Rev. Jackson, Call Your Office!

Uh Oh. A friend passes word that yet another ballot has been rigged by the Republicans in order to suppress the Kerry vote. No doubt this will be an issue in the next debate. Go here and try to cast a vote for Kerry to see what we're talking about.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. When it comes to dirty tricks all the attempts by the Democrats to hide who they are, to deny the vote to servicemen and servicewomen, to deceive the public about what the Republicans will do if re-elected, and to register new voters in excess of the populations of some voting districts, all seem amateurish in comparison to stunts like this.

The Price of Gasoline

Gasoline prices will probably soon become an issue in the presidential campaign and perhaps they should, but Viewpoint cautions against falling for the claim that they're higher now than ever before in our history. That would be true if the price is considered in constant dollars, but if the price is adjusted for inflation we find that a dollar buys much more gasoline today than it did in 1980. Brother Bill, who is the brains behind this blog, sends along a link to this graph to buttress the point.

Animals and Humanism

Peter Singer is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who is has famously made a case for legalizing infanticide and who is also well-known for his advocacy of animal rights. In the recent issue of Free Inquiry, the organ of the Council for Secular Humanism, Singer chides his fellow humanists for their overall failure to shed the prejudice of speciesism which, he claims, has been inherited from Christian forebears.

He writes that Christians believe that "God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God doesn't care how we treat it....Nature itself is of no intrinsic value," in the Christian view, "and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful." This, of course, is the sheerest flapdoodle, but more on that later.

Singer chastises humanists for holding to the Christian idea that humans are at the center of the moral universe and for thinking that values are grounded in the welfare of humans rather than in the "welfare of all beings capable of having a welfare at all." There is, Singer asserts, "no non-religious reason why the pains and pleasures of non-human animals should not be given equal [moral] weight with the similar pains and pleasures of human beings."

As an atheistic Darwinian, this is a very peculiar argument for the Princeton professor to make. It may be that there's no non-religious reason for not treating animals as the moral equal of humans, but the salient point is that there's no non-religious reason why one should do it. Searching the article for reasons why he believes humanists are wrong to exploit animals, the only thing one finds is his claim that they should reject this sort of behavior because it's based upon Christian dogma and, the implication is, anything Christian is ipso facto wrong.

Singer is in an awkward position here. He wants to make the case that exploitation of animals is immoral, but as a Darwinian he has no basis for making such a claim. What grounds does Darwinian survival of the fittest give us for condemning the mistreatment of animals? The only ethic one can derive from evolution is that one should look out for one's own interests. The principles of evolution are silent, as they must be, about the means employed to insure one's survival. If human survival is accomplished through behaviors that involve cruelty to other creatures, evolution affords us no basis for passing judgment. Darwinian evolution, to the extent that it endorses any ethic over any other, simply endorses the view that might makes right.

Singer's complaint against the mistreatment of animals distills to this: He likes animals and it makes him sad to see them treated badly, and he wishes others would feel the way he does. As an atheist that's the most he can say. To suggest that others are immoral if they don't feel the way he does is silly. Indeed, an animal abuser could reply that it is Singer who is immoral for not believing that animals should be killed for sport and pleasure, and his argument would be no less compelling than Singer's.

One of the oddities of what people like Singer are trying to do is that in seeking to convince people that they should discard every vestige of religious dogma, they make it clear that they themselves wish to retain the concept of moral judgment. Yet moral judgment is incoherent apart from religious assumptions, specifically the assumption that there exists a personal God.

It needs to be stressed that the only basis we have for saying that it is wrong to treat animals unkindly is the Christian doctrine that animals, and nature in general, belong to God who has given us stewardship over them. He grants us the right to derive pleasure from them in various ways, but he expects us to treat them with respect and care and to avoid inflicting gratuitous pain and harm. We have, therefore, an obligation, a moral obligation, to be diligent in our care of his creation.

We're in the position of the babysitter who has been told to feel free to help herself to the refrigerator, but such a privilege does not entitle her to go on a destructive rampage throughout the house. Take away the belief that God exists and has made us stewards over his creation, however, and adopt instead the view that all of life is just an amazing fluke in a vast, empty cosmos, and the notion that there exists some imperative to treat animals, or other humans for that matter, in any particular way becomes ludicrous.

