A Party <i>In Extremis</i>

Democrats are devaluing one of the more effective epithets in their considerable arsenal of political slurs by extravagant over-use of the word. Their fondness for it has resulted in the fact that few people listen to them any more when they use it. The word is "extreme" and its variations.

President Bush's judicial nominations are "extremist". The Republican move to end the use of the filibuster to block those nominees is "extreme". Anyone who holds conservative religious views is an "extremist". Anyone who opposes gay marriage is an "extremist". The attempt to reform social security and to institute personal savings accounts is "extreme". Those who yearn for a return to traditional values of truth, commitment, loyalty, and hard work are on the "extreme" right.

After a while it starts to sink in that in the Democrats' lexicon anyone is an "extremist" who disagrees with them. The Democrats want to undo centuries of settled policy on marriage, sex, and family life, but it is those who see value in the traditional ways of looking at these things who are "extreme".

When everyone is an extremist the word ceases to move the listener. It loses its punch, and the Democrats just sound silly every time the try to tarnish another political opponent with it. Bereft of ideas, with no plan for the country to offer the American people, they are reduced to labeling as extremists a significant percentage, perhaps a majority, of the American people.

It's no wonder that they have themselves become a party in extremis.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker

This may be of little interest to anyone else, but I thought it was wonderful news when I heard that biologists have discovered that a bird long thought to be extinct still survives in the swamps along the Mississippi river in Arkansas. The bird is a magnificent nineteen inch long black and white woodpecker called the Ivory-billed, and had last been seen in 1944. It has a three foot wingspan, and its large size made it especially vulnerable to the loss of habitat it suffered due to logging in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

There was hope that some of the birds had survived in Louisiana, but no one was able to confirm their existence. A team of ornithologists searching the Big Woods region of Arkansas, however, discovered the woodpecker there about a year ago but kept their find secret so as not to incite an influx of birders into the region. They finally submitted the results of their study of the Ivory-billed to Science which is going to publish their report in a future issue.

The Departments of Interior and Agriculture have already promised millions of dollars toward protecting and hopefully increasing the numbers of this beautiful creature. Like the recovery efforts which are restoring the populations of the California condor and the Whooping crane, it may be that similar efforts will make the Ivory-billed woodpecker another conservation success story.

Borking Bolton

Victor David Hanson places the arrow directly in the little black circle in this piece on the John Bolton nomination in the Jewish World Review. The resistance to Bolton has nothing to do with his credentials or abilities. It has everything to do with denying George Bush a successful nomination and protecting the U.N. from anyone who would hold its feet to the fire. Hanson writes:

The marathon confirmation hearings of John Bolton to be the American ambassador to the United Nations have become pathetic. Bolton is supposedly discourteous to subordinates. He was a hands-on-his-hips boss! Heaven forbid, he sometimes bellowed.

The "disclosure" of these supposedly hurtful flare-ups has little to do with Bolton's fitness to navigate in the United Nations, whose General Assembly includes miscreants from Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Zimbabwe. Otherwise, Bolton's occasional gruffness would be seen as a real asset in an international jungle where a murderous Syria sat on the Commission on Human Rights while member states perennially castigated democratic Israel as racist.

So the Bush administration wants to unleash a barking watchdog to patrol the United Nations, reeling from its multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food scandal, sexual misconduct among its operatives in Africa, and inaction as thousands perished in the Congo and Darfur. It tires of subsidizing an unaccountable organization that institutionalizes graft, excuses criminality and ignores genocide - but somehow regularly blames its chief democratic patron, the United States.

Bolton's critics apparently feel that such global organizations, for all their faults, nevertheless provide a useful brake on George Bush's exuberance abroad. And now they appear confident that their own barroom tactics will eventually wear down the patrician complacency of Bolton's strangely nonchalant supporters.

Those who roast Bolton prefer an ambassador who would not rock the boat of multilateralism, or, better yet, lack the zeal and skills even to try - and certainly would not employ Bolton's characterization of Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical dictator." The last time we heard such provocative talk Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" under the curious assumption that it was both evil and an empire.

The rest of the essay is even better. Hanson reminds us of the minimalist ethical standards of three of Bolton's foremost senatorial critics, Senators Boxer, Dodd, and Biden, and highlights the hypocrisy of such people as these preventing the confirmation of a man to an ambassadorship because his subordinates sometimes found him demanding.

