Who Should it Be?

As the presidential race heats up let's talk a little about which candidates are best qualified for the office they seek.

Among the Democratic hopefuls for president the best qualified is without question New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Not only has he served as governor but he has been a cabinet secretary, a congressional representative, and an ambassador to the U.N. In a healthy democracy where substance trumps image Richardson would be the front-runner for the nomination. As it happens, he's running against Hillary Clinton who in six years in the Senate has achieved nothing except gain celebrity status based on her marriage to President Clinton, and Barack Obama who's only been in the Senate for three years and whose main qualifications for the lofty office to which he aspires are his charm and the color of his skin. John Edwards is an also-ran who only spent one term in the Senate and whose singular claim to fame, besides his $400 haircuts, is that he was John Kerry's running mate in 2004.

Among the Republicans it's a harder call. Almost all of the likely candidates (I'm assuming that neither Newt Gingrich nor Dick Cheney will be running) have a lot of experience in government and several of them have actually administered a state or, as in Guiliani's case, a major city. This, in my mind, is a much stronger qualifier for the White House than merely having served in the Senate.

That being the case, Mitt Romney would be our pick if he didn't seem like such an opportunist, only having become pro-life when a run for president loomed large in his future. Guiliani seems to be the kind of man we need to lead us in the war on terror and he's good on economic matters, but he's a virtual Democrat on key social issues (This endorsement, for instance, can't possibly help him). Senator McCain is too unstable, both politically and emotionally, for the job. Fred Thompson has never served as an administrator, and I wonder about both the depth of his conservatism and his staying power.

That takes us into the second tier of candidates where we find several intriguing possibilities. Ron Paul is appealing, but is grievously mistaken on the war on terror. Tom Tancredo is great on immigration but has been rather reckless on some of his foreign policy pronouncements. Duncan Hunter is also an outstanding congressional asset, but his government experience is limited to his role as a member of the House of Representatives.

That leaves us with the man who, at this point, appears to be the most attractive candidate in the field - Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee. There's plenty of time to change one's mind, of course, but if our state primary were held today he's the man I'd be voting for. To learn a little more about him check out this Weekly Standard article.

In a country in which character and qualifications mattered the contest in 2008 would be between Richardson and Huckabee. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a country.

RLC

Sociological Tut-Tutting

Christopher Hitchens enumerates the many crimes emanating from Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland and wonders why the police have been loath to act against these cretins until it became too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums-who I was startled to find was still alive-would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless....If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.

Of course he's right. Crimes committed by blacks, especially when committed against other blacks and especially if the perpetrators are Muslim, are simply not treated with the same urgency as crimes committed by whites. It's as if the authorities, so burdened by what Shelby Steele calls white guilt, think it's indicative of racial bigotry to treat black crime seriously.

It's not just the police. The media is even worse. On those exceedingly rare occasions when a black person is assaulted or murdered by a white person the media wring their hands for weeks and months about the residual and endemic stain of racism that pervades the land, but on the almost daily occasions when blacks assault whites, the race of those involved is scarcely even mentioned.

Here in our fair city we've had a recent illustration of this phenomenon. In 1969, York, like a lot of other cities in the sixties, suffered a series of race riots. At the height of the disturbances a black woman was shot by a white teenaged sniper and killed. It was a tragedy for which the city has been flagellating itself for forty years, and all sorts of racial lessons have been drawn from it.

However, a year ago a young black man with a shotgun walked up to a pregnant white woman in the parking lot of a food market and, because he wanted to kill some "white devil," unloaded the gun at her head. Miraculously, the woman survived, but the racial implications of this horrific crime have been completely ignored by the media. It's as if black on white crime has no racial significance, but white on black crime, to the extent that it exists, is filled with it.

