September 11 attacks. In a little-reported passage, they warn: 'Al-Qaida remains extremely interested in conducting chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks..'"

"This spectre, of course, is what drove us to invade Iraq. Not only did Saddam house and help terrorists, including Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, Palestinian suicide bombers and a bomb-maker of the 1993 World Trade Centre attack, but his scientists worked on chemical and biological weapons up until the war, as the Iraq Survey Group now confirms. The day would surely come when Saddam's weapons and the terrorists who wanted them finally met."

"So there were links between Saddam and al-Qaida, not to mention other terrorists, but no proof (yet) of active collaboration or co-operation in the September 11 attacks. This is almost word for word what Bush has long said. Yet ABC TV news said this week's reports prove al-Qaida 'had no links with Saddam Hussein, as suggested by the White House', and ABC's The World Today added: 'One of the Bush administration's central arguments for going to war with Iraq appears to be in tatters.' As if Bush had blamed Iraq for the September 11 attacks. The liar."

"More of this and al-Nashami can take it easy. We'll have cut our own throats already."

Zayed at Healing Iraq is an Iraqi Muslim who fears that "we are going to see more beheadings, the Mujahideen seem to appreciate the publicity and attention they receive with each new execution. Don't count on any public demonstrations of Muslim outrage though, there won't be any."

Chilling stuff. A very important question we should be asking ourselves is how would a president John Kerry protect us and our children from these people?

Sheik al Sadr

A month ago the press was deep into its "Sky is Falling" mode as it reported that Muqtada al Sadr had taken the measure of our troops and was leading Iraq into chaos. Meanwhile, some journalists could scarcely conceal their satisfaction as they contemplated the impact the cleric's successful uprising would have on George Bush's reelection hopes.

Then suddenly al Sadr disappeared from the news reports. The Mahdi army went silent. What happened? We were never really told, but Rowan Scarborough of the nation's best newspaper, The Washington Times, gives us some interesting insight. The key passage:

"When the division got word April 8 that Sheik al-Sadr's uprising meant most 1st Armored soldiers would stay and fight, rather than going home as scheduled, it touched off a series of remarkable military maneuvers."

"Soldiers, tanks and helicopters at a port in Kuwait reversed course, rushing back inside Iraq to battle the Shi'ite cleric's 10,000-strong army....Once he had targets [provided by a growing network of Iraqi spies and informants], Gen. Dempsey could then map a battle plan for entering four key cities - Karbala, Najaf, Kufa and Diwaniyah. This would be a counterinsurgency fought with 70-ton M-1 Abrams tanks and aerial gunships overhead. It would not be the lightning movements of clandestine commandos, but rather all the brute force the Army could muster, directed at narrowly defined targets."

"Last week, Sheik al-Sadr surrendered. He called on what was left of his men to cease operations...."

Why, one wonders, would he do that? Scarborough's answer:

"The division estimates it killed at least several thousand militia members."

I don't recall hearing anything about that on the evening news, do you?

Good News From Iraq

Andrew Sullivan directs us to this site for the most comprehensive news on developments, military, economic, political, social, and otherwise, in Iraq and asks why we can't find information like this in a major media outlet. Good question, but I think you'll know the answer once you start to explore the site. It's must reading for anyone who wants to be informed about what's happening in that country.

The Horse Race

John Podhoretz argues that we shouldn't believe polls that show John Kerry ahead in the race for the presidency. My question is, other than being the UnBush, what reason has Kerry given for anyone at all to vote for him? Since the primary he has become less and less distinguishable from Bush on what to do in Iraq, the economy is taking off under Bush, Bush does what he says he'll do, so we know exactly what we're getting with him.

Kerry would provide a plausible alternative if what Bush intends is not what a voter wants, of course, but the problem with Kerry is that one has no idea what he will do. He's been all over the lot on Iraq and the war on terrorism. With Kerry the more he talks the less one knows about what he believes. He puts himself in the position of being able to do just what he says he'll do only because at some time or other he's covered every possibility.

Unless there is some major event between now and November, I'll be surprised if Kerry is still competitive by the end of the campaign.

Give Us Barabbas!

The other day I suggested that liberal contempt for Bush distils to two things: His Christian faith and the threat his strong pro-life inclinations pose to Roe v. Wade. The Belmont Club has a slightly different take:

The particular venom with which the Liberals regard President Bush is at heart a reaction to what they perceive as a coup d'etat directed against the carefully constructed edifice of their historical achievements. To understand why the President and individuals like Paul Wolfowitz are described as "illegitimate", one should not, like the man who doesn't get the reference, look to the Florida chads or US Supreme Court decisions. Liberals are not talking about that kind of statutory legitimacy. Rather they are referring to what is perceived as a brazen attempt to negate the cultural equivalent of the Brezhnev doctrine, the idea that certain "progressive" modes of behavior, once attained, are irreversible. In this view, an entire set of attitudes, commonly referred to as "political correctness" and their institutional expressions, like the United Nations, have become part of a social contract, part of an unwritten constitution....James Lileks described the intensity of the revulsion at the barbarians at the gates; not Osama Bin Laden, but rather someone else:

"I ask my Democrat friends what they'd rather see happen -- Bush reelected and bin Laden caught, or Bush defeated and bin Laden still in the wind. They're all honest: they'd rather see Bush lose."

This is surely symptomatic of mental illness. It's a form of insanity that has gripped the left which they seem unwilling and unable to shake off. How else to describe people who would rather see the perpetrator of the 9/11 massacre go free to commit more such crimes if it means the political defeat of George Bush. It's reminiscent of the cry of the mob in Jerusalem two thousand years ago to "Give us Barabbas!" Sick.

True Lies

Bush's critics have been relentless in their allegations that the President lied to us about the reasons for invading Iraq. Al Gore's speech tomorrow will be but the most current example of such accusations about which three things that can be said.

First, as much as they have been repeated there has never to my knowledge been anything to show that Bush deliberately said what he knew to be false in order to mislead the American people. A lie, to be a lie, must be deliberate, and the teller must know, or should know, that what he is saying is false. In the run up to Operation Iraqi Freedom the White House offered as two of several justifications for military action their conviction that Saddam was working on obtaining WMD and their belief that he was aiding and abetting terrorists, including, but not limited to, al Qaida. Both of these, critics allege, were lies.

The evidence at this point in time suggests that the administration may have been mistaken about the WMD, but even if it turns out that they were, being mistaken is hardly the same as lying. Furthermore, if administration spokespersons were mistaken then they were not the only ones who were. So were Bill Clinton, John Kerry, almost every other Democrat, the New York Times, and most of the leadership of Europe. All of the foregoing believed, and told us at one point or another, that Saddam had, or was working toward obtaining, WMD. If his critics are going to accuse him of lying they have a duty to show that what he said was not simply an error, that it was an intentional effort to deceive. This they have not done, nor do they evidently care to. The language of character assassination comes too easily to their lips.

The connection to terrorism which Bush alleged seems pretty clear. Saddam harbored Abu Nidal and al Zarqawi. He allowed terrorists to train at a facility at Salman Pak and he rewarded the families of terrorists who blew themselves up in Israel with stipends of several thousand dollars. There is other evidence which reveals Saddam's relationship to terrorists in the Middle East. Interested readers should check out Stephen Hayes' book The Connection or read this interview of Hayes by NRO.

The finding of the 9/11 commission that there's no evidence that Saddam was connected to the 9/11 attack and the oohing and ahhing that subsequently erupted in the media is a red herring. To suggest that this finding refutes Bush's claim that the Iraqis were assisting terrorists is like arguing that because there's no evidence that Kobe Bryant's agent was involved in the events of which Bryant stands accused that there's therefore no connection between the player and the agent.

