The Audacity of Blame

Allahpundit wonders how anyone who has done nothing but blame his predecessor for every difficulty he's faced since being elected can urge students not to blame others for their problems. Good question. Allahpundit quotes Charles Krauthammer as saying that by October last year Mr. Obama had blamed George Bush for "the economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad - everything but swine flu."

And now he advises graduates not to point fingers at others for their problems. You certainly can't say he's short on audacity. Or shamelessness:

RLC

$7000 an Ounce?

Bill sends along this good news/bad news item for any investors among our readers to ponder:

The "real move" in gold is to come, predicted Egon von Gruyerz, founder of precious metals investment and storage company GoldSwitzerland.com, on Monday.

He told CNBC he sees the inflation-adjusted price of gold "easily" rising to six times its current price ($1,210) to around $7,000 an ounce in the future on "normal" inflation.

"Adjusted for real inflation the 1980 gold peak in today's prices corresponds to around $7,200 today. So gold could easily go up 6 times from the current price of $1,220 and still be within normal parameters," von Gruyerz's latest report for GoldSwitzerland.com said.

But von Gruyerz told CNBC gold could go higher if the world encounters hyperinflation.

The fears stemming from the European debt crisis will enhance gold's safe haven appeal, according to von Gruyerz.

"Gold is at this point not a bubble," he added. "It is not overbought."

The bad news, of course, is the reason for the price rise. According to von Gruyerz:

"Clueless governments still don't understand that their ruinous actions have created a credit-infested and bankrupt world. They will continue to prescribe the same remedy that caused the problem in the first place, namely more credit and more printed money. The consequences are clear: Inflation, hyperinflation, economic and human misery as well as social unrest."

These are interesting times.

RLC

Ten Highest and Lowest

Trying to decide on a career? Here's a list of the ten highest paying jobs in American (and the ten lowest).

Speaking of careers, Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee has a brief piece in the Washington Examiner predicting that the next bubble to burst in our economy is going to be the higher education bubble.

A New York Times profile last week described Courtney Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University with nearly $100,000 in student loan debt -- debt that her degree in Religious and Women's Studies did not equip her to repay. Payments on the debt are about $700 per month, equivalent to a respectable house payment, and a major bite on her monthly income of $2,300 as a photographer's assistant earning an hourly wage. And, unlike a bad mortgage on an underwater house, Munna can't simply walk away from her student loans, which cannot be expunged in a bankruptcy. She's stuck in a financial trap.

Some might say that she deserves it -- who borrows $100,000 to finance a degree in women's and religious studies that won't make you any money? She should have wised up, and others should learn from her mistake, instead of learning too late, as she did: "I don't want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back."

But bubbles burst when people catch on, and there's some evidence that people are beginning to catch on. Student loan demand, according to a recent report in the Washington Post, is going soft, and students are expressing a willingness to go to a cheaper school rather than run up debt. Things haven't collapsed yet, but they're looking shakier -- kind of like the housing market looked in 2007.

If Reynolds is right, young people are soon going to stop borrowing large sums and start looking for cheaper educational alternatives. Colleges will have to adjust or go under. He predicts that a lot of frivolous majors, like Munna's, will simply dry up as students realize that degrees in such disciplines will not pay off their debt. Maybe that would be a silver lining.

RLC

Conceding the Debate

Bilbo at Telic Thoughts comments on remarks by Craig Venter who recently succeeded in coaxing a cell to accept the synthesized DNA from a different species. An article in Technology Review says of this feat:

Venter also points to what the cells--powered by genomes made in a lab from four bottles of chemicals, based on instructions stored on a computer--reveal about what life is. "This is as much a philosophical as a technological advance," he says. "The notion that this is possible means bacterial cells are software-driven biological machines. If you change the software, you build a new machine. I'm still amazed by it."