Free Will v. Determinism

There's a good discussion on Evangelical Outpost about the perennial philosophical problem of free will vs. determinism. The discussion specifically addresses the difficulty in reconciling human freedom with God's sovereignty. The thread was triggered by a "tormented youth" who is seeking an answer to this conundrum, and there are a number of interesting responses in the comment section.

Liberal Humor

The left has demonstrated time and again that many of them suffer from an apparently incurable case of arrested development. Their political discourse is often characterized by an adolescent nastiness, and their attempts at humor are generally unfunny, tasteless, and incredibly juvenile. This report of a skit on the left-wing radio network Air America is just the latest example:

Government officials are reviewing a skit which aired on the network Monday evening -- a skit featuring an apparent gunshot warning to the president!

The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]."

The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show.

"What's with all the killing?" Rhodes said, laughing, after the clip aired.

Hilarious, isn't it?

Janice Rogers Brown

Now we know why the left is so desperate to keep the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers off the federal bench. The LATimes(free registration required) has an account of a talk Judge Janice Rogers Brown gave last Sunday. Here are some of the key points in the Times' report:

Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.

"There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate.

"These are perilous times for people of faith," she said, "not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."

The Advocate quoted Brown as lamenting that America had moved away from the religious traditions on which it was founded. "When we move away from that, we change our whole conception of the most significant idea that America has to offer, which is this idea of human freedom and this notion of liberty," she said.

She added that atheism "handed human destiny over to the great god, autonomy, and this is quite a different idea of freedom.... Freedom then becomes willfulness."

"No wonder the radical left opposes her," Gary Bauer, president of the advocacy group American Values wrote in an e-mail to supporters. "Janice Rogers Brown understands the great culture war raging in America. That is why the abortion crowd, the homosexual rights movement and the radical secularists are all demanding that Senate liberals block her confirmation."

Brown was first nominated by President Bush in 2003 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, an appointment considered a steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court. She has emerged as one of the president's most controversial judicial nominees - and one of the conservative movement's favorite examples of Democratic delays.

Democrats blocked Brown's confirmation by the full Senate, charging that she held extremist views that interfere with her ability to render objective judgments. She has a history of delivering provocative speeches.

Democrats have questioned speeches in which she called the New Deal the "triumph of our socialist revolution." She has described herself as a "true conservative" who believes that "where the government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates.... The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."

Questioned in 2003 about her comments, Brown conceded that she was blunt when addressing conservative audiences. "I don't have a speechwriter," she said. "I do these myself. And it speaks for itself."

"It's so shocking that in the middle of this battle she would say such extraordinarily intemperate things," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Two religious leaders who heard Brown speak Sunday had only praise. The Rev. Michael R. Moynihan, pastor of a church in Greenwich, Conn., and an organizer of the Red Mass, said he was impressed with Brown.

"She caused all of us to reflect more profoundly on the intersection between law and morality, and on the role of religion in shaping those virtues and values, which are crucial to our democratic way of life," said Bishop William E. Lori, the head of the Bridgeport diocese, who invited Brown to address the group.

The Reverend Barry Lynn is "shocked" that the judge would say such outrageous things in the middle of her confirmation battle. He evidently can't comprehend that a judicial nominee would actually want people to know where she stood and what she thinks. He calls her remarks "intemperate" as though it were somehow scandalous to acknowledge what anyone who has one eye half open can plainly see, that we are in the midst of a struggle for the culture with those who wish to turn the United States into Sweden.

It's a peculiarity of this struggle that those who hold to views that have been commonplace in this nation for over two hundred years are labelled extremist by those who are eager to overturn traditional beliefs about religion, sexuality, marriage, and family.

Apparently, for such as Mr. Lynn statements of the obvious should have no place in our political discourse, and people who believe what Janice Brown believes are ipso facto unsuited to serve on the federal bench. The left recoils in sanctimonious horror from the accusation that they are deliberately seeking to exclude people from the judiciary based upon their religious beliefs, but anyone who can't see that this is so can look at a clear sky at noon and fail to see the sun.

Judge Brown said in her talk that "it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud." Indeed. Liberal Democrats and their groupies, like Barry Lynn, will do all they can to make you pay for being an uppity Christian. They are unwitting proof that what she says about the culture war is on the mark.

