We're All Georgians

I took my daughter to see John McCain live at the townhall meeting yesterday in York, Pa. It was quite a show with warmup speeches by Senators Arlen Specter and Joe Leiberman and former governor Tom Ridge. When he took the stage Senator McCain chose to give a disquisition on the situation in Georgia. It was ironic that while Senator Obama vacationed in Hawaii and President Bush was taking in the Olympics in Beijing, it fell to Senator McCain to address the Russian aggression against the small democracy of Georgia:

It wasn't hard to imagine Obama being more polished, but it was almost impossible to imagine him giving a speech on any matter of foreign policy whose content was comparable to this one. The speech was directed at the conflict in Georgia, but it certainly made Senator Obama, who wasn't even mentioned, seem diminished and irrelevant.

RLC

What Does Hillary Want?

I was listening to the local talk radio show the other day and the host asked his guest the question, "What does Hillary want?" The question was prompted by the New York senator's hot and cold behavior toward the Obama campaign. The guest on the show said that she wanted recognition at the convention, etc., but I think this is all short term stuff. What Hillary wants, of course, is to be president, and as long as we keep that before us her strange behavior makes complete sense.

Assume with me that I am correct about her goal. Assume, too, that the Clintons really are as Machiavellian as even the liberal press is beginning to suggest. If so, then she probably sees that her best chance of reaching her goal is to have Obama lose in November.

If he does, Senator Clinton will have an almost uncontested road to the nomination in 2012, and McCain, if he wins, may well choose to serve only a single term. Thus, she may be running against a non-incumbent 2012. If Obama wins in November it would kill her hopes of ever becoming president since her chances of unseating him in the 2012 primaries would be nil.

Thus, it is in her interest to see to it that Obama loses, but she must give the impression that she's working in support of his campaign in order not to alienate the Democratic base. She must walk a tightrope, publicly supporting Barack and privately undermining him.

In light of this strategy, what we should look for from her in the weeks ahead is lip-service to the Obama election campaign, but lukewarm effort on his behalf. We might also anticipate a few stilettos to Obama's political ribs from Hillary's surrogates, not least her husband, but most of the damage will be inflicted outside of the public's view.

RLC

What's to Like?

A couple of days ago I wrote that a particular column by Jonah Goldberg, "tends to make postmodernism seem arrantly bad. It's not, but lots of it is...."

My friend Jason wrote to inquire what it was about postmodernism that I thought congenial. Here's my reply:

You ask a good question, Jason: What is there to like about postmodernism? The answer is not much, but there are a couple of things. First, though, I agree with you that postmodernism is a dead end, but like everything (even communism!) it's not completely bad.

I think, for example, that the postmodern critique of the "Enlightenment project" is partly correct. Modernity adopted the Enlightenment view that the world could be objectively known through our reason and known with certainty. It holds that the scientific method is the only way to genuine knowledge. Modernity thus tended to diminish the role of faith and led to religious skepticism.

Postmodern thinkers reject the idea of "objective" knowledge and argue that what we "know" is largely conditioned by our historical, social, cultural, economic perspective. I think they're right about that. They're also skeptical of the power of human reason to yield certainty and also our ability to experience the world as it really is. It's much more open to faith and very skeptical of "scientism". I think they're at least partly correct about these things as well.

Finally, I think they're right that people are persuaded to change their minds more by story, testimony, music, art and film than they are by logical argumentation. In other words, people are more effectively reached through their hearts than through their heads. This has profound implications for evangelism, of course.

It could be objected that none of what I've said I agree with here is really new and that therefore it's a bit of a stretch to call these ideas "postmodern" as if they were recent discoveries. I agree. I tell my students that what is new about postmodernism is not good, and what is good is not new. Even so, these are frequently assumed to be elements of the postmodern mindset, and since I agree with them I have to say that I don't think that what is usually meant by "postmodernism" is entirely misguided.

The problem with postmodernism is not that it doesn't contain some good but rather that the good is far outweighed by its problematic consequences. For example, postmodernism leads, in my view, to epistemological, moral and metaphysical nihilism.

What I mean by that is this: Since postmodernism relativizes and subjectivizes truth then the idea of truth loses all meaning. Truth is whatever one, or the group with which one identifies, feels most strongly about. From this it's but a short step to the conclusion that there is no real truth, just feelings.

If this is so, then there's no real truth about morals and thus morality becomes subjectivized as well. What's right for you isn't necessarily right for me and nothing is right for everyone. It's all a matter of how we feel about things.

Further, if there's no objective truth, something which is true regardless of how anyone feels about it, then the claim that God exists is not objectively true. If we cannot say that God exists (except in our own personal world) we have no ground for meaning in our life. Life is just a series of pointless events and then we die.

Thus postmodernism leads to the conclusion that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters. The consequences of this are far more corrosive to individual life and to our social well-being than the positive aspects of postmodernism mentioned above are beneficial to it.

RLC

Coin Flips

One of the cosmic parameters that scientists have determined must have an extremely precise value if the universe is going to exist at all is one called the dark energy density. This refers to an exotic form of energy that must be present in the universe but which is undetectable by direct observation. The value is fine tuned to one part in 10 to the 120th power and the odds against it having emerged by chance are, according to science writer Paul Davies, the same as the odds of getting 400 consecutive heads on a coin flip.

This is pretty stunning, especially when the necessary values of other parameters are taken into consideration. Davies is impressed by the sheer improbability of a universe so exquisitely precise having arisen by chance, but not wanting to explain how the astronomically improbable becomes actual by positing an intelligent creator that no one can detect, he instead posits a near infinite number of "pocket" universes that no one can detect. With so many universes existing, and assuming the universes would all be different (but why make that assumption?), the odds of one like ours appearing would improve to the point of an almost certainty.

This is called the multiverse hypothesis, and as we've noted before, this is an act of intellectual desperation, but let's play along. Assume there are a near infinite number of universes exhibiting a near infinite variety of physical constants, laws, and other states of affairs. If so, then any possible state of affairs would have to exist somewhere among them. The existence of a maximally great being is a possible state of affairs, therefore in at least one of our pocket universes it must be true to say that a maximally great being exists. But if a being is maximally great it must exist not just in one universe but in every universe, otherwise it's not maximally great. Thus if there are a near infinite number of universes there must exist a maximally great being (i.e. God) which created them all.

In other words, resorting to the multiverse hypothesis to escape the conclusion that our universe is intentionally designed is like trying to disprove the existence of gravity by tossing a ball into the air. One winds up demonstrating the very explanation one sought to avoid.

RLC

Another Blow to the Principle of Mediocrity

There's an assumption made by scientists who study the cosmos that our sun, planet, solar system, galaxy, and our location in these are all pretty much the norm in the universe. There's nothing special about where we are or the conditions which exist in our galactic neighborhood. Our planet and our place in the universe are, it has been said, mediocre.

Unfortunately, for adherents to the Principle of Mediocrity, this idea has become more difficult to maintain of late, having suffered numerous insults at the hands of research scientists themselves over the past several decades. Books like Rare Earth and Privileged Planet summarize their findings and make a powerful case that the earth is special indeed in a host of important ways.

Now comes news that not only are planets like our earth probably quite rare in the universe so are solar systems like ours. Science Daily reports on an article scheduled to appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Science:

Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head.

The solar system, it turns out, is pretty special indeed. The study illustrates that if early conditions had been just slightly different, very unpleasant things could have happened -- like planets being thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space.

Solar systems must be similar to ours if life is going to flourish in them. For instance, ours is a relatively stable system compared to what almost every other system is like. Also, the large gas giants in the outer regions of our solar system act as vacuum sweepers attracting meteors and comets into their bosoms and protecting the earth from their impact. The distribution of the planets and the size of the sun ensure that gravitational effects do not exert a destructive influence on the earth's orbit. The list goes on, but read what Science Daily says:

The [computer] simulations suggest that an average planetary system's origin is extremely dramatic. The gas disk that gives birth to the planets also pushes them mercilessly toward the central star, where they crowd together or are engulfed. Among the growing planets, there is cut-throat competition for gas, a chaotic process that produces a rich variety of planet masses.