Second, the implication that Bush has done something morally offensive by lying (if he did) to the American people is absurd coming from those whose concept of morality is purely pragmatic. The critics of the Bush administration are largely secular men and women who hold to an ethic that declares whatever works to be right. For many of them there is no transcendent basis for morality, there's no God who establishes a standard to which we can repair to see if our behavior is right or wrong. In the absence of such a standard the only meaning that attaches to moral claims like "Bush lied" is a subjective expression of distaste.

In other words, if Bush did lie, then, on the modernist, secular assumption that there is no transcendent moral law, he hasn't done anything really wrong, he's only done something his critics don't like, and why should anyone care about what his critics like and don't like? Unless there is a transcendent moral authority, a God and a divinely ordained moral law, all the moral outrage on display on the op-ed pages of our papers is so much childish ranting. The only people who have solid ground to criticize anyone else's moral behavior are theists.

Third, the charge of lying levelled against Bush is hypocritical because lying and defending lying are tactics leftists and liberals themselves don't hesitate to embrace whenever it suits their purposes. Marx wrote that there is no morality save that which promotes the advance of materialistic socialism. The left shares the Marxist assumptions and agrees with him on ultimate goals. For many on the left, therefore, lying is moral if it promotes world socialism and immoral if it hinders it. Thus the paroxysms of righteousness that southpaw political figures and journalists affect at the very thought that Bush might have lied in order to accomplish a political goal is little else than a cynical attempt to discredit a "capitalist" president in the eyes of the gullible, unsophisticated masses, not something they themselves actually find personally reprehensible.

An excellent example of the left/liberal embrace of the lie as a political weapon opens in our local theaters this weekend. However, before you pay money to see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 you really should read Christopher Hitchens' devastating review of both the film and it's creator in Vanity Fair. Hitchens is certainly no conservative Republican. He's a former left-wing writer for The Nation who is disenchanted with his erstwhile colleagues' opposition to a war he believes to have been a moral necessity, an important step in the direction of establishing justice in the world. He begins his review with this:

"To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery"

Then, after having dispensed with the niceties, Hitchens takes the gloves off. Anyone interested in Moore's work in general or this film in particular should read the whole critique. It's a little long, but it's absolutely devastating in its analysis of Moore's integrity and superficiality.

Why They Hate Him

It's not a particularly trenchant insight to observe that the left in America despises George Bush. What is interesting is the question why this is so. The left, of course, has hated every Republican president at least since Eisenhower, and especially Nixon, Reagan, and George W. so hatred is perhaps an ugly allele in their political genome. Beyond that there are a number of ostensive reasons given as to why the left feels so much contempt for this president: his tax cuts, Iraq, his alienation of the French, the Florida election fiasco, and his allegedly sub-standard IQ all come to mind, but perhaps the real reason is none of these.

I suspect he's hated by the left primarily because he is feared by them, and he's feared because he is resolutely pro-life on abortion and because he is explicitly and unabashedly Christian. If Bush were a staunch defender of a woman's right to an abortion, and if he were more muted in his expressions of faith, the left would still oppose him, of course, but they wouldn't despise him. They would regard him as a reinstantiation of Gerald Ford. As it is, however, they see him as an imminent threat to two things which are of paramount importance to them. They see him as a clear and present danger to Roe v. Wade, and they see him as a serious menace to the realization of the secularist dream of a religion-free society.

They know that in a second term Bush will have the opportunity to appoint numerous judges to the federal bench and three, maybe even four, justices to the Supreme Court. Moreover, depending on how the senatorial elections go in November, the liberals may lack sufficient strength in the senate to continue to block his judicial nominations.

In other words, whoever is elected president in November may well establish the moral and spiritual direction this country will follow for the next two generations. The choice is between continuing the ongoing Europeanization of America or perhaps rolling back some of the more egregious Supreme Court decisions of the last sixty years. The left devoutly wishes the former and is horrified at the prospect of the latter. Thus Bush must be defeated at all costs, he is the closest thing to Satan which exists in the liberal mythos and their hatred for him is amply justified in their minds by the nature of the threat he poses.

John Leo thinks there is something of this political contempt underlying the recent failure of the Supreme Court to address head-on the question of the constitutional propriety of the under God phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance in the recent Newdow case. He writes:

"Call me a cynic, but I think the liberals on the court didn't want to cause an uproar that would help Republicans in an election year. Better to come up with a soothing but temporary political decision -- restoring "under God" for now while clearly inviting a future challenge that the court will be only too happy to grant once the political coast is clear."

The left is aware that there are a number of court decisions that would not withstand scrutiny from jurists committed to maintaining the integrity of the Constitution rather than wresting it to conform to contemporary ideological fashion. Roe v. Wade would certainly be vulnerable to a Court whose decisions were governed by what the constitution says rather than by what five justices think it should say.

Another awful decision, one whose reversal would go a long way toward restoring some measure of common sense to our understanding of the role of religion in society, and one which a conservative court might be expected to revisit, is Everson v. Board of Education (1947). This was the case which incorporated the language of separation of church and state into the legal understanding of the first amendment. The Everson court cited this particular phrase in an 1802 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut who were concerned that Jefferson intended to establish a national religious denomination. Jefferson wrote to reassure them that this was not the case, and he borrowed from another Baptist preacher, Roger Williams, the idea of "a wall of separation between church and state" to persuade the Baptists that the church should be protected from interference by the government.

It is hard to read the history of this episode and come reasonably to the conclusion that Jefferson wished to exclude all references to God from our public ceremonies and discourse. Jefferson, after all, within a year of writing this letter, signed legislation giving money to evangelize Indians. He also used state funds to establish a divinity department at the University of Virginia and declared that students of the university were expected to attend religious services.

To cite this letter as being somehow dispositive in revealing what the framers had in mind as they drew up the Bill of Rights is ludicrous since Jefferson was in France when the first amendment was being crafted. Just as pernicious, however, was the decision by the Everson court to extend the injunction against Congress' making any law which would establish a religion to the states and hence to every level of government. The logic of this ruling has led to the effort on the part of secularists to proscribe every reference to anything which could be construed as religious in any venue supported by public monies.

That the Founders never intended the first amendment to apply to other than the federal government is clear from the fact that many of the original thirteen states required their elected officials to declare a personal commitment to orthodox Christianity, and five of the thirteen states had official state churches. These states didn't disestablish their churches after they voted to ratify the first amendment. Indeed, they never saw themselves as in breach of it because the amendment didn't apply to the states until the Supreme Court finally discovered the apparent oversight in 1947. Now Everson is used to sweep not just sectarian religious references and symbols from every nook and cranny of the public square, but even mention of an abstract, generalized deity is taboo.

Thus Newdow was evidently really all about Everson. The crucial question lurking in the background was whether or not the Court was going to take Everson to its logical conclusion, and, if not, would Everson eventually be rolled back. It's hard to overstate the stakes here. If the Court followed the logic of Everson and found that the phrase under God, when recited in public schools, violated the separation of church and state and therefore decided in favor of Mr. Newdow, the winds of secularism blowing through our society would become a gale. This, however, would carry with it the risk of roiling the electorate into such a lather that Bush might be given the opportunity in a second term to restructure the Court in ways that would redound throughout the next fifty years.

On the other hand, if the Justices found against Mr. Newdow by upholding the constitutional propriety of the under God language they would have implicitly repudiated Everson and thus risked laying the ground work for the overturning of, not only Everson, but a string of subsequent decisions based upon it. So the Court did neither, ruling instead that Mr. Newdow did not have legal standing to bring suit against the defendant and leaving the door open, as Leo points out, for another challenge sometime in the future when the political risks are not as significant.