The Clock is Ticking on Zarqawi

Bill Roggio at the Fourth Rail notes this about the ABC report on the near capture of Abu al-Zarqawi in February:

The fact that there is someone inside the Zarqawi network is what is startling. Al Qaeda in Iraq appears to have been penetrated, no small feat as al Qaeda is traditionally a very closed and secretive organization, admitting only the most ideologically pure of the Islamists within their ranks.

The mole is likely of Arab descent, perhaps an Iraqi, as genuine cover would be needed to break into al Qaeda's inner circle. This mole may be responsible for several of the arrests of high-ranking Zarqawi lieutenants over the past several months. While Zarqawi escaped, the mission was not a complete failure, as money, a computer and two close assistants were captured in the raid:

Finding the computer, said the official, "was a seminal event." It had "a very big hard drive," the official said, and recent pictures of Zarqawi. The official said Zarqawi's driver and a bodyguard were taken into custody.

The computer will likely have a huge amount of data on al Qaedas network, based on past findings of siezed hardware. Zarqawi's driver and a bodyguard are the real catches, as their job descriptions constantly put them at Zarqawi's side. These are men that would know the most intimate details of his professional life: his habits, routines, and methods of operation as well as knowledge about the group's leaders, safe houses, finances and areas of operation.

See here for more details on the contents of the computer.

Zarqawi will be captured or killed sooner or later. One wonders what effect this will have on the morale of terrorists throughout the Middle East and beyond. They will still slog on, to be sure. They will continue their demonic fascination with death, but will they find it increasingly more difficult to recruit new foot soldiers? Will they find it more difficult to raise money or to mount complex operations abroad? Will they find the hardships they have to endure less appealing than they did a year ago? There is a good chance that the capture of a "hero" like Zarqawi will be a significant blow to global terrorism. We pray that is the case.

Islamic Honor

Another honor killing among the followers of Mohammed. This one because the victim's photo was on someone's cellphone. Sounds reasonable, I suppose, if you're a Muslim:

A Jordanian man shot dead his divorced sister after seeing her photo on his friend's camera-equipped cellphone in the latest "honour" killing in the kingdom, hospital officials said Monday.

The unidentified man shot the 31-year-old mother twice in the head Sunday night and then turned himself in to police saying he committed the murder to "cleanse his family's honour".

The incident is the fifth example of a so-called honour killing in Jordan this year. Those found guilty usually face sentences of a maximum of one year in jail under Jordanian law.

Last month, a man stabbed his sister to death after finding out she had agreed an unofficial marriage with a man who subsequently disappeared.

At least 19 women lost their lives in honour killings in Jordan last year, according to the local press.

One year in jail for first-degree murder? Islamic notions of justice are as peculiar as their notions of honor.

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the tip.

The Coming Theocracy

Michael Barone responds to the alarm raised by liberal Chicken Littles that the U.S. is headed for a theocracy. He dismisses this bit of paranoia as silliness. Several of his key points follow:

[W]hether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question. No religion is going to impose laws on an unwilling Congress or the people of this country. And we have long lived comfortably with a few trappings of religion in the public space, such as "In God We Trust" or "God save this honorable court."

The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization, and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada, and American university faculty clubs. But this movement has not been as benign as expected: The secular faiths of fascism and communism destroyed millions of lives before they were extinguished.

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite.

[T]he religions and sects that have grown are those that make serious demands on members; those that accommodate to secular critics and make few demands decline in numbers. The Roman Catholic Church continues to grow in America; the Assemblies of God and the Mormon Church grow even faster. But mainline Protestant denominations, which spend much effort ordaining gay bishops or urging disinvestment in Israel, lose members.

Who inherits the future? In free societies each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests. In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle and Ben Wattenberg in Fewer, birthrates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in "family values" are more likely to have families.

This doesn't mean we're headed toward a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom loving for that. But it does mean that we're probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.

When listening to liberal caterwauling about the insurgency of the evangelical Ayatollahs it must be born in mind that, in their pinched view of the world, anyone who takes religious faith seriously is a threat to freedom, and anything other than a completely secular society is a theocracy. Liberals fear religious belief because people whose allegiance is to their God and their Church often feel quite independent of government and tend to see government as a usurper of their freedoms. This is why the left, whether in its extreme forms like communism or in its more moderate forms like democratic socialism, always seeks to banish religion from public life.