Bilbo says that Venter has in these four sentences conceded the debate over intelligent design to the IDers. I think he's right, but materialists will surely object. If they stay true to past practice one thing they can be counted on to do is criticize IDers for quoting them. Darwinian materialists hate it when IDers quote their own words because it's so unfair to have to be on one's guard all the time, fearing that one's frank admissions will be used as evidence against one. It's misleading, too, because it should be understood that materialists would not be nearly so clear and forthright if they knew that their antagonists would be taking their words seriously and embarrassing them with them.

As for Venter's statement, it's exactly what IDers have been saying for almost thirty years: Cells are software (information) driven biological machines. Neither information nor machines are the product of random processes conjoined with physical forces. Four bottles of chemicals mixed together for billions of years by wind and sun would never produce a library of coherent information. Neither would they produce DNA. Only a mind can do that and Venter pretty much acknowledges the fact.

I'm sure he's already received dozens of emails from colleagues telling him to just shut up.

RLC

Everyone Has Their Price

Renowned blogger Mickey Kaus has entered the Democratic primary against incumbent California Senator Barbara Boxer and, in the spirit of Democratic political machinations, has announced that he can be bought off if the Obama administration is willing to bribe him with any of three jobs. Kaus declares that he could be persuaded to drop out of the race by being offered:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement so that he could push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.

Kaus is tweaking the Democrat establishment, of course, particularly the Obama administration which has been embarrassed by revelations that they have been bribing primary candidates with offers of jobs in the administration.

His announcement is pretty funny, especially since Kaus is a liberal, or at least I always thought that he was, and you might expect that he would have actually supported the positions he skewers. I doubt that he'll be welcome at many Democrat functions after this.

RLC

Wrong Gig?

You gotta watch the drummer. Steve Moore is his name. I don't know how hard all of this is to do, but it certainly looks impressive, and the video has apparently gone viral. You can read about Moore here. Enjoy.

The ZZ Top tune is perfect for this guy.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

What Goes Around

Should the public be angry with the president over his seemingly desultory response to the oil spill? Probably not. At least they shouldn't fault Mr. Obama to the extent some commentators are.

There are things the president could have done but didn't do, to be sure, but the appearance of detachment doesn't mean that his administration hasn't been engaged. Indeed, much of the criticism of the president's insouciance in the midst of the crisis sounds like Monday-morning second-guessing and an attempt to squeeze out of the disaster a few political points. I'm willing to give Mr. Obama the benefit of the doubt that, aside from granting Louisiana permission to build the sand berms they wanted to build, it may be that there's just not much more he could've done.

But. Do I think growing public anger at the president is poetic justice? Absolutely. When George Bush's administration was reluctant to override local authorities after Katrina, the Democrats, including Senator Obama prominent among them, criticized him mercilessly and unfairly for his hesitation. Indeed, it was the withering criticism of Mr. Bush from such as Mr. Obama for waiting a day or two before losing patience with the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans and restoring order to the city of New Orleans himself that caused Americans to begin to lose confidence in his competence in 2005.

Moreover, it was candidate Obama who prophesied that people would look back on his nomination as the day that the seas stopped rising and the planet began to heal. That sort of pomposity makes it hard to feel sorry for the man who finds himself helpless in the face of what may turn out to be the worst ecological disaster in our nation's history.

Finally, the problem with capping the leak is that it's a mile under the ocean. Why are we drilling in such deep waters in the first place when there's so much easily accessible oil on land and in shallower seas? Because the Democrats, including Mr. Obama, have blocked for decades attempts to drill for oil in places like Alaska or in shallower waters where leaks could be plugged in a matter of hours.

So, the criticism of Mr. Obama's failure to stop the BP oil spill may be technically a bit unfair, but given the harshness of his judgment of Mr. Bush, given his almost buffoonish confidence in his own ability to bring about ecological healing, and given the fact of his complicity in forcing the oil companies to mine in much more treacherous locales than they would prefer, it's hard to be sympathetic.

