Brain Trust

CNN brightens our day with this bit of buffoonery from a man who has made a career out of embarrassing himself. Speaking to a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Rep. Alcee Hastings (D,FL) delivered himself of this asseveration:

"If Sarah Palin isn't enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don't care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through."

We're told that the room erupted in laughter and applause which leads me to conclude that thinking things through must be as novel a concept among the members of his audience as it is for Rep. Hastings. The impeached former judge managed to pack an exceptional amount of racial demagoguery and logical incoherence into just a single sentence. Apparently, both Hastings and his audience believe that anyone who hunts is a neo-nazi. Either that or Hastings and his listeners have the IQ of protozoa.

CNN goes on to tell us that Hastings was joined on the panel by Rep. Steven Cohen (D,TN). Cohen is the gentleman, you'll recall, who recently proclaimed from the House floor that Barack Obama is like Jesus Christ (they were both community organizers) and Sarah Palin is like Pontius Pilate (they were both governors). Get it?

It's fitting, I suppose, that these two fine minds should appear together on the same stage. They have a lot in common.

Not having exhausted his supply of theologically edifying pronouncements before Congress, Cohen added this observation at the event with Hastings: "A lot of what Jesus talks about is wonderful, talks about helping people and lifting them up and caring about people who are sick and all those things. He's a great Democrat."

Indeed. The difference, however, between Jesus and many congressional Democrats is that Jesus actually did more than talk about helping people.

Anyway, Hillary was also at the event. The photo below shows her listening to Mr. Hastings. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but she appears to be marveling at how anybody who was once a judge and who now serves in Congress could possibly say anything so pathetically stupid:

A nation shares in her wonderment.

RLC

Is McCain Fit?

My friend Jason calls our attention to an essay by George Will in which he lays hold of a troubling aspect of Senator McCain's character that we ourselves have fretted over on a number of previous occasions - his volatile temperament. Will argues that the man is temperamentally unsuited for the office of the presidency, and it's hard to argue with him, especially since we've made a similar case ourselves before and during the primaries.

In this election, however, one has to keep in mind one very important fact. We are voting not just for the next president. We are voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of others. It's a vote to help the Democrats achieve their goal of removing all restrictions on abortion, of altering the meaning of marriage, of effecting a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass, of treating terrorism as a police matter, of piling onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market, of continuing the accelerating secularization of our society, of opening our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country, of nationalizing health care, of denying parents the choice of where they send their children to school, of maintaining high fuel costs, of quelling freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, and much else as well.

Some of this may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of it, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress.

Will is correct. The GOP has nominated a less than ideal candidate which is why most of the enthusiasm for him is a result of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. But we must look at more than just the two men running for president. We must also consider what kind of society their respective parties will create for us. For my part, I don't feel at all comfortable with the Democrats' vision of what the future should be.

RLC

Just Tell the Truth

What is Senator Obama's position on social security? He goes to Florida and tells retirees there that had George Bush been successful in privatizing social security three years ago seniors would have lost a bundle in this latest bear market, an assertion which is patently untrue. For one thing, Bush's program would have not been open to anyone 55 or older, which would exclude current seniors, and would have been optional in any event.

Then the senator's website quietly removed from their social security statement Obama's previous assurance that it would be both unnecessary and unfair to raise the retirement age.

So what's going on here?

Ed Morrissey thinks that Obama's Florida statements were a way of preparing the ground for a new social security plan that would indeed raise the retirement age. In other words, the misrepresetation of Bush's plan is the run-up to another policy back flip.

Maybe, maybe not. Raising the retirement age may be the right thing to do, even if Obama has been saying all along it would be the wrong thing to do, but misrepresenting Bush's plan to retirees in order to discredit Bush and, by extension, McCain, is not.