Also, as the planets approach each other, they frequently lock into dynamical resonances that drive the orbits of all participants to be increasingly elongated. Such a gravitational embrace often results in a slingshot encounter that flings the planets elsewhere in the system; occasionally, one is ejected into deep space. Despite its best efforts to kill its offspring, the gas disk eventually is consumed and dissipates, and a young planetary system emerges.

"Such a turbulent history would seem to leave little room for the sedate solar system, and our simulations show exactly that," said Rasio. "Conditions must be just right for the solar system to emerge."

Too massive a gas disk, for example, and planet formation is an anarchic mess, producing "hot Jupiters" and noncircular orbits galore. Too low-mass a disk, and nothing bigger than Neptune -- an "ice giant" with only a small amount of gas -- will grow.

"We now better understand the process of planet formation and can explain the properties of the strange exoplanets we've observed," said Rasio. "We also know that the solar system is special and understand at some level what makes it special."

"The solar system had to be born under just the right conditions to become this quiet place we see. The vast majority of other planetary systems didn't have these special properties at birth and became something very different."

The more we learn about the cosmos and about life the more difficult it is to think that it's all just a fortuitous accident and the easier it is to think that conscious purpose lies behind it all.

Artist's rendition of the formation of the solar system

Graphic representation of the solar system (not to scale)

RLC

Bedrock

Marriage between a man and a woman may have had value fifty years ago, but today it's just one option among several. Children can get along just as well without dad around. The family is a quaint anachronism. Those are opinions one heard frequently in the seventies and eighties but less so today. The research being done on the importance of a two parent family is just too hard to ignore. Rebecca Hagelin talks about what we've learned about the family and why it matters that children live with both parents. Here's an excerpt:

Adolescents in intact families, for example, perform better on a number of measures when compared with their counterparts in non-intact families. As family expert Jennifer Marshall of The Heritage Foundation notes, children in intact families "have better health, are less likely to be depressed, are less likely to repeat a grade in school, and have fewer developmental problems." Their peers in non-traditional households, meanwhile, "are more likely to experience poverty, abuse, behavioral and emotional problems, lower academic achievement, and drug use."

This is not to say that being raised in an intact family is a guaranteed ticket to success, or that children in non-traditional families have no hope of doing well. But as a group, the odds strongly favor the children raised in intact families. It's really a question of giving our children the best possible chance to succeed. Cohabiting couples may wish it were otherwise, but in general their lifestyle doesn't serve their children -- or the wider society in which they are raised -- as well as the traditional family does.

In our headlong rush to escape traditional morality and social structures we've jettisoned the wisdom of two millenia because a) we wanted to and b) a few social scientists told us it was outmoded and unnecessary. Dumb.

HT: Jason.

RLC

Fighting in Georgia

If trying to figure out what's going on with the current fighting between Russia and Georgia has you puzzled Strategy Page has a succinct primer on the situation there. Read it, and in four minutes you'll know more about the conflict than 99 out of 100 of your fellow Americans.

UPDATE: This letter from the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, on the genesis of the conflict there is a must read. Read it and you'll know more than 499 out of 500 Americans.

RLC

Creeping Tyranny

I'm occasionally asked if maybe Viewpoint isn't a little too hard on liberalism. Many good people are liberals, I'm reminded, and maybe I'm being needlessly offensive in hammering away at them.

Yes, I reply, this is so, but we need to see clearly what is at stake. To help us, let's make a distinction similar to the Christian distinction between sin and sinner (no offense intended by the analogy). Just as we should abhor sin but love sinners, we need to abhor liberalism even as we try to love those who embrace it - even when those who embrace it are exceedingly difficult to love.

An article in the Washington Times a week ago offers an example or two to illustrate the point I wish to make:

In one case, a Georgia counselor has filed a federal suit against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying that she was fired after she found someone else to counsel a lesbian about her sexual relationship. In the other, a Los Angeles police officer is suing the department, saying it has denied him promotions and pay raises because of a sermon that he gave at a church that cited a biblical verse on homosexuality.

In the first case, the counselor, a woman named Marcia Walden who worked for an agency contracted by the CDC to counsel its employees, was asked to take on a client who needed help with her same sex relationship. Ms Walden, who had counseled lesbians and homosexuals in the past but not about their relationships, felt that her beliefs about homosexuality precluded her from being able to give the client the care she wanted and so she obtained for her another counselor from the same firm who was better suited to address the client's problems.

Ms Walden apparently followed all the proper protocols and the client said she received exemplary advice from the substitute.

Nevertheless, according to the complaint, Ms Walden was subsequently accused of homophobia and extensively questioned about her Christian faith by her supervisor. Within three days of her referring Ms. Doe [the lesbian], Ms. Walden was suspended without pay by Computer Science Corp. and fired outright three weeks later.

In the second case a LA police officer who works as a minister when off-duty was presiding at the funeral of a fellow officer he had once supervised:

Sgt. Holyfield quoted a passage from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians that says "the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God" before going on to list such unrighteous people: adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, drunkards and others.

Sgt. Holyfield was off-duty and in clerical garb for the funeral, which was not LAPD-sponsored, and was giving the sermon at a private chapel at the invitation of his colleague's family.

But several senior police officers were in attendance, leading to complaints that the sergeant had made comments disparaging homosexuals and adulterers.

Consequently Sgt. Holyfield has been demoted and passed over for promotion numerous times.

It's hard to believe that this is happening in the United States, but it is, and these certainly aren't the only instances. There's a cancer of persecution and oppression metastasizing throughout our society and it will continue to grow until enough people stand against it.

But what do these travesties have to do with liberalism? Let's ask ourselves a question. How many of the people who are responsible for the firing of the counselor and the demotion of the police officer do you suppose are conservative Republicans? I don't have the facts so I admit I'm speculating, but I'm willing to bet that the number is zero.

Liberals are, in the name of tolerance and diversity, often the most intolerant and conformist people in our society. Ever since the progressives co-opted the word liberal at the end of the 19th century, liberalism has featured a prominent fascist strain (Don't take my word for it. Read Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism). Like all fascisms it promises a bright utopian future, but in fact, under liberalism, our future is likely to be similar to that of farmer Jones' livestock in Animal Farm. You recall that in the name of freedom the animals revolted against farmer Jones and set up their own government, but it wasn't long before the animal government turned to tyranny and all their freedoms were lost. George Orwell's vision of the future is precisely what lies in store for us if ever liberalism gains political dominance: a (government) boot stamping on a (Christian) human face, forever. Just as it has stamped on Ms Walden and Sgt. Holyfield.

That's just one reason why Viewpoint finds liberalism so horrid, and why we feel it a moral duty to set our friends and family wise to its false promises and enchantments.

RLC

The Postmodern Candidate

A couple of days ago I mentioned that Senator Obama seems to hold to a postmodern view of truth, i.e. there are no fixed meanings in the text of his words. They mean whatever the listener wants them to mean, whatever has "purchase" with the listener. They're not to be taken literally - they're too broad and contradictory for that. Rather their vagueness and ambiguities invite us, like poetry, to bask in their resonances and read into them our own hopes and desires. For the postmodern, style trumps content and rhetorical power trumps logic. People in a postmodern world tend to think with their hearts rather than their minds, and come to know by intuition and emotion rather than through reason. This is perhaps why so many find Obama such an appealling candidate even though they can't point to a single accomplishment that would qualify him to be the leader of the United States.

