Uncivil War

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

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

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

No wonder they lost.

RLC

When Human Life Begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Capt. John Ripley, RIP

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

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

RLC

Loyal Opposition

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Anti-Christian Poet

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

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

RLC

Without God (IX)

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

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

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

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

Consider these depressing reflections:

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

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

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

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

RLC

Experience Matters

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

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

RLC

Reflections on Yesterday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RLC

Destroying Democracy

There's no surer way to destroy democracy than to undermine confidence in the integrity of the voting process itself, but this is exactly what the left is doing in this country. First it was the massive voter registration fraud perpetrated by ACORN employees. Today it's thuggery carried out on behalf of Barack Obama in key cities like Philadelphia.

Americans will only rally behind a president if they believe that he was a legitimate winner. One reason Democrats hate Bush is because they believe he stole the 2000 election. If the conviction is widespread that Obama has stolen this election he'll never be able to heal the wounds that fester in our body politic.

Unfortunately, anecdotal stories being aired on talk radio today suggest that intimidation against McCain voters is common across the country, and if this is true it bodes ill for our future as a nation.

RLC

The Decline of Art

Richard Neuhaus, in the November issue of First Things, quotes Charles Murray on art:

According to every indicator of population, wealth, access to education, and ease of transportation and communication, the twentieth century had a greater number of talented people available to create great art than in any preceding century in history, by many orders of magnitude. I submit that the legacy that will still be a part of the cultural landscape in, say, the year 2300, in the same way that hundreds of writers, painters and composers from earlier centuries are still part of our cultural landscape, will be paltry. Any plausible explanation for their meager record must take into account the role of secularization.

In other words, despite having numerous creative advantages unavailable to previous ages, contemporary art is thoroughly forgettable. This certainly seems to be true as far as I can see. I can't imagine very much of the music or visual art (except for maybe film) that today befouls our culture still being around even a generation from now. Murray attributes the sterility of contemporary art to the secularization of culture, and surely this is a big part of the problem. Religion has historically inspired great art, and a culture in which religion has become an archeaological artifact has lost a major, perhaps the major, source of artistic and creative inspiration.

Christmas, perhaps, serves as a synecdoche. A secularized Christmas inspires nothing. It's flat, gray, tawdry and tedious. Secularized Christmas produces "art" like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer and aluminum Christmas trees. It's only when Christmas is infused with the mystery of the incarnation of God that artists are moved to write hymns like Hark, the Herald Angels and Silent Night. It's only when the original meaning of Christmas (or Thanksgiving or Easter, for that matter) is manifest that it has any meaning at all. It's only when the religious significance of Christmas is emphasized that the full beauty of the season is realized.

Neuhaus goes on to say that even more bleak is the prospect that the artists from past centuries whom we now revere will be forgotten in the year 2300, or long before. Perhaps. Perhaps it will fall to some future devotees to follow the lead of the medieval Irish monks laboring away in their cold, damp scriptoria, struggling to copy and preserve ancient scrolls, to hide them from the vandals, vikings and visigoths and vouchsafe them for a future renaissance. Heaven knows there are plenty of vandals, vikings and visigoths on the contemporary horizon, some even now at the gates.

RLC

What Comes Naturally

Richard Neuhaus of First Things quotes Adam Kirsch reviewing a book by Jean Bethke Elshtain:

"Our sense of the natural is constantly evolving - slavery and patriarchy once seemed natural, while in some quarters gay marriage is still stigmatized as unnatural."

Mr. Kirsch evidently disapproves of viewing gay marriage as "unnatural" which raises the question in what sense gay marriage might be thought to be "natural". If by "natural" we mean what is biologically normal, there's certainly no warrant for saying that gay marriage is natural. Homosexuality occurs in nature, but it's not normal either statistically or in any other sense. If by "natural" we mean something like "designed for connubial or conjugal union", then the fact that men are manifestly not designed by nature for sexual congress with each other would seem to render this meaning implausible.

If gay marriage is considered to be unnatural maybe that's because it is; In every sense of the word.

RLC

Without God (VIII)

An additional fact about our existence that fits better into a theistic worldview than an atheistic metaphysics is our belief that human beings possess dignity. Modern atheism tells us that we're little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There's no soul; there's nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We're more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout.

In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he might profit from so doing. The universe reminds us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made by God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of atheism.

Related to the previous point is the further truth that we have a conviction that human beings are intrinsically valuable. If, however, all we are is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us. If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There's no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious. If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? What grounds them? If it's not God then it must be the state, but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all. The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

RLC

The Conservative Ethos

The following is a slightly edited version of a talk I was invited to give this morning at a local church on the topic of political conservatism:

As Richard Neuhaus likes to say, the first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.