RLC

Sam Harris' Silly Column

I've never been impressed with the arguments advanced by uberatheist Sam Harris (See Ten Myths about Atheism in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page), and little that he says in a recent column in Newsweek gives me reason to reassess my opinion. The article is, like much of his work, a rant against Christian belief, embodied, in this case, in the person of Sarah Palin. His list of particulars against her includes the following:

She's a closet theocrat:

"If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could."

Harris offers, however, no evidence that Palin has theocratic tendencies so his charge is little more than petty libel.

Harris also castigates Ms Palin for being as unprepared for the responsibilities of the presidency as, well, as is the Democratic standard-bearer:

"She comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her....She is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history."

"The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security ... the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them."

"What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth."

To all of which one must ask how much Barack Obama knows about these matters and how have the last 44 years prepared him for the presidency? Harris doesn't seem interested in these inconvenient questions, however. He much prefers to dash off to compile more reasons to dislike Palin.

For instance, like many of the most brilliant thinkers in the history of Western civilization, Governor Palin believes God is sovereign. Harris finds this both disagreeable and disqualifying:

"I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events."

Also, like millions of Americans Governor Palin has the temerity to think that parents should be able to decide whether their minor children have an abortion:

"She has also fought vigorously for a 'parental consent law' in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning-or, indeed, of the 21st century."

Most galling to Harris, perhaps, is that Palin is a confident woman:

"Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth: 'Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?' "

Among the most annoying of Harris' indictments of Palin was this one:

When asked about these remarks [her prayer that the U.S. would be within God's will in Iraq] in her [ABC] interview with [John] Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations.

Harris' accusation has the misfortune of being completely misleading, grossly unfair, and manifestly wrong all at once - a kind of trifecta of intellectual irresponsibility. Palin was explaining to Gibson that her intent when she made those remarks was to reiterate, however imprecisely, Lincoln's response to a clergyman who ventured to say, in his presence, that he hoped 'the Lord was on our side'. Lincoln replied "I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side." Palin was obviously trying to emulate Lincoln, to hold his prayer up as her model. For Harris to call her a liar just makes him look the ignorant fool.

But speaking of having a tenuous relationship with the truth, Harris himself seems to be no stranger to the seductions of making stuff up. He writes:

[W]e cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity.

I don't know of any conservative writer or commenter who has suggested that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is anything but an unfortunate illustration of the sorts of problems that so many people have to wrestle with in our world. For Harris to characterize conservatives as interpreting Bristol's situation as somehow benign is ridiculous. But, perhaps, when your goal is to diminish someone in the eyes of others and when you're philosophically unhampered by any moral constraints yourself, such fabrications come easily to the tongue.

Harris concludes his essay with this:

[H]ow has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth-in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

Here I agree somewhat with Harris, but I think I know the answer to his rhetorical question. Washington is in a mess precisely because we've entrusted it to the graduates of the Ivies. Who does Harris think has been running this country for the past century? Who does he think has run our financial markets into the ground? What makes Harris think that what we need is more of the same? Why does Harris think that a degree from an expensive college means anything more than that you had a rich daddy? Why does Harris think that the children of privilege are better suited to run this country than anyone else? Didn't the execrable George W. Bush graduate from Yale? Money and brains are worthless without values and virtue, and Harvard and Yale do nothing to instill either of those in their graduates.

The late William F. Buckley once famously opined that he would rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. A lot of Americans see his point. What we don't need are bigots like Harris telling us that those who've come from humble backgrounds are not suited to assume the duties of citizenship just because they never got stoned at an Ivy league school.

RLC

The Bailout

Here we are after much disparaging of the government regarding the financial malfeasance that has occurred over the last 35 years. Given the attempts of the present administration to rush through an ill-conceived bailout of the financial industry, I find it fascinating that Germany would be the defender of free markets and capitalism but here we have it.

It's not a call for assistance; it's a scream for help. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is asking other countries to help buy up bad US debt. The US government is putting up $700 billion in taxpayer money in the hopes that the measure might restore stability in the financial system. Some countries are planning to help. But the German government has answered this call quickly and clearly: no.