The Supreme Court has, by ducking a definitive decision in the Newdow case, poorly served our nation. As John Leo says, "We deserve a better, more honest Supreme Court."

Good Analysis

The Belmont Club continues to offer readers excellent analysis of, and insight into, the War On Terrorism. Sunday's posting analyzes what's behind the shift to attacks in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Good stuff.

After reading it you might want to scroll up to The Enemy Offensive Begins which discusses the Iranian seizure of three small Royal Navy craft. A couple of excerpts from Belmont Club:

"The origins of the seizure, which have no apparent operational rationale, are rooted in the April 2004 offensive against Coalition Forces in Iraq. Iran saw that the US was unwilling to engage in large-scale combat operations against either the Ba'ath in Fallujah but more importantly against Moqtada Al-Sadr in Najaf in an election year. Instead, American commanders attempted to finesse the situation by applying limited and targeted force hand in glove with political warfare. Teheran saw that if those were the rules they were willing to play."

"Although the Iranians may try to dominate the agenda with the usual television parade of hostages and prisoners, just as their terrorist counterparts in Iraq and Saudi Arabia do with their captives, the only real question should be how to humiliate the Mullahs. Tables were made to be turned. They should be made to remember this day so that if their miserable theocracy lasts another ten years they can never bring themselves to look at a calendar opened to the month of June without trembling."

The next few days will be interesting. Will this seizure serve as a pretext for an attack against Iran's nuclear weapons production facilities? Will the Brits handle this themselves or will they enlist our aid? What are the consequences for Iran if they don't release the eight crewmen? What are the consequences for the West if we let them get away with it?

Good News

"Americans are paying markedly less attention to Iraq than in the last two months. At the same time, their opinions about the war have become more positive. The number of Americans who think the U.S. military effort is going well has jumped from 46% in May to 57%, despite ongoing violence in Iraq and the widening prison abuse scandal. And the percentage of the public who believes it was right to go to war inched up to 55%, from 51% in May." From The Pew Research Center

A recent Harris poll shows Bush over Kerry by 10% among likely voters.

Ten Percent!!?? Viewpoint predicted last month that Kerry was going to do very poorly among minority voters and that this would be fatal in November. He hasn't given us any reason to alter that prediction, but we'll see how the summer goes. Maybe Kerry will claim to have been W.E.B. DuBois in a previous life.

Rope-A-Dope

In Asleep at the Wheel? I lamented the administration's diffident response to the portrait being painted of it in the liberal media. David Horowitz, a former radical leftist at FrontPage Magazine.com has an excellent piece on this same theme. Some excerpts:

"As wars go, the conflict in Iraq was (and is) as good as it gets. A three week military campaign with minimal casualties, 25 million people liberated from one of the most sadistic tyrants of modern times, the establishment of a military and intelligence base in the heart of the terrorist world. What well-meaning person could oppose this? In fact there is none."

"The war has had enormous beneficial effects with minimal negative consequences. A terrible tyrant was taken down. The filling of mass graves with 300,000 corpses was stopped. Plastic shredders for human beings were deactivated. Prisons for four to twelve year olds were closed. A democratic constitution has been drafted. Two-thirds of al-Qaeda's leadership is gone. There hasn't been a terrorist attack in America in more than two and a half years, something no one would have predicted after 9/11. By any objective standard, the Bush war on terror is a triumph."

"The Times 'News Analysis' accompanying the [9/11 Commission report] draws this conclusion: 'In questioning the extent of any ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the commission weakened the already spotty scorecard on Mr. Bush's justifications for sending the military to topple Saddam Hussein.' Actually this Times reportage is several lies in one. First, the panel did not conclude that there was no al Qaeda-Iraq tie. It concluded that it could not find an al Qaeda-Iraq tie in respect to the attacks of 9/11. This is entirely different from the claim that there were no links between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime."

"These real world considerations are why the campaign waged by the Democratic Party and a Democratic press against the Bush war policy is based not on any analysis of the war itself, but on maliciously concocted claims about the prewar justification for military action. For purely political agendas, the Democrats hope to attempt to convict the Administration of 'misleading the American public' and wasting American lives through deception and fraud, and thus to defeat the President at the polls in November."

"This is the campaign of the Big Lie and its success depends on the very fact that it is a big lie. Its aim is to shift the very terms of the argument to a terrain favorable to the critics who have been refuted by the events themselves, a terrain entirely irrelevant to the reality of the war itself. To respond to this campaign would require of its targets candor and courage, because the only way to confront it is to impugn the integrity, honesty and goodwill of those who so maliciously prosecute it. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration does not seem up to this task of calling its critics to account. This is why it is on the defensive and in serious trouble in its political campaign."

"The critics of the Bush Administration have used their lies about the rationale for the war to call the President a liar, a fraud, a deceiver and a traitor. These are terms that apply to the critics themselves. But the Bush Administration has not had the gumption to use them (or their political equivalents). The Bush Administration had better rethink this reluctance if it intends on retaining power in November. American voters are not going to be able to sort out these lies for themselves in the absence of a strong case by the Bush team."

"What we are confronting in this spectacle is an unprecedented event in American political life. In the midst of a good war and a noble enterprise, a major American party is engaged in an effort to stab its own country in the back for short term political gain, and is willing to do to so by the most underhanded and unscrupulous means."

It's hard to improve on this. Horowitz has nailed the problem raised in Asleep at the Wheel? Fortunately, there have been signs this weekend that the administration is rousing itself from its slumbers. Time will tell whether this is just a stirring or whether the White House really is going to get serious. Maybe the strategy is to play a kind of political rope-a-dope until the convention and then start swinging furiously. I don't know, but if it weren't for the fact that John Kerry is no Bill Clinton images of 1992 would be filling the mind with foreboding.

Karma Chameleon

Senator Kerry, like Boy George in Karma Chameleon (Don't ask me how I remember that one), is a man without conviction. Nor can he tell a contradiction, he just comes and goes. Here's a piece which reveals, in his own words, Kerry's stance on Iraq in 2002, before he realized that he would have to be vigorously anti-war to go anywhere as a Democratic presidential candidate, and his position today when he has to distinguish himself as the un-Bush. Kerry seems as confused about his ideology as Boy George was about his gender.

Paul Johnson

Matt Drudge has the awful pictures. We won't see them on the mainstream media, of course, because they still can't get over the ghastly photos of Iraqi men with hoods over their heads and leashes around their necks. One writer to our local paper last evening called the Abu Ghraib photos "horrific". If the media wants to show something "horrific" then they should show the Nicholas Berg or Paul Johnson videotapes, but they won't because that would strengthen the determination of the American people to fight the war on terror with even greater resolve which would mean four more years of George Bush, and that, for many of the port-siders in the media, is itself a horrific prospect. So we'll continue to see only photos that make the U.S. look bad.

If one does go to the Drudge site he/she should do two things: First, one should repeat over and over that this savagery doesn't represent true Islam because it's important that we convince ourselves of this while wondering why, in the wake of this unspeakable horror in the name of Allah, there is such a mystifying silence emanating from our mosques here in the states. And secondly, we need to keep securely in mind that this is pretty much what these people have planned for us and our children if we let up for just a moment in the war on terror.

The barbarians who perpetrate the evils we've witnessed in recent weeks in Iraq and Saudi Arabia are characters right out of J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Anyone who could do these things to another human being is less than human, he is a morally hideous Orc-like savage that knows nothing of the human virtues. He lives in a bleak, dark Mordor-like land blindly following the toxic behest of Imams, more Sauerman than holy men, who preach a message of hate, blood and death. They live in Sauron's world and are firmly in his thrall. They talk of God, but the love and beauty of God are not part of their world. They despise and disdain them.