Gangs of black youths roam our city's streets preying on white victims, but one has to read between the lines to learn the race of those involved. Recently, in broad daylight a retired former superintendent of one of our local school districts was savagely beaten by three black "youths" in the rest room at a public park during a festival, but the media, while deploring the incident, thought the racial aspects too unimportant to mention. One may be assured, though, that if a group of white thugs had beaten a black superintendent we'd be facing another forty years of racial soul-searching here in York.

Whites, especially white liberals, are so burdened by their fear of being seen as "insensitive" that they cannot bring themselves to point out that the kind of virulent racism that really harms people is alive and well in our cities, and resides almost entirely in the black community. Intimidated by race hustlers like Al Sharpton and paralyzed by belief in their own guilt, their denunciations of violent black crime are usually limited to feeble expressions of sociological tut-tutting.

Thanks to Steve Martin for the link to Hitchens' column.

RLC

Synonym for <i>Bigotry</i>

All the Democratic candidates for president except Joe Biden made the pilgrimmage last weekend to the YearlyKos conference in order to have their progressive bona fides reauthorized. Senator Durbin, who is not running for president, couldn't make it so he sent instead an obsequious video message (which has since been pulled from YouTube) praising the people who write for the DailyKos and their "progressive" influence on the Democratic party.

So what's the problem? The DailyKos is the biggest blog in the country, several dozen people write for it, and politicians need to score points with their audience. Why not attend?

Suppose, however, Republican candidates went to a conference sponsored by a right-wing blogger whose writers, readership, commenters included a large number of racial bigots. How would the media respond to the willingness of the Republicans to associate themselves with such people? I expect that the folks over at MSNBC and elsewhere in liberaldom would go nuts, as they should.

But then why are these folks silent about the Democrats going to the YearlyKos conference? The staff and reasership at The DailyKos aren't racial bigots but an uncomfortably high percentage of them appear to be anti-semitic bigots. This piece from the Washington Times fills in the details.

So the question this raises is why do Clinton, Obama, and Edwards fawn over these people? Why do the media let them get away with it? Is "Progressive" being turned into a synonym for "anti-semitic"?

RLC

OUT

The militant anti-theists are coming OUT, or at least they want to. Here's part of the rationale for their OUT campaign:

Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies.

Well. I think the atheists' concern that theists will interject "the supernatural" into their moral principles is a little misplaced. The better point to make is that the concept of non-subjective, non-arbitrary moral principles is incomprehensible if atheism is true. There is nothing more metaphysically odd than an atheist talking about morality.

And then there's this from Richard Dawkins' introduction:

Moreover, even if the religious have the numbers, we have the arguments, we have history on our side, and we are walking with a new spring in our step - you can hear the gentle patter of our feet on every side.

Actually, notwithstanding his springing step and pattering feet Dr. Dawkins is quite mistaken. Atheism certainly does not have the best arguments nor does it have history on its side (the communists used to say this very thing and look where they are today). In fact, there are no good arguments for Dawkins' brand of atheism at all. Dawkins holds to what we might call "hard atheism," the view which asserts that there is no God (as opposed to soft atheism or what is fashionably called agnosticism). There are, as far as I know, no good arguments in defense of hard atheism, nor does Dawkins himself offer any. He simply rants against religion and tries to show that because the classical arguments for God's existence are not proofs therefore they're not good arguments, as if he thinks an argument has to be a proof to be compelling.

Dawkins adds the reassurance that "Atheists are just people with a different interpretation of cosmic origins, nothing to be alarmed about."

Nothing to be alarmed about? Such a statement can only arise from the pen of a man who has not thought through the logical implications of his atheism. As we've argued elsewhere (See here for example), if there is no God there is plenty to worry about, not least of which are people who assure us that God's non-existence doesn't change much about our view of morality, human worth, human dignity, and human rights.

RLC

Twilight of Atheism

Marvin Olasky recites examples of the hyperventilations found in the anti-God books of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens and then notes this:

So why, despite the evidence, are authors such as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens so doctrinaire in their denunciations? Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath offer a reason in their book, The Dawkins Delusion: "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded."