Jonah Goldberg amplifies the idea of Barack as a postmodern in an essay at USAToday. Here's an excerpt:

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's - unless he really is our Savior.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but with the caveat that the column tends to make postmodernism seem arrantly bad. It's not, but lots of it is, and the idea that truth is whatever harmonizes with your own experience is particularly corrosive. Unfortunately, that's the aspect of postmodernism most frequently on display in Senator Obama's speeches and pronouncements.

RLC

Media Bias

Recall a couple of weeks ago a lunatic walked into a Unitarian church and started shooting people. The media made sure we all understood that the man hated liberals and, we were to conclude, was a right-wing nut case. No story on the tragic affair left unimplied that the man was driven by dangerous antipathies fairly typical of the right.

Okay, but now it turns out that Bruce Ivins, the biochemist who sent the anthrax letters to a number of people in Washington, killing several, was a committed Democrat. Have you heard any mention of this from the MSM? I haven't.

Ace of Spades, who has a very thorough report on the entire case, writes about this development:

So if you're wondering why Ivins' political affiliation has not been reported -- as many of you were certain would be the main storyline here, assuming he had turned out to be Republican -- there's your answer. Surely the MSM would be calling him a Republican in every report, but, alas, it turns out he's a Democrat, and hence no reportage on this aspect of his political beliefs whatsoever.

I wouldn't read too much into his political affiliation; his main party was of course "Crazy."

But yeah, I do know that if he had been a Republican, the MSM and the left would be going beserkers and blaming this all on us.

And I find it a bit unsettling that members of the "Reality Based Community" immediately begin offering conspiracy theories based on little more than the fact that Ivins was a Democrat, so of course he can't be guilty.

Brad Blog's argument is slightly more nuanced than that -- he asks why a liberal (presumably, based on his letters to the editor) Democrat would send anthrax to liberals Daschle, Leahy, and Tom Brokaw ( a curious sudden admission from the left that a big MSM figure is in fact "liberal").

But the writer seems trapped in the thinking that political orientation determines bad behavior (of course Ivins must have been a Republican; only mean Republicans do stuff like this!), rather than accepting that insanity and not political belief is the main motivating impulse in this sort of crime.

So why did Ivins send the letters to liberals, mostly? Why not? For one thing, he was bonkers. For another thing, he wanted a lot of publicity, and, at the time, Daschle and Leahy were in the Senatorial majority. Republicans, at that time, were in the minority....

And what conservative media figures were prominent enough to warrant an anthrax letter? George Will? Jonah Goldberg? Pshah. If you want to make a splash, you send letters to TV news anchors, and all of them, of course, were/are liberals.

For another thing, as the netroots proves day-in, day-out, the netroots hate what it considers heretics and apostates in the Church of Liberalism nearly as passionately (sometimes moreso) than actual Evil Republican Malefactors.

The left's determination to find a Republican villain behind every single crime or misfortune that befalls the world is borderline insane -- nearly Bruce Ivins level paranoid, actually.

Ace is right. The church shooter was nuts and so was Ivins, but it is annoying that the media thinks that one nut's ideology is relevant and the other's isn't.

It's sort of like the elite media's refusal to say anything about John Edwards' "love" affair until he admitted it, and his apparent illegitimate child. Does anyone really think that if a Republican of Edwards' prominence had engaged in such sordid behavior while his wife suffered from incurable cancer that the media would have sat on the story?

RLC

The Fruit of Bigotry

In the course of commenting on an article by Peter Wood on the obstacles confronting those who would like to see an increase in the number of American born and educated scientists, Bruce Chapman mentions an obstacle that Wood omits. Chapman thinks that the current hostility to religion among many educators, especially scientists, acts as a deterrent to many Christian young people who would otherwise be inclined to go into a scientific field. In other words, the climate is such that Christian students don't feel comfortable in the presence of so many militant materialist professors and fellow students.

Chapman admits he has nothing but anecdotal data to support his theory, but there's nothing implausible about it. Students who peruse the internet and view the rantings of people like Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers and their epigones are certainly not going to be eager to study science in college if they think they might be singled out and humiliated by such people. Nor would they be inclined to make science a profession if they thought that they would have to spend much of their career concealing their ideas from their colleagues and facing tenure denial if they speak out. It surely must seem much easier to a sizeable minority of bright Christian young people to choose some other line of work.

If Chapman is right then the Torquemadas among today's university professoriat are doing the nation a profound disservice in more ways than just their stifling of ideas.

RLC

For Book Lovers

My friend Byron passes along a list compiled by Neil Bowers of the 100 best novels ever written. This list is different from others in that it combines a number of other such rankings and orders the books by how many other lists they appear on and how high they're rated. Bowers' list can be found here, and his rationale and methodology are explained here.

Surprisingly, only one book was found on every list so Bowers has it ranked number one. How many of the 100 have you read?

Bethanne Patrick at Publisher's Weekly says she's read all but one of the titles on Bowers' list. That's quite an achievement, but I have to say that I was surprised at the title she hadn't yet read. I think you'll be, too.

RLC

Whither Natural Selection

Darwin's theory of natural selection (NS) continues to get dissed by scientists disillusioned by the failure of NS to account for the enormous diversity of living things. The latest outrage is occuring in England at a conference of over 300 biologists, chemists, philosophers and other scholars who are trying to come up with an alternative or a supplement to NS.

The story quickly offers its obligatory dismissal of any nonsense about intelligent agency behind life, but then buried in the text are passages like these:

Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, will argue at this week's meeting - the 11th International Conference on Artificial Life - that .... although natural selection is necessary for life, something is missing in our understanding of how evolution produced complex creatures. By this, he doesn't mean intelligent design - the claim that only God can light the blue touch paper of life - but some other concept. "I don't know what it is, nor do I think anyone else does, contrary to the claims you hear asserted," he says. But he believes ALife (artificial life) will be crucial in discovering the missing mechanism.

Dr Richard Watson of Southampton University, the co-organiser of the conference, echoes his concerns. "Although Darwin gave us an essential component for the evolution of complexity, it is not a sufficient theory," he says. "There are other essential components that are missing."

"Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says Dr Seth Bullock, another of the conference's organisers. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organisation is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us.

The more we learn about the complexity of life the more inadequate purely material processes seem to be in explaining it. Living things certainly appear to be engineered, and it is, I think, just a matter of time before scientists can no longer evade the inference.

HT: Evolution News and Views.

RLC

You May be a Racist If...

I was watching a cable talk show the other night and one of the interlocutors was struggling mightily to make the point that McCain's ad briefly showing Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears was racist because it showed a black man (Barack Obama) right after two blonde white women and we all know what message that sends, don't we? Timothy Noah at The New Republic in all seriousness opined that it's racist to call Obama "skinny" because that calls attention to his appearance, and there can only be nefarious motives for wanting to do that.

There are apparently a lot of people who think that any criticism of Obama is rooted in racism, even if the sin is buried deep in the subconscious. There are some who think that all whites are racist just by virtue of being white, and thus if a white criticizes Obama it's confirmation of the suspicion. To assist our readers in confronting their own inherent racism, no matter how strenuously they deny its existence, we run the following partial list of reliable indicators of this awful and insidious affliction. We thank Peter Kirsanow at National Review Online for coming up with it and refer you to the full list at that site:

• If you think Obama's the most liberal member of the senate you...may be a racist.
• If you object to Obama raising your payroll, capital gains and estate taxes you...may be a racist.
• If you'd prefer a president have at least some foreign policy experience you...may be a racist.
• If you wonder why Obama was hanging around William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn you...may be a racist.
• If your pastor is nothing like Rev. Wright or Father Pfleger you... may be a racist.
• If you don't want the majority of justices on the Supreme Court to be like Stephen Breyer you...may be a racist.
• If you're not impressed with Obama's 100% NARAL rating you...may be a racist.
• If you're not sure whether Obama opposed or supported FISA reauthorization you...may be a racist.
• If you oppose racial preferences in employment, school admissions and contracting you...may be a racist.
• If you think "we are the change we've been waiting for" is a line from a Monty Python skit you...may be a racist.
• If you prefer that a president have a smidgen of executive experience you...may be a racist.
• If you're appalled that Obama voted against treating infants born after an abortion attempt the same medically as other infants born alive you...may be a racist.
• If you were proud of your country even before Obama's candidacy you...may be a racist.