Say What?

There's much blustering and harrumphing going on in the blogosphere over the ABC memo from ABCNews political director Mark Halperin that fell into the hands of Matt Drudge on Friday, but, truth to tell, I'm not sure what to make of it. The easy interpretation is that it's just another illustration of how the MSM see themselves as the propaganda arm of the Kerry campaign, and perhaps that's the correct way to read it. It's just that the memo is so enigmatic, obscure, and unintelligible that whatever Halperin was trying to tell his troops at ABC it's doubtful that any of them could decipher it. Here's the last paragraph:

It's up to Kerry to defend himself, of course. But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest. Now is the time for all of us to step up and do that right.

I've received better writing from barely literate high school students. In fact, one account has it that Drudge got the memo from a staffer who asked him to read it so he could tell him what it says (Just kidding).

Perhaps they simply speak in code at ABC so that when Halperin states that We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that maybe they just assume he's giving them the green light to stick it to Bush whenever they see the opportunity. Maybe, but, heck, why do they need a cryptic memo to know to do that? They're liberal media creatures, for heaven's sake. Savaging Republicans is part of their genetic endowment. It's what they do.

Perhaps, like a coach at halftime trying to rally a team which has played listlessly in the first half, Halperin feels the need to prod his staffers on to a more vigorous performance of their duties. Perhaps he's striving, in his semi-coherent way, to inspire them to feats of political partisanship of which they otherwise could not have imagined themselves capable. Whatever. It would have been easier to discern what he was trying to accomplish if the guy knew how to write.

Jacques Derrida, RIP

Peter Schramm at No Left Turns relays word that the famous French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida has passed away. Derrida was famous for his work on textual deconstruction which reduced literature, in the minds of many, to nothing but a series of expressions of self-interest. Schramm offers this obituary:

The Parisian Heidegerrian Jacques Derrida has died. I'm tempted to deconstruct this, but I'll just leave it as a postcard since my intention wouldn't control the reading of the text. It would be the metaphysical illusion. Deconstruction is justice, Derrida said. I say Derrida isn't even a trace; and that's the truth.

An Australian Augur?

In Australia Prime Minister John Howard, a dependable ally of ours in Iraq and in the war on terror has been re-elected to office, defeating an opponent who sounded a lot like Senator Kerry in his promises to pull Australia's troops out of Iraq and concentrate them on the "real" war on terror closer to home.

This is by itself good news, of course, but it may be even better than it appears. Reports up until election day had the race very close, John Kerry's sister, who lives in Australia, campaigned vigorously against Howard, and yet he seems to have won a 53% to 48% plurality. There might be a lesson here for our election which seems to have some things in common with Australia's. Just because the polls show the race getting tight doesn't mean that it really is.

The Debate

It's impossible to say how many viewers were willing to have their vote decided by anything that happened on the stage last night, and, of those who were, we can't know how many will make their decision based upon what was said rather than upon the image that the candidates projected. In our post-modern world, unfortunately, people are persuaded more by style than by substance, more by how one says what they say rather than by what they say. A smooth, eloquent delivery covers a multitude of sins against logic and coherence.

Consequently, for the fashionably po-mo John Kerry is very appealing, but for the remnant of modern thinkers who believe that character counts and that substance should trump style, George Bush would've been awarded the laurel last evening and should be granted it on election day as well. Hugh Hewitt tells us why:

In the past eight days, John Kerry has:

*announced to a national audience that American actions in defense of national security must pass a "global test";

*announced that he would sell nuclear fuel to Iran;

*could not answer, and badly filibustered a question on what he would do if Iran continued to push towards nuclear weapons acquisition;

*denounced as unilateralism the conation that George Bush put together to overthrow Iraq, and called for unilateral appeasement of North Korea;

*compared Iraq to Lebanon, but insisted a summit could entice other countries to join the effort in Iraq, even after the French and the Germans announced they would not do so even if Kerry was elected;