RLC

Ignorant and Free

If you've ever wondered how a man with absolutely no qualifications could get himself elected to the most powerful political office in the world, perhaps this goes some way toward explaining it:

According to a new survey released by the legal information website Findlaw.com. Two-thirds of the 1,000 American adults polled couldn't name a single current Supreme Court justice, and just 1 percent were able to name all nine sitting justices. Many respondents believed that retired justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter continue to sit on the court.

Maybe it should be a requirement that, in order to be eligible to vote, one care enough about what's going on that one is at least able to identify the people who occupy our country's highest political and judicial posts.

Thomas Jefferson once said that any nation that expects to be ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be. Scary thought, that, given the results of the above poll.

RLC

They <i>Are</i> Home, Helen

Helen Thomas seems to agree with Iran's thug president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that the Jews need to get out of the Middle East:

Set aside the sheer impracticality, the utter unhelpfulness, of Thomas' suggestion that millions of Jews pack up, leave Israel, and flood into Europe and ask rather why they alone, of all the people who live in lands previously occupied by others, most of whom took those lands from yet others, should leave their homes and go into exile? Does she think that every non-native American should "go home" to Europe and Africa? If so, why does she continue to live here? Does she think that Arabs who conquered their way from the Middle East across north Africa to Spain should now all return to the land of their origin? Indeed, she says that Jews should "go home," but Jews lived in the Middle East for thousands of years after the Egyptian captivity, why is that land now the Palestinians' home and not theirs? Why does Ms Thomas begrudge the Jews this tiny sliver of land carved by the United Nations from the vast expanses of the Middle East after the horrors of the Holocaust?

Helen Thomas is the dean of the White House press corps, a status which is evidently completely unrelated to one's ability to offer thoughtful solutions to difficult problems.

RLC

The Frankfurt School

I've recently come across an article in Catholic Insight by Timothy Matthews on something called the Frankfurt School. I had never heard of it before, that I can remember, but reading Matthews' column sure explains a lot about what the Left has been up to in the culture wars for the last seventy years or so. Here's Matthews:

What was the Frankfurt School? Well, in the days following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was believed that workers' revolution would sweep into Europe and, eventually, into the United States. But it did not do so. Towards the end of 1922 the Communist International (Comintern) began to consider what were the reasons....

Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief - or even the hope of belief - that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the 'oppressive' order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus-'continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means' as one of their members noted.

To further the advance of their 'quiet' cultural revolution - but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future - the School recommended (among other things):

• The creation of racism offences.
• Continual change to create confusion.
• The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
• The undermining of schools' and teachers' authority.
• Huge immigration to destroy identity.
• The promotion of excessive drinking.
• Emptying of churches.
• An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
• Dependency on the state or state benefits.
• Control and dumbing down of media.
• Encouraging the breakdown of the family.

One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud's idea of 'pansexualism' - the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims they would:

• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children.
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls.
• abolish all forms of male dominance - hence the presence of women in the armed forces.
• declare women to be an 'oppressed class' and men to be 'oppressors.'

Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School's long-term operation thus: 'We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.'

The School believed there were two types of revolution: (a) political and (b) cultural. Cultural revolution demolishes from within. 'Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness'. They saw it as a long-term project and kept their sights clearly focused on the family, education, media, sex and popular culture.

Matthews goes on to discuss specific strategies of the Left's campaign to undermine each of the institutions of our society in order to bring about their cultural revolution. Given the current ulcerated state of much of our culture the Left must feel that success is finally within reach.

At any rate, the essay is worth reading in it's entirety although it has to be taken with a bit of skepticism since Matthews uses no citations. Even so, unless he's just making the whole thing up, which seems unlikely since much of it is simply an elaboration upon Marx's Communist Manifesto, it appears that the Left has for at least three generations been purposefully waging a war of lies and deceit to destroy our nation from within.

Of course, conservatives have been sounding the tocsin for at least that long, but mainstream liberalism has been been deaf to the alarm, preferring instead to remain pretty much in a state of complacent denial. Hopefully, the more the disinfectant of sunlight is shed upon such cabals the better our chances are of blocking their success.