I read recently (I can't remember the source) that to use God's name to justify evil is precisely what the commandment forbids when it enjoins us not to take God's name in vain. This, however, is exactly what those who shout "God is great" while sawing off a man's head are doing. They praise God as if they are doing what He wants them to do. What can be a greater offense against the holiness and goodness of God than to make Him an accomplice, indeed a motivating cause, of such evil? These men are not righteous, they are not pious, they are not pleasing God, they are, if anything is, satanic.

All We Need To Know

Some time ago I wrote that all we needed to know about John Kerry is that if Osama bin Laden could vote in our election Kerry would be his choice in November. Most commentators, Democrat and Republican, tacitly acknowledge this when they discuss the possibility of a terrorist strike on American homeland this summer or autumn to pull the electorate to the left, as they succeeded in doing in Spain.

Now there is a runner-up for the honorific "All We Need to Know About John Kerry" An article in the Washington Times sums it up for us in a single sentence. In a piece discussing how Kerry is being advised to keep quiet about religious matters, the Times explains how Kerry's new religion advisor, a twenty nine year old Unitarian socialist named Mara Vanderslice, who majored in Peace and Global Studies at a Quaker college and who somewhat paradoxically participated in the violent rallies against the IMF in Seattle in 2000 and 2002, is now being marginalized by the Kerry campaign. The article then quotes the fateful sentence:

At first, Miss Vanderslice was given wide latitude to define Mr. Kerry's positions on spiritual issues and to hire assistants who would reach out to Muslims and black churches, the Kerry campaign source said.

Think about that for a moment. Someone who probably doesn't know Kerry personally, at least not well, is permitted to define his positions on spiritual issues. This certainly gives a new twist to the concept of "deep convictions". A man's spiritual beliefs, if they are genuine, are surely the most important, most personal, most profound beliefs he holds. How can someone else, someone who doesn't even know the candidate, be allowed to define those positions for him unless, in fact, they're not all that important to Senator Kerry in the first place? Perhaps for Kerry the only purpose religious beliefs serve is to endear him to whichever segment of the electorate he can bamboozle with them. Can you imagine George Bush having his spiritual beliefs defined by someone other than himself?

Asleep at the Wheel?

The biggest disappointment one feels with the Bush administration is its utter inability or unwillingness to explain or defend the positions it takes and the policies it pursues. If Bush loses in November it will be in large part, perhaps, because, despite all the good things happening in Iraq, despite all the positive news about the economy, a depressing number of voters still think that Iraq is in chaos and the economy is in the tank. It's possible, of course, to blame a mendacious media and an apathetic citizenry for much of this ignorance, but the presidency is not without resources. The administration could be doing far more than it is to make it all but impossible for the media to ignore their message. Instead the White House acts as if their successes are none of our business. See this article by Robert Kaplan in the WSJ for an excellent account of Marine operations in Fallujah and his perplexity at the administration's failure to inform the American public about it.

Now comes the 9/11 commission report and the media make it sound as if the document is an indictment of the president's rationale for going into Iraq in the first place. The commission has found no connection, we are told, between Iraq and 9/11, thus undercutting one of the chief reasons Bush gave for toppling Saddam. The problem with this is that Bush never, as far as anyone has been able to determine, said that Iraq was somehow connected to 9/11, so it is strange that the commission thinks this statement was necessary. What Bush did say was that Iraq supported terrorists and terrorism which seems pretty clearly true since there was a terrorist training facility at Salmon Pak and since several major terrorists had taken refuge in Iraq including Abu Nidal and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bush's spokespersons also claimed that Saddam was involved with al Qaida, but they never said that Saddam was directly complicit in the 9/11 attack.

Nevertheless, the media, who themselves seem intellectually incapable of distinguishing between having a relationship with al Qaida and being directly involved in the specific acts of terrorism they perpetrate, is allowed to create the impression that somehow the 9/11 commission has shown the Bush administration to have been once again either dishonest or incompetent or both. The White House response to this absurd mangling of the truth is little more than a rhetorical yawn.

For an excellent analysis of the 9/11 commission's report check out the entire day's worth of posts for June 17 at Power Line. The last post in the queue has this remarkable statement which perfectly captures the frustration that a lot of conservatives must be feeling right now:

"Given that the Republicans ostensibly control both houses of Congress, I can't explain why the Sept. 11 commission and its staff consist mostly of Democratic Party operatives. But that isn't the real problem; the real problem is that President Bush is passive and inarticulate, and his administration is pathologically unable to engage in debate. The staff report is a juicy target--what movie is it where a soldier rides between rows of watermelons set on sticks, slicing them off with his sword?--but no one in the Bush administration has the courage or skill to stand up for the administration's policies. So, as always, the administration will keep its head down and try to weather another storm, hoping to slide its nose over the finish line in November. That really isn't good enough."

George Bush has been an excellent leader in many ways, but a big part of leadership is constantly reminding the troops, in this case the voters, of what the mission is, explaining why that mission is necessary, and how the mission is progressing. We're evidently a nation of people who need a lot of reminding. The apparent apathy in this administration about what the average American is hearing about the two issues which most commentators think will decide the election, Iraq and the economy, is astonishing and made all the more appalling and exasperating by the fact that the alternative to Bush is so dismal.

Reporting D-Day Today

This parody of the contemporary media's propensity to see imminent catastrophe in every national undertaking, particularly military operations, has been making the rounds on the internet. It's pretty good. I think the following address is the site where it originated, but I didn't see this particular piece when I went there.

StrategyPage.com Spring 2004 If D-Day Had Been Reported On Today By William A. Mayer

Tragic French Offensive Stalled on Beaches (Normandy, France - June 6, 1944)

Pandemonium, shock and sheer terror dominate today's events in Europe. In an as yet unfolding apparent fiasco, Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower's troops got a rude awakening this morning at Omaha Beach here in Normandy. Due to insufficient planning and lack of a workable entrance strategy, soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry as well as Army Rangers are now bogged down and sustaining heavy casualties inflicted on them by dug-in insurgent positions located 170 feet above them on cliffs overlooking the beaches which now resemble blood soaked killing fields at the time of this mid-morning filing.

Bodies, parts of bodies, and blood are the order of the day here, the screams of the dying and the stillness of the dead mingle in testament to this terrible event. Morale can only be described as extremely poor--in some companies all the officers have been either killed or incapacitated, leaving only poorly trained privates to fend for themselves. Things appear to be going so poorly that Lt. General Omar Bradley has been rumored to be considering breaking off the attack entirely.

As we go to press embattled U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt's spokesman has not made himself available for comment at all, fueling speculation that something has gone disastrously awry. The government at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in a distinct lock-down mode and the Vice President's location is presently and officially undisclosed. Whether the second in command should have gone into hiding during such a crisis will have to be answered at some future time, but many agree it does not send a good signal.

Miles behind the beaches and adding to the chaos, U.S. Naval gunships have inflicted many friendly fire casualties, as huge high explosive projectiles rain death and destruction on unsuspecting Allied positions. The lack of training of Naval gunners has been called into question numerous times before and today's demonstration seems to underlie those concerns.

At Utah Beach the situation is also grim, elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne seemed to be in disarray as they missed their primary drop zones behind the area believed to comprise the militant's front lines. Errant paratroopers have been hung up in trees, breaking arms and legs, rendering themselves easy targets for those defending this territory.