Alistair McGrath wrote an earlier book which he titled The Twilight of Atheism and in which he expands on the idea that atheism is a dying belief system. It's a good book, offering as it does a helpful historical overview of the rise and decline of atheism, and well worth a read.

One evidence of the intellectual feebleness of the atheist's position is the form that their argument almost always takes. They assert that belief in God is intellectually untenable and then they support that conclusion by trotting out all sorts of irrelevant eccentric religious beliefs that people hold. Arguing that belief in God is nonsense because some religious expressions are absurd is like arguing that physics is quackery because there have been scientists who have believed nutty things.

Yet that's the kind of argument that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens offer. But it's all they've got so they have to go with it and hope that if they wrap an empty argument in enough stridency a lot of people will be impressed.

RLC

Very Odd

Something very significant is going on with Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution, and it seems to be going largely unremarked.

Virtually all the critics of the book have been scientists. Why is that and why is it significant? If Intelligent Design isn't science why don't these scientific critics just pass the book on to philosophers or theologians? They don't, and they don't criticize the book on the basis of it not being science, either. They critique it, not very sucessfully in my opinion, on the basis of the merits of its scientific claims.

Now this is very odd. If ID is not science then many scientists are reviewing a book that discusses matters on which they have no expertise, and no one seems to think this inappropriate. Somebody call Judge John Jones who ruled in the Dover case that ID wasn't science. Maybe he can help us understand this phenomenon.

RLC

The Evolving Case for Surrender

Now that even erstwhile anti-war liberals are conceding that the military is successfully moving toward suppressing the terrorists in Iraq a lot of war opponents are shifting their rationale for pulling out.

They're now placing their chips on the argument that the Maliki government is a failure and that nothing can be done to pump life back into it.

This may be true, but how does it follow that we should therefore withdraw from Iraq?

Suppose the military situation gets to the point where we are taking only one or two casualties a month, or a year, from Iraqi insurgents. Suppose further that the current government remains dysfunctional moving only glacially toward the benchmarks Congress has set for them.

Why should that be a reason for withdrawal? If we leave there will be, all hands agree, a vacuum that will turn into a slaughterhouse. If we leave civil war will ensue resulting in famine, disease, retribution, and millions of deaths. If we leave the region will probably embark upon a nuclear arms race to defend themselves against Iranian hegemony. If we leave there will almost surely be an attack against Israel. This is more than speculation, it's common sense given the history and nature of the region.

If our presence there staves off this holocaust, if it helps maintain a modicum of stability, why should we not stay? What possible argument can there be for abandoning the region to the kind of consequences likely to follow upon our withdrawal?

We stayed in Japan for sixty years after WWII, and we're still in Europe. We're also still in Korea fifty seven years after the end of that civil war, and we remain in Bosnia ten years after President Clinton said we'd be out. The stakes are just as high if not higher in Iraq as they are in any of these regions.

Nevertheless, some argue that the failure of Iraq's government to reach Western standards of political harmony means we have to get out as soon as possible. Joe Klein, for example, writing in Time delivers himself of these four utterly incomprehensible rationales for surrender:

• Is there any role we can play in alleviating the coming internecine Iraqi chaos? (My guess is, not much of one...although a U.S. military drawdown, starting now, might induce some sobriety on the part of the various Iraqi factions.)
• Is there any danger that the Iraqi chaos will spill the country's borders and become regional? (Yes, of course, but not necessarily the broad regional cataclysm that people like John McCain posit.)
• Is there anything we can do to limit the possibility of regional conflict? (Yes, but the good we can do is mostly diplomatic, not military.)
• Is there anything left for our military to do in Iraq? (Yes, continue to press the case against the jihadis. But that can be done with far fewer troops.)

Let's take each of these in turn: What a drawdown will do is cause Iraqis who were willing to stick their necks out because they thought we were going to be there to protect them to start turning back to clan and militia for their protection. Millions of others will seek to flee the country to avoid the inevitable retribution of the terrorists. It will be Cambodia 1975 all over again.