RLC

Welcome to L.A.

Maybe this is just a piece of photo-shopped humor, but if in fact it's a real billboard, it's an amusing response to L.A.'s threatened boycott of Arizona:

RLC

The Bishop's Letter

The Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Rev. Mark Hanson, has written an epistle expressing his "deep sadness regarding events surrounding the flotilla seeking to deliver humanitarian goods to Gaza." The letter reads in part:

While we condemn all violence in the resolution of political disputes, this incident raises a number of questions related to the just use of force. It is not clear that, in this incident, all alternatives were explored prior to the use of military force. One tenet of the just use of force is proportionality, a principle I raised during my meeting with the chief rabbis of the State of Israel during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza which lasted from December 2008 to January 2009. This incident provides an example of how proportionality is an ongoing concern related to Israeli military action against civilians, both Palestinians and internationals.

Bishop Hanson must be the only person in the U.S. who has not been apprised of what actually happened aboard the lead ship in the flotilla. The Israeli soldiers did not use force as they boarded the ship, but they were immediately mobbed, had their equipment taken from them, were beaten with iron rods, kicked, thrown off the deck, stabbed with knives and shot at. They returned fire with paint ball guns, until the ship's crew ignored the paint balls and continued to threaten the lives of the commandos.

In desperation, unarmed, or disarmed, Israeli commandos jumped off the ship into the water to escape the Muslim crew which had clearly planned to instigate a violent confrontation. At length the commandos were given permission to use their sidearms to protect themselves. I don't know what other measures the good Bishop thinks they might have employed.

Nor do I understand the Bishop's reference to proportionality. He seems to think that it was somehow disproportionate for the Israelis to use pistols when the ship's crew was bringing only knives and iron bars to bear against them. This is, however, a ludicrous application of the Just War proportionality principle which is intended to limit the use of force to what is necessary to defeat one's enemy and to protect one's life. The Bishop's understanding of proportionality seems to entail that since the crew was attacking them with fists, knives, and iron bars the Israelis should have limited their response to similar weapons. This belies both a misunderstanding of "proportionality" and an almost cartoonish understanding of the horrific nature of what the Israelis confronted on board the ship.

Perhaps the Bishop would be better advised in the future to confine his letters to ecclesiastical matters, like how to hold his Lutheran congregations together in the wake of the ELCA's decision to ordain practicing homosexuals, and avoid commenting on things he has taken so little trouble to learn about. He might also go here to educate himself about who these "humanitarians" were and what they were trying to accomplish.

Thanks to Byron for calling our attention to the Bishop's letter.

RLC

Re: Defender of the Faith (Pt. I)

Byron shares some thoughts and criticisms of the first part of our critique of Jim Wallis on the Feedback page. Check it out.

RLC

Defender of the Faith (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis up on his challenge to consider whether the Tea-Party is compatible with Christian principles. Wallis says it isn't but, in my opinion, at least, he failed to make a convincing case. We return today to examine the rest of his argument.

We begin with Wallis' claim that an anti-government ideology just isn't biblical.

To disparage government per se -- to see government as the central problem in society -- is simply not a biblical position.

This is true, but it's irrelevant since the Tea Party is not anti-government. Wallis wants his readers to associate Tea Party opposition to big, bloated government with opposition to government itself, but, as we pointed out yesterday, there's a significant difference between the two, and it's at best misleading for him to repeatedly ignore the distinction.

Wallis' next claim is almost humorous in its irony. He writes that:

The Libertarians' supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin.

True enough, but neither is Wallis' supreme confidence in government consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin. A just state is one in which the market is given the freedom to do what it does best, i.e. create a flourishing economy, and in which the state limits itself to ensuring that the market does not abuse its freedom. What Tea-Partiers object to is a state that actually controls, regulates, and owns a huge sector of the market. When that happens who will oversee the state? Wallis, like socialists of all stripes, doesn't seem to be worried about that problem, but he should be.

