Incredible Shrinking Presidency

In previous posts we wondered why the administration has been so slow to respond to the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, especially after the criticism this president heaped on President Bush for his dilatory response to Hurricane Katrina.

Well, it has turned out that there were two big reasons for refusing offers of help from the Dutch and both of them are disgraceful. The first is that the Dutch skimmers remove a tiny fraction less oil from the water than EPA regulations permit and the second is that the use of Dutch skimmers would have meant that unionized American crews would be excluded from the work, which circumstance offends the labor unions in whose pocket our president is ensconced.

Tens of thousands of Gulf coast residents are losing their livelihoods but, hey, the unions are happy.

There's much more in the article at the link to cause you to despair of the competence and intelligence of the people in the White House who seek to assure us that they've been on top of this disaster from day one.

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell said recently that the administration has shown so much incompetence in their handling of the oil clean-up that it'll be a long time before anyone has any confidence in the government's ability to manage a crisis.

Indeed, with every passing day both the confidence Americans have in government's ability to solve problems and the stature of President Obama diminish apace. Mr. Obama has become the political embodiment of the Incredible Shrinking Man, and nothing he says about the spill means anything to anyone any more. Maybe it's time for him to retreat to the links for another round of golf and just let the governors of the affected states handle the clean-up.

RLC

Who Did We Gain Our Independence From?

Jay Leno asks some people (including a college instructor!) some basic questions about American history, and the results are as depressing as they are funny. I know you can't draw sweeping conclusions from a small data set, but still ....

It's scary to think that these people probably vote. Gosh, come to think of it, I wonder who they voted for in the last presidential election.

Exit question: Is there some sociological significance in the fact that the only one on the film who knew the answers was the grandpa?

Thanks to Hot Air for calling our attention to the video.

RLC

Fourth of July Meditation

Most Americans know that Thomas Jefferson, at the age of only 33, was tasked with composing the Declaration of Independence, but we probably don't know much about how his selection came about. The following is a letter John Adams wrote to his secretary of State Thomas Pickering summarizing the selection process (and also giving a few hints as to Adam's personality, a personality captured very well, by the way, by Paul Giamatti in the excellent HBO miniseries titled John Adams).

Adams writes:

"You inquire why so young a man as Mr. Jefferson was placed at the head of the committee for preparing a Declaration of Independence? I answer: It was the Frankfort advice, to place Virginia at the head of everything. Mr. Richard Henry Lee might be gone to Virginia, to his sick family, for aught I know, but that was not the reason of Mr. Jefferson's appointment. There were three committees appointed at the same time, one for the Declaration of Independence, another for preparing articles of confederation, and another for preparing a treaty to be proposed to France.

Mr. Lee was chosen for the Committee of Confederation, and it was not thought convenient that the same person should be upon both. Mr. Jefferson came into Congress in June, 1775, and brought with him a reputation for literature, science, and a happy talent of composition. Writings of his were handed about, remarkable for the peculiar felicity of expression. Though a silent member in Congress, he was so prompt, frank, explicit, and decisive upon committees and in conversation - not even Samuel Adams was more so - that he soon seized upon my heart; and upon this occasion I gave him my vote, and did all in my power to procure the votes of others. I think he had one more vote than any other, and that placed him at the head of the committee. I had the next highest number, and that placed me the second. The committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draft, I suppose because we were the two first on the list.

The subcommittee met. Jefferson proposed to me to make the draft. I said, 'I will not,' 'You should do it.' 'Oh! no.' 'Why will you not? You ought to do it.' 'I will not.' 'Why?' 'Reasons enough.' 'What can be your reasons?' 'Reason first, you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third, you can write ten times better than I can.' 'Well,' said Jefferson, 'if you are decided, I will do as well as I can.' 'Very well. When you have drawn it up, we will have a meeting.'

A meeting we accordingly had, and conned the paper over. I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly never would oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant. I thought this too personal, for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature; I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity, only, cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration.