*twice identified the most pressing proliferation problem as the American effort to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons capable of destroying deep bunkers, thus equating the United States with rogue states like North Korea and Iran and proclaiming hostility to modernization of the American arsenal - vintage Kerry defense thinking;

*announced plan after plan for which no details exist;

*"absolutely" pledged not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200,000 annually, a pledge that even his most ardent admirers know is either a bald lie or a repudiation of most of his spending plans;

*ignored the creation of 1.9 million jobs over the past 13 months and ignored the economic consequences of the Clinton recession and 9/11 attacks while attacking Bush's tax cuts;

*while calling attention to his Catholic status, defended his vote against banning partial birth abortion, called for taxpayer support for abortion, argued that "parental notification" was connected to dads raping daughters and defended the wholesale harvesting of frozen embryos for research purposes --four positions completely opposite of Catholic Church teaching and far outside the American consensus opinion on abortion;

*actually said "John Edwards and I are for tort reform," and told the American people that lawsuits against doctors are 1% of the health care problem;

*defensively denied being "wishy washy," a "flip flopper," and a "liberal," while complaining about being branded such by the president;

*embraced the Kyoto Treaty and called for its resuscitation with amendments;

*told America that General Shinseki had been fired by Bush and that the firing had a "chilling" effect on all generals, and one day later said Shinseki had been "retired" --not fired-- and left off the "chilling effect" argument --a record one day flip flop;

*saw his running mate get woodshedded and his campaign try to reverse that blow by arguing that the Vice President should have remembered meeting Edwards;

*heard his wife assert that American troops were fighting for oil and many other stunning things;

*watched as Bush did not make a single memorable error in two debates while effectively underscoring Kerry's "global test" pratfall, focusing on Kerry's did-nothing time-serving two decades in the Senate, wrestle the ISG report to its appropriate place in the discussion of the Iraq War, persuade by repeated argument (which the Vice President also helped along) that coalitions can not be led or maintain by derision or democracies built by indecision;

*watched as Bush effectively and accurately branded KerryCare as an expanded form of HillaryCare;

*watched as Bush simply and devastatingly branded Kerry as not credible on taxes, spending and most important of all, defending the United States.

Against all of this and more, Kerry backers point to his debating skills in round one and George W. Bush's expressions from the first debate. If this was a good eight days for Kerry, then November 11, 1864 was a fine day for Atlanta. In fact this stretch has been a disaster for Kerry as all the set-up work Bush-Cheney had performed for eight months came home in eight days as Kerry cooperated in his unmasking as a candidate far from the country's center of political gravity on nearly every issue, comfortable only in ambiguity and a champion of every one of the left's pet domestic causes from partial birth abortion and taxpayer funded abortions to Kyoto and federal delivery of health care.

The relentless focus on his hard left posturing on foreign affairs through 20 years in the Senate hasn't even begun yet. Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke wondered aloud last night why the president didn't make use of Kerry's 1991 vote against the first Gulf War, and I wonder when we will hear about Kerry's mini-Munich in Managua in April 1985 or his nuclear freeze pedigree and opposition to many of the major weapon programs on which our military now relies, but there is still three and a half weeks and one more debate left in which these and other points have opportunity to surface.

The clock has almost run out on Kerry, and his little gust of momentum - called a hurricane by his backers because they hadn't felt a breeze for months - is spent.

We're not as sanguine about all this as Hewitt is because, as mentioned above, too many people who will go to the polls on November 2nd don't really care about facts or argument. They'll cast their vote on the basis of "presence" or physical attractiveness or verbal eloquence, all criteria which are absurdly irrelevant to picking a president but by which Kerry will score high. Even so, Viewpoint certainly hopes that Hewitt is right.

What If Clinton Led OIF?