To this list might be added: If you use words like "black hole" or "niggardly" then you're definitely a racist. Re-education and sensitivity training will begin next week. If you don't show up it's because you're racist.

RLC

Democracy in America

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "explains" why she will not allow a vote in the House of Representatives on whether or not oil companies should be permitted to drill offshore for oil:

If the Speaker had a good reason for preventing a vote why doesn't she state it instead of insulting the nation the literal nonsense she stammers to Stephanopolous? It certainly appears as if Speaker Pelosi knows she doesn't have the votes to defeat the bill, and so, rather than let the representatives of the people decide what we should do about oil supply, she adjourns the House and goes on vacation. Is this how democracy works in America when liberals are in charge.

Ms Pelosi was adamant two years ago that Congress under her leadership would be bipartisan and open to debate, yet when an issue arises for which there is much bipartisan support but to which she is strongly opposed, she refuses to allow it to come to a vote.

She's also a champion of the "Fairness Doctrine" which would require radio stations to balance conservative points of view with liberal counterweights. Well, where's the fairness in refusing to allow the people to decide whether we should drill for the oil we have within our territorial waters?

RLC

Crypto-Conservatives

There's a longish but interesting essay at Bookworm on what it's like to be a conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal community. Here's a sample of what the blogger, a mother and a housewife, says:

Given that liberals are in the catbird seat, and given their much-vaunted tolerance, one might think that they'd be kind to, indeed solicitous of, the few Republicans in the midst. Sadly, however, that's not the case. As regular readers know, I've chosen to keep my political life separate from the day-to-day aspects of my life. I simply can't (and don't want to) run the risk of tainting my carpools, my neighborhood barbecues, my kids' comfort level at school, the camaraderie of the sports teams with which we're involved, etc., by exposing myself to the obloquy that is routinely heaped on conservatives here - and this is a hostility that increases as elections draw near, of course.

During the 2004 elections, people who were unaware of my political inclinations announced in front of me that "Bush is the worst President ever," "Republicans are stupid," "Republicans are evil," "Bush is stupid," "Republicans are corrupt," "Republicans are fascists" and "Bush should be impeached." Children ran up to me on the sidewalk chanting "Bush is evil, Bush is evil" - so you know what their parents were saying at the dinner table. In this election cycle, one of my children announced after school that she was voting for Barack Obama "since every one is because he's black." I quickly scotched that line of reasoning.

I know I should be speaking out when I hear statements such as these, but the sad fact is that I like these people. Barring their monomaniacal animosity towards Bush and the Republicans, they're otherwise very nice: they're hard workers, loving parents, good neighbors and helpful and reliable friends. Being the social creature that I am, I don't want with one word ("Republican") to turn these friendships upside down and inside out. (I'm not the only one with this problem.) I don't want to be on the receiving end of some hideous Jekyll to Hyde transformation, so I just keep my mouth shut.

Those people I know who have spoken aloud their new conservative political views have been horrified by the animosity turned against them by formerly friendly neighbors and colleagues. My in-laws who are, like me, 9/11 neocons (down in Los Angeles) have stared open-mouthed at colleagues who use staff meetings to revile Bush and the Republicans - all to the cheers and huzzahs of the other staff members. (Indeed, what they describe sounds remarkably like Orwell's Two Minutes Hate.) On the occasions when they've suggested that maybe, just maybe, Bush isn't the Antichrist, they've found themselves shunned by these same colleagues.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but there is, as anyone who watches, say, MSNBC, can attest, an astonishing transformation that comes over some otherwise pleasant, rational people as soon as the subject turns to George Bush. There seems to be a venomous hatred roiling just below the surface of their psyches that transmogrifies some of these folks into thoroughly unpleasant commentators and companions. Whatever the cause, and we've speculated on some of the possibilities here over the years, it would be funny to behold were it not so pathetic.

Anyway, read the essay at the link.

RLC

McCain Edges Ahead

I don't think there's much point in getting too excited about polls this early in the presidential campaign, but the most recent Rasmussen poll has some interesting results:

The Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows the race for the White House is tied with Barack Obama and John McCain each attracting 44% of the vote. However, when "leaners" are included, it's McCain 47% and Obama 46%.

This is the first time McCain has enjoyed even a statistically insignificant advantage of any sort since Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on June 3. A week ago today, Obama had a three-percentage point lead and the candidates were even among unaffiliated voters. Today, McCain leads 52% to 37% among unaffiliateds.

The huge swing of unaffiliated voters is especially noteworthy. Of course, this could all change tomorrow, but as of now it looks like the media infatuation with Obama is not helping him as much as one might have thought.

RLC

About Face

In yet another volte face, Senator Obama has pretty much reversed himself on off-shore drilling:

The change is dramatic because Obama often pointed to his opposition to drilling as a key difference between himself and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

"I will keep the moratorium in place and prevent oil companies from drilling off Florida's coasts," Obama said in Florida in June.

Obama also said, in a separate statement issued by his campaign, that he supported the bipartisan energy plan offered by 10 senators Friday.

"Like all compromises, it also includes steps that I haven't always supported," he said. "I remain skeptical that new offshore drilling will bring down gas prices in the short-term or significantly reduce our oil dependence in the long-term, though I do welcome the establishment of a process that will allow us to make future drilling decisions based on science and fact."

Obama is racing headlong to minimize the substantive differences between himself and McCain. He apparently doesn't want McCain to be able to point to any reason why anyone should vote for him rather than Obama. If the public perceives there is no difference between the two then they'll be much more likely to vote for the youthful, charismatic Obama. It's a clever strategy, but if this is what he's doing it makes him look like a first class political opportunist with no guiding principles except the imperative of getting elected.

Read the last two paragraphs of this post from July 27th.

RLC

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One man perhaps more than any other made it impossible in the second half of the 20th century to defend Soviet communism. That man was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Douglas Burch at Time magazine writes:

Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the greatest heroes of the last century. His books are a must read for anyone who wishes to catch a glimpse of the hell to which atheistic totalitarianism leads. He is dead at the age of 89.

RLC

Please Move Aside

Quick: What's the most dangerous fuel to use to generate power? Coal, oil, nuclear?

How many people have died from accidents in American nuclear power plants? World nuclear power plants?

How many deaths occur in coal mining accidents each year in the U.S.? In China?

An article at FrontPage Mag provides some interesting perspective on these questions and others. For example, did you know that:

A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.

If Three Mile Island was a disaster, it was largely in terms of public relations: the meltdown had resulted in no injuries and precisely zero deaths - indeed, there was no sign of harm to any living thing in the plant's vicinity. The worst that occurred was that the two million residents in the surrounding were exposed to approximately one-sixth the amount of radiation that they would have absorbed from a single chest X-ray at their local hospital. Thanks to the plant's built-in safety features, the public was never in danger.

The worst nuclear power plant accident in history, the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine, resulted directly in the deaths of more than 30 people, and it exposed millions more to radiation that, by the highest estimates, could eventually result in several thousand cancer-related deaths. Moreover, it rendered some 20 square miles of land uninhabitable for an extended period.

But the Soviet reactor in Chernobyl was an outmoded relic: it bore no resemblance to the reactors that are used in the West. Most notably, it lacked containment shells to prevent radioactive materials from escaping in the event of an accident. The far superior Western reactors were equipped not only with such safeguards, but also with numerous built-in sensors designed to shut down the plant immediately in the event of trouble.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American nuclear plants have long been safer workplaces than most other manufacturing plants. The nuclear industry's safety record is far better than that of the competing coal industry, for instance. Each year in the United States, an average of 33 coal miners die in the line of work, yet there have been no calls to end coal mining on grounds that it is too dangerous.