We reported it to the committee of five. It was read, and I do not remember that Franklin or Sherman criticized anything. We were all in haste. Congress was impatient, and the instrument was reported, as I believe, in Jefferson's handwriting, as he first drew it. Congress cut off about a quarter of it, as I expected they would; but they obliterated some of the best of it, and left all that was exceptionable, if anything in it was. I have long wondered that the original draft had not been published. I suppose the reason is the vehement philippic against Negro slavery.

As you justly observe, there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights in the Journals of Congress in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams."

Rich Lowery has a brief but informative piece on the Declaration at NRO in which he says this:

Jefferson's words were more than rhetorical theatrics; they laid the philosophical bedrock of the American republic. In the space of three magnificent sentences in its preamble, the Declaration packs enough content to fill volumes of treatises on political theory.

In declaring that "all men are created equal," it insists that there's no such thing as a natural ruling class. Put another way, it tells us, as Jefferson wrote near the end of his life, "that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

Lowery also discusses several other of Jefferson's phrases and notes that they were borrowed from the writings of John Locke, particularly his Second Treatise on Government, in whose thought the Founding Fathers had been steeped. Lowery omits mention, though, of what may be Locke's most important idea: the notion that our rights are rooted in, and given to us, by God. This is important because if the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson replaced Locke's "property" with "pursuit of happiness") are grounded in anything else then they are not "unalienable." We can only have enduring, unalienable rights if they are endowed by our Creator. Nature certainly confers no rights upon us, and the rights bestowed by men are ephemeral and arbitrary.

Philosopher Todd May, in a rather peculiar essay on the Declaration at the NYT's Opinionator, declares that:

Most philosophers now agree that the rights we have are not rooted in nature or in a divine being but in our social practices, our ways of living together.

May might be correct that this is the view of most philosophers today, but if so we should be deeply troubled. Rights that are grounded in nothing more than our social practices are mere words on paper that can change with the social conventions of the time. Philosophers, and Supreme Court Justices, who think that the rights we have in the Constitution are rooted in 18th century social practices are not going to be zealous in defending and perpetuating those rights. Indeed, this is what Elena Kagan seems to believe, and it's one of the deepest concerns with her nomination. Such a view of the nature of rights, a view that grounds them in the shifting mores of social custom and fashion, is a path that leads straight to the might-makes-right philosophy of tyrants.

In any event, I urge you to take a few minutes this Fourth of July weekend to reflect upon the meaning, the grounds, and the contemporary threats to those freedoms and rights bequeathed to us by the founders of our nation.

RLC

How to Achieve Full Employment

In the course of explaining the benefits of unemployment compensation Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi teaches us something I'll bet few really knew or appreciated: Unemployment benefits are a job creator:

Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? All we need do to achieve full employment is to lay everyone off and send them an unemployment check. What could be easier? When next the Nobel Prizes are awarded for economics I hope the committee gives Ms Pelosi due consideration.

RLC

Honey Bee Declines

Honey bee populations around the world are in decline, which is a serious agricultural problem since bees are one of the main pollinators of flowers of all kinds, including food crops. A parasitic mite had been believed to be the culprit, but now there's another suspect: Cell phones. Bees use earth's magnetic field to navigate and cell phones and towers generate electromagnetic radiation that may interfere with the pigment in bees which is involved in sensing the magnetic field. In some studies this has caused the bees to be unable to find their way back to their hives.

If this indeed turns out to be the problem it's possible that changing the frequencies at which cell phones operate will solve the problem, but no one knows for sure.

Go here to read a fuller account of the research that has led to cell phones being implicated in the crash of bee populations.

RLC

Feedback

A friend, former student, and current law school student named Caleb sends along some thoughtful comments on several of our recent posts. His letter can be read on our Feedback page. Check it out.

RLC

Headless Chickens

James Carville's outburst a couple of weeks ago appears to have legitimized Democratic criticism of the Obama White House for its lackadaisical response to the oil spill. One recent example is Democrat House member Gene Taylor who calls Obama's response to the spill incompetent:

As oil spread as close as 1.5 miles from Jackson County's coast Saturday, U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor called the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster "incompetent."

"I'm having a Katrina flashback," said the Bay St. Louis Democrat after an aerial survey of the Mississippi Sound and barrier islands Saturday morning. "I haven't seen this much incompetence since Michael Brown was running FEMA."