Any sign that religion may be experiencing a reinvigoration among the masses motivates the left to do and say whatever it can to discredit it. If there were only one person remaining who still believed in God the left would nevertheless consider him a portent of an impending theocracy that threatens us all.

EMP

The greatest threat Iran and North Korea pose to the United States is not that one of them will detonate a weapon over or in one of our cities, although that remains a terrible possibility, but that they will detonate a nuclear warhead high in the earth's atmosphere. This would cause little immediate damage but it would generate a pulse of electromagnetic energy, called an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that would completely destroy almost all electrical and electronic equipment in the U.S. The consequences of this would be devastating. Iran appears to be preparing for just such an attack. Here are excerpts from a World Net Daily report on the threat:

WASHINGTON -- Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons, it is already testing ballistic missiles specifically designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower, say U.S. intelligence sources, top scientists and western missile industry experts. The radical Shiite regime has conducted successful tests to determine if its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can be detonated by a remote-control device while still in high-altitude flight.

"An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies - terrorist or otherwise," wrote Senator John Kyl in an article in the Washington Post a week ago, "And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years."

If electrical power is knocked out and circuit boards fried, telecommunications are disrupted, energy deliveries are impeded, the financial system breaks down, food, water and gasoline become scarce.

As Kyl put it: "Few if any people would die right away. But the loss of power would have a cascading effect on all aspects of U.S. society. Communication would be largely impossible. Lack of refrigeration would leave food rotting in warehouses, exacerbated by a lack of transportation as those vehicles still working simply ran out of gas (which is pumped with electricity). The inability to sanitize and distribute water would quickly threaten public health, not to mention the safety of anyone in the path of the inevitable fires, which would rage unchecked. And as we have seen in areas of natural and other disasters, such circumstances often result in a fairly rapid breakdown of social order."

"American society has grown so dependent on computer and other electrical systems that we have created our own Achilles' heel of vulnerability, ironically much greater than those of other, less developed nations," the senator wrote. "When deprived of power, we are in many ways helpless, as the New York City blackout made clear. In that case, power was restored quickly because adjacent areas could provide help. But a large-scale burnout caused by a broad EMP attack would create a much more difficult situation. Not only would there be nobody nearby to help, it could take years to replace destroyed equipment."

A warhead could be lobbed high enough into the atmosphere over the U.S. by any of a number of existing missiles available to the remaining members of the Axis of Evil. They can be launched from a freighter at sea and don't have to be particularly accurate to achieve their purpose.

Those who argued against the Bush administration's attempt to complete the construction of a missile defense on the grounds that missiles aren't a realistic threat turn out to be very wrong. Again. Let's hope that their error remains theoretical and not catastrophic.

Over the next few years we must resolve to do the following: We must not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons; we must continue to work surreptitiously to weaken the regime of North Korea; we must continue to build an anti-missile shield to protect us against the kinds of attack these nations are likely to mount; we must stockpile spare parts like transformers and other essential components of our electrical grid; and we must look for ways to insulate our electronic infrastructure.

If we fail to do any of these we'll leave ourselves in a position where a single warhead on a single missile could cause a degree of social upheaval and devastation that would far exceed any calamity ever to befall mankind. Once Iran and North Korea have the capacity to launch such an attack with a fair assurance of success they may choose not to, but we would be foolish in the extreme to count on that.

Syria Packs Up

Here's the AP story on the historic withdrawal by Syria from Lebanon. Not a word in it about the work of the Bush administration in bringing it about, just a vague reference to "international pressure", as if the Syrians might have buckled to the fearsome demands of Kofi Annan or the French.

The lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq continue to resonate among Middle East tyrants like Bashar Assad even if the Western press thinks these developments are simply instances of spontaneous generation. The media is trying so hard to avoid giving Bush any credit for the pullout that we wouldn't be surprised to soon see this headline: Syria Withdraws Despite U.S. Pressure.

It's Just a Matter of Time

Last February American troops came within a whisker of nabbing Abu al Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who heads up the insurgency in Iraq. Zarqawi managed to escape, but his computer was seized and has apparently been a rich source of intelligence on his operation.

The details on how he managed to escape are in this interesting ABC News story.

The State of the Church

The Barna Group released their 2005 report on the state of the Church on April 11.