Klein states blithely that the cataclysm won't necessarily be broad, but this is an asinine assertion. Of course there's a logical possibility that a cataclysm will be relatively contained, but why take the chance that the bare possibility will be actualized? The liklihood is that the whole region will be at war. Iran will move into Iraq to protect Shia Muslims from Sunni. Turkey will seek to settle their Kurdish problem once and for all. Syria will want to grab oil fields. There will be enormous pressure on Sunni Muslim nations to come to the defense of their fellow Sunnis.

Once we have withdrawn there is nothing that will get us to go back in. Israel's neighbors will see that as a golden opportunity to mount a large scale attack on the "Zionists" and fulfil their dream of destroying the Israeli state.

Regional conflict can only be prevented by diplomacy, Klein says, but he fails to understand the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Diplomacy is necessary to achieve stability but by itself it's not sufficient. Diplomacy unsupported by military force and peace is useless, especially in that part of the world. It reduces to offering people bribes to play nice, but our bribes don't interest them, and they don't want to play nice.

The last assertion is the most astonishing. The reason we're having success against the jihadis is because we increased the number of troops. Now Klein says we can have that same kind of success with fewer troops. On what does he base this? It couldn't be done before the surge, but the armchair general writing from his cozy New York office is certain it can be done now.

If Klein's argument is the best that the advocates of surrender can muster then one grows more confident than ever that we simply have to stay on the course we're on for the sake of the Iraqi people and for the peace of the whole world.

RLC

Five Questions

Here are five questions I hope the Democratic candidates for president, or indeed, candidates for any federal office, get asked over and over again before the 2008 elections:

• If it looks in September as though the administration's Iraq policy is working would you support it? If not, why not?
• Would you favor sending combat troops to Darfur to stop the genocide there? If not, do you believe we have no business interfering with genocidal tyrannies?
• Would you permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons rather than employ military force to stop them? If not, why not?
• If it could be conclusively demonstrated that lower tax rates actually stimulate the economy and produce more revenue for the government would you nevertheless favor rescinding the Bush tax cuts? If so, why?
• Do you think that among the qualifications for the office of president should be experience with having actually governed and/or run an administration?

I'd love to see these questions asked, but they won't be, of course.

Maybe if you have a liberal friend you might pose them to him/her to see what sort of response you get. My guess is that the reply will consist of lots hems, haws and circumlocutions.

RLC

Racist, Bigot, Xenophobe

Ruben Navarrette, evidently unable to engage the arguments for sealing our borders, resorts instead to ad hominem. It's a time-honored technique for persuading the uncritical of the justness of one's own position, and Navarrette employs it deftly. He attacks not only the motives of those with whom he disagrees but also insults them personally.

In a recent column Navarette strongly suggests that opposition to open borders is due to racism and nativism. His evidence consists of surveys which show that Hispanics tend to feel that there's been an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment.

He also cites some of the hostile e-mail he's received as if this proves that the objections to the recent immigration reform bill were invalid.

He acknowledges that it wasn't "just hate" or only hate that drove the opposition, thereby cleverly implying that hate played a substantial, if not solitary, role. So that we don't miss the implication, he relates the story of a racist assault on a 16 year-old Hispanic American.

He finishes by demonstrating how he thinks political discourse should be conducted by essentially calling his opponents xenophobes, demagogues, and bigots. Nice. Never once in his column did he offer any reason why we should not seek to control our borders. He simply insisted, or implied, that those who believe we should are racists.

Should Mr. Navarrette ever decide to actually argue that our borders should be open, perhaps he'll answer the question at the end of this little thought experiment:

Imagine that Mr. Navarrette and I are neighbors. Imagine, too, that my children are constantly running into his house, breaking in through windows, jimmying doors, and availing themselves of his refrigerator, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Suppose that despite his complaints, I do nothing to stop this. So, in his exasperation, he decides to build a fence around his property and put secure locks on his doors and windows.