On the beach front itself the landing area was missed, catapulting U.S. forces nearly 2,000 yards south of the intended coordinates, thus placing them that much farther away from the German insurgents and unable to direct covering fire or materially add to the operation. Casualties at day's end are nothing short of horrific; at least 8,000 and possibly as many as 9,000 were wounded in the haphazardly coordinated attack, which seems to have no unifying purpose or intent. Of this number at least 3,000 have been estimated as having been killed, making June 6th by far, the worst single day of the war which has dragged on now--with no exit strategy in sight--as the American economy still struggles to recover from Herbert Hoover's depression and its 25% unemployment. Military spending has skyrocketed the national debt into uncharted regions, lending another cause for concern. When and if the current hostilities finally end it may take generations for the huge debt to be repaid.

On the planning end of things, experts wonder privately if enough troops were committed to the initial offensive and whether at least another 100,000 troops should have been added to the force structure before such an audacious undertaking. Communication problems also have made their presence felt making that an area for further investigation by the appropriategovernmental committees.

On the home front, questions and concern have been voiced. A telephone poll has shown dwindling support for the wheel-chair bound Commander In Chief, which might indicate a further erosion of support for his now three year-old global war. Of course, the President's precarious health has always been a question. He has just recently recovered from pneumonia and speculation persists whether or not he has sufficient stamina to properly sustain the war effort. This remains a topic of furious discussion among those questioning his competency.

Today's costly and chaotic landing compounds the President's already large credibility problem. More darkly, this phase of the war, commencing less than six months before the next general election, gives some the impression that Roosevelt may be using this offensive simply as a means to secure re-election in the fall.

Underlining the less than effective Allied attack, German casualties--most of them innocent and hapless conscripts--seem not to be as severe as would be imagined. A German minister who requested anonymity stated categorically that "the aggressors were being driven back into the sea amidst heavy casualties, the German people seek no wider war."

"The news couldn't be better," Adolph Hitler said when he was first informed of the D-Day assault earlier this afternoon. "As long as they were in Britain we couldn't get at them. Now we have them where we can destroy them." German minister Goebbels had been told of the Allied airborne landings at 0400 hours. "Thank God, at last," he said. "This is the final round."

Hoist By Their Own Petard.

Check out Andrew Sullivan for a fascinating compendium of quotes about Ronald Reagan from lefties back in the eighties. It affords a fascinating glimpse of how the left got the man so wrong. They never learn, though, nor do they ever seem to be embarrassed by their dismal track record. They just keep on making the same mistakes. In the eighties the target of their errant sniping was RR, today the beneficiary of their foolishness is GWB. Someone once pointed out that neurosis is doing the same thing over and over, hoping that somehow you'll soon get a different result. The left seems to believe that if they beat their heads against the brick wall hard enough and long enough eventually the wall will collapse. We'll see, but I suspect they're more likely to suffer brain damage.

The Privileged Theory

The culture wars have finally arrived in our humble county. A local school board has balked at adopting a high school biology textbook because it gives short shrift to any metaphysical alternatives to Darwinian evolution. Our evening newspaper, always on the look-out for controversy, has decided to create one by opining that the school board's recalcitrance somehow flies in the face of Supreme Court decisions which forbid teaching Creationism in schools.

There are so many confusions here that one scarcely knows where to begin to try to clarify. It is true that the Supreme Court found in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that it's unconstitutional to require that creationism be taught in public schools, but in his majority opinion Justice Brennan wrote: "The [Louisianna act mandating Creationism] does not grant teachers a flexibility that they did not already possess to supplant the present science curriculum with the presentation of theories, besides evolution, about the origin of life. Indeed, the Court of Appeals found that no law prohibited Louisiana public school teachers from teaching any scientific theory. As the president of the Louisiana Science Teachers Association testified, 'any scientific concept that's based on established fact can be included in our curriculum already, and no legislation allowing this is necessary.'"

It is not clear, therefore, why a school board would be in violation of Edwards in wishing to furnish district students with textbooks that present evidence of other explanations of origins besides the Darwinian account. Edwards struck down an attempt by a state legislature to enact a law requiring that a view of origins which is based upon a particular interpretation of the Biblical book of Genesis be taught by all schools. A school board, however, is not a state legislature. It is the task of a school board to select texts they deem suitable for their students and which will help them attain the best possible education. The board, in carrying out this responsibility, may exercise poor judgment, may be mistaken, may be unwise, but it's hard to see how it violates Edwards.

In rendering his opinion in the Edwards case Justice Brennan sites the three prong test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). He writes: "First, the legislature must have adopted the law with a secular purpose. Second, the statute's principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion. Third, the statute must not result in an excessive entanglement of government with religion. State action violates the Establishment Clause if it fails to satisfy any of these prongs."

One thing seems clear about this. Lemon addressed a law enacted by a state legislature, it's not clear that it applies to a school board displaying a preference for one textbook over another.

Brennan also writes that: "Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family. Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary."

Just so. The problem that Justice Brennan and the editorial writer for my local paper don't see is that neither Darwinian evolution nor "Scientific Creationism" are scientific in the classic Baconian sense of the word. Darwinian evolution is the belief that blind, purposeless processes, acting over long periods of time, gave rise first to living cells, and then ultimately, to all the diversity of life which inhabits this planet. The theory insists that all life, indeed all of space-time, can be explained solely in terms of material causes. Darwinism goes on to assert that the universe is closed to any non-material interference from any entities existing "outside" of it.

Now whatever this is it's not an empirical theory. It's not science. It's a philosophical assumption that some scientists make about ultimate reality. As such it is pure metaphysics masquerading as science, and as Justice Brennan implies, teaching this to a captive audience of impressionable young people is seen by many parents as a betrayal of the trust that they placed in the school when they enrolled their children.

In my view, the proper approach for a concerned, conscientious school board to take is not to look for a book that teaches Creationism because Creationism is indeed a view based upon a particular religious interpretation of the Bible. It holds that the world and life were created by God in six days some ten thousand years ago. This may well be the case metaphysically, but it is hard to see how it can avoid the charge of being a religious dogma dressed up in scientific drag.

A much better way to present a balanced approach to the issue and to truly educate our children without entangling public tax dollars in sectarian controversy is that employed by Intelligent Design theorists. What they advocate is that a teacher be encouraged to present to his/her students the standard Darwinian model and then explain the evidence both for and against it. There is no constitutional objection to this methodology. It's what education should be and the way many of the best teachers, going all the way back to Socrates, have taught. As Darwin himself said in the Origin of Species, "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."

There are many scientific, empirical challenges to Darwinism, but the major challenge is philosophical. Philosophers and scientists have been telling us for some time that there is a mounting body of empirical evidence that leads to the conclusion that the universe, including the biosphere, is richly endowed with information. They argue that since we have a uniform experience of information being produced solely by intelligent minds, it is reasonable to assume, in lieu of evidence to the contrary, that the information contained in, for example, the elaborate and intricate cellular assembly line machines that generate proteins, is an artifact of intelligence, of a mind. Teachers should teach the biochemical facts of cellular machinery, ID theorists insist, and explain the emergence of this machinery in terms of blind, undirected, mechanical processes, if they wish. But we need to recognize that the claim that this machinery came about through impersonal, unintelligent agency is no less metaphysical, nor any more scientific, than the claim that it came about through personal intelligent agency. Therefore, if teachers are to be free to explain the origin of life, the emergence of cellular machines, and the appearance of consciousness in terms of mechanistic processes, and they should be, school boards certainly should have it within their purview to provide students with textbooks which also present arguments for the contrary view that these phenomena can best be explained in terms of intelligent agency.