He goes on:

Libertarians seem to believe in the myth of the sinless market and that the self-interest of business owners or corporations will serve the interests of society; and if they don't, it's not government's role to correct it.

This is not just wrong, it's a deliberate falsehood. Wallis knows very well that not even libertarians believe in a "sinless market" any more than Wallis himself believes in a sinless government. He also knows that, whatever the case might be with libertarians, few in the Tea Party think that government has no role in correcting the market. To suggest that they do is to cast into question his commitment to the truth.

But he's not done:

The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian. "Leave me alone to make my own choices and spend my own money" is a political philosophy that puts those who need help at a real disadvantage....To anticipate the Libertarian response, let me just say that private charity is simply not enough to satisfy the demands of either fairness or justice, let alone compassion. When the system is designed to protect the privileges of the already strong and make the weak even more defenseless and vulnerable, something is wrong with the system.

What is unChristian is to coerce people into helping others. Wallis suggests that if there are people who lack what you have the Christian thing to do is for government, essentially at the point of a gun, to seize your property in order to give it to those who don't have their own. He also assumes that everyone agrees that the (capitalist) system is designed to protect the privileges of the strong and to punish the weak, but if any system is designed to protect the privileged it's our government. Consider the perks and privileges that go with being a government employee or being a CEO of a favored bank or industry under the current administration. Consider the power government bureaucrats can bring to bear against the rest of us, and then consider that Wallis wants to make government even bigger, stronger, and more coercive.

Up until this point in his essay Wallis has merely, in my view, been wrong, deceptive, or tendentious, but now he makes himself sound eye-rollingly ridiculous. Perhaps sensing that he has failed to mount a convincing case against the Tea-Party folk he reaches up his sleeve for the old threadbare liberal hole card and avers that because the Tea Party is mostly white there just has to be the odor of racism clinging to it:

Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not. But is an undercurrent of white resentment part of the Tea Party ethos, and would there even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren't the first black man to occupy that office? It's time we had some honest answers to that question. And as far as I can tell, Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism -- overt, implied, or even subtle -- is not a Christian virtue.

Allegations of racism are often acts of desperation on the part of those who know they have a distressingly weak argument. In this case the allegation has the further liability of being so simple-minded as to make one feel almost embarrassed for Wallis. He seems intellectually unable to imagine that anyone could plausibly object to Obama's radicalism, his reckless spending, his disdainful treatment of our allies, or that he brings to the White House an historically unAmerican set of attitudes and beliefs. For Wallis it's apparently incomprehensible that a significant number of people could sincerely be opposed to a government take-over of the national economy.

No. For Wallis and others like him, opposition to the President is fully explained by this simple syllogism: Obama is black, Tea-Partiers oppose him, therefore their opposition must be because he's black. It's just as silly as arguing that Lincoln was from Illinois, the Confederacy hated him, therefore southern hatred must be because the President was from Illinois.

If Wallis is really interested in learning why the Tea Party is mostly white, if he really wants to prospect for racism, all he need do is look at the President's support among African-Americans. Much of that support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama's policies and everything to with the fact that Mr. Obama is black.

The Tea Party is largely white for the same reason that it's largely comprised of conservatives, Republicans, and Independents - because it opposes leftist Democratic policies. African-Americans are mostly Democrats so they're no more likely to feel comfortable in the midst of people who stand in opposition to Democrat policies than are Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.

Surely Wallis understands this, it's not a difficult concept, after all, but then why does he want to leave us with the impression that there's something racially odious about anyone who opposes the President?