I am outraged. I call him up and demand that he allow my children to enter his house any time they wish. I point out to him that the children sometimes wash his dishes and mow his lawn. He should have the decency to allow them access to his home when they want it. I suggest to him that the only reason he doesn't want my kids in his house is because they're of Irish descent, and that his fence and locked doors are proof of his xenophobia and racism.

Which of the two of us in this little vignette is acting irrationally?

RLC

Higher Truths

The New Republic has come in for a lot of criticism for running anonymous reports which eventually turned out to be written by a soldier named Scott Beauchamp. Beauchamp's stories were alleged to be eye-witness accounts of various acts of callousness, coarseness, and insensitivity that reflected poorly on our troops.

The Left lapped it all up, of course, but it turns out that investigations have failed to find any substantiation for Beauchamp's reports and he has subsequently admitted to having essentially fabricated most of them. This is very disappointing for the lefties eager to believe the very worst about our soldiers and Marines, but one crest-fallen individual who goes by the name Artista merits special mention. Artista writes:

While Beauchamp's claims were not factually true, they illustrated a greater truth about the American military and the insidious effects that Bush's illegal war has one [sic] the troops.

This is perfect. It doesn't matter what the facts are, Beauchamp's allegations conform to the Left's preconceptions and prejudices and are therefore true in a more transcendent way. Artista's comment reminded me of an incident during the Clarence Thomas hearings when he was alleged by Anita Hill to have made a vulgar remark in her presence. No one could be found to substantiate Hill's claims of impropriety, but that didn't deter Catharine McKinnon, a feminist law professor, from intoning that the charges against Thomas didn't have to reflect any actual facts. They are illustrative of the greater truth that men frequently objectify and sexually harrass women. Thomas, according was guilty not because of what he did but because he was a male.

The far left worldview is completely impervious to falsification. Facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is that one embraces the Left's higher "truths" which serve as the Rosetta stone by which all of life is to be interpreted.

BTW, here's an irony. The Left is smearing the blogger who has done more to expose Beauchamp's fraud than anyone else. According to Hot Air Huffpo has dug up that this Marine was at one time a gay porn star and are bashing him for it. What relevance this has is beyond me, but apparently some lefty bloggers think his past completely discredits the guy's work. It sounds to me like some people are just trying to hurt the guy for the sake of punishing someone who doesn't share their "higher truth." Typical stuff.

RLC

Neuhaus on Dawkins on Behe

Richard John Neuhaus has an excellent essay at First Things on the odd decision of the New York Times Book Review to assign Richard Dawkins to review Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution.

Neuhaus doesn't say this in his piece, but the weakness of Dawkins' "argument" against Behe's book is telling. Behe puts the materialists in a real pickle. He grants that evolution has occured and then uses the evidence of molecular genetics to argue that it couldn't have occured through purely mechanistic processes. The Darwinians are left to show that he's mistaken, but they have no empirical evidence to support the claim. All they have is their faith that there is nothing other than mechanistic processes at work in the world. Since there is no God, or He's uninvolved in the creation, physical processes like mutation and natural selection must be the whole explanation for the diversification of life.

Dawkins offers little else, beyond copious insults, in his review. He sputters about Behe being a creationist (he's not). He scoffs that Behe stands against the accumulated wisdom of many Darwinian worthies (so what). He misrepresents Behe's argument in Darwin's Black Box (and also overstates the success of the responses to that argument), and he ridicules Behe for the fact that his colleagues at Lehigh don't agree with him (Of course, many of Darwin's colleagues didn't agree with him, either). The only scientific argument Dawkins musters is the embarrassing claim that the many different breeds of dogs proves Behe wrong, which, of course, they do not.

Behe doesn't argue that there's no variability among living things, rather he argues that there's a limit to how much variability can be produced by genetic mutation. This argument Dawkins steers clear of and for good reason. He has no answer to it except a derisive sneer.