In other nations, the numbers are much worse. During Chernobyl's heyday, thousands of men were killed in coal mining accidents in the Soviet Union. In China, some 5,000 coal miners perish in accidents each and every year. Since the dawn of the nuclear era, the world's 400-plus civilian nuclear plants have logged well over 10,000 aggregate years of activity, and Chernobyl remains the only accident ever to have harmed members of the public. In addition, the U.S. Navy has been powering ships with nuclear reactors for more than 50 years and has experienced no nuclear accidents.

Nor is there any discernible health risk associated with living close to a nuclear plant. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a person would have to live next door to such a plant for more than 2,000 years to get the amount of radiation exposure he gets from a single X-ray.

Coal today is used to produce about 49 percent of America's electricity, while natural gas and petroleum account for another 20 percent and 2 percent, respectively. A coal-fired plant releases 100 times more radioactive material than an equivalent nuclear reactor-and not into a self-contained storage site but directly into the atmosphere. By generating electricity whose production otherwise would have required the use of fossil fuels, the 104 nuclear plants now operating in the U.S. prevent the release of approximately 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year; that is the equivalent of removing 96 percent of all passenger cars from U.S. roads.

If not for nuclear energy, America's dependence on foreign oil would be even greater than it currently is. During the 1973 oil embargo, nuclear technology produced only 5 percent of the U.S. electric supply, while oil accounted for 17 percent. Today those figures are 19 percent and 2 percent, respectively. If more nuclear plants are constructed, they could replace coal and natural gas as America's major source of electricity production.

So why aren't we building more nuclear power plants? For the same reason we're not drilling for more oil and building new refineries. The Democrats refuse to allow them. They need to be told politely to get out of the way.

RLC

No Excuses

Another young Muslim woman is murdered by a family member, in this case her father, and the cable news outlets which can't give enough coverage to the murders of Caucasian women slain by relatives, can't be bothered to even report the news. John Avlon at the New York Post wonders why. He concludes that the media doesn't want to emphasize a story that discredits the multicultural narrative that the left has promoted for the last two decades.

Perhaps this is so, but I'm beginning to wonder. Could there not be a tincture of lower expectations among journalists when it comes to certain demographic groups? Might there be a feeling of well, that's just how these people are and one can't expect much better from them? Civilization is an achievement of white Europeans, and those others who have adopted their assumptions. Perhaps, buried in the psyches of a lot of journalists, is the assumption that a desert plant transplanted to a rain forest is still a desert plant and nothing will change it much.

Surely if a Caucasian American father murdered his daughter because she wanted out of an unhappy arranged marriage the media would be all over the story, especially if the father were a putative Christian. Perhaps the reason is that this is unusual behavior for white Christians, but when blacks in our cities kill each other by the tens of thousands every year, or Muslims kill their own daughters the media treat it as little more than a sad statistic. It's as if they think it would be somehow racist to call attention to the dysfunctionalities in these communities, and appearing racist is the very last thing a good liberal wants.

Yet isn't the real racism the refusal to hold people to the same standard as everyone else? Isn't the real racism the belief that some groups just can't be expected to behave in a civilized, moral manner? Isn't the real racism what President Bush has called the "soft bigotry of diminished expectations"?

Perhaps we do others no favors with all our talk of uneven playing fields, historical disadvantages, tolerating diversity and the equal value of all cultures. Perhaps the best thing we can do for other ethnic and racial groups in our society is to tell them that the standard white Americans are expected to meet is the standard that they are expected to meet, and that there are no excuses for failing to meet it.

As a society we need to adopt the same slogan that athletes live by: Excuses are for losers.

RLC

Taliban Tactics

Strategy Page has an interesting piece on how the Taliban are trying to adjust to offset the deadly capabilities of the NATO and Afghan forces along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border:

The Taliban have developed more effective tactics this year. After a disastrous outing last year, the Taliban were under a lot of pressure to reduce their casualties this year, and they have. The Afghans have always been adaptable, especially when it is a matter of life and death, and there have been many small changes in Taliban tactics to counter the greater lethality of NATO forces (who use UAVs, smart bombs and better trained troops). Taliban forces now operate in smaller groups, keeping weapons (which can be identified from the air by UAV or aircraft cameras) hidden, and concentrate forces just before an attack. Cell phones and walkie-talkies make this easier. Taliban will also break off an attack quickly, knowing that the smart bombs are on the way.

The Taliban will stay near the Pakistani border, because the Americans and NATO rarely pursue, although smart bombs are more frequently dropped on the Pakistani side. But once a group of armed Taliban have made it into Pakistan, they can melt into the civilian population. Which leads to another popular Taliban tactic, using civilians as human shields. It doesn't always work, and when it doesn't the Taliban are quick to claim another NATO atrocity. The Taliban have also been using a growing number of deceptions to try and get NATO smart bombs or artillery to hit friendly targets. A favorite one on the border is to fire mortar shells at NATO troops on one side of the border, and at nearby Pakistani border guards just across the frontier, to try and deceive NATO and Pakistani troops into believing they are firing at each other. NATO counter-fire radars have spotted the shells, and traced them all back to the same location. But such radars are not always available, and sometimes this trick works. Another deception is to feed bad intel to the followers, and try and trigger a missile or smart bomb attack on civilians.

There's more at the link.

RLC

Iran Practices Nuclear Strike

Kenneth Timmerman at Newsmax.com reports that intelligence agencies believe that Iran is practicing a nuclear strike against the U.S. They appear to be planning a single strike that would be launched from a merchant ship off the coast. A nuclear warhead would be mounted on a Scud missile and sent into the upper atmosphere where it would be detonated creating an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry all of our electronics across the entire continent. In the worst case we would be instantly thrown back into the 19th century and the resulting chaos and starvation would eventually kill off over 70% of our population.

We've written about EMP before and there's some doubt as to how successful such an attack would be, but evidently the Iranians think it would work.

There are several measures we can take to prevent it. We can stop Iran from securing nuclear warheads. We can continue to develop our missile defense system. We can tell Iran that any such attack in which they are suspected will result in a total obliteration of their country. Of course, this last option depends on being able to demonstrate that the attack came from Iran, and if they sink the ship that launched the missile we might not be able to do that.

In any event, the last alternative is certainly the worst since if it fails to deter the Iranians a nuclear holocaust would ensue. The best way to prevent such a catastrophe is to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon in the first place. The second best is to build a missile shield and create enough uncertainty of success in the minds of the Iranian mullahs that they wouldn't attempt the attack. Of the three options, guess which two Senator Obama and the Democrats are on record opposing.

RLC

Bush and the Chronically Homeless

A New York Times report notes that, due largely to a Bush administration initiative, chronic homelessness in the U.S. has declined by 52,000 people from 175,914 to 123,833, a 30% drop, between 2005 and 2007.

I wonder what the decline was during the halcyon years of the Clinton administration.

In any event, this is another data point that future historians will factor into their assessment of Bush's presidency. Combined with his achievements on behalf of the poor in Africa and his liberation from tyranny of 50 million people in the Middle East, those who really care about human rights and human welfare, as opposed to those who simply pay lip service to these concepts, will be forced to conclude that Bush has done more good for the people they're concerned about than any president or world leader in the last 100 years.

For many this will no doubt be an awkward and uncomfortable realization.

Perhaps this is one reason liberals despise him. While they have talked endlessly about their concern for the poor, he has made them look impotent and hypocritical by actually doing something to alleviate their suffering.