RLC

Preacher of the House

Like expert wine tasters, liberals evidently have a highly refined ability to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate insertions of religion into politics. The litmus test is, it seems, that when a liberal does it, breaching the wall of church/state separation is just hunky dory, but when a conservative does it it's a threat to the fabric of our Constitution. It was inspiring, for example, when Martin Luther King did it, but not when Jerry Falwell did it. It's uplifting when Barack Obama does it, but not when George Bush did it, and it's charming when Nancy Pelosi does it, but not when your local congressperson does it:

It's ironic that the woman who voted against banning partial birth abortion can caution us with a straight face that we must be prepared to give an account to God for how we have "measured up" in this life. Whatever one thinks of abortion, surely partial birth abortion is hard to square with the tenets of the teaching of Christ. I should think that anyone who defends infanticide will, indeed, have someday a lot of 'splainin' to do.

RLC

BP

Well, the Justice Department has opened civil and criminal investigations into the events that led to the continuing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday.

I have a suggestion for the oil company if they wish to get Mr. Holder off their back: Just tell him that BP stands for Black Panthers and neither Mr. Holder nor his Justice Department will give them any more trouble.

RLC

Defender of the Faith (Pt. I)

Somehow Jim Wallis of Sojourner's has become the media's chief arbiter of what it means to be a Christian. Some time ago he wrote a book titled God's Politics in which it turned out that God was an uber Democrat, and ever since then whenever Christian conservatives start feeling a little feisty Wallis shows up on MSNBC or HuffPo to set us all straight as to why these benighted rubes don't really represent the true Gospel. Now he has a piece in the Huffington Post wherein he argues that the Tea Party movement, because it embraces a libertarian political philosophy, is unbiblical.

There are two major shortcomings to his argument: First, Wallis fails to give a fair picture of libertarianism. Second, the Tea-Party is comprised mostly of conservatives, not libertarians.

Wallis writes:

Since the Tea Party is getting such national attention, our God's Politics blog is going to begin a dialogue on this question: Just how Christian is the Tea Party Movement -- and the Libertarian political philosophy that lies behind it?

Libertarians are social and economic minimalists when it comes to government. They want the maximum individual freedom in both spheres that's consistent with an orderly society. They believe that government has certain limited constitutional roles and that our modern government has far exceeded those bounds. The difference between conservatives and libertarians is complex, but basically conservatives would assign a stronger role to government in regulating our social life (unlike libertarians, they would not oppose, and would even favor, government regulation of pornography, obscenity, drug use, and abortion on demand. Libertarians would be indifferent to gay marriage whereas conservatives generally oppose it.).

On economic matters the differences are generally matters of degree. Libertarians are laissez faire with regard to the marketplace whereas most conservatives think government does have some role to play in protecting the consumer and the environment from abuses and unscrupulous business practices.

Tea-partiers are, by and large, social and economic conservatives. Surely there are libertarians among them, but libertarianism is not the official philosophy of the movement. The people in the Tea Party are simply citizens who are fed up with a government that is spending recklessly and unsustainably and which aspires to total control of every aspect of our economic life. One need not be a libertarian to object to the irresponsible spending of the last two administrations.

Wallis pronounces Rand Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act, and the administration's criticisms of BP, to be unChristian, but he fails to do Rand the courtesy of elaborating on Rand's reasons for saying what he said. Then, having blurred the distinction between Tea Party conservatism and Rand Paul's libertarianism, he tries to discredit the former by impugning the latter.

Wallis writes:

The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition. The Christian answer to the question "Are we our brother's keeper?" is decidedly "Yes." Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbor. Loving your neighbor is a better Christian response than telling your neighbor to leave you alone. Both compassion and social justice are fundamental Christian commitments, and while the Christian community is responsible for living out both, government is also held accountable to the requirements of justice and mercy.

This is what rhetoricians call a straw man argument. It consists in misrepresenting an opponent's argument, the more easily to discredit it.

First, Tea-Partiers are not philosophically opposed to government itself but rather to statist government, an all-encompassing, economically smothering state that seeks to transfer wealth from those who produce it to those who don't.

Second, conservatives do not wish to emphasize individual rights at the expense of the well-being of other people (Indeed, this is actually a trait of the Left which perpetually fights against obscenity and pornography restrictions on the basis of individual rights). What Tea-Partiers want is a government that will not trample individual rights, particularly property rights.