All those boats are running around like headless chickens. None of them are skimming for oil. It is criminal. Between the amount of money, the amount of wasted effort, there shouldn't be a drop of oil in the Mississippi Sound, but because of this incompetence, it is there."

It's hard to understand the congressman's complaint, actually. The President has assured us that he's been on the case from "day one" and is not resting until, well, until he's kicked somebody's fanny.

Maybe there are some headless chickens running around in the West Wing, too.

RLC

Three Questions

Justin Taylor over at Evangel relates part of an interview he had with theologian Gerald Bray. During their conversation Bray explained the three overarching questions which we should bring to our reading of any passage of the Bible. If we do this, he says, passages which seem otherwise to have no meaning will become meaningful. Taylor then challenges Bray to apply his method to the genealogies in I Chronicles which certainly seem to have no purpose other than to make the reader's eyes glaze over.

Bray's three questions are these:

The first question we must ask of every biblical text is simply this-what does it tell us about God? What does it say about who he is and about what he does?

The second question is: what does this text say about us human beings? What are we meant to be and what has gone wrong?

The third and final question is: what has God done about this and what does he expect of us in the light of what he has done?

Asking these questions and seeking answers to them will help us interpret the Spirit's message to Christ's people and to each of us as individuals.

Bray's application of these to the I Chronicles genealogies is interesting. Give it a look.

RLC

More Bureaucratic Bungling

Dick Morris paints us a picture of the sort of ineptitude on display by the federal government as it does its best to turn the Gulf oil crisis into a tale straight out of a Franz Kafka novel. I doubt that even the greatest satirist in the history of western literature could have constructed a parody to match what the feds are doing in real life:

According to state disaster relief officials, Alabama conceived a plan - early on - to erect huge booms off shore to shield the approximately 200 miles of their state's coastline from oil. Rather than install the relatively light and shallow booms in use elsewhere, the state (with assistance from the Coast Guard) canvassed the world and located enough huge, heavy booms - some weighing tons and seven meters high - to guard their coast.

[Unfortunately, two days after James Carville complained about the lack of effort to stop the oil from spilling into Louisiana marshes the Coast Guard moved those booms to protect the Louisiana coast.]

So, Alabama decided on a backup plan. It would buy snare booms to catch the oil as it began to wash up on the beaches.

But...the Fish and Wildlife Administration vetoed the plan saying it would endanger sea turtles that nest on the beaches.

So, Alabama - ever resourceful - decided to hire 400 workers to patrol the beaches in person scooping up oil that had washed ashore.

But ... OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Agency) refused to allow them to work more than twenty minutes out of every hour and required an hour long break after forty minutes of work so the cleanup proceeded at a very slow pace.

[E]very agency - each with its own particular bureaucratic agenda - was able to veto each aspect of any plan to fight the spill with the unintended consequence that nothing stopped the oil from destroying hundreds of miles of wetlands, habitats, beaches, fisheries, and recreational facilities.

Where was the president? Why did he not intervene in these and countless other bureaucratic controversies to force a focus on the oil, not on the turtles and other incidental concerns?

Good questions. They're questions that Mr. Obama needs to be forced by the media to answer. Until he does he simply looks uncaring, disengaged, and incompetent. What's worse for the Democrats in November, it won't be long before bumper stickers start appearing referring to the president as President Obungler.

BTW, these are the same people who are trying to lead us out of the economic doldrums and who have recently arrogated to themselves the power to manage your health care. That should make you feel good.

RLC

Looking for Violence in All the Wrong Places

A number of articles have appeared in the media expressing fear that Tea-Party protests will turn violent and that some TPers may be on the brink of doing something, well, Nazi-like. Meanwhile, there's been real fascism afoot - people being beaten, property being destroyed - and not much is being said about it on the port side of our media ship. Guess why:

Police say the incident began Wednesday morning when non-union construction workers attempted to gain access to the new Toys R Us site, but were blocked by protesting union workers.

When the victims were unable to gain access to the construction site, they drove to the area of the Transportation Center in the King of Prussia Plaza lot to wait for police assistance.