RLC

Religious Renaissance

A generation or so ago it looked as though theistic belief in general and Christian belief in particular were on the ropes. The atheists had all the good arguments, it was thought, the liberal church was embracing them, and it was just a matter of time until skepticism trickled down from the ivory towers of the academy to the pulpits and pews of parish churches and wiped out religious belief altogether.

Along the way to this denouement, however, a funny thing happened. A number of Christian philosophers remained unimpressed by the force of the secularists' arguments and were quietly churning out powerful philosophical arguments in defense of traditional Christian belief. This effort was epitomized, perhaps, with the publication in the late sixties of Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds, a work which completely altered the terms of the debate. Other philosophers contributed additional efforts over the next couple of decades and some, like William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, became powerful public debators.

In addition, the creationist critique of Darwinism and the rise of the intelligent design movement hewed away at an essential prop in the atheistic worldview. All this, coupled with the utter failure of secular assumptions to provide a framework for social well-being - the devastation wrought by the sexual revolution and the horrors of street crime and the ubiquity of white collar crime - cast into unmistakeable highlights the moral inadequacies of secular atheism.

Douglas Groothius at Books and Culture gives us an interesting glimpse of the current state of the controversy with emphasis on books by three of the participants, Alistir McGrath, Antony Flew, and a debate between William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. It's a good read.

RLC

Terrorism's Most Effective Weapons

This article at Strategy Page discusses some interesting aspects to the war in Iraq from the standpoint of the military:

Throughout the current conflict, the military made no secret of what they were doing, and just kept focused on winning. They knew they would be dealing with an unusual enemy, a stateless force based on ideology and religion based hatred. This foe was weak, in the conventional military sense, but was armed with two powerful weapons.

First, there was the suicide bomber, and terrorism in general. Against civilian populations, this was a very effective weapon. Against a professional and resourceful military foe, it was much less so. But the enemy had another weapon; the media and political opposition in their opponents homeland. The media is eager to report real or imagined disasters and mistakes. This is how the news business has stayed solvent since the mass media first appeared in the mid 19th century. Al Qaeda was run by people who were aware of this, and knew how to exploit it, both among friendly (Moslem) populations, and in nations they had declared their enemy. This they did by exploiting the proclivities of the political oppositions in the West.

There is much more at the link, especially regarding how the liberal media and our political leadership has been one of terrorism's most effective weapons.

RLC

Evolution vs. Naturalism

Alvin Plantinga, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, has for several decades been pressing the argument that it is literally irrational to be an evolutionary naturalist. Naturalism is the view that there is no God nor anything like God. It holds that nature is all there is. For the purposes of Plantinga's argument we can think of naturalism as being synonymous with atheism.

Plantinga argues that if evolution is true we have no reason to believe that naturalism is. He notes, for instance, that:

Richard Dawkins once claimed that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I believe he is dead wrong: I don't think it's possible at all to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist; but in any event you can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism.

This is a claim that strikes many atheists as risible until they examine the argument that lies behind it. Once they do, the snickers cease.

Books and Culture has an essay by Plantinga in which he lays out his case in clear, easily comprehendable fashion. It's an important argument, one that both Christians and atheists should make themselves familiar with. Give it a few minutes of your time.

RLC

Whatever You Can Get Away With

There are lots of possible explanations for Senator Obama's apparent ability to hold every side of a contentious issue. One such possibility, the one to which I subscribe, is that the senator is simply the product of his post modern times, an era in which "texts" have no fixed meaning, and truth is, to quote the late Richard Rorty, whatever your peers will let you get away with saying.

David Bueche at The American Thinker agrees and offers a catalogue of Obama's statements on Iraq to illustrate what the MSM, another product of the Rortian school of epistemology, is letting him get away with. The display of rhetorical gymnastics to which Obama has treated us over the last year and a half is worthy of a gold at Beijing. Here's Bueche's recitation:

• January 10, 2007, on MSNBC: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse."
• Also from January 2007: "We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war. And until we acknowledge that reality, uh, we can send 15,000 more troops; 20,000 more troops; 30,000 more troops. Uh, I don't know any, uh, expert on the region or any military officer that I've spoken to, uh, privately that believes that that is gonna make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground."
• May 25th, 2007: "And what I know is that what our troops deserve is not just rhetoric, they deserve a new plan. Governor Romney and Senator McCain clearly believe that the course that we're on in Iraq is working, I do not."
• July, 2007: "Here's what we know. The surge has not worked. And they said today, 'Well, even in September, we're going to need more time.' So we're going to kick this can all the way down to the next president, under the president's plan."
• September 13th, 2007: "After putting an additional 30,000 troops in, far longer and more troops than the president had initially said, we have gone from a horrendous situation of violence in Iraq to the same intolerable levels of violence that we had back in June of 2006. So, essentially, after all this we're back where we were 15 months ago. And what has not happened is any movement with respect to the sort of political accommodations among the various factions, the Shia, the Sunni, and Kurds that were the rationale for [the] surge and that ultimately is going to be what stabilizes Iraq. So, I think it is fair to say that the president has simply tried to gain another six months to continue on the same course that he's been on for several years now. It is a course that will not succeed."
• November 11, 2007: "Finally, in 2006-2007, we started to see that, even after an election, George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn't withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled them and initiated a surge and at that stage I said very clearly, not only have we not seen improvements, but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there."

In early 2008, as statistical proof of The Surge's incredible success became indisputable, Mr. Obama abruptly reversed his assessment of the situation and his recollection of his own recent history:

• January 5, 2008: "I had no doubt, and I said when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence."

And now this:

• July 21, 2008: When asked if - knowing what he knows now - would Mr. Obama support the Troop Surge. He replied, "No." When asked to explain he added, "These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult," he said. "Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is, at that time, we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with, and one that I continue to disagree with -- is to look narrowly at Iraq and not focus on these broader issues."

This is astonishing. Having claimed that he was saying all along that the surge would reduce violence and increase security when in fact he had for a year been insisting on precisely the opposite, he now says that even had he known that Iraqi lives would be saved by the surge and that stability would come to that land, he still would have opposed increasing troop levels.

It's one thing to have opposed the surge because you thought at the time that it would cause more harm to befall the long-suffering Iraqis, but to say that you would have opposed it even if you knew that it would end the violence and bring peace to that land is the babbling of one who is either morally or intellectually ill-equipped to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

RLC

Sudden Death

Unconfirmed reports out of Pakistan say that an unmanned drone aircraft fired a missile that killed Abu Khabab in southern Waziristan in Pakistan today. Abu Khabab headed up al Qaeda's WMD program and had worked on chemical agents that could cause mass deaths in a terror attack. He had a 5 million dollar bounty on his head which has presumably been dissociated into atom-sized particles. Perhaps he saw the missile coming and had a moment to reflect upon his crimes.

Meanwhile, another Taliban raid in Afghanistan resulted in losses approaching 70% for the attackers:

The Taliban launched their assault on the Spera district center at 2 AM local time, the International Security Assistance Force reported in a press release. The attacking force, estimated at 100 Taliban fighters, attacked using small arms and machineguns.

The Afghan National Police manning the outpost held off the attack and radioed US forces for backup. The US responded by sending ground forces and supporting fire from artillery as well as helicopter and aircraft.

US and Afghan forces then surrounded the Taliban force and pounded the position with small-arms fire, artillery, and airstrikes.

The Taliban force was routed. "The number of insurgents killed is in double-digit figures," the International Security Assistance Force reported. Arsala Jamal, the governor of Khost, said between 50 and 70 Taliban fighters were killed. "A small number" of police officers were reported killed. No US troops were reported killed or wounded during the engagement.

RLC

Po-Mo Crackup

A couple of Saturdays ago I posted on an old Chuck Colson column in which he critiqued postmodernism. I mentioned that Brian McLaren, a Maryland pastor who has become well-known for his books urging the church to accomodate itself to the postmodern mindset, wrote a rejoinder to Colson and then Colson wrote a response to McLaren. Despite the fact that the exchange is almost five years old all three essays are very much worth the time it takes to read them, and the latter two can be found here.