Accordingly, IWH's Dietrich suggests that the US government require all banks to issue stocks and that they be required to back up the issuance with a set amount of capital. Under these circumstances, Dietrich believes that investors would buy shares of the banks that they consider healthy and that the market would make it crystal clear which banks these were. And the institutions that are having a rough time because they can't find investors will go broke. "That step would send the right signal to the market," Dietrich says, adding that those who were performing the worst wouldn't be rewarded in such as situation -- as they are being now.

Maybe the idea of a trillion dollar bailout isn't such a good idea. America is truly the frog in a pan of boiling water and soon will be too cooked to jump out and save itself. "Hank" Paulson says "The crisis is embarrassing". Personally, I think "Hank" Paulson is embarrassing. He and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke didn't cause the problem rather ex-chairman, Alan Greenspan is probably responsible for most of it. However, they perpetuated it and are ultimately accountable for the mess we are faced with and now we find them at the trough of the government largess urgently imploring the people to bail out the very institutions they have mismanaged.

I'm reminded of the movie, Trading Places when Dan Aykroyd as Louis Winthorpe III approaches his friends at the country club asking for some financial help and Todd says something to the effect of "frankly, Winthorpe, I find this to be in extremely bad taste.".

Well, I have to say that we find the efforts of the buffoons in charge of the financial markets of the U.S. to be equally in "bad taste".

The honorable Ron Paul, Texas congressman is against the bailout:

The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.

It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.

The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.

I strongly urge our readers to take a moment and visit this website where you can express your opinion on this issue.

Heretics and Scientists

The Darwinian thought police have added another scalp to their belt. This time it was the Director of Education of the British Royal Society, Michael Reiss. Reiss, who is an Anglican priest as well as a professional biologist and evolutionist made the breathtaking observation that it might be good to teach creation along with evolution in British public school.

Here in his own words is proof of Reiss' heresy:

"I realised that simply banging on about evolution and natural selection didn't lead some pupils to change their minds at all. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn't seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from the science lesson . . . There is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have - hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching - and doing one's best to have a genuine discussion."

In other words, Reiss wasn't endorsing creationism, he was simply saying that many students believe it, and they should be allowed to debate it in their classes if they wish. This immediately set off the tocsin alerting the protectors of orthodoxy at the Royal Society to an unacceptable level of intellectual freedom for British students. Howls of protest were raised at the very thought that students might be permitted to question whether the Truth was indeed the truth. Letters were written and demands that Reiss be marched to the gallows were registered. Finally Reiss agreed to step down from his post, perhaps out of fear that the Royal Society would embarrass itself even further:

Reiss ... agreed to step down from his position with the national academy of science after its officers decided that his comments had damaged its reputation.

No doubt that was their reputation for narrow-minded intolerance they felt had been damaged.

Kidding aside, if anything has damaged the Society's reputation it's the prigs who are so fearful that their theory will be unable to withstand scrutiny that they insist it be protected and insulated from all examination.

It reminds me of a passage written by that great British advocate of freedom of thought, John Stuart Mill, who said in his masterful essay On Liberty that:

There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth....

And here's another:

All attempts by the State to bias the conclusions of its citizens on disputed subjects are evil.

There's an amusing irony in this. If the Catholic church, say, were to expel from it's clergy those who disagreed with Church doctrine on the Trinity, or if the Church were to excommunicate politicians who endorsed a right to abortion, civil libertarians everywhere would be execrating the Church for its ossified and archaic intolerance. But let a society of Darwinians do the same thing and there's scarcely a peep. Well, of course, scientists have an obligation to keep their science free from the taint of heresy, we're told, but Churches should be much more broad-minded than to stifle and punish dissent. Pretty funny, I think.

For more on this unfortunate episode see here.