Claims as to exactly who, or what, the intelligent agent is, or was, are not apposite. It could be the God of the Christians and Jews. It could be Allah. It could be Zeus. It could be aliens from a distant galaxy. Neither need there be controversy over how long ago the original biogenetic event took place. Whether it was 10,000 yrs. ago or 3 billion years ago is irrelevant to the fundamental question at issue. Likewise, there need be no debate over what means the intelligent agent used to bring higher life forms about. It could, indeed, have been a long process of evolution. Intelligent Design theorists are methodological agnostics on all these matters. The only question of concern to them as professional scientists and philosophers is: Do living things show the impress of design or are they the sorts of things that could plausibly be generated by physical forces and serendipity?

Put this way, the debate is not one of religion vs. science rather it is a debate between two different schools within the philosophy of science. It's a debate between those who think the cause of all we find in the world is material and those who think it is mind. It's a debate between those who believe the universe is closed and those who believe it is open. Since these questions are philosophical some may think they have no place in a science classroom, but I think this would be a mistake. Let's have students examine the scientific evidence and let them draw their own conclusions. It would also be a mistake, and an injustice, to arbitrarily privilege one school of thought while excluding the other. This would cheat our children, but it is what Darwinians are all too happy to do to protect their theory and themselves from criticism and to perpetuate their privileged status.

Krauthammer on Reagan

Charles Krauthammer does a nice job making the liberal media look a little silly in their attempt to find an appropriate way to cover the week's memorials to President Reagan. He begins his column by noting that:

"[T]he liberal establishment that alternately ridiculed and demonized Ronald Reagan throughout his presidency is in a quandary. How to remember a man they anathematized for eight years, but who enjoys both the overwhelming affection of the American people and decisive vindication by history? They found their way to do it. They dwell endlessly on the man's smile, his sunny personality, his good manners. Above all, his optimism."

For Mr. Krauthammer this is a ludicrous cop-out:

"Optimism? Every other person on the No. 6 bus is an optimist. What distinguished Reagan was what he did and said."

Krauthammer focusses on Reagan's foreign policy successes in this essay, but he might also have written about how the Gipper healed the nation's sick economy and restored America's confidence in itself after the shattering experiences of Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis and a decade of stagnation and malaise during the seventies. Krauthammer writes:

"Rarely has a president been so quickly and completely vindicated by history. The Berlin Wall came down 10 months after Reagan left office. His policies of unrelenting toughness won the Cold War and brought a new peace. That is because Reagan understood that the key to peace was never arms control. Security had nothing to do with the number of weapons, it had everything to do with the intention and power of those who possessed them."

"This success is an understandable embarrassment to the critics who opposed his every policy. They supported the [nuclear]freeze, denounced [his] military buildup, ridiculed strategic defenses, opposed aid to the Nicaraguan anti-communists and derided Reagan for telling the truth about the Soviet empire."

"So now they praise his sunny smile. Normally, people speak well of the recently deceased to honor the dictum of being kind to the dead. When Reagan's opponents speak well of him now, however, they are trying to be kind to themselves."

As usual, Krauthammer has it pretty much right. Reagan wasn't perfect, of course. His tenure was certainly not uniformly glorious. There were black marks, some of them serious, on his presidency. From a conservative perspective he was remiss in choosing justices for the Supreme Court who lacked a commitment to finding a remedy for Roe v. Wade. Sandra Day O'Conner and Anthony Kennedy, both appointed by Reagan, have been disappointing on those issues, dear to conservatives, which bear on the question of how we shall value human life.

He was also negligent, it seems to some, in not insisting on stricter oversight of the Contras in Nicaraugua. The cause of opposing communism in this hemisphere was right and just, and sometimes, if you want to dance, you have to embrace the only lady in the bar, even if she's not very pretty. But some of the Contras were undisciplined and indiscriminate in their tactics and guilty, evidence indicates, of atrocities which simply should not have been tolerated. To the extent that our tax dollars supported murders of innocent people we should weep in repentance.

Even so, Krauthammer is surely correct that what Reagan did for the United States, a nation sliding deep into the economic and psychological doldrums by the late seventies, and what he did for the world by catalyzing the collapse of totalitarian communism in Europe and Central America, at a time when it seemed as if opposition to communism put one on the wrong side of history, warrants far more than an editorial emphasis on sunny dispositions and warm smiles.

The Religious Divide

Some political science types see the political divide in this country as running between red and blue states, some between rich and poor citizens, but evidence is building that the biggest political separation in this country is between those who are religious, i.e. those who believe in a personal God, and those who are not. Religion, we had been told for the last half century, was dying in the U.S. just as it had been in Europe. Atheism is the wave of the future and will soon extinguish its pre-modern competitor. Be all this as it may, it seems that religion is not going gently into that dark night. At least in the United States it remains a potent political force and will continue to be so for some time to come.

That is not to say that religious belief is thriving everywhere in the U.S. It certainly seems moribund, even despised, among the cultural elites. The late Carl Sagan, an astronomer who achieved celebrity status in the 1970s, was well-known for his claim that "The universe is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." How Sagan knew this is a mystery to me. It's also a mystery where an atheistic scientist finds philosophical justification for these words: "The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

If the universe really is all there is then the first sentence in this quote is romantic flummery. The second is metaphysically vacuous. I don't know where Sagan is looking that he sees so much love in the world, but even if his keen eye does discern it in some nook somewhere, on his own principle that nature is the highest metaphysical reality, that all there is can be reduced to matter and energy, then the abundant love he espies is nothing more than a meaningless mixture of chemicals in the brain. It's little else than an interesting arrangement of atoms, ultimately no more significant than, say, digestion. On what grounds, then, does Sagan privilege love over digestion or excretion?

It's true that love stimulates us to desire union with the people we care deeply for, to meld our souls to theirs like the alloy of two disparate metals, but we are existentially doomed to be always other, to be isolated, to be never able to fully realize that oneness we yearn for. The chemicals in our bodies deceive us so that, at least in some instances, we unite only long enough to copulate and perpetuate the species. Big deal. Plants and animals do that without, as far as we know, experiencing love.

As for Sagan's "moral depth" there is no such thing as moral oughtness, and certainly no such thing as moral depth if each of us is nothing more than a biochemical machine. Neither you nor I have any more moral responsibility than does the computer I'm writing this on. Where would moral responsibility come from in a world where everyone is simply the product of Darwinian chance and mutation? Who are we responsible to if the universe is all there is? Why talk about morality at all if life beyond death is just a "pretty story" and if death is in fact utter annihilation? Sagan states that we should be "grateful every day for the brief opportunity that life provides," but to whom should we be grateful? Why should we be grateful? If "nature" is god then nature is cruelly teasing us with this brief taste of life which is, for so many people, a woeful tale of suffering, sorrow, injustice and then death. Even if Sagan could tell us who or what we should be grateful to, why should we be grateful for life as so many experience it?

Another writer, Christopher Hitchens, who has the distinction of having written a book about Mother Teresa in which he finds virtually nothing good to say about her, and pretty much calls her a fraud, elsewhere writes this: "I have many political disagreements with all kinds of people, but they are irrelevant compared with the ones between me and anyone who is a religious believer-It's such a disgusting idea-the idea that you would want permanent, inescapable supervision from the cradle to the grave ..and it's a fantastic vanity - 'The universe is about me. God cares what I'm up to' - masked in the most horrible way as modesty and resignation. It's the element in us that is slavish, stupid, childish, superstitious and bigoted...It bids to all the bits of us that are not properly evolved."

Hitchens doesn't explain why it is a vanity to believe that one's life has a purpose and that the purpose is to live in a love relationship with one's Creator. Nor does he explain why it is so horrible to be modest (I assume he means humble) and to hope and trust that, even though the world appears to be going to hell, the Creator will not abandon us. Hitchens considers it slavish and stupid to believe that a world saturated with signs of intelligent agency actually is the work of an intelligent Creator rather than blind, purposeless forces and random chance. Presumably in his world it's much more grown-up and far less superstitious to believe that matter, chance, time, and physical forces can fashion a living cell, a human immune system, a human brain, or, for that matter, a physical force.