The data for 2005 were generated from a study in January based on a nationwide survey of a random sample of 1003 adults. That survey asked the same questions about religious practices and perspectives that Barna has been tracking in national surveys each January for the last fifteen years. Here are some of their more interesting results:

More than nine out of ten American adults engage in some type of faith-related practice during a typical week.

The survey found a small but noteworthy increase in Bible reading. Currently, 45% of adults read the Bible during a typical week, not including when they are at church. That figure represents a minimal increase over the past few years, but a significant rise from the 31% measured in 1995, the lowest level of Bible reading recorded by Barna in the past 15 years. The current statistic is still below the levels achieved in 1980s and early 1990s, but the report shows that the trend is upward.

Despite the media frenzy surrounding the influence of evangelical Christians during the 2004 presidential election, the new study indicates that evangelicals remain just 7% of the adult population. That number has not changed since the Barna Group began measuring the size of the evangelical public in 1994.

Barna surveys do not ask people to define themselves as "evangelical" but instead categorize people as such based on their beliefs. In this approach, evangelicals are a subset of "born-again" Christians. In addition to meeting the born-again criteria evangelicals also meet seven other conditions. Those include saying their faith is very important in their life today; contending that they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; stating that Satan exists; maintaining that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not by being good or doing good deeds; asserting that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; saying that the Bible is totally accurate in all it teaches; and describing God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today. In this framework, being classified as "evangelical" is not dependent upon any kind of church or denominational affiliation or involvement.

When all of the atheists, agnostics and adults associated with non-Christian faith groups are combined, they are only half as numerous as the born-again segment (21% compared to 40% respectively). The remaining body of people, 39% of the nation's adult population, is what Barna categorizes as "notional Christians" - people who consider themselves to be Christian but not born-again. For more than a decade, the sizes of the born-again and notional segments have been roughly equivalent.

Given the criteria for being "evangelical" it's something of a surprise that evangelicals are only about 28% of all "born-again" Christians. It's also a bit surprising, to me anyway, that 40% of adults are in this latter group. That seems rather a large number given the dominant secularism of the culture. Perhaps there are many people who claim to be born-again whose lives, paradoxically, are relatively unaffected by their alleged rebirth.

How to Tell If You're a Liberal

Dennis Prager thinks that a significant fraction of those who call themselves liberal really aren't. Indeed, if they knew what it was that liberals believed they'd disassociate themselves from the Democratic party forthwith. He writes:

It is my belief that about half of the Americans who call themselves liberal do not hold the great majority of positions held by mainstream liberal institutions such as the New York Times editorial page, People for the American Way, and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. So here is a test of this thesis to be given to anyone who believes he or she is a liberal. If you feel I have omitted a liberal position or have unfairly characterized any of them here, please email me at dennisprager@dennisprager.com. This is still a work in progress.

You say you are a liberal. Do you believe the following?

1.Standards for admissions to universities, fire departments, etc. should be lowered for people of color.

2.Bilingual education for children of immigrants, rather than immersion in English, is good for them and for America.

3.Murderers should never be put to death.

4.During the Cold War, America should have adopted a nuclear arms freeze.

5.Colleges should not allow ROTC programs.

6.It was wrong to wage war against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.

7.Poor parents should not be allowed to have vouchers to send their children to private schools.

8.It is good that trial lawyers and teachers unions are the two biggest contributors to the Democratic Party.

9.Marriage should be redefined from male-female to any two people.

10.A married couple should not have more of a right to adopt a child than two men or two women.

11.The Boy Scouts should not be allowed to use parks or any other public places and should be prohibited from using churches and synagogues for their meetings.

12.The present high tax rates are good.

13.Speech codes on college campuses are good and American values are bad.

14.The Israelis and Palestinians are morally equivalent.

15.The United Nations is a moral force for good in the world, and therefore America should be subservient to it and such international institutions as a world court.

16.It is good that colleges have dropped hundreds of men's sports teams in order to meet gender-based quotas.

17.No abortions can be labeled immoral.

18.Restaurants should be prohibited by law from allowing customers to choose between a smoking and a non-smoking section.

19.High schools should make condoms available to students and teach them how to use them.

20.Racial profiling for terrorists is wrong -- a white American grandmother should as likely be searched as a Saudi young male.

21.Racism and poverty -- not a lack of fathers and a crisis of values -- are the primary causes of violent crime in the inner city.

22.It is wrong and unconstitutional for students to be told, "God bless you" at their graduation.