Authorities say while waiting for police to arrive, a black sedan pulled up and several white males exited with baseball bats and shattered both rear windows of the two work trucks. As the victims exited the trucks in fear, police say at least two were physically assaulted with the baseball bats. One of the victims was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for treatment.

Then, of course, there are the rioters at the G20 conference in Toronto:

Black-clad demonstrators broke off from a peaceful protest and torched a police cruiser in the financial district and smashed windows in a shopping district after veering off from the planned protest route.

A group, dressed all in black, smashed the windows of a bank, a coffee shop and some stores before heading to an area where Canada's largest banks are headquartered, smashing restaurant windows there.

Parenthetically, here's video of one Toronto citizen doing the job the police should have been doing:

Anyway, even when the liberal media reports these outrages but they do so almost sotto voce. There's very little commentary on the threat such behavior poses to our polity. Nor is it easy to find liberal commentators expressing revulsion at the penchant by the left for employing violence as a political tool. Why is that?

Perhaps if our journalistic wise men spent less time scrutinizing every protest sign carried by the grannies at Tea Party protests, seeking evidence of the smoldering bigotry and potential terrorism that they just know infects the movement, and spent more time focusing on union thugs and radical leftists who are actually hurting people and property, we'd all be a bit safer.

Exit question: The Toronto Blue Jays out of fear of left-wing violence, actually moved a home series with the Philadelphia Phillies to Philadelphia this past weekend. Can you imagine the Blue Jays moving a set of games out of town for fear of a Tea-Party demonstration?

RLC

Books That Changed Lives

Patheos has an interesting piece in which they invite various contributors to give an annotated list of the books that changed their lives. In the course of his selection Tim Dalrymple mentions a book whose thesis it is that atheism got started when Christians undertook to respond to challenges to present a philosophical argument for the existence of God. The book is Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism. Here's Dalrymple:

Buckley, a Jesuit scholar and professor, has the kind of fine-grained vision of the whole canopy of western theological and philosophical traditions that has all but vanished from the universities today. The path toward atheism began, he argues, when Christians suggested -- in order to defeat skeptics at their own game -- that they could, and must, provide a philosophical demonstration of the existence of God and the revelatory status of scripture before there could be any consideration of the God who reveals Himself within scripture.

Descartes, among others, proposed that the essential elements of Christian thought could be reconstructed essentially without the aid of the Holy Spirit, the witness of the church, and God's self-revelation in Christ; all that is required to demonstrate the truth of Christianity, he argued, is objective rationality reflecting upon its conditions and experience. Proving this proposition became the (hubristic) great task of modern philosophers, and the inability to find any such unassailable proof, when it was made to appear that this was the lynchpin upon which responsible assent to Christian faith must rest, has proven devastating beyond measure to western Christianity. If responsible rationality means believing only that which cannot be doubted, and it is not possible to construct an indubitable series of proofs for the whole of Christian belief, then our faith is an abdication of our responsibilities as rational beings.

I haven't yet read Buckley's book, but I have to say that I'm dubious about laying such enormous blame at the feet of those who desire to demonstrate God's existence. It's true that none of the "proofs" are airtight, but what of that? Suppose Christians had never made the effort to construct such arguments, many of which are compelling even if they do fall short of providing total certainty, would they not still be vulnerable to the charge that their faith is irrational because they refuse to argue for it?

It seems to me that the fault is not with trying to construct logical arguments but with the belief that unless one can prove apodictically that God exists one's faith that He does is irrational.

Anyone who would understand the rise of skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism in the modern west -- and every Christian who seeks to comprehend contemporary western culture should desire to understand these things -- should purchase Michael Buckley's book today and read it as soon as it arrives upon the doorstep. Christians were wrong to attempt to answer philosophically what were essentially theological questions, and wrong to abandon the witness and revelation that are intrinsic to its own tradition in the face of life's most fundamental problems.

Well, perhaps, but this is like saying that it's wrong to speak to others in a language they can understand. The attempt to persuade others requires that we talk to them in their own idiom and vocabulary, much as Paul did on Mars Hill. Throughout much of the last millennium this has meant talking to the very well-educated in the language of philosophical discourse.