HT: Byron

RLC

Grand Finale

The last of the Loser Letters is up at National Review Online. All's well that ends well.

RLC

Iowa and New Orleans

In the wake of the Iowa floods Dick Francis passed along a few pertinent questions:

• Where was the hysterical 24/7 media coverage, complete with reports of cannibalism?
• Where was the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hadn't solved the problem and where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) were?
• Why wasn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago?
• When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines?
• Where were Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks?
• Where were all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen television sets?
• When will we hear Governor Chet Culver say that he wants to rebuild a 'vanilla' Iowa, because that's the way God wants it?
• Where are the people declaring that George Bush hates white, rural people?
• How come 2 weeks afterwards you never heard anything more about the Iowa flood disaster?

Well, why was the media response to Iowa so much different than the response to Katrina, and why was the reaction of the victims of the Iowa floods so much different than the reaction of the victims of Katrina?

Perhaps we have fostered a culture of dependency among urban blacks that has all but extinguished in many of them the qualities of self-reliance and initiative that were so much in evidence in the people along the upper Mississippi. Could it be that the media sees members of the black underclass as fundamentally incapable of taking care of themselves and considers it unfair to expect them to be able to react to crisis with the same moxie as white middle class Americans? Do poor blacks feel that way about themselves?

It would be interesting if the media and others engaged in a little self-examination of the racial assumptions at play in the way these two natural disasters were covered and responded to.

RLC

Twilight of the War

The Associated Press has a story on Iraq that all but declares "Mission Accomplished". This is the AP, mind you, so there's no praise in the story for the White House, although Gen. Petraeus gets some grudging credit for the surge. The writers of the piece declare as if it were news what anyone who had been paying attention has known for some time, "The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost".

The scales having fallen from the AP's eyes, Senator Obama's narrative over the last two years that Iraq is irretrievably lost is deeply complicated and compromised. The Senator now appears to be the only person left in American politics, outside of a handful of left-wing diehards, who still thinks that the surge was the wrong thing to do. Like the Japanese soldier holding out on some lonely atoll still fighting the war thirty years after it had ended, Senator Obama still refuses to admit that the surge was a strategic and tactical success and that it has made an enormous difference in the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

He's in a tough spot, actually. If he acknowledges the success of the Bush/Petraeus/McCain surge he concedes that his own judgment of such matters is greatly inferior to that of his rival, but if he continues to refuse to acknowledge that the surge was the right thing to do then he looks like a man who can't see the sun at noon on a clear day.

P.S. We wrote a few days ago that, by choosing the Victory Column as the site for his speech in Berlin Obama "tacitly endorses the Nazi symbolism of the Column and makes himself appear just as blissfully ignorant of European history and culture as the feckless tourist who speaks no French."

It was objected by a reader that this was too strong. It's possible, the reader rightly pointed out, that Obama doesn't know the history of the column or that he will use the backdrop to denounce militarism. Unfortunately, the senator surely knew by the time of the event what the monument represented and there was nothing in his speech which would redeem his choice of the site for his rally. So, I think the original point stands - Obama tacitly endorsed the symbolism of the monument by holding his rally there, or, at best, simply chose to ignore the symbolism. Imagine the media reaction had John McCain done something similar.

RLC

Planet of the Apes

My friend Linda gives us a heads-up on a Weekly Standard column by Wesley Smith in which he foresees very disturbing consequences of Spain's recent decision to confer certain rights upon apes that heretofore had been reserved solely for human beings. Smith asks:

But why grant apes rights? After all, if the Spanish parliament deems these animals insufficiently protected, it can enact more stringent protections, as other countries have. But improving the treatment of apes--of which there are few in Spain--is not really the game that is afoot. Rather, [as animal rights activist Pedro] Pozas chortled after the environment committee of the Spanish parliament passed the resolutions committing Spain to the Great Ape Project, this precedent will be the "spear point" that breaks the "species barrier."

And why break the species barrier? Why, to destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.

Specifically, by including animals in the "community of equals" and in effect declaring apes to be persons, the Great Ape Project would break the spine of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, which holds that humans enjoy equal and incalculable moral worth, regardless of our respective capacities, age, and state of health. Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out and new criteria devised to determine which human/animal lives matter and which individuals can be treated like, well, animals.

The Great Ape Project does indeed seem to be a logical consequence of the loss of belief that we are created in the image of God. Indeed, in a secularized, Darwinized cultural environment we truly are descended from apes, and a number of bleak consequences follow from no longer regarding human beings as if they were in some sense special. Smith talks about some of these consequences in the rest of his fine article.

RLC

Bush and the Dark Knight

Novelist Andrew Klavan compares Batman to Bush in an excellent column at the Wall Street Journal. Klavan writes that:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

He goes on to ask:

Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

Do read the rest at the link, it's just outstanding stuff.

I haven't seen the new Batman, but Klavan has just convinced me that I need to rectify the omission.

RLC

Tale of Two Judgments

While Senator Obama was sucking up all the media oxygen in Europe Senator McCain was in Denver dispensing some hard truths about his rival. Here's part of what the Arizona senator said about the differences between him and Obama on the surge:

Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama's failed.

We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the "surge" was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops -- which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn't test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn't matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn't just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.

And as our troops took the fight to the enemy, Senator Obama tried to cut off funding for them. He was one of only 14 senators to vote against the emergency funding in May 2007 that supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

Three weeks after Senator Obama voted to deny funding for our troops in the field, General Ray Odierno launched the first major combat operations of the surge. Senator Obama declared defeat one month later: "My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now." His assessment was popular at the time. But it couldn't have been more wrong.

By November 2007, the success of the surge was becoming apparent. Attacks on Coalition forces had dropped almost 60 percent from pre-surge levels. American casualties had fallen by more than half. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen by more than two-thirds. But Senator Obama ignored the new and encouraging reality. "Not only have we not seen improvements," he said, "but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there."

If Senator Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi Army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically. Al Qaeda would have killed the Sunni sheikhs who had begun to cooperate with us, and the "Sunni Awakening" would have been strangled at birth. Al Qaeda fighters would have safe havens, from where they could train Iraqis and foreigners, and turn Iraq into a base for launching attacks on Americans elsewhere. Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been likely.

Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. ...

Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.

Fortunately, Senator Obama failed, not our military. We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right. Violence in Iraq fell to such low levels for such a long time that Senator Obama, detecting the success he never believed possible, falsely claimed that he had always predicted it. ... In Iraq, we are no longer on the doorstep of defeat, but on the road to victory.

Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice.

Whereas Obama gives the impression of determining his positions by looking at the political weathervane, McCain does what he thinks is right regardless of which way the wind is blowing. Obama's judgment has been impugned by the success of the surge and McCain's has been vindicated.

HT: Powerline

RLC

Summer Symposium

Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online distributed a number of questions on books, movies and politics to some of the folks at NRO, and their responses are posted here.

These are the questions, and though I was not invited to participate in the symposium (an oversight on their part, I'm sure), just for fun I'll supply my answers to them anyway:

What's the best political novel you've ever read? Why is it the best? I read Advise and Consent so long ago I can't remember anything about it other than it inspired me to pursue a career in politics. The inspiration subsided after a couple of days. Since then maybe 1984 is the best, because it paints such a chilling, dreary picture of the world as the left would make it.

If there were only one book on conservatism you could recommend to a newcomer, what would it be and why? The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk because it gives such a masterful overview of the history of conservative thought. If Kirk's tome is a little bit daunting I'd probably recommend Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative.

Is there one book that you'd recommend to uplift and inspire depressed conservatives this summer? Perhaps Michael Gerson's Heroic Conservatism, but in truth it would take more than a book to uplift conservatives faced with having to vote in November for John McDole and faced with the prospect of at least four years of an Obama presidency. That's depression for which there is no anodyne.