The irrationality of the Bush haters induces an episode of cathartic venting by Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online. A couple of excerpts:

Bush "lied" because he believed the same intelligence John Kerry believed. Bush "lied" even though John Edwards called the threat from Iraq "imminent" - something Bush never did. No one bothers to ask how it could be possible that Bush lied. How could he have known there were no WMDs? No one bothers to wonder why Tony Blair isn't a liar. Indeed, no one bothers to ask whether the Great Diplomat and Alliance Builder believes our oldest and truest allies Great Britain and Australia are lead by equally contemptible liars. Of course, they can't be liars - they are merely part of the coalition of the bribed. In John Kerry's world, it's a defense to say your oldest friends aren't dishonest, they're merely whores.

Oh, one more thing no one asks. How could Bush think he could pull this thing off? I mean, knowing as he did that there were no WMDs in Iraq, how could he invade the country and think no one would notice? And if he's capable of lying to send Americans to their deaths for some nebulous petro-oedipal conspiracy no intelligent person has bothered to make even credible, why on earth didn't he just plant some WMDs on the victim after the fact? If you're willing to kill Americans for a lie, surely you'd be willing to plant some anthrax to keep your job.

And speaking of the victim, if it's in fact true that Bush offered no rationale for the war other than WMDs, why shouldn't we simply let Saddam out of his cage and put him back in office? We can even use some of the extra money from the Oil-for-Food program to compensate him for the damage to his palaces and prisons. Heck, if John Edwards weren't busy, he could represent him.

If Bill Clinton or Al Gore had conducted this war, you would be weeping joyously about Iraqi children going to school and women registering to vote. If this war had been successful rather than hard, John Kerry would be boasting today about how he supported it - much as he did every time it looked like the polls were moving in that direction. You may have forgotten Kerry's anti-Dean gloating when Saddam was captured, but many of us haven't. He would be saying the lack of WMDs are irrelevant and that Bush's lies were mistakes. And that's the point. I don't care if you hate George W. Bush; it's not like I love the guy. And I don't care if you opposed the war from day one. What disgusts me are those people who say toppling Saddam and fighting the terror war on their turf rather than ours is a mistake, not because these are bad ideas, but merely because your vanity cannot tolerate the notion that George W. Bush is right or that George W. Bush's rightness might cost John Kerry the election.

Indeed. If Clinton were still president and had led the war against Iraq there would be not a peep of protest from the Democrats. They would, in fact, be right now praising this undertaking as one of the greatest causes in the history of Western civilization (which it is). They would be shaming any naysayers for their reluctance to have America bring to completion an historic mission of liberation. They would be castigating their opponents for not caring sufficiently about the horrible oppression of millions of Iraqis who simply yearn to be free of fear, torture, and murder. They would be decrying the implicit sexism of the critics who are content to see women ground down under the boot of Islamic machismo. They would be condemning the greedy selfishness of a people who have so much but who are loath to spend a relatively small portion of their abundance to help the desperate millions in Iraq get up on their feet.

This is why so much of the Democratic criticism of the President is so difficult to abide. It's so manifestly hypocritical, self-serving, and unprincipled.

Mistaken, Deluded, or Lying

Hugh Hewitt has the facts concerning Senator Kerry's repeated claim that General Shinseki was fired because he criticized the decision not to put more troops in Iraq. The truth is he wasn't fired. He retired after serving a full term and his retirement was announced months before the invasion of Iraq.

When someone says what is false they are either mistaken, deluded, or lying. The claim that Shinseki was fired has been made too often, and rebutted too often, for it to be a mistake.

Senator Kerry keeps repeating this falsehood because it makes the White House look like it punishes dissenters and wouldn't listen to advice from military men about how to plan for the invasion. Kerry's campaign could be forgiven for having made a false claim once, maybe even twice, but to continue to mislead the American people and to persist in slandering the President when they know that what they're saying is false is unconscionable.

Strange Folks

It should give John Kerry supporters, as well as the rest of us, some measure of pause to consider that a large segment of Kerry's supporters are voting for him because either they believe he's lying or they hope that he is. Something like 30% of the Democrat party is fervently anti-war. This is the overriding issue for them and they want us to get out of Iraq now. Even so, Kerry has vowed to stay and win it. Yet this 30% is solidly in his camp. There can be only one reason for this discrepancy and that is that they don't believe the Senator really means what he says.