23.No culture is morally superior to any other.

This is a pretty thorough catalogue of the views of modern liberals and of the beliefs of the average Democratic leader and activist today. It puts into bold relief a major reason why Democrats have been largely unsuccessful in electoral politics over the last two decades and reinforces one's fervent hope that they remain so.

Roe is the Root of All Evil

David Brooks traces the political hostility we're seeing in Washington today back to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. He may well be right. Almost all of the most bitter battles have been between those who wish to defend and those who wish to overturn that decision. Brooks writes:

When [Justice Harry] Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate. Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations. Dozens of groups on the right and left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight.

Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.

In response, Republicans now threaten to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster on judicial nominees. That they have a right to do this is certain. That doing this would destroy the culture of the Senate and damage the cause of limited government is also certain.

Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

Brooks is certainly correct about this. Our politics will not improve until Roe is reversed and decisions about abortion are placed back in state legislatures where they belong, but Roe will not be overturned until more conservative judges are seated on the Supreme Court, and that won't happen until the filibuster of judicial nominees is ended.

In other words, Brooks' argument entails the conclusion that our politics will not grow more civil until the Republicans vote to change the Senate rule that allows a minority of senators to block a vote on the president's nominees. This seems paradoxical since such a vote, though necessary, will surely make our politics much more vituperative than they already are.

Squandering Power

Senator Joe Biden and WaPo columnist David Broder are calling for a compromise with the Republicans on the filibuster issue, a sure sign that the Democrats are in a position of political disadvantage. Sen. Mitch McConnell claims that the GOP has the necessary votes to get a rule change that would preclude filibustering judicial nominees. Majority Leader Frist has gotten over a wobbly spell and seems prepared to do whatever it takes to get the president's candidates an up or down vote in the full Senate.

Things are falling the Republican's way, but never underestimate the GOP's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. How else do we explain this from Captain's Quarters, except as a timid reluctance to press their advantage?

Unfortunately, this vote [on changing the Senate rule on filibustering judicial nominees] will not take place now. The GOP had to schedule more pressing business before the recess in the first week of May. The emergency? The new highway bill. You all recall when we fought to expand the GOP majority in the Senate to get that highway bill passed, right? That legislation inspired all of us to donate money that could have gone to family vacations and to assist others in our community to the National Republican Committee instead in 2002 and 2004 ... right? That's what Frist and the GOP leadership expects you to believe now, apparently.

If there's a way to squander political strength the Republicans can be counted upon to find it. They are masters of the art of losing gracefully. They think of themselves as a natural minority party and are as surprised as anyone to find themselves with fifty five members in the Senate. Now that they're there they'd be perfectly happy to let the Democrats take over, but of course they can't actually do that, so they do the next worst thing which is to let the Democrats call the shots on everything that really matters.

If Democrats accuse John Bolton of being mean to underlings then the Republicans pause to reconsider his nomination as ambassador to the U.N. If Tom DeLay is accused of doing what Democrats have long done as a matter of course and which is apparently not a violation of House ethics then Republicans stroke their chins and nod sagely that perhaps DeLay should indeed be dumped. If Democrats think it unconscionable that Bush's judges get a straight up or down vote on the floor of the Senate, well, then, far be it from the Republicans to insist otherwise. That would be needlessly confrontational. If the Republicans find themselves in the unaccustomed position of enjoying political momentum, as they seem to be on the filibuster issue, then the gentlemanly thing to do is put off the vote until the Democrats have a chance to recover their footing enough to kick the GOP in the pants on the vote.

Viewpoint predicts that if Republicans do not vote to change the Senate rules on filibusters there will be a hemorrhage of membership from the rank and file of the party of historic proportions. Financial support will evaporate overnight and Republicans will get steamrollered by the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.

Surely, Republican leaders understand that a party that declines to use the perquisites of power that attach to the majority do not deserve to be, nor will long remain in, the majority. Unfortunately, the prospect of being returned to minority status probably suits the Republicans just fine.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson offers five lessons we should take from our experience in the Middle-East since 9/11. Here's #5:

Do not look for logic and consistency in the Middle East where they are not to be found. It makes no sense to be frustrated that Arab intellectuals and reformers damn us for removing Saddam and simultaneously praise democratic rumblings that followed his fall. We should accept that the only palatable scenario for the Arab Street was one equally fanciful: Brave demonstrators took to the barricades, forced Saddam's departure, created a constitution, held elections, and then invited other Arab reformers into Baghdad to spread such indigenous reform - all resulting in a society as sophisticated, wealthy, free, and modern as the West, but felt to be morally superior because of its allegiance to Islam. That is the dream that is preferable to the reality that the Americans alone took out the monster of the Middle East and that any peaceful protest against Saddam would have ended in another genocide.