I close with another excerpt from Mill who wrote in 1859 (the same year Darwin published Origin of Species) but whose essay is must reading for every intelligent, educated person today:

But when it [e.g. Darwinism, ed.] has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively - when the mind is no longer compelled...to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it - there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience, until it almost ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the human being.... The creed remains, as it were, outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them vacant.

RLC

Tough Choices in Waziristan

Bill Roggio talks about the cross-border attacks in Pakistan's northwestern province of Waziristan carried out over the last several weeks by American forces.

The problem is that al Qaeda is using training facilities and safe houses in western Pakistan to train and prepare for further attacks on American soil which leaves us with two options. We can do nothing and hope that the Pakistanis will, counter to all experience, purge the Taliban and al Qaeda from these territories themselves, or we can try to disrupt their planning and training by attacking these facilities ourselves and killing the terrorists. This last carries with it substantial costs since it threatens to undermine the Pakistani government and thus our relationship with it. Unfortunately the risks associated with doing nothing are even greater.

Roggio's analysis is a good read.

RLC

Bad Mommy

Lest anyone be influenced by Sarah Palin's decision to have a retarded child Nicholas Provenzo feels it important to affirm that it is indeed moral, even obligatory, to kill such children. Provenzo writes:

Like many, I am troubled by the implications of Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to knowingly give birth to a child disabled with Down syndrome. Given that Palin's decision is being celebrated in some quarters, it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome (or by extension, any unborn fetus)-a freedom that anti-abortion advocates seek to deny.

A parent has a moral obligation to provide for his or her children until these children are equipped to provide for themselves. Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child's life upon others.

In other words, Provenzo seems to be saying, if a parent cannot provide adequately for a Down's syndrome child throughout its life the parent has a moral obligation to terminate the pregnancy.

This from someone who titles his blog The Rule of Reason. Rule of Reason is an Objectivist blog based on Ayn Rand's philosophy and presumably embraces Rand's atheism, which causes me to wonder. How does reason lead us to moral obligation? Why are we obligated to care for our children, and why do they think it appropriate to affirm the morality of aborting a child? Why, if one is an atheist, think that abortion is a moral matter at all, or that anything is?

But the irony of atheists talking about moral obligation aside, the implication running through all this is that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in having her Down's syndrome child because she set a bad example for other women and is therefore a bad mother.

See here for more of this kind of purge-the-race-of-all-defectives thinking. Upon visiting these blogs one can almost hear the jackboots marching in the background and smell the crematories of Auschwitz.

RLC

Authoring a Crisis

While Barack Obama assigns the blame for Wall Street's current woes to eight years of "George Bush's failed policies" Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg.com tells a different tale. Hassett recounts the history of the Fannie and Freddie crisis and lays the blame squarely at the feet of the Democrats in Congress, particularly those, like Senator Obama, who have been on the take from these failed institutions throughout their political careers. After recapping events leading to 2005 Hassett writes:

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by [Republicans in] the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different....But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. The SEC's chief accountant, Peter Wallison, wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

Nevertheless, who do you suppose is going to be blamed by the media and by voters come November?

RLC

The Duty to Die

A U.K. Telegraph article begins with these jarring words:

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

This is disturbing not least because it sounds as if a presumably intelligent ethicist is suggesting that people with dementia are nevertheless capable of making a reasoned decision about what to do with their lives. Actually, as we'll see, what she's suggesting is much more sinister than that:

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain. She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.

Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as "immoral" and "barbaric", but also sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters.

Lady Warnock, a former headmistress who went on to become Britain's leading moral philosopher, chaired a landmark Government committee in the 1980s that established the law on fertility treatment and embryo research.

A prominent supporter of euthanasia, she has previously suggested that pensioners who do not want to become a burden on their care-givers should be helped to die.

Lady Warnock claims that dementia sufferers should consider ending their lives through euthanasia because of the strain they put on their families and public services.