After all, everything he's ever done in his public life suggests that he doesn't mean it. He first broke upon the national stage by insisting that the United States summarily withdraw from Vietnam because it was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and there were no national interests at stake. Since then he has consistently sought to thwart efforts to use military force abroad. To think that he would now be genuinely transformed into an advocate for "staying the course" in a war he believes is misbegotten and pointless is to think that he has somehow undergone an ideological transformation that would be nothing short of miraculous.

Moreover, there is another sizable chunk of Democratic voters who are viscerally opposed to an unfettered right to bear arms. It is perhaps one of the top three issues for them in determining their vote. Kerry flaunts his support of such a right and yet the anti-gun folks are out campaigning for him. Why? Is it because they don't think he's telling the truth about his love for the 2nd ammendment?

It is certainly one of the oddities of this election season that the Democrats have mustered such an animosity toward President Bush because, as they claim to see it, he lied to the American people, while, at the same time, a large number of them are going to vote for Senator Kerry precisely because they believe, or are hoping, that he really is lying to the American people.

Strange folks, these liberals.

Where Things Stand

Jay Cost has some great analysis of recent polls which show the race tightening. The news is not all as bad for Bush supporters as it might seem. Kerry Spot posts the following excerpts from Cost:

The first moral of the story is to try to be sanguine about these polls. It is important to remember that last Thursday was the low-point for Dubya and the high-point for Kerry. Even now, Dubya still has a lead. The way to look at this is week is that, given the public's reaction to his performance last Thursday, the president has really dodged a bullet.

The second moral of the story is to remember that polling is, at best, ill-suited for presidential politics. We political junkies are desperate for some kind of certainty, and so we cling to these polls. But the bottom line is that there is no certainty in these polls. Once again, to obtain any kind of certainty, you would have to conduct the same poll at least thirty times and average the results. And you would have to do it before there are any possibilities of substantial changes in the electorate (e.g. you would have to do thirty identical polls in between the two debates). That would give you an indication of where the race stands. That would give you certainty.

The campaigns probably do something like this. Thus, if you want to know where the race really stands, take a look at where they are campaigning. Kerry is spending time in Wisconsin and Colorado. Bush is spending time in Maine, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Interestingly, nobody is spending time in Florida, New Mexico, West Virginia, Minnesota, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri.

My guess is that the Bushies are reasonably confidant that they will hold all the states they held in 2000 except New Hampshire, Colorado and Ohio without much effort (which Kerry thinks he can pick up). But, on the other hand, he can hold Florida and likely pick up Iowa and probably Wisconsin (which Kerry is worried that he will lose), and possibly one EV from Maine.

Suppose all of this breaks against Bush. Suppose he loses PA, OH, CO, NH, WI, ME. He holds FL and picks up IA. That would put the final EV count at 254. We should call that Dubya's floor. There are lots and lots of different things Dubya could do here to get to 270. It would be pretty easy. A hold in OH. A pick-up of PA. A pick up of NH (4 EV's) and WI (11 EV's) and ME (1 EV). A pick-up of WI (11 EV's) and a hold of CO (9 EV's).

On the other hand, Kerry's floor is 229. Kerry has to do a lot more than Dubya to get to 270. This is where the real race is, people. It is not in that AP-IPSOS poll!

In other words, a solid performance tonight by Bush might make victory irretrievable for the Democrats even with one debate left.

For the Philosophically Inclined

The philosophically-minded and intellectually curious will want to check out and bookmark MeaningofLife.tv, which offers an archive of video clips of interviews of many of the foremost thinkers in the U.S., Britain, and Canada on a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects. The interviews are conducted by Robert Wright who uses brief clips (two or three minutes) to explore a wide diversity of ideas, and each set of topic includes the thoughts of several prominent thinkers. Topics include Free Will, the Anthropic Principle, Quantum Wierdness, the possiblity of goodness without God, the nature of Consciousness, and many others. Good stuff.