After all these years, do not expect praise or gratitude for billions poured into Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, or Palestine or thanks for the liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia in 1990, or the removal of Saddam - much less for American concern for Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Somalia, the Sudan, or Afghanistan. Our past sins always must be magnified as much as our more recent benefactions are slighted.

In response, American policy should be predicated not on friendship or the desire for appreciation, but on what is in our national interest and what is right - whose symbiosis is possible only through the current policy of consistently promoting democracy. Constitutional government is not utopia - only the proper antidote for the sickness in the Middle East, and the one medicine that hateful jihadists, dictators, kings, terrorists, and theocrats all agree that they alike hate.

There is much wisdom in this as well as the rest of the prescriptions in his article. We hope that Washington is listening.

Justice for Hasan Akbar

Here's an update on the case of Hasan Akbar, the soldier who in the early days of OIF killed two of his fellow soldiers and wounded fourteen in Kuwait:

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) - An Army sergeant was convicted Thursday by a military jury of premeditated murder and attempted murder in a grenade and rifle attack that killed two of his comrades and wounded 14 others in Kuwait during the opening days of the Iraq war.

Hasan Akbar, 34, now faces a possible death penalty, which the same 15-member jury will consider at a hearing that begins Monday.

Prosecutors say Akbar told investigators he launched the attack because he was concerned U.S. troops would kill fellow Muslims in Iraq. They said he coolly carried out the attack to achieve "maximum carnage" on his comrades in the 101st Airborne Division.

The verdict came after only 2 1/2 hours of deliberations following seven days of testimony in the court-martial - the first time since the Vietnam era that an American has been prosecuted on charges of murdering a fellow soldier during wartime.

There's more on the story at the link.

Liberal Legerdemain

It's always fun to watch the liberal media in action in much the same way that it's fun to watch a card cheat pull off his amazing sleight of hand in the service of his skulduggery.

PowerLine has a fine analysis by Dafydd ab Hugh of the recent ABC report of Henry Hyde's comments about the Clinton impeachment in which Hyde is charged in the headline with saying something he clearly doesn't say. The headline reads (or did read, since it has since been modified) that Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman.

Here's Dafydd's commentary on what Hyde actually said:

A transcript of a video report that appeared on an ABC affiliate makes a rather startling claim. Upon careful parsing, however, there appears to be an awful lot of gravy for so little pot roast. Here is the screaming headline:

Clinton impeachment was retaliation for Nixon, says retiring congressman by Andy Shaw.

By the time we get [to the story], an element of doubt has begun to creep in:

Republican Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

Note how "was retaliation" has transubstantiated into "may have" been retaliation. Doubt and certainty are locked in an epic battle for all time (like the two guys in the Star Trek episode). But reading a bit further, doubt starts to get the upper hand:

The veteran DuPage County congressman acknowledged that Republicans went after Clinton in part to enact revenge against the Democrats for impeaching President Richard Nixon 25 years earlier.

In part? How much part? One part principle to three parts revenge? Or one part revenge to four parts sloe gin? And at last, if we persevere long enough, we finally come to the actual words that Hammerin' Hank Hyde actually used to Mr. Shaw:

Andy Shaw asked Hyde if the Clinton proceedings were payback for Nixon's impeachment.

"I can't say it wasn't, but I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility," said Hyde.

Well! It's certainly hard to imagine a stronger indictment of Republican perfidy than that! The sudden upthrust of principle after all renders utterly absurd the next paragraph... which makes it quite plain that Mr. Shaw began with his conclusion and worked backwards to his evidence, then forgot to work forward again and bring his snarky commentary into line with the best quote he could get out of old Henry:

Hyde's comments reflect what Democrats have been saying for years about the Clinton impeachment. It will be interesting to see what happens when Hyde's comments hit the national media.

Yes siree... for years and years Democrats have insisted, against an army of naysayers, that the Republican Party should stand for something and shouldn't walk away from its responsibility to impeach Bill Clinton. By golly, I think the Dems deserve a round of applause and perhaps a lump of sugar for finally proving their case!