It doesn't follow that because someone argues philosophically for the existence of God that that person bases his own faith on the success of his argument. It simply means that skeptics should be helped to see that even on the principle of rational thought which they accept reason is not necessarily their friend.

Maybe I just need to read the book.

RLC

Hunting Down the IED Makers

Strategy Page updates us on what's going on in Afghanistan with regard to the IED war and why Afghanistan IEDs are not the Iraqi IEDs:

June 28, 2010: The successful technique of concentrating on the leaders and technicians, to disrupt terrorist activities, is having an impact on the Taliban IED (improvised explosive device) campaign. More IEDs are duds (the exact number, and why, is kept secret so the enemy cannot fix their mistakes.) More IEDs are going off while being built. Afghanistan always had fewer bomb makers than the Islamic terrorists in Iraq. There, Saddam had trained thousands of his Sunni Iraqi loyalists to handle explosives and build bombs.

The Iraqi population is more literate than the Afghans, and thus easier to train in technical matters, like bomb building. Not surprisingly, much of the IED building in Afghanistan is being done by foreigners, especially Iraqi Sunnis who got out when their movement collapsed in 2008. It's easier to find these foreigners. Afghans have a thing about foreigners, especially Arabs (who tend to be particularly disdainful of these "Afghan hillbillies.") The Taliban leadership is almost all Afghan, and those running the IED operation (which involves thousands of people) have to communicate and move around to instruct, discipline and encourage the troops. This makes them easier to track and catch.

This tactic of going after the bomb builder techs and their leaders was pioneered a decade ago, when the Palestinians began their latest terror campaign against Israel. Within a few years, the Israelis had perfected their techniques, and crippled the Palestinian terror efforts. The U.S. adopted these tactics in Iraq shortly thereafter, and it played a large role in reducing the terrorist violence 90 percent by 2008. Now the tactic is arriving in Afghanistan, and having the same impact it did in Israel and Iraq.

There's more on military tactics in Afghanistan at the link.

RLC

Mood Music

I've been trying to get the image of Al Gore assaulting that masseuse in a hotel room out of my mind, but I just can't. In fact, the more I think about it the more credible the massuese's story seems. After all, not even the world's greatest satirist could concoct a detail like this:

The accuser said Gore maneuvered her into the bedroom. His iPod docking station was there, he told her, and he wanted her to listen to "Dear Mr. President," a lachrymose attack on George W. Bush by the singer Pink.

Only Al Gore would find listening to a song that bashes George Bush suitable for erotic mood-setting. No wonder Tipper couldn't take it anymore.

RLC

Blowin' in the Wind

Kyle Smith of the New York Post declares the culture war all but over and conservatives are the losers. He arrives at this melancholy conclusion because of evidence that young voters have rejected the traditionally conservative positions on many of the social issues that their elders have clashed over:

You know something is changing in American mores when the supposed leader of the culture wars from the right, Sarah Palin, declares that smoking pot is "a minimal problem" and that "if somebody's gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in."

Like many other pointless wars, the culture conflict has mainly resulted in exhaustion. Now the troops are laying down their arms and going home.

More and more Americans, particularly in the youngest generation of adults, are shrugging at drug use, gay relationships, pre-marital cohabitation, single motherhood, interracial marriage (which is now all but universally accepted) and gun ownership. More and more people aren't bothering to lug their church to the voting booth.

If only people between the ages of 18 to 29 voted, 38 states would support gay marriage, says a study by Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips of Columbia University. Will today's youngsters change their minds about gay marriage as they age? Don't count on it.

You may have heard a word or two about the Tea Party, which is fiscally focused. But the accompanying demise of Reagan-era groups like the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority is just as important. The morality armies have failed to inspire their children to join the crusade.

I'm not saying that Smith isn't correct, he may be, and in my more saturnine moments I fear he is, but it must be said that the views of the young are notoriously volatile, and it's risky to base predictions of the future of our culture conflicts on such a mercurial demographic.