Having said that, the second thing I want to say is that there are basically two disparate political ideologies or worldviews in our politics - conservatism and liberalism, and that sincere, honest and thoughtful Christians are found in both camps. Christians who are conservative and liberal agree on the importance of peace, of helping the poor, of protecting nature, of valuing life, of improving education, of doing justice.

Indeed, the commands in Scripture distill to these two: Love God and love others. In the Old Testament love for others is usually discussed in the context of doing justice. In the New Testament the emphasis is on showing compassion. So as Christians who seek to achieve the ends we all agree upon, we are constrained by love for God to be compassionate and just toward our fellow man.

But, though we agree on the ends, and we agree that we should be compassionate and just, that's where agreement ends. Some very significant differences center around how we can best achieve the ends we all desire, and here the differences between us are often so great that one sometimes despairs that agreement could ever be reached.

I believe (but won't argue) that whether we see the world through conservative lenses or liberal is a function of our personality, our upbringing, our life experience and that since these things can't be changed, it's very difficult, though certainly not impossible, for people to change their ideology.

Because it's so hard to change minds, both sides resort to power politics. The only way to get what we think is best is to acquire the political power to impose our will on the rest of the nation.

One might wish that as Christians, informed by a Biblical vision of the world and of justice, we would pretty much agree on how to achieve the ends we mentioned above. Unfortunately, it's not that easy.

Consider an example: We all agree that the government needs money to do the things necessary to maintain a large population and to help those who need it. So, what's the best way to get the money? Is it to raise taxes or cut them? What does the Bible say? Well, the Bible is pretty much silent on the matter.

Should we raise taxes or should we cut them to fund needed programs? We should do whichever works provided it is compassionate and just, and deciding that is not always easy. Liberals say we should raise taxes, conservatives say we should cut them. Liberals say if the government needs more money you go to where the money is and take it. Conservatives believe that by cutting taxes on families and businesses people have more money to spend, they buy more, business prospers, hires more employees and pays them better salaries. The more people you have working and the more money they make, the more they pay in taxes and thus revenues actually go up. If, on the other hand, you raise taxes, conservatives argue, then the consumer has less to spend, business makes less money, they cut workers and reduce benefits which results in fewer people paying less tax in the long run.

So, what is the conservative philosophy of government? Different people would answer the question differently, but generally conservatives believe that in the three primary spheres of government responsibility - economic, social, and foreign policy - the government is best which governs least.

The economy does best when taxes and regulations on business are kept as low as possible. On foreign policy there are two schools of thought among conservatives: "Paleo" cons tend to be isolationists, "neo" cons tend to believe that we have a moral obligation to liberate people from oppression to the extent we can. That used to be the liberal position, by the way, but it no longer is. Domestically, as a general rule, conservatives hold that the less accountable a government entity is to the people the less it should interfere with their lives.

There's nothing in Scripture that mandates conservatism or liberalism, but the conservative ethos is certainly compatible with Paul's injunction in I Thess. 5:21 to "Examine all things carefully and hold fast to that which is good."

Well, we are on the cusp of an election and most conservatives are deeply concerned that democrats will wind up controlling both houses of congress and the White House. Why is this such a serious concern for them? Why do they think it so important to defeat the Democrats?

The Democrat party, in its current incarnation, stands for a number of things which conservatives believe to be fundamentally unjust. Remember, when we vote on Tuesday we're not just voting for Obama or McCain, we're voting for the entire party.

Whoever wins is going to surround himself with people from his party. In the case of the Democrats that means people who wish to make some fundamental changes that conservatives think would be gravely harmful.

Conservatives may be wrong about this (though I don't think they are). It may be that the Democrats do not intend to do what conservatives think they'll do or it may be that the changes will not be as harmful as conservatives think they will be.

I'm not going to argue that the perceptions I'll mention are accurate renditions of Democratic aims. Nor do I wish to argue that they would be harmful. I merely point out that this is how conservatives see Democrat intentions and that they believe them to be harmful.

So - most conservatives would agree that the Democrat party hopes to do the following:

• Remove all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion.
• Alter the meaning of marriage so that it's no longer the union of one man and one woman.
• Appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices whose decisions will be based on political fashion rather than on the text of the constitution.
• Effect a redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass.
• Treat terrorism as a police matter rather than as a global war on Western civilization.
• Pile onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market and which will result in higher unemployment and higher costs. (Minimum wage, capital gains, health insurance)
• Continue the accelerating secularization of our society.
• Open our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country and give illegal aliens the right to a driver's license, health care, and welfare.
• Nationalize health care.
• Deny to parents any choice in where they send their children to school.
• Push fuel costs back up so as to force us to conserve and develop alternative energy sources.
• Quell freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, through vehicles like the Fairness Doctrine.
• Downgrade our military preparedness and end the program that would enable us to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles.
• Take away the right to own or buy most types of guns or to acquire a license to carry them on one's person.
• Strip union workers of the right to a secret ballot in union elections.