Kicking Against the Goads

A friend passes on an article in Front Page Mag on the political conversion, sort of, of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is an erstwhile advocate of all the causes of the far left, but 9/11 was something of a Damascus road experience for him. The scales fell from his eyes and, like a lot of former leftists who have experienced a political epiphany, he suddenly realized that the left-wing criticism of the U.S., though perhaps still valid in some respects, was woefully mistaken in those areas of greatest importance. He also came to see that in many ways the left was phony and unprincipled. One wonders why it took something as dramatic as 9/11 for such an intelligent man to see that, but nevertheless, it did.

Hitchens is very much of a moralist and is also an outspoken atheist. Indeed, he calls to mind the character that Orwell describes as "an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Hitchens even wrote a book the whole point of which was to discredit, of all people, Mother Teresa. He has not moved away from these positions and writes regular essays for militantly atheistic publications like Free Inquiry.

We mention this because it will be interesting to see how comfortable he feels in the company of neo-cons, many of whom are devout. It will also be interesting to see whether he has a second enlightenment and comes to the realization that his strong sense of moral outrage is incompatible with his equally strong belief in the irrelevance of God.

Anyway, the article is an interesting read even if the reader is not familiar with Hitchens, and it's fascinating if he/she is.

The Grand Equivocator

Captain's Quarters has a couple of important pieces. The first goes into some detail about how Saddam had bribed Jacques Chirac to get him to oppose us at the U.N. It's incredible that having suffered the betrayal of our putative allies in the U.N. who chose avarice over loyalty, that Senator Kerry still criticizes President Bush for not letting these people in on Iraqi reconstruction contracts. What's equally difficult to believe, or would be if we hadn't had prior experience of Kerry's ability to simultaneously advance two mutually exclusive criticisms of Bush, is that he condemns the president for "allowing" American business to be outsourced to other countries, while at the same time condemning him for not outsourcing American business in Iraq.

The second is a sad recitation of recent examples of Democrats vandalizing and threatening Republican campaign facilities and workers. This is the party of liberalism, but it's pretty hard to distinguish these tactics from those of the European fascists in the 1930s.

Combine these sordid episodes with the Dems strategy of assuring the public that there will be a draft if Bush is reelected, telling the black community that the Republicans are trying to suppress their vote, and scaring old people about alleged Republican plans to take their social security away from them and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Democratic strategy to win in November consists largely of lying, cheating, and thuggery.

Not Enough Troops?

Much has been made of the claim by Paul Bremer and others that we didn't have enough troops in Baghdad to suppress the looting and violence that followed hard upon the liberation of that city. The lack of troops has been seized upon by the president's opponents as evidence that he mishandled the post war and didn't have an effective plan to control the country. For those who want a much more trenchant analysis, however, Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must-read essay.

Wretchard reminds us of two important facts. First, Bremer claimed that there weren't enough troops available at the time he got there shortly after Baghdad fell, but he believes that the number of troops deployed there now is adequate.

Second, the shortfall was not because of poor planning but rather because the troops that had been planned for were rendered unavailable by the last minute decision by Turkey to refuse permission to the 4th Infantry Division to use their soil as a staging area for an invasion of Iraq. This caused a delay in their deployment that seriously hampered attempts to bring the looting under immediate control. Read the details, they're quite interesting.

The Ultimate Kerry Ad

A friend sends me this link to the ultimate campaign ad for Senator Kerry. It's a hoot.

Swimming in the Shallow Water

Vice-president Dick Cheney delivered a right hook to the chin of John Edwards last night by shining a light on the North Carolinian's abysmal record of attendance in the Senate. His recitation of Edwards' lackluster senate career was devastating. We sat there wondering how America can vote for a guy who's been collecting a paycheck and benefits for almost six years while doing next to nothing to earn it. How, we wondered, can anyone defend such an egregious abuse of tax-payer trust?

All we had to do to find an answer to that question was be one of the dozen or so viewers who watched Keith Olberman on MSNBC tonight. Did Olberman hammer Edwards for failing to fulfill his obligation to do the people's business? Of course not. He spent a large part of his show castigating Cheney for having forgotten that he'd ever met Edwards' before last night's debate. Olberman seemed outraged that Cheney would say this. Cheney must be lying, he hinted. We know they met, we have it on video, Olberman scoffed. True enough but so what? It's possible that there's not a person in this great country of Dick Cheney's age and background who remembers every meeting of every individual in his life, but Olberman couldn't get over his glee in having caught Cheney in a whopper.