Wallis seems to think, absurdly, that because I don't want the government taking money out of my pocket to give to others whom it thinks deserve it more than I do that I'm being unChristian. In fact, the major objection among Tea-Partiers to government welfare does not arise from a lack of concern for the poor but rather from the obvious fact that government only exacerbates the problems of the poor, perpetuates their poverty, and wastes our money.

Thirdly, the commandment to love our neighbor is not one that Jesus enjoins upon government. It's given to us as individuals. I don't want Barack Obama or Jim Wallis telling me how best to love my neighbor or who, exactly, I should be helping. The government should provide a minimum safety net for the helpless, but beyond that it should let the people decide for themselves how and who they will assist.

Wallis goes on to defend his view that government should be deeply involved in social welfare by citing a number of Old Testament passages which really don't support his case:

Just look at the biblical prophets in their condemnation of injustice to the poor, and how they frequently follow those statements by requiring the king (the government) to act justly (these requirements applied both to the kings of Israel and to foreign potentates). Jeremiah, speaking of King Josiah, said, "He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well."(Jeremiah 22:16). Amos instructs the courts (the government) to "Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts" (Amos 5:15). The prophets hold kings, rulers, judges, and employers accountable to the demands of justice and mercy.

Of course any government should act justly, but that doesn't mean, necessarily, that the government should confiscate your property and give it to others, or, as candidate Obama put it, "spread the wealth around." What it means is that the laws of the state should protect the poor from being victimized, exploited and harmed by the rich and powerful. The meaning of these justice passages seems so obvious, and so incompatible with what Wallis wants them to say, that one wonders why he cites them.

We'll look at the rest of Wallis' essay tomorrow.

RLC

Why the Outrage Against Israel?

In the aftermath of Israel's completely understandable resort to deadly force in response to the beatings of their soldiers by Turkish Muslims Victor Davis Hanson wonders what explains the irrational reaction of so much of the world to what the Israelis did (For those who need to get caught up go here and here):

What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid - or, to use the politically correct parlance, "disproportionate," terms? It is not about "occupied land," given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital - Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se - the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.

Perhaps the outrage reflects simple realpolitik - 350 million Arab Muslims versus 7 million Israelis. Perhaps it is oil: half the world's reserves versus Israel's nada. Perhaps it is the fear of terror: draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism, which is as fashionable on the academic Left as it used to be among the neanderthal Right.

Perhaps there is also a new sense that the United States at last has fallen into line with the Western consensus, and so is hardly likely to play the old lone-wolf supporter of Israel in the press or at the U.N.

The world condemns the Israelis for defending themselves, as if it were a crime against humanity for Jews to preserve their own lives, but the world has been almost completely silent about the North Koreans sinking a South Korean vessel killing a dozen or so South Korean sailors. Nor has the world condemned the Palestinians for their incessant attempts to kill Israelis nor for their attempts to procure more rockets with which to blow up Israeli children. About these atrocities the world is silent.

For Muslims, and increasingly for the western Left, the very existence of Israel is a crime and nothing anyone who hates Israel says or does is beyond the pale. Israel blockades Gaza to keep weapons such as rockets out of the hands of vicious thugs and the world condemns them for it, even though they allow humanitarian goods to pass. The world doesn't condemn Hamas for using the weapons, mind you, they condemn Israel for trying to keep them from getting them. The Israelis seek to turn back ships, leased to a known terrorist organization, trying to run the blockade and the crew set upon the commandos with guns, iron bars, knives and other weapons. The Israelis reluctantly draw their sidearms to defend themselves, and the Left everywhere condemns whom? The crew? No, the Israelis.

To get an idea of the twisted thinking of those on the Left when it comes to Israel listen to Helen Thomas assuming that Israel "deliberately" massacred the jihadis on the ship:

It's beginning to smell like the 