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, to be sure, but conservatives believe that it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress.

If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If, on the other hand, you don't think this is the sort of change that America needs then you should resist the seductive lure of Hope and Change and vote for McCain.

RLC

Bad Moon Rising

Who knows if this cri de coeur is genuine, but whether it really comes from inside the Obama campaign or not, the analysis is interesting. If it was, in fact, written by an Obama staffer, as it purports to be, then it's fascinating and highly significant. Here are the opening paragraphs:

After a long and careful consideration of all the implications and possible consequences of my actions today, I have decided to go through with this in the hope that our country can indeed be guided into the right direction. First, a little personal background... I am a female grad student in my 20's, and a registered Democrat. During the primaries, I was a campaign worker for the Clinton candidacy. I believed in her and still do, staying all the way to the bitter end. And believe me, it was bitter. The snippets you've heard from various media outlets only grazed the surface. There was no love between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and these feelings extended all the way to the top. Hillary was no dope though, and knew that any endorsement of Obama must appear to be a full-fledged one. She did this out of political survival. As a part of his overall effort to extend an olive branch to the Clinton camp and her supporters, Obama took on a few Hillary staff members into his campaign. I was one such worker. Though I was still bitterly loyal to Hillary, I still held out hope that he would choose her as VP. In fact, there was a consensus among us transplants that in the end, he HAD to choose her. It was the only logical choice. I also was committed to the Democratic cause and without much of a second thought, transferred my allegiance to Senator Obama.

I'm going to let you in on a few secrets here, and this is not because I enjoy the gossip or the attention directed my way. I'm doing this because I doubt [many] of you know the true weaknesses of Obama. Another reason for my doing this is that I [have] lost faith in this campaign, and feel that this choice has been forced on many people in this country. Put simply, you are being manipulated. That was and is our job - to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope. I've come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn't have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans. It has worked up until now. Joe the Plumber has put the focus on the issues again, and this scares us more than anything. Being in a position to know these things, I will rate what the Obama campaign already knows are their weak links from the most important on down.

The post gets more interesting as it goes on so read it all at the link. There's a similar report making the rounds from another anonymous Democrat who looks at the situation in Pennsylvania and draws a gloomy conclusion. That report can be found at American Thinker. Unfortunately, there's an accompanying video that shows McCain supporters responding in very unflattering fashion to the provocations of some Obama demonstrators. One wishes that voters on both sides would comport themselves with a little more dignity and class.

RLC

Invasion of Privacy

As soon as private citizen Joe Wurzelbacher posed a question to Barack Obama that caused Obama to say something impolitic, Wurzelbacher became the object of a state intrusion into his private records by Ohio government employees who also happen to be Obama backers. The invasion of his privacy was okayed by the director of Ohio's Job and Family Services Division, Helen Jones-Kelley, a donor to the Obama campaign, and whose underlings rummaged through files trying to discover whether Joe the Plumber could be found to have been cheating on taxes, child support or welfare payments.

The fruits of their searches were then turned over to the media so that Joe could be properly humiliated before the entire nation, all because he had the audacity to ask a question that Obama handled poorly.

It's frightening that public employees have no reservation about using their access to personal records for partisan purposes and will reveal confidential information about private citizens if it's politically useful to do so. This is an abuse of power, and it makes us wonder what such people will do when they have the IRS, the attorney general and the secret service at their disposal.

Michelle Malkin has details on this travesty and the media indifference to it in her syndicated column which can be read here.

RLC

It's Possible

John Podhoretz at Commentary elaborates on ten reason why McCain might win on Tuesday. He's not saying he will win, only that an Obama victory is by no means a certainty. Here are reasons 8 through 10:

8) What happened with the Joe the Plumber story is that Obama has now been effectively outed as a liberal, not a moderate; and because liberalism is still less popular than conservatism, that's not the best place for Obama to be.

9) The fire lit under Obama's young supporters in the winter was largely due to Iraq and his opposition to the war. The stunning decline in violence and the departure of Iraq from the front page has put out the fire, to the extent that, like the young woman who made a sexy video calling herself Obama Girl and then didn't vote in the New York primary because she went to get a manicure, they might not want to stand on line on Tuesday.

10) Hispanic voters, who are always underpolled, know and appreciate McCain from his stance on immigration and will vote for him in larger numbers than anyone anticipates.

Podhoretz's first six reasons can be read at the link. It may be grasping at straws, but Obama does appear worried, the polls are tightening, and Pennsylvania seems to be in play. If strongly blue Pennsylvania is close then red states that earlier appeared to be tilting toward Obama will probably remain Republican. If so, McCain could pull it out on Tuesday.