Worse, Olberman, having demonstrated a remarkable proclivity for diving into the shallow end of the pool, found himself unable to make his way into deeper waters. He could manage no outrage at all over the fact that Edwards has been essentially AWOL from the Senate since almost the day he was sworn in. The senator's absenteeism is surely what matters, not whether Cheney's memory was correct, yet to such as Keith Olberman, Cheney's lapse negated his entire critique of his opponent's pathetic attendance record. Olberman never once tried to challenge the vice-president on the substance of his allegations. Instead he latched onto an irrelevant mistake and treated it as if it were a felony. No wonder nobody watches.

<i>Sola Scriptura</i> In a Po-Mo World

David Wayne at Jollyblogger challenges his readers with the question "Does the doctrine of 'sola scriptura' have a place in the post-modern world?" The doctrine of sola scriptura (Literally, scripture only) arose out of the Protestant Reformation and affirms that the Bible is the word of God and is our ultimate authority in all matters of faith and practice.

The question seems to imply that if we can't conform our theological views to current cultural fashion we might be impelled to discard our theology. For someone who accepts the principle of sola scriptura, this probably seems backwards. It might perhaps better be asked whether post-modernity can find any place to dwell within a scriptural worldview.

Whichever way we frame it, however, the question must be answered in the negative. Whatever one thinks about the Bible, it seems pretty clear that the post-modern mindset is quite incompatible with sola scriptura.

The Bible makes claims to truth. It asserts in the strongest possible way that there is an objective universal truth about God, about man's condition, about morality, and about man's destiny. It tells us of Jesus' assertion that he is the way, the truth, and the life and it insists that Jesus' claim is objectively true.

Post-moderns, however, would find this claim incomprehensible and would tend to ignore it just as they would ignore all exclusive claims and all claims about any absolute truth. Post-modernity seeks to relativize or pragmatize truth, not absolutize it.

In a post-modern culture scripture would be removed from the lofty perch upon which it was ensconced by the Reformers and reduced to the status of secular literature. It could not be permitted to occupy the exalted chair of final arbiter of matters of faith and belief for these would be determined by the consensus in the existential communities in which people find themselves.

Thus one community's truth would not necessarily correspond to that of another and the same would be the case for individuals within the community. Communities of faith might choose to continue to accept the traditional theological significance of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but their decision to do so stands on a cloud. It's purely an emotional choice which is grounded in nothing but an arbitrary preference.

Should the church acquiesce to the post-modern view the whole notion of doctrine would soon be subjectivized and relativized until "truth" morphed into whatever gives the individual or the community a sense of well-being and hope. Truth would be that which grips the imagination of those in the relevant faith community and whatever they agree upon as having some "purchase" upon their commitments.

Faith would be based on nothing more substantial than emotional experience. It would forfeit any objective ground in the scripture, because scripture would be interpreted to mean whatever the reader felt most deeply that it meant. The significance of scripture would be intensely personal. What it means to me would be my truth, it would be true for me. Questions like whether Jesus was in fact divine or did indeed rise from dead would be moot. If you believe he did, then he did, if someone else believes he didn't, then he didn't. Each of us would be an island possessing our own private truth, and there would be no point in asking whether Jesus really was divine or really did rise from the dead. If you believe it strongly then the answer's yes. If you don't the answer's no.

Moreover, even the notion that the Bible is the word of God would come in for revision in the light of deconstructive unmasking of the authors' hidden agendas. Such an analysis would surely conclude that the texts are obvious attempts by the writers to empower males, or some such thing, and that the Church perpetuates this gender oppression by foisting upon the community the myth that these writings were really the very words of God.

The doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible alone is the final authority in matters of faith and practice, is antithetical to the post-modern idea that there is no final authority in such matters except the self or the community. The doctrine implicitly denies human autonomy while post-modernity explicitly affirms it.