Young people are almost always more liberal than their parents, and they grow increasingly more conservative as they have their own families and experience more of life. Even people who count themselves as liberal today are probably less so now than they were in their late teens and twenties.

For example, the finding that if only the young voted 38 states would support gay marriage is doubtless true, but it probably would have been true forty years ago as well.

Neither does Smith's claim that Sarah Palin would support legalizing marijuana amount to much as an augur of the future because it's really nothing new. Conservative icon Bill Buckley came out for marijuana's legalization back in the 1970s. Nor has interracial marriage been an issue for conservatives for at least a generation. A number of prominent conservatives have mixed race families, either by marriage or adoption. No one is more revered among conservatives than Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, and, though he's black, Mrs. Thomas, also a popular conservative activist, is white.

In other words, the youthful attitudes Smith points to as storm clouds on the horizon for cultural conservatives have been around for a long time and yet the culture war still rages. Perhaps Smith is reading into the current shape of the clouds his own hopes for the future.

At any rate, Mr. Smith may be correct, but I think it's a little too early to be prognosticating what society will look like a few decades down the road. History takes strange twists, and it often doesn't take much to nudge it onto a completely different path.

RLC

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

Steve Martin joins the Steep Canyon Rangers at the New Orleans Jazz Festival to perform a little ditty that makes a pretty interesting point, actually:

Well, there was John Lennon's Imagine, but after that ....

Atheism simply doesn't inspire art, at least not sublime art. This is not to say that atheists as individual artists haven't produced great works of art, literature, or music, of course, but rather that the art that they have churned out has not, except in a relatively few instances been inspired by their atheistic worldview. Alexander Pope's Essay on Man comes to mind as an exception, perhaps, but little else does. If I remember correctly, Richard Dawkins laments the inability of the atheism to inspire great art in his book The God Delusion.

If it's true that atheism is such a dry well of inspiration we might take a moment or two to reflect on the reasons why that should be so. Perhaps it's because, followed to its logical conclusions, atheism offers no hope, no good, and no meaning to anything. It's a gateway to despair, and despair has never been an impetus for art that lifts the spirit and soars.

HT: First Thoughts

RLC

Enigma in the White House

Mark Steyn writes with a pungent wit that's at its keenest when Mr. Obama is his subject. In this column he reflects on the air of apathy and detachment that clings to our president:

Only the other day, Sen. George Lemieux of Florida attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, over-manned, and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Senator Lemieux found the president unengaged and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.

He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia. . . . The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

"This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

It does appear that Mr. Obama's goals for America are such as would have guaranteed electoral defeat if the majority of voters had known what they were. He wanted to become president for one reason: to diminish American economic and military influence in the world and force the nation, Procrustus-like, into a kind of egalitarian Euro-socialism. Nothing else really seems to fire his imagination. Other matters, like the Gulf oil spill, are little more than irritating distractions from his major passion.

To return to Cohen's question: "Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-forties with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Mr. Obama really isn't all that enigmatic for anyone who bothered during the campaign to attend to what he was saying and what others were saying about him. You can learn much about a man by reading the books which bear his name, by looking at the people with whom he surrounds himself throughout his life, and by examining his voting record. You can also learn something of the man by observing what sorts of records about himself he shields from public view. All of these considered together strongly suggested that Mr. Obama was a far-left ideologue of modest academic achievements who did not identify with the history and traditions of the Anglo-Saxon West and was not particularly fond of them. As such the probable path that Mr. Obama would choose to follow as president was fairly clear.

A large segment of America may now be growing disenchanted with the direction Mr. Obama is taking the country. We may be increasingly disturbed by the feeling that no matter how shallow the waters he finds himself in, he's out of his depth. We may find the looming prospect of huge deficits and crushing taxes alarming, but we have no one to blame but ourselves. We had every reason to foresee all this coming and we, or at least a majority of us, voted for it anyway.