If people should be given the choice whether to dispose of their life when they become a burden how long will it be before people are told they have a duty to end their lives when they become a burden? Evidently it doesn't take long at all since Lady Warnock takes that very step just a few paragraphs on:

Recent figures show there are 700,000 people with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in Britain. By 2026 experts predict there will be one million dementia sufferers in the country, costing the NHS an estimated 㿏 billion a year. Lady Warnock said: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

"I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die. "Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."

So we've slipped smoothly from the right to choose to die to the obligation to die. But Lady Warnock is not through. She also wants to see the decision taken out of the hands of the individual and placed in the hands of an "advocate", i.e. the state:

"If you've an advance directive, appointing someone else to act on your behalf, if you become incapacitated, then I think there is a hope that your advocate may say that you would not wish to live in this condition so please try to help her die. "I think that's the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you'd be licensing people to put others down."

So, in a few brief paragraphs we've seen the entire slippery slope unfold. From the right to choose to die, to the duty to choose to die, to having the state license people to decide you have to die. This is the brave new world envisioned by the secular left.

It reminds me of the insistence of some that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in not choosing to abort her mentally retarded son. From the right to choose an abortion we've "progressed" to the duty to choose an abortion. How long will it be before, as in Communist China, the state tells women they must have an abortion?

The one virtue in Lady Warnock's dark social prescription is that it is completely consistent with the basic assumption of secular leftism: There is no God but the state. Thus human life has no value except as it is valuable to the state. When people cease to be valuable to those who govern they should be done away with, like farm animals no longer productive for the farmer must needs be removed from the herd.

Perhaps it's convenient that the Europeans never tore down all of Hitler's extermination camps. Who knows but that they might be pressed into service yet again if people who think as does Lady Warnock ever manage to acquire political power.

RLC

The Party of Liberalism

An AP-Yahoo News poll found that one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks-many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles. See the results here, especially on page 21f, although I was unable to figure out how they arrived at the numbers for Democrats and Republicans from this data.

At any rate, if liberals feel that way about minorities what must conservatives think? The article says that:

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president-white, black or brown.

No support from the survey was adduced to support either of these claims although a sidebar does show that Republicans harbor more negative views toward blacks than do Democrats.

The interesting thing about the survey, however, is not that Republicans tend to be more critical of blacks than Democrats, but that so many Democrats harbor opinions about blacks that are totally at odds with the party's reputation for liberalism.

RLC

Priestly Piffle

Gerry Coyne is an astronomer and Catholic priest whose views about God and creation seem a little out of step with those of his church. He recently gave a lecture at The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College) in which he said that although he believes in God, and believes God created the universe, he cannot as a scientist believe in intelligent design:

"God gave the universe a certain structure so we could come about, but he didn't predetermine it. He created the universe and then let it go."

This is standard-issue deism which seems odd coming from a Catholic priest, but I suppose such theological tepidness is no less uncommon among Catholic clergy than it is among protestant clergy.

According to Coyne, it is the parents' duty to teach their child about God, if they want, but its not the science teacher's responsibility.

Well, yes, but what does this have to do with intelligent design? Coyne is neither stupid nor new to the debates over ID so one has to think that he's deliberately dissembling here when he implies that teaching ID in a science class would amount to teaching about God. As he surely knows ID is silent on who or what the designer of the cosmos is.

But let's play along. Suppose we agree with Fr. Coyne and banish ID and all of its intellectual cousins from the public school science classroom. Will we then be teaching nothing about God? Actually, no. By implicitly teaching that the universe and life came about by purely mechanical, naturalistic means we are tacitly teaching that God is neither necessary nor in any way relevant. We're subtly teaching, in fact, that if God exists he's little more than the same remote and impotent deity that Fr. Coyne believes in. How convenient.

Excluding God from the science classroom is not nearly as easy as Fr. Coyne thinks. Even if God is never mentioned students are still being taught theology. They're being taught that God has almost nothing to do with life as it has developed which is certainly a theological claim.