According to Hitchens it's bigoted and superstitious to believe that the reason we deeply desire to find meaning in our lives is because there really is true meaning out there. It's bigoted, he apparently assumes, to believe that we think in moral categories because there really is a moral law written into the fabric of the universe. It's superstitious to hope that there really is an ultimate justice, that love is truly meaningful and not just an evolutionary survival mechanism, that peace will someday prevail, that we long to know the answers to life's deepest questions because answers actually exist. In other words, for Hitchens, as for Sagan, it's childish to hope, to believe, that the cosmos is anything but an incredibly improbable, inexplicable freak with no meaning, no purpose, no hope, no justice. The proper view is that life is a crushingly pointless cycle of birth, suffering, terror, and death with now and then a brief flash, perhaps, of a chemical reaction which delights us with a fleeting frisson of joy, to keep us from despairing at the absurdity of it all.

The world of Sagan and Hitchens is as empty and sterile as it is absurd. It is a world which has led many who've accepted it to nihilism and despair. That Sagan and Hitchens would urge us to stop short of this final step says more about the inconsistency of their logic than of the soundness of their metaphysics. In the U.S., at least, we may be grateful that, for now, a large segment of the population evidently isn't paying such as Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens much heed.

Gay Marriage and the ELCA

The Lutheran Office for Governmental Affairs (LOGA), Washington D.C., the federal public policy office of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), joined 25 other religious organizations June 3 to urge members of the U.S. Congress to reject the proposed "Federal Marriage Amendment" to the constitution. These groups claimed in a letter to Congress that the proposal threatens individual civil rights and religious freedom since, if adopted, it would restrict marriage to one man and one woman.

Spokesperson Karen Vagley, LOGA director, said the letter was not a statement about the morality of homosexuality or gay marriage but rather merely reflected the church's concern for civil rights. "All of our positions and statements are based on policy statements that have been approved by the church body," she said. "This is a civil rights issue, and our social statement is very clear on civil rights."

LOGA is acting independently of the parent ELCA and justifies its action by arguing that its position is consonant with established ELCA social statements that endorse the protection of civil rights for all citizens. Is LOGA correct, however, in its basic premise that gay marriage is a civil rights issue?

Jeff Jacoby, writer for the Boston Globe, argues that it’s not. Responding to an essay by Frank Rich in the New York Times which supported gay marriage and which was severely hostile and insulting to traditionalists, Jacoby writes:

Rich's essay -- "The Joy of Gay Marriage" -- went on to cast the supporters of traditional marriage as hateful zealots. They are "eager to foment the bloodiest culture war possible," he charged. "They are gladly donning the roles played by Lester Maddox and George Wallace in the civil rights era."

[But] those first four sit-in strikers, like the thousands of others who would emulate them at lunch counters across the South, weren't demanding that Woolworth's prepare or serve their food in ways it had never been prepared or served before. They weren't trying to do something that had never been lawful in any state of the union. They weren't bent on forcing a revolutionary change upon a timeless social institution.

All they were seeking was what should already have been theirs under the law of the land. The 14th Amendment had declared that blacks no less than whites were entitled to equal protection of the law. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 had barred discrimination in public accommodations. But the Supreme Court had gutted those protections with shameful decisions in 1883 and 1896. The court's betrayal of black Americans was the reason why, more than six decades later, segregation still polluted so much of the nation. To restore the 14th Amendment to its original purpose, to re-create the Civil Rights Act, to return to black citizens the equality that had been stolen from them. That was the great cause of civil rights.

The marriage radicals, on the other hand, seek to restore nothing. They have not been deprived of the right to marry -- only of the right to insist that a single-sex union is a "marriage." They cloak their demands in the language of civil rights because it sounds so much better than the truth: They don't want to accept or reject marriage on the same terms that it is available to everyone else. They want it on entirely new terms. They want it to be given a meaning it has never before had, and they prefer that it be done undemocratically -- by judicial fiat, for example, or by mayors flouting the law. Whatever else that may be, it isn't civil rights. But dare to speak against it, and you are no better than Bull Connor.

Ms. Vagley states that,"It is not the task of our government and elected representatives to enshrine in our laws the religious point of view of any one faith. Rather, our government should dedicate itself to protecting the rights of all citizens and all faiths."

But this reveals a misunderstanding of what the Marriage Amendment seeks to do. Its intent is not to enshrine into law the belief of a particular religious faith or denomination but rather to protect and preserve an understanding of marriage that has persisted for thousands of years across many cultures and religions and which experience has shown to be vital for the health of civil society.

That aside, however, Vagley’s insinuation that government has no business intruding into this sphere of life is certainly questionable. Although in principle I am sympathetic to her aversion to government intrusion, it nevertheless seems to me that the representatives of the people have as much right to legislate that marriage shall be restricted to one man and one woman as it does to exclude polygamous or incestuous unions between consenting adults.

If Vagley believes that gay marriage is a civil rights issue, is she also prepared to lend the weight of her office to a campaign to have laws against group marriage or kinship marriage repealed? Would Vagley view legislation designed to prevent large groups of gay men from getting married as an infringement upon their civil rights? If not, why not? If so, then it would be good of her to be up front about it and tell the entire Lutheran Church that the Lutheran Office of Governmental Affairs stands against all government imposed restrictions on who can marry whom and in what combinations.

The Frank Riches of the world like to portray advocates of the marriage amendment as divisive extremists - name-calling, after all, is such a satisfying substitute for argument among those who have no argument - but it’s not those who are seeking to preserve the heritage and tradition of two thousand years who are the extremists. It’s not those who feel that to abandon the definition of marriage that has served the vast majority of the world’s people for millennia who are the zealots. Rather it is those who, following a whim of current political fashion, would pour yet another corrosive acid onto the fabric of a social institution whose integrity and strength are crucial to the social well-being of our nation, who more closely fit the definitions of those terms.

Ms. Vagley is correct about one thing, however. This debate isn’t primarily about the morality or immorality of homosexuality. It’s not about homophobia. It’s about the future of the institution of marriage and, therefore, about the future of the family.

Iraqi Oil and Getting Reagan Right

Power Line has two very worthwhile pieces up today. The first concerns the transfer of control of the oil industry in Iraq to total Iraqi control. It wasn't too long ago, you'll recall, that we were being pepper sprayed with accusations that the war was all about control of the oil wealth of Iraq. Bush went into Iraq, we were repeatedly told, at the behest of his friends in the oil industry. "No blood for oil!" the war protestors shouted. Now it seems that the Bush administration has once again quietly done precisely what it said it was going to do from the beginning and handed control of the industry over to the Iraqi interim governing council.

Let's see how long it takes before those who were quick to impugn the administration's motives a year ago come forward with their apologies. Doubtless, they have it right at Power Line. All those allegations of evil intent will simply be forgotten, as if they never happened, and we'll Move On to the next set of calumnies until those, too, are discredited.

Here's the important stuff about the oil transfer quoted from YahooNews via Power Line:

"Today the most important natural resource has been returned to Iraqis to serve all Iraqis," Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said. "I'm pleased to announce that full sovereignty and full control on oil industry has been handed over to the oil ministry today and to the new Iraqi government as of today."

The announcement came as Allawi and Oil Minister Thamir Ghadbhan toured the al-Doura oil refinery in southern Baghdad. After meeting and shaking hands with the refinery workers, the two ministers thanked oil sector workers. "We are totally now in control, there are no more advisers," Ghadbhan said. "We are running the show, the oil policies will be implemented 100 percent by Iraqis."