Poor Erica Jong.

RLC

Erica <i>Agonistes</i>

The self important never seem to realize that they're a walking parody of themselves. Here, for example, are excerpts from an interview given by Erica Jong to an Italian newspaper describing her angst over the possibility that "The Messiah" (Louis Farrakhan's description) might lose next Tuesday:

"The record shows that voting machines in America are rigged."

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

"After having stolen the last two elections, the Republican Mafia..."

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."

"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

Like someone hallucinating from a terrible fever, Ms Jong's agonies appear to have placed such stress on her cognitive faculties that she's seeing bogeymen everywhere.

The Bush/Cheney paranoia is par for the left, but I'm always amazed that "liberals" have so little compunction about insulting and demeaning an entire racial group and that the media lets them get away with it. What does it say, after all, about Ms Jong's assumptions about blacks that she speaks with such apodictic certainty of a resort to violence if Obama loses? Apparently Ms Jong believes, as does a sizable portion of the American left, that not only should we expect such behavior from African Americans but that we cannot expect better from them.

Such thoughts as these, if spoken by, say, Rush Limbaugh, would be trumpeted all across the country as proof of the insidious racism of the right, but when a member of the liberal literati delivers herself of such sentiments, her ideological confreres simply nod in solemn agreement. Even more amazing is the fact that black spokespersons, many of whom are hyper-quick to discern even the most minute racial slight or slander, don't seem to be insulted by such remarks. Very curious.

RLC

Don't Worry, Be Happy

The Guardian informs us of this development in the British culture wars:

The atheist bus campaign launches today. Because of your enthusiastic response to the idea of a reassuring God-free advert being used to counter religious advertising, the slogan "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life" could now become an ad campaign on London buses - and leading secularists have jumped on board to help us raise the money.

The British Humanist Association will be administering all donations to the campaign, and Professor Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The God Delusion, has generously agreed to match all contributions up to a maximum of �5,500, giving us a total of �11,000 if we raise the full amount. This will be enough to fund two sets of atheist adverts on 30 London buses for four weeks.

As Richard Dawkins says: "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion."

Well, if Professor Dawkins expects us to think perhaps we could follow the example of the renowned thinker Blaise Pascal and begin by asking if a thinking man wouldn't wish to see appended to the words "There's Probably No God" the question "but why on earth would you want to bet on it?"

In any event, like so much of what Dawkins says, the claim that thinking is anathema to religion is simply nonsense, at least if the religion under examination is Christianity. Most of the greatest thinkers in the history of human civilization were religious as are many of the finest thinkers doing philosophy today. If we would like an example of what ideas people propound when they refuse to think it's hard to imagine a better case than Dawkins' own book The God Delusion (See Hall of Fame in left margin of this page).

The slogan on the bus tells us to accept the probable non-existence of God, to enjoy our lives and not worry. Such an odd juxtaposition of thoughts. It's a bit like saying we're all doomed to a meaningless, pointless existence so let's enjoy ourselves and not think about it. It's precisely those who don't think who alone could enjoy life despite its horrors and absurdities, despite the monumental mass of human suffering. Anyone who thinks, would, if they really thought seriously about the emptiness of human existence in a world without God, be driven to despair.

Here is the assessment of a man known for thinking, an atheist like Dawkins: "I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre from Nausea.

But don't worry. We all escape the nausea eventually. We all die. Enjoy.

RLC

Don't Judge Him

By Ramirez.

RLC

Battle for the Mind

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views composes a post in which he offers up a nice summary of various materialist views of the mind. He closes with this:

The mind is a catastrophe for materialism. Materialism doesn't explain the mind, and it probably can't explain the mind. Materialism flounders on the hard problem of consciousness - the problem of understanding how it is that we are subjects and not just objects. Now a number of scientists and other academics are challenging this repellent materialist nonsense. There's no scientific or even logical justification for the inference that the mind is merely the brain, without remainder, and the philosophical and sociological implications of the materialist view of the mind are abhorrent. Now there's a reality-based push-back to materialist superstition, and the materialists have an insurrection on their hands.

The question of whether we have a mind that is a qualitatively different "substance" than matter has, like almost all philosophical problems, enormous implications. If material stuff is all that makes up the world, our bodies, and our brains then it becomes much more difficult to hold onto a number of beliefs that many people hold dear.

If, for example, materialism is true it's harder to believe that there is a God, a life after death, human dignity, free will, and moral responsibility, just to mention a few. Indeed, most materialists don't believe in any of these things. Fortunately, it's very unlikely that materialism is true. Egnor's summary does a nice job in a relatively few paragraphs of showing us why.

RLC