No sermon would be complete without its homily; no symphony would seem finished without a grace note. Shaw understands the requirements of his chosen profession, so he finishes out with the following:

Hyde's style will be missed in Washington, as well as his sense of civility, even though a lot of people will not miss his rigid ideology.

PowerLine adds this observation:

Somehow I have a feeling the "rigid ideology" at work here is Andy Shaw's. Turns out he was the one that introduced the concept of "payback" for Nixon's impeachment--a mere 25 years earlier--and Hyde responded politely, while making the point that the impeachment issue was one of principle. What a scoop!

As we mentioned above, the media lefties are a real caution. They never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices nor of a good column. Having discovered that which eluded the alchemists of old, they have the uncanny ability to transmute the base metal of "I can't say that it wasn't" into the precious journalistic gold of a scandalous admission. These media David Copperfields can make juicy stories appear right out of thin air. Their skillful prestidigitation is enough to take one's breath away. You can't help but admire it.

CFN Offers Lousy Trade (Pt. III)

This is the third in our series of posts on the Center For Naturalism's (CFN) statement of beliefs as found on their web site. The previous two posts can be read here and here.

CFN makes a number of assertions which seem problematic. Let's begin with this one:

[B]ecause it discounts the existence of the soul and survival after death, naturalism increases the value we place on this, our only life, and the world we inhabit now. Such values support an environmental ethic of wise use, sustainability, and population control that will keep the earth habitable for future generations of all creatures.

The problem with this is that the metaphysical view called naturalism renders all values arbitrary. The naturalist, who believes that this life is all there is, can offer no reason why one shouldn't be a nihilist and reject all values. Nor can they offer a reason why one shouldn't embrace egoism and place one's own selfish interests and pleasures above all else. Why would either be wrong? Why not try to get as much from the earth while we can and let future generations fend for themselves? What is it about naturalism that impels us to care about our descendents? If death is final, there is no reason whatsoever why anyone should care what happens to the world after one's own demise. The only way a naturalist could gainsay this would be by referring to some objective standard of morality, but such standards do not exist if naturalism is true.

CFN also states that:

Because naturalism doubts the existence of ultimate purposes either inherent in nature or imposed by a creator, values derive from human desires and preferences, not discoverable absolutes. To the extent that there is a shared human nature, values are common across cultures, but to the extent cultures differ, so will values. There is no finally correct way to behave, nor are there finally justifiable goals, but only the desires and intentions that currently constitute us, all of which may change as human nature and cultures change. Although values do not have a foundation outside ourselves, we cannot escape having them, since they constitute us as motivated creatures.

We can't help having values just like we can't help having preferences in flavors or colors or music, but it doesn't follow that these preferences are in any way morally significant or binding on ourselves or others. All values in a naturalistic world are ultimately arbitrary and subjective. There is no right or wrong, there are only differences in how people feel about certain behaviors. CFN acknowledges here that naturalism is incompatible with any non-arbitrary morality. It, in fact, offers no basis for any morality whatsoever.

They go on to claim that:

A naturalistic understanding of the causes of criminality helps undercut retributive attitudes favoring the death penalty and punitive prison conditions, while building support for alternative sentencing and policies that address the conditions which generate crime and recidivism. Realizing that but for the luck of circumstances, any of us could be standing in the criminal's shoes, generates compassion for offenders as well as for victims.

However, consideration of the criminal's crime often generates deep contempt and a desire for retribution. Why is the feeling of compassion to be preferred to the feeling of contempt or hatred? Why does CFN arbitrarily favor mercy over retribution? In a naturalistic world there is no basis for choosing between them. If one man prefers compassion and another prefers retribution, neither is right and neither is wrong. For CFN to assume that one is good and the other evil is totally unwarranted on the basis of CFN's assumptions about the world. The folks at CFN are here simply revealing that they would like to turn their subjective preferences into universal social policy.

CFN tries hard to mask the unremitting bleakness of a naturalistic worldview by wrapping it in pretty paper, but the attempt is doomed to fail as soon as one starts to examine the package closely. Naturalism will never be able to supplant Christianity because Christianity is the source of all that makes life meaningful, beautiful, and endurable (See here).

Naturalism would take this source away and offer nothing in its place except a barren and sterile nihilism. Some trade.