Freshman Stephanie Laurent got the message. Asked about the lecture she said:

"It was good. It really cleared up a couple of things I had been wondering about. Religion is abstract and you can't really touch it. Science, you could find evidence and actually believe that it's true. Religion only uses the Bible, and you can't really explain it."

This is depressing. It's certainly the case that its easy to believe a particular explanation if the only evidence you're allowed to consider is the evidence supporting that explanation. That's the state of affairs that Fr. Coyne wants to see prevail in our public schools.

RLC

Market Forces

George Will gives us a primer on the nature of capitalism and markets all centered around the lowly wooden pencil. It's a good read and important instruction for the student just beginning to develop an awareness of economics.

HT: Jason

RLC

Pots and Kettles

Woody Allen, the man who married his step-daughter, instructs the rest of us on the ontology of disgrace:

"It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win," Allen avers. Well, I guess Allen should know about such things.

Then there was the ethically challenged Charlie Rangel calling Sarah Palin "disabled". Here's the report:

The question was simple: Why are the Democrats so afraid of Palin and her popularity?

The answer was astonishing.

"You got to be kind to the disabled," Rangel said.

That's right. The chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee called Palin disabled -- even when CBS 2 HD called him on it.

CBS 2 HD: "You got to be kind to the disabled?"

Rangel: "Yes."

CBS 2 HD: "She's disabled?"

Rangel: "There's no question about it politically.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the committee charged with writing our tax laws, is being investigated for not paying taxes he claims he didn't know he had to pay. I don't know what kind of disability he thinks Palin has - such an odd word to use in the context. Was it an oblique reference to Palin's youngest child? - but people who write the laws about taxes and don't know what those laws are certainly shouldn't be calling others disabled.

RLC

Meanwhile, in Palestine

Strategy Page gives us an update on what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza:

Israel has refused to free 1,500 Palestinians from jail, in return for the release of an Israeli soldier held (for two years) by Hamas. Israel has offered to release 450 Palestinians (mostly low level offenders, not the killers and terrorist leaders Hamas wants). Thus negotiations with Hamas are deadlocked.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have been warning their citizens to beware when visiting nations with large Moslem populations, because Hezbollah has begun a large scale effort to kill or kidnap Israelis overseas, this being the easiest way to strike at Israel (at least according to Hezbollah thinking.)

Hamas is in a downward spiral. Opinion polls show that Hamas would receive only 29 percent of the vote if elections were held today, versus 43 percent for Fatah. The problem is that the economic problems in Gaza (largely the result of Hamas insisting that its main goal is the destruction of Israel) have changed attitudes towards Hamas (but not towards Israel, which most Palestinians still want destroyed, or at least hurt in a big way.) The hatred of Israel by Palestinians appears to be implacable, and unlikely to change any time soon.

There is growing armed opposition to Hamas in Gaza, largely from al Qaeda affiliated groups. But this opposition is not strong enough to really threaten Hamas control. The Hamas reaction to its problems has been to build a police state in Gaza. This is not popular, but Hamas has sufficient support (at least a third of the 1.5 million population) to make it work.

Egypt is concerned that Hamas will provide a base for Islamic terrorists, and their attacks into Egypt. A solution being talked up in Egypt is the takeover and annexation of Gaza. Israel would have to agree to this, and is apparently giving serious consideration to the idea. That has resurrected the old proposal that the West Bank be given back to Jordan (which used to control it, but gave up its claims after the Palestinians decided they were a separate people four decades ago). Jordan already has many Palestinians, who comprise over half their population. Jordan has never been keen on acquiring more Palestinian citizens (the royal family that rules Jordan is Bedouin, and relies on the Bedouin minority to stay in power.)

Meanwhile, Israel has made it very difficult for Palestinians to travel between the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli counter-terror operations in the West Bank are as active as ever, keeping the terrorists neutralized (as they have been for several years).