Post-modernity is not unreceptive to everything about Christian belief, but it is incompatible with the doctrine that the Bible is the ultimate authority in our lives. If we choose to conform to the world then we will have to abandon the Reformation view of the Bible, and if we wish to be conformed to the Bible we will have to reject much about the post-modern view of the world. Perhaps this is just another illustration of what it means to be in the world but not of it.

The God That Failed

Sigmund Freud captures the disillusionment of those who in the early years of the twentieth century embraced the liberal view of man as inherently good, a Promethean shaper of a glorious future, an Olympian god:

"A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we regarded as changeless."

Sigmund Freud --On Transience

Those earlier humanists who thought man to be the closest thing to divinity in the cosmos were devastated by the horrors of WWI. The same thing happened when the full extent of the holocaust became known after WWII, and it happened again when the crimes of totalitarian communism were exposed in the second half of the last century. Yet the project of deifying man is resurrected every generation. The liberal, humanistic faith that man can be his own deity, that he doesn't need a transcendent God, that he can create heaven on earth all by himself, is as irrepressible as it is manifestly false.

Telling it Like it Isn't

Jim Skillen at the Center for Peace and Justice has a piece on the election wherein he makes these remarks:

Do you want to know what kind of president George Bush will be during the next four years? Look at his record; read reality; and then ask how well his words square with that record and reality.

For Senator Kerry one should take a different approach. He has no presidential deeds to evaluate. Listen carefully to his words, his promises, his proposals. If the promises remain general and vague; if the tax-and-spending proposals don't quite add up; if the security and foreign affairs strategies don't seem likely to yield more safety and international justice over the next decade; if he relies as much on Bush-bashing as Bush relies on Kerry-bashing, then assume that Kerry will be that kind of president.

Mr. Skillen's advice needs a little clarification. First, it's simply misleading to say that Kerry has no presidential deeds to evaluate as if there were no relevant record at all upon which a voter can base a decision on Mr. Kerry. He has spent almost twenty years in the Senate and, on those occasions when he has shown up, has cast votes. There is plenty of record there for voters to contemplate. Mr. Skillen doesn't mention it because unless those who take the trouble to discover how the Senator has voted over the years are pro-abortion, pacifist socialists Kerry's record is likely to alienate most of them, including, one hopes, not a few of Skillen's own readers.

The biggest untold story in this campaign, in fact, is Senator Kerry's senatorial record. The media aren't going to publicize it, of course, because they know it would swing the election to Bush, and the Republicans, for some unfathomable reason, haven't made much of an issue of it either except to cite the Senators chronic tergiversations on Iraq.

The second point on which Mr. Skillen allows his ideological preference to cloud his judgment is when he suggests that Mr. Bush has "relied on Kerry-bashing". It's not clear whether he means to imply that Bush himself has engaged in this behavior, or whether he means to suggest that Bush is relying on others to do the bashing. The latter interpretation is more charitable toward Skillen because it merely makes him look silly, but it is less plausible than the former.

If Skillen is indeed stating that it remains to be seen whether Kerry will rely on others to do the bashing of the president, then we must conclude that Mr. Skillen must have been sequestered in a cave for the last two years during which time Kerry's surrogates have been flaying Bush with the most odious charges and allegations imaginable.

Assuming he hasn't been on a two year retreat somewhere, Skillen must mean that Bush himself has been taking cheap shots at Kerry and that we should watch to see if Kerry responds in kind. If so, Skillens' claim is simply false. Bush has publically said nothing about Kerry except as it pertains to his record throughout this campaign. He has been extraordinarily gracious to his opponent in praising his dubious military record and has refused to attack Kerry personally. Perhaps Mr. Skillen can offer us a counterexample or two, but it's doubtful. Unless he can, however, his assertion above that Bush has engaged in some ignoble political chicanery slanders a man whose conduct in this campaign should serve as a model for politicians everywhere, and Skillens' insinuation to the contrary, therefore, is itself a disreputable cheap shot.

Thanks to Derek Melleby via Byron Borger for the Skillen article.