Referring to the former regime of Saddam Hussein, Allawi said that "in the past, Iraqi oil was used in building palaces, buying weapons to achieve one person's goals."

The second post at Power Line excerpts Dinesh D'Souza's deconstruction of the liberal critique of Ronald Reagan's presidency, which, distilled to its essence, claims that Reagan was just plain lucky to be in the right place at the right time when the U.S.S.R. collapsed. The fall of the Soviet hegemon was inevitable; Reagan's polcies had nothing to do with it; etc., etc.

D'Souza has this embarrassing bit of history to share on one of the chief proponents of the "lucky" view, historian Arthur Schlesinger:

Writing on Ronald Reagan's achievements in Newsweek, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, "Reagan's admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster."

Funny: Here's Schlesinger in 1982, observing that "Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."

Of course, Schlesinger isn't the only Reagan critic made to look foolish by events. Power Line quotes D'Souza:

Many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan's policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory, blaming communism's chronic economic problems. Yet, like Scheslinger, they failed to describe it as inevitable while Reagan was actually in office.

In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs:"The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: "Can economic command significantly . . . accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

Uh, huh. Check out the Power Line commentary. It's good stuff.

Good News Is No News Dept.

Omar, an Iraqi who manages Iraq The Model, makes an interesting observation that those who insist that Iraq is descending into chaos ought to note. In the course of writing about the recent agreement of the militias to disband, Omar observes that: "The U.S.-led coalition tried to persuade the militias to disband last year but failed because leaders were unwilling to give up their armed fighters at a time of deteriorating security." He adds that: "I guess this indicates an interesting change in the Iraqi parties' evaluation about the security condition in the country."

It does indeed seem that the parties involved must be convinced that the Iraqi police and the American military have the situation well enough in hand to cede to them their right to protect themselves and their families. This is certainly an important implication of the agreement to disband and very good news. I'm sure the major news outlets, eager as they are to find positive stories to report from Iraq, will be quick to draw similar surmises in the days to come. Or not.

More Hate From the Left

More vitriol from the deep reservoirs of hatred irrigating the American left. In this case the invective comes from the NYT and the Village Voice. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip:

Michael Feingold writing a review of a play by Richard Foreman in The Village Voice states that:

"This opinion is presumably not shared by Foreman; you can gauge the breadth of his imaginative compassion from his willingness to extend it even toward George W. Bush, idiot scion of a genetically criminal family that should have been sterilized three generations ago.... Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don't give a hoot about human beings, either can't or won't. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm."

Sullivan also posts this from Tony Kushner writing in The New York Times:"The hegemonic, grim spirit of the age [is] incarnate in our thought-disordered, bloody, greedy, little plutocrat-slash-soulless-theocrat of an unelected president."

I wrote yesterday about the need to revisit the Geneva Conventions' strictures on the treatment of prisoners taken in war. Perhaps we need a new Geneva Convention to cover political warfare. The left seems to think that no toxin is too poisonous to use against its enemies. No language is too ugly or cruel to be considered beyond the pale of human decency.

Imagine for a moment, though, the pandemonium that would break out on the evening news if a conservative were to say anything half as contemptible as this nugget of human kindness posted by Matt Drudge who quotes British writer Greg Palast on the occasion of Ronald Reagan's passing: "Killer, con-man, coward. Good riddance, Gipper.... [You're] More proof that only the good die young."

What sorts of people talk like this, and why? Perhaps it is in part a symptom of the madness which sometimes settles upon those who are infuriated that men they believe to be much inferior to themselves control the levers of power and history. At any rate, their souls must be terribly barren and sour that they feel compelled to sacrifice all human decency by making such patently false and spiteful claims, and for no better purpose than to damage and hurt another human being? What cold, bitter, unpleasant people these must be, consumed as they apparently are by implacable angers and resentments. The very fact that so many individuals of this kind align themselves in opposition to President Bush is eo ipso justification enough to support him, one is tempted to think, even if sufficient other reasons were lacking.

Toby and the Nuge

Hugh Hewitt has a very interesting e-mail from a marine in Fallujah describing a visit from Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Great stuff, especially if you're a fan.

Is Torture Always Bad?

Question: A terrorist has planted a nuclear device somewhere in New York City (or Washington, D.C.). The terrorist has been apprehended and interrogated but will say only that the device will go off in 12 hours. It will kill at least several million people and destroy the economic hub of the United States. He will not say where it is. Should he be forced by whatever means necessary, including torture, to divulge the information? The scenario is frighteningly plausible, and the question is urgent. Under the current Geneva Accords torture is explicitly prohibited as a means of extracting information no matter how desperate the circumstances:

"This convention bans torture under all circumstances... In particular, it declares that no state of emergency, other external threats, nor orders from a superior officer or authority may be invoked to justify torture."
(See Part I Article I of UN Convention Against Torture).

We need a national discussion on whether the rules proscribing torture, drawn up in 1949 for a world which knew nothing of suitcase nuclear bombs or biological weapons, should be revised, and we need it soon. Next year may be too late. We need also to reexamine the definition of torture itself. The Geneva Convention defines torture as:

"Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind..."

This definition seems to leave a lot of unanswered questions. Is the use of chemicals which cause no pain or suffering considered torture under this definition? What about sleep deprivation which, though it causes suffering, inflicts no permanent injury? Was what our soldiers did at Abu Ghraib torture? Should the army officer who threatened an Iraqi with his sidearm and then fired it beside his head to frighten him into revealing information about the location of roadside bombs have been dismissed from the service? His action saved the lives of his men and did no lasting injury to the prisoner. To be sure, it entailed some mental distress on the part of the terrorist suspect, but if imposing mental suffering constitutes torture shouldn't solitary confinement also be banned? Or, for that matter, why shouldn't forced confinement of any sort be proscribed? Surely such confinement causes serious mental anguish in many prisoners.

Of course torture should be prohibited as a means of punishment, as should any application of pain carried out for trivial reasons, but saving human life is orders of magnitude more serious than these. Exceptional cases require exceptions. The possibility for abuse is inherent in any exception, but the imperative of saving lives far outweighs, or should outweigh, the squeamishness we might feel at the prospect that someone might abuse those exceptions.

Alan Dershowitz, of all people, makes some important suggestions about the rules of warfare in general, and about torture in particular, in a column he wrote for the Baltimore Sun on May 28th. His key points:

First, democracies must be legally empowered to attack terrorists who hide among civilians, so long as proportional force is employed. Civilians who are killed while being used as human shields by terrorists must be deemed the victims of the terrorists who have chosen to hide among them, rather than those of the democracies who may have fired the fatal shot.

Second, a new category of prisoner should be recognized for captured terrorists and those who support them. They are not "prisoners of war," neither are they "ordinary criminals." They are suspected terrorists who operate outside the laws of war, and a new status should be designated for them - a status that affords them certain humanitarian rights, but does not treat them as traditional combatants.

Third, the law must come to realize that the traditional sharp line between combatants and civilians has been replaced by a continuum of civilian-ness. At the innocent end are those who do not support terrorism in any way. In the middle are those who applaud the terrorism, encourage it, but do not actively facilitate it. At the guilty end are those who help finance it, who make martyrs of the suicide bombers, who help the terrorists hide among them, and who fail to report imminent attacks of which they are aware. The law should recognize this continuum in dealing with those who are complicit, to some degree, in terrorism.

Fourth, the treaties against all forms of torture must begin to recognize differences in degree among varying forms of rough interrogation, ranging from trickery and humiliation, on the one hand, to lethal torture on the other. They must also recognize that any country faced with a ticking-time-bomb terrorist would resort to some forms of interrogation that are today prohibited by the treaty.

It's worth reading the whole thing.