RLC

Sex Poodles and Global Warming

Al Gore is back in the news, though probably not in a manner he'd have preferred. The police report of his alleged assault upon a female masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel room makes him look like a buffoonish, bullying satyr. I'm not going to go into the sordid details here, but few who have followed Gore since his nomination for the presidency in 2000 will have trouble believing the buffoonish part. From his "impromptu" PDA with Tipper on the convention stage, to his ridiculous stalking behavior of George Bush in the debates, to his sudden acquisition of a black dialect when campaigning, er, speaking at a black church, to his "He betrayed this country... He played on our fears" performance after his defeat in the election, Mr. Gore has always managed to amuse those not gullible enough to take him seriously.

Anyway, if you want the short version of his shenanigans with the masseuse you can read Byron York's piece at The Washington Examiner, but if you were an admirer of Mr. Gore you might want to take a pass. Less disillusionment that way.

If you do read it, though, reflect on the fact that we came within a few votes and a Supreme Court decision of having this man as our president in 2000.

One thing about the report I will comment upon is the advice given the masseuse by one of her liberal friends:

Finally she got away [from Gore]. Later, she talked to friends, liberals like herself, who advised against telling police. One asked her "to just suck it up; otherwise, the world's going to be destroyed from global warming."

Pretty funny.

RLC

Oops

You remember, perhaps, the case of the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mahboub in a Dubai hotel last January. The Israeli Mossad was believed to be responsible, but their connivance could never be proven. Now U.S. intelligence sources are reportedly suggesting that the caper was not actually supposed to be an assassination but rather part of a series of abductions designed to gain the freedom of an Israeli soldier named Gilead Shalit who had been kidnapped by Hamas gunmen four years ago:

Debkafile cites US intelligence sources as speculating that Mahboub was to have been one of half a dozen high-value Hamas operatives Israel planned to grab in January in different parts of the Middle East as bargaining chips for the Israeli soldier.

As the man in charge of Iran's weapons supplies to Hamas, Mahboub was judged a key lever for obtaining the Israeli soldier's freedom.

Those US sources believe the plan to snatch him from a Dubai hotel went smoothly enough up until the last step. But then, the drugs administered to knock him out appeared to have killed him on the spot. He was meant to be doped enough to let himself be bundled out of the hotel on his two feet in the middle of the team of abductors without drawing attention. According to this theory, the team was to have driven him to Dubai port and put him aboard a waiting yacht, which was to sail off and rendezvous with an Israeli naval missile boat in the Red Sea.

After delivering him, the same team was to have proceeded to its next target.

But whether they gave Mahboub an overdose or whether his health was frailer than believed, he did not survive. The abduction team leader, lacking instructions for this exigency, decided to abort the mission and leave the dead man in place. He told the would-be abductors to get out of Dubai fast and scatter. The rest of the high-risk, ambitious plan was scrapped.

Interesting theory.

RLC

Discrimination

The Supreme Court has ruled in another ideologically split 5-4 decision that public schools can refuse funding and facilities to campus groups that discriminate as to who they allow to join their organizations. The specific case pitted the Christian Legal Society against the University of California's Hastings College of Law (CLS v. Martinez) and devolved around the question whether Hastings could defund a Christian law student group which offered membership only to those who agreed that sex apart from a marriage of one man and one woman was wrong. This provision violated the school's policy of non-discrimination on the basis of religion or sexual orientation. The Court ruled that the school can indeed defund such groups.

Why, though, should religion and sexual orientation be the only criteria upon which to base non-discrimination? Why not race, sex, political affiliation, or even academic achievement?

The logic of the Court's decision seems to suggest that, in order to keep their funding and access to school facilities, Muslims should have to accept into their chapters Christians, Jews, atheists and any other infidels who wish to join and vice versa. Moreover, organizations for minority students should be obligated to accept non-minorities into membership, women's groups should have to accept men, Republicans should be able to join the Young Democrats, and organizations based on academic distinction should be required to accept academic sluggards onto their rolls. To do otherwise is to "discriminate."

Indeed, the decision will ultimately force any group which wishes to retain its distinctive identity - which is probably most student groups - off campus. I haven't read the ruling itself so perhaps I'm missing something, but if I'm not, what is there about the majority's reasoning in this case that makes sense? Have we become so politically correct, so egalitarian, so progressive, so fatuous that student groups will no longer be recognized by tax-payer funded schools if they seek to limit their membership to people with which they share some crucial quality in common? Has the very concept of discrimination, once considered the essence of wisdom and taste, now become an obscenity?