Israel has supplied Fatah with several thousand assault rifles and pistols, as well as vehicles (armored and unarmored.) Israel has also released about a thousand West Bank residents from jail. Most of these were being held for low level offenses, but the gesture has made Fatah more popular.

The question the Palestinian people must face is, to paraphrase Golda Meir, whether they hate the Israelis more than they love their own children. The only way their children have a future is through peaceful rapprochement with Israel. Endless war will only keep the Palestinians poor and miserable, but that's all that Hamas offers them.

RLC

Why the Sisters Hate Sarah

Cathy Young examines the feminist teeth-grinding over Sarah Palin's ascendancy and marvels at how women who should be rejoicing at the success of a strong woman are instead resorting to, well, cattiness:

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a "Christian Stepford Wife" and a "Republican blow-up doll." Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

You'd think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman's right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she's just too good at having it all.

Read the rest at the link.

HT: Jason

RLC

Religion is Science

The atheist philosopher of science Daniel Dennett was interviewed in Science and Spirit and along the way uttered this remarkable claim:

There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim as its own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have not considered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are no factual assertions about the origin of the universe or its future trajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas, burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about the existence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science. After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lack of purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertions about the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance, poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview of science.

I say this is remarkable because it completely undercuts the rational for excluding intelligent design from the science classroom. If ID is, as its critics insist, a religious theory, and if, as Dennett says, all religious claims are ultimately matters which science can investigate and assess, then why would ID not be appropriate in a science classroom? If religion just is science then what's the problem?

Richard Dawkins, another adamantine atheist, makes a claim similar to this - but even more strongly worded - in The God Delusion. So, will Dennett and Dawkins be called upon to testify for the ID side the next time there's a prominent court case over teaching ID in schools? If so, will they stick to their guns or will they start backpedaling like an NFL defensive back as soon as they realize the harm they're doing to the materialist cause is causing their comrades in the cause to grow furious with them?

Dennett certainly proves his point that people who accept the claim that religious assertions are within the purview of science don't consider its implications. He and Dawkins are exhibit A.

RLC

Finger Pointing

There's lots of finger pointing going on as to who should shoulder the blame for the mismanagement of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Bros., AIG and other failing finacial institutions. The Obama campaign instinctively faults the policies of George Bush and John McCain for the debacle that has rocked Wall Street this week and last, but their indictment is rich in hypocrisy which I will explain below.

Meanwhile, Jim Wallis of Sojourners tends to agree that there's something wrong with the prevailing ethos in Washington:

In the search for blame, some say greed and some say deregulation. Both are right. The financial collapse of Wall Street is the fiscal consequence of the economic philosophy that now governs America - that markets are always good and government is always bad. But it is also the moral consequence of greed, where private profit prevails over the concept of the common good. The American economy is often rooted in unbridled materialism, a culture that continues to extol greed, a false standard of values that puts short-term profits over societal health, and a distorted calculus that measures human worth by personal income instead of character, integrity, and generosity.

Wallis is right, I think, as far as he goes, but it's not the whole story. If we're looking for villains we should examine the political prostitutes who were in bed with the corporate CEOs throughout the last twenty years. Turning our gaze toward Washington we discover an interesting irony in Senator Obama's indictments of Bush/McCain:

In 2003 George Bush requested that Congress act to reign in Freddie and Fannie, but he was resisted by Barney Frank and other Democrats who insisted there was no crisis and that Bush's request would stifle home loans to poor people and minorities. Congress did nothing, partly, at least, because the financial giants were flooding Capitol Hill with cash through their lobbyists.

Two years later John McCain co-sponsored legislation that would impose regulations on Freddie, Fannie and other mortgage institutions that would force them to do a better job of bookkeeping, make them more accountable and tighten up their lending practices. McCain predicted in 2006 exactly what came to pass these past weeks, but the legislation he endorsed died in committee. The committee was chaired by Democrat senator Christopher Dodd.