Check out Neuhaus' essay.

RLC

Robo-Soldiers

The military has now deployed three armed robots to Iraq. These are the first such robots ever designed for actual combat missions. Danger Room has the story and an impressive video of the capabilities of these machines.

RLC

Practicing Their Religion

An Oakland newspaper editor was shot and killed in the street the other day in what was an apparent assassination. Arrests have been made and it turns out the suspects were devotees of the Religion of Peace. Who would have thought?

RLC

Syria Postpones

According to DEBKAFile the Syrians have for some reason postponed the commencement of hostilities against Israel until November:

This piece of intelligence was behind the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's comment Tuesday, July 31: "I think this summer and fall will be less hot than we expected." He was addressing a ceremony ending a course at the National Security College in Jerusalem on expectations from the Syrian front and in the Lebanese Hizballah.

DEBKAfile's military sources report that the latest intelligence update on Syria's intentions reached Jerusalem via Washington in the last few days. It indicated that Syria's political and military leaders had rescheduled the start of hostilities against Israel on the Golan for the second two weeks of November, 2007, postponing their original planning by more than two months.

According to those sources, Syria plans to kick off its offensive with a series of terrorist raids by commando units on civilian villages, military bases and highways, as well as cross-border fire on IDF vehicles and positions guarding the border.

At that stage, the Syrian command will be testing Israel's military responses before mapping out its next moves accordingly.

Israel's military responses should include raids that take out the Syrian government, air force and missile batteries. Then they should commence destroying the Syrian army and intelligence apparatus. Whoever's left in Damascus can then "map out their next moves."

RLC

The Atheist Manifesto

Byron sent along a link to a story by Dinesh D'Souza on one of the hottest selling atheist books in Europe. It's titled The Atheist Manifesto and it's by Michael Onfray.

According to D'Souza, Onfray actually undertakes to do what less intrepid atheist writers usually shrink from doing. Following the German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche he follows the rejection of God to its logical conclusion, at least in terms of the consequences for morals and human worth.

For Onfray, like Neitzsche, moral values are to be determined by the "overmen," those who are strong and masterful. Think, for example, of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, et al.

Onfray also argues that we must get over the Christian notion that each individual has a right to life. Individuals have no rights except what the overmen give them. Thus, Onfray's atheism would entail that genocidal holocausts of people whose existence is inconvenient for those who wield power would be justifiable.

This is the brave, new world that the new atheism would bequeath us - a bloody Darwinian struggle for survival, an incessant war of every man against every man, a world in which might makes right. It would be a world in which the most ruthless and psychopathic would rule and murder would not only be no crime, it would become morally obligatory.

If more atheists begin to see the logic of their position, and if sufficient political power devolves into their hands, a new dark ages would descend upon mankind, and the whole world would become a vast killing field. Life would be a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty, brutish, and short.

Perhaps this sounds a little overwrought, but ideas have consequences and the major consequence of atheism, as Onfray points out, is that without God there can be no objectively right or wrong conduct and no value to human beings. If sufficient numbers of people ever come to believe this what else could the consequences be?

RLC

Principled Politicians Retraction

In yesterday's post titled Principled Politicians it was strongly suggested that the President's senatorial critics of his terrorist spying program were being hypocritical by voting to pass a security bill the other day which allows the program to continue after they had expressed such outrage over it a year ago.

This was misleading since 28 senators voted against the bill and among these were some of the most vocal of the President's opponents on this issue. So, those critics were entirely consistent, and it was an error to suggest otherwise.

RLC

Principled Politicians

After all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the White House spying on innocent Americans, after all the calls for impeachment and howls of outrage over creeping tyranny, what did the Democrat-controlled Senate do with yesterday's opportunity to stand for freedom, justice, and the American way?

They passed the administration's spy bill which gives the President even greater authority to eavesdrop on potential terrorist communications.