What's your favorite WFB book and why? All the Buckley books I've read I read decades ago and can't recall which of them, if any, was my favorite. I do know that I never read a Buckley book I didn't enjoy.

What's your favorite political movie and why? Man for All Seasons featuring Paul Scofield is my second choice. My first selection is The Lives of Others. It's a film everyone should see who wants to understand the sort of world to which leftist ideas logically leads. It's a great movie with lots of drama and redemption.

If you could read or reread one classic this summer, what would it be? What are the odds you actually do? Well, it's not a reread, and I'm embarrassed to say that I've never read it before, but I recently started Tolstoy's War and Peace. I expect to have it finished by the summer of 2010.

Is there any recent book that's made you want to buy copies for everyone you know and love? Did you actually make the purchases? I actually did buy copies of Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax for my son and daughter who have children of their own. Two other recent books I'd be willing to buy for people are Tim Keller's Reason for God, and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Unfortunately, I have very little success getting people to read books I recommend to them so I haven't bought either of these for anyone. Yet.

Are there any summer movies you're looking forward to? I'm hearing interesting things about The Dark Knight, so I might see that. It's not a summer movie, I guess, but I do recommend Bellah for anyone looking for a wonderful film about real people.

Would you rather listen to John McCain's convention speech or read Dick Morris's new book? I'd rather be assured that John McCain was reading Dick Morris' new book.

Name one book we're going to be shocked you read. The Devil Wears Prada. I read it for a book club I was in. In my defense I should mention that I never finished it.

Thanks to Jason for passing on the link.

RLC

Supporting the Troops

The MSNBC website tells us that:

"During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops," Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign."

A U.S. military official tells NBC News they were making preparations for Sen. Barack Obama to visit wounded troops at the Landstuhl Medical Center at Ramstein, Germany on Friday, but "for some reason the visit was called off."

One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama's representatives were told, "he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers." In addition, "Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."

The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."

I sure hope that he didn't cancel the visit to the wounded troops just because he couldn't take along photographers. I heard yesterday, but cannot confirm, that instead of the hospital visit Obama went shopping and worked out.

If he did cancel the hospital trip because it wasn't a politically advantageous use of his time then what are we to think of him? The reason he gave, that it wasn't appropriate to visit the troops as part of a trip funded by the campaign, doesn't make any sense at all since he visited wounded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to cancel the visit makes it look an awful lot as though Obama's just exploiting the wounded troops for his own political purposes.

The cancellation makes it appear that if Obama's going to visit our wounded and maimed soldiers and Marines he wants everyone to know that he's doing it. I wonder how many visits to our kids McCain has made that nobody but his people and the hospital staff and patients know about.

RLC

The Giant Amoeba

Throughout his tour of the Middle East Barack Obama sounded as though he were a member of the Bush administration when talking about Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. Almost nothing he said, except for his 16 month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, differs substantively from what the White House has been saying for years. This was especially true of his thoughts on Iran:

Barack Obama asserted that he would bring "big sticks and big carrots" to make Iran stand down on its nuclear program, but take no option off the table. Answering reporters' questions in the missile-battered southern town of Sderot, July 23, Obama stressed that preventing Iran [from] acquiring a nuclear weapon must be of paramount concern for any US administration. It would lead to the disintegration of the non-proliferation regime, other Middle East nations would also obtain nuclear weapons and some would reach terrorists. "This is the single most important threat to Israel and the US."

The logic of Senator Obama's words leads to this: If the nuclearization of Iran is the single most important threat to this country then, if all else fails, military force would be justified to prevent it. This is exactly the Bush/McCain position.

I don't know whether Obama actually means what he's saying, but if he does it's a significant departure from the Obama who campaigned in the primaries as the candidate least likely to ever go to war. He has now moved so close to McCain on foreign policy that the two are almost occupying the same ground.

Like a giant amoeba Obama he's slowly engulfing and absorbing the differences which had distinguished McCain from himself. He seems eager to make the campaign not about policy distinctions but about image, style, and charisma. He realizes that on the issues McCain is pretty much where the country is, but that the old man can't compete with Obama's charm, wit and afflatus, qualities which seduce many voters who haven't a clue what the issues are or where the candidates stand on them.

The rookie Senator appears to recognize that on policy matters and experience he has nothing much to offer so in order to win the presidency he has to maximize his strengths, and neutralize McCain's by making McCain's positions his own. If this is correct, then Obama is going to continue moving right and continue to look just like many another politician - a dishonest, insincere opportunist.

I hope for the country's sake that this is not what Obama is up to, but if we see him moderate his views on taxes, health care, and/or off-shore drilling then we'll know that it is.

RLC

Sound Advice

I'm told by a friend that the letter below appeared in Letters to the Editor in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond , VA on July 7, 2008.

The writer has an important lesson to impart here although he goes a little too far with his analogy:

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30 I celebrate my independence day and on July 4 I celebrate America's. This year is special, because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.

On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba, and a few months later I was in the United States to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

I've thought a lot about the anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right. So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said "Praise the Lord." And when the young leader said, "I will be for change and I'll bring you change," everyone yelled, "Viva Fidel!"

But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner's guns went silent the people's guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to third-world status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. And now I'm back to the beginning of my story.

Luckily, we would never fall in America for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change? How will you carry it out? What will it cost America? Would we?

In America he would could be voted out of office after 4 years, the longest he could be in office is 8 years, but his actions could take years to fix.

The lesson we should take from this letter from a Cuban refugee is not that Senator Obama will turn out to be another Castro, but rather that when people give their support to a virtual unknown without asking any really tough questions just because that individual is charismatic and youthful, they put at grave risk the future of their children and their nation. The Cubans did that and it has cost them dearly for two generations.

I think the letter writer is urging us to ignore the "tingling feeling up our legs" (Chris Matthews on MSNBC) that the candidates might give us, to refuse to be beguiled by their eloquence and charm, and to find out all we can about who they are before we give them our vote.

I think that's pretty sound advice.

HT: Dick Francis

RLC

Postmodern F-Word

Comment Magazine's Peter Menzies has a few interesting reflections on Bono, John Lennon, Josh Hamilton, and the inability of journalists to sift the gold from the dross. Here's an excerpt:

Journalists and faith have never had a comfortable relationship. Given the skeptical role of media in society, that isn't surprising.

Neither is the awkward news that journalists are not typically very good with ideas. Yes, some are brilliant and most are okay with facts, great with controversial quotes (such as when John Lennon described the Beatles as bigger than Christ), and anything hypocritical. They are even okay when it comes to faith leaders such as the Pope or the Dalai Lama whom they understand to have political roles.

But when it comes to ideas-concepts that demand texture, nuance, and precision of thought-most journalists and their editors are lost. Too many have little memory of their social responsibilities, and they are unconscious as to how their suppositions undermine public confidence in the veracity of news and therefore their own credibility. Trust me on this: I have been directly involved in journalism for thirty years. I know. Too few of my colleagues understand that the stories they choose not to tell can be every bit as important as the ones they do tell. And they are.

If you read it all you'll probably learn something about John Lennon that you never knew.

Menzies refers in his piece to C&W star Paul Brandt's acceptance speech upon being recognized for humanitarian service. Here's the speech (9:50):

RLC

The Pilgrimmage

Gerard Baker at the UK Times Online has some fun with those in the media who seem to regard Senator Obama as the savior of the world in this send up of how the Obama World Tour might have been conceived, if not actually chronicled, by the Western press. It's pretty good.

The only thing he might have included would have been the narrative of how The One takes the three network anchors, Couric, Gibson, and Williams, to the Mount of Transfiguration where they behold his glory in raptures too ineffable for words.

RLC