The lenders didn't want to be regulated, and they had bought influence in Washington with millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Records show that Senator Dodd ranked first among over 300 recipients of such contributions, receiving over $165,000 from the lobbyists over twenty years. John Kerry was third. Barack Obama, the man who criticizes John McCain for not doing anything to prevent the collapse, managed to be second, having collected over $123,000 from the lobbyists, even though he had only been receiving these emoluments for just three years.

What's more, the former CEOs of both Freddie and Fannie, men who had made millions while their companies hurtled toward collapse, have both served as economic advisors on Obama's campaign team. Whoever Senator Obama has in mind when he promises us change from the old ways of doing business in Washington, he's not thinking of himself. No one is more wedded to cronyism and big dollar politics than is Barack Obama.

Here's John Gibson's report on this sordid tale:

For more see Hot Air.

RLC

RRAD

A couple of years ago we gave out Dreyfus awards here at Viewpoint to people who, like Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series, seemed to have been driven mad by their profound hatred for Inspector Clouseau, i.e. George Bush.

Maybe we should start giving another award which we could title something like, the Randi Rhodes Award for Despicability, or something. There would be no shortage of material, that's for sure. In addition to all the distortions, sleaze and rumors about Sarah Palin we were treated to over the past two weeks there's lots else.

Here's an example: A professional photographer named Jill Greenberg was hired by The Atlantic to get some pictures of John McCain. She deliberately set him up to make him look as devilish as possible and then bragged about it on her blog. Not only is she unembarrassed by her complete lack of professionalism and ethics, she seems to think that her behavior is somehow noble and important.

Is there something in the water these people drink that makes them this way? Michelle Malkin gives a number of additional examples of the kind of deranged behavior that's come to be so common on the left, and she has more on Jill Greenberg here.

RLC

Why People Vote Republican

Jonathan Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal and an atheist, says many interesting things in an essay at Edge titled What Makes People Vote Republican?, but in the end his discussion leaves unanswered a fundamental question that is implicitly raised in his article.

It's hard to summarize his essay because it covers a lot of ground, but essentially he says that there are five domains of moral experience about which people feel strongly. He labels these harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In other words, people have moral concerns that arise out of behaviors which can either harm others or which are somehow unfair, or disloyal, disrespectful, or unchaste.

Liberals, he maintains, are concerned only with the first two of these and are actually disdainful of the last three, whereas most Americans care about all five. Thus liberals are seen by most people in this country as out-of-touch elitists. He urges his fellow liberal Democrats to recover at least the language of the last three.

But herein lies the problem. Morality itself, whether we're talking about "justice, rights, and welfare", the moral sphere of most concern to liberals, or the wider sphere which encompasses, in addition, patriotism to one's country, family, sexuality, etc., is contingent upon there being a personal transcendent moral authority. Without such an authority to obligate us to follow certain prescriptions there is no moral obligation at all. In other words, in order to sound genuinely interested in the moral realm liberals have to acknowledge that the foundation of secular exclusivism upon which they have tried to stand is crumbling under the weight. Without God there is no morality, no good or bad, no right or wrong. There are just things that people do that other people either like or dislike.

This is what conservative people tend to see, or at least intuit, and to which liberals are largely blind. Liberals talk about justice and human rights on the one hand while, often, minimizing the need to ground these in a God who made us in His image and whose property, to use a Lockean term, we are. Their moral pronouncements thus seem to float like balloons in metaphysical air, anchored to nothing.

Haidt seems to recognize this at several points throughout his essay but, being an atheist, he shies away from drawing the proper conclusion. In the end he winds up calling for Democrats to embrace the larger moral vision of conservatives but gives them no real reason to do so other than political expediency. Such a prescription can only be seen as hypocritical by the people he's trying to win over.

He concludes with these words:

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three ... foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The article is a little long but worth the time to read.

RLC