Isn't it thrilling to watch people display the courage of their convictions?

Of course, passing the bill was the right thing to do. The buffoonery was in the faux outrage over the spying in the first place. It was all part of an effort to weaken the President, even at the expense of national security.

No wonder the term "principled politicians" has become an alliterative oxymoron.

RLC

Barack's Blunder

Barack Obama is coming in for some criticism from conservative talkers like Sean Hannity for his comment that he'd be willing to invade Pakistan to chase down terrorists, and thereby widen the war in the Middle East.

I think it's a little silly, if not hypocritical, of Hannity to try to make hay out of this since Hannity would be all for it if Bush had said the same thing, which he essentially did in the aftermath to 9/11.

I also think that Obama is right. We should go after terrorists wherever they are. If Pakistan won't do it then we should. Obama's blunder was not in affirming that the war on terror is a war without borders, his blunder is in saying something so viscerally at odds with the views of the bulk of his supporters.

Obama is very popular with the anti-war left which sees Hillary as a bit of a sell-out on the war. If now it transpires that he's saying he would launch an invasion of Waziristan then he leaves his supporters on the left with two options. They can drop him as just another political hypocrite, or they can console themselves by thinking that he's only talking tough in order to get elected, in which case he's still a political hypocrite.

The problem all the Democrat candidates have is that they're torn between their left-wing base, which wants to effect the emasculation of this nation, and presenting an image to the general public of being willing to do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves from those who would destroy us. The two political necessities are at cross-purposes, keel-hauling the candidates under the ship of their campaigns. The Democrats are thus in the unenviable, if not unaccustomed, position of having to deceive either their base or the majority of American voters.

RLC

Reconsidering the Right to Vote

Jonah Goldberg thinks there should be a test for voting, and there is much merit in his argument. The American public, including large swaths of the voting public, are abysmally ignorant of how our government works and what they're voting on. Millions of people pay no attention to politics for four years and then, a week before the election, listen to the news sound bites for some reason to vote against one candidate or the other.

Every election season our local newspapers urge people to get out and vote as if the act of voting itself indicated political responsibility and a healthy democracy. This advice is as wrongheaded as it can be. If anything, people should actually be discouraged from voting. Voting should not be made overly convenient and should only be undertaken by those who really want to vote and who have taken the time to learn a little bit about who and what they're voting for. No one who cannot name two or three Supreme Court justices, at least one of their U.S. Senators, or the Vice-president is, in my mind, qualified to enter the voting booth. Nor is one qualified who can't speak English.

Here's Goldberg:

So, maybe, just maybe, we have our priorities wrong. Perhaps cheapening the vote by requiring little more than an active pulse (Chicago famously waives this rule) has turned it into something many people don't value. Maybe the emphasis on getting more people to vote has dumbed-down our democracy by pushing participation onto people uninterested in such things. Maybe our society would be healthier if politicians aimed higher than the lowest common denominator. Maybe the opinions of people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license.

Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?

An uninformed citizenry is a threat to a democracy. An uniformed citizenry that votes is a calamity. The right to vote, like the right to bear arms, should not be granted to everyone without qualification.

RLC

Birds of a Feather

Senator Chris Dodd (D, CT) defended his participation in a conference sponsored by The Daily Kos on the O'Reilly show the other night despite the fact that Daily Kos is one of the more nasty blogs in the blogosphere and despite the sleazy photoshop of Bush, Rove and Leiberman that has been up at the site for over a year.

Video of Dodd's defense can be found here. The video also shows the photoshop that the Senator doesn't mind associating himself with.

Actually, his unwillingness to allow a little sleaze to deter him from the conference shouldn't surprise us, given the Senator's history and reputation, but it is ironic that he refused to participate in a candidates' debate on Fox News. His ostensible reason was that Fox has a reputation for being conservative, yet his scruples are not so fastidious as to keep him from mingling with people who put garbage like the aforementioned photoshop on their web log.

RLC