RLC

Bleeding Jobs

President Obama's decision to declare a moratorium on off-shore oil drilling would, if enacted, put thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Americans out of work and do nothing to stop foreign companies from drilling in the Gulf. The decision makes no sense, but it's not the only inexplicable environmental decision that has resulted from this president's policies. Recently, an American firm was denied an opportunity to sell $600 million worth of equipment to an Indian company that's building a coal-burning electricity plant because the Indian firm was denied financing by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. The U.S. bank, which is funded by congress, denied the funding because it felt constrained by Obama administration directives.

Of course, the Indians will simply go elsewhere for their equipment, the plant will be built, and carbon will still be pumped into the atmosphere. All the administration will have accomplished is to bring harm to the American company and to put up to a thousand jobs at risk:

Up to 1,000 jobs at Bucyrus International Inc. and its suppliers could be in jeopardy as the result of a decision by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, funded by Congress, to deny several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees to a coal-fired power plant and mine in India.

On Thursday, the Export-Import Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, effectively wiping out about $600 million in coal mining equipment sales for Bucyrus, chief executive Tim Sullivan said.

"President Obama has made clear his administration's commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future," Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg said in a statement. "After careful deliberation, the Export-Import Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse environmental impact."

The bank's decision is puzzling, Sullivan said, because the power plant will meet international standards and the bank's environmental criteria.

The plant is under construction in Sasan, central India, and is scheduled to be up and running in 2012. Coal mining will take place for the plant whether it's done with Bucyrus machines or equipment from China and Belarus, Sullivan said.

"Unless the Obama administration jumps all over this and corrects a wrong fairly quickly, I am confident this business is going elsewhere," Sullivan told the Journal Sentinel on Saturday. "The bank's decision has had no impact on global carbon emissions but has cost the U.S. nearly 1,000 jobs," he added.

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Sen. Herb Kohl, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor, voiced their objections to the Export-Import Bank decision, which may be irreversible since there isn't an appeals process. Doyle said he met with Hochberg to stress the importance of the mining equipment sale, which was contingent on the loan guarantees, for sustaining jobs here.

"I was absolutely stunned by their decision. It was the most shortsighted, unconscionable decision you could imagine, and I can't see any justification for it," the governor said. Doyle said he hopes the bank's decision can be reversed before India turns to China or Belarus for mining equipment.

The decision could set a precedent that would keep other nations from buying U.S. mining equipment, especially since China offers discount financing on machines built there, which puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. "My discussions with the bank chairman were hardly confidence-building," Doyle said. "They really could not justify their decision except somehow, somebody told them that if the word coal is anywhere in a plan, then they can't move forward with it."

"By rejecting the Bucyrus proposal, the bank has guaranteed companies who care little for carbon emissions in Russia or China will get these jobs. These are the common-sense arguments I will make to the bank to reverse this awful decision. And they are points I'll personally share with the president when he is in Wisconsin this week," Barrett added.

Ryan said he was angered by the "slippery explanation" given by the Export-Import Bank for denying the loan guarantees.

"This is an ominous preview of the economic damage from Washington's environmental overreach. Should they fail to overturn this decision, the administration is sending a clear signal to the Midwest that political ideology is a higher priority than the livelihoods of Wisconsin families," Ryan said.

"I am a green-energy guy," Doyle said. "But I also understand that we need coal as a major source of energy. What that means is, we need to develop and support the technologies and businesses that are involved in the production of energy from clean coal. Bucyrus is one of those businesses."

So what reason could the administration have for putting people out of work when doing so accomplishes nothing? Does Mr. Obama even care about the suffering his hostility to fossil fuels is causing? Does it not matter to him that he's, in effect, sending American jobs overseas, something for which he and other Democrats volubly criticized President Bush? If it does matter to him, I think he needs to give us an explanation as to how these decisions are really in the best interest of both the environment and the American people, because it's certainly not obvious that they are, and if it doesn't matter to him then the American people need to know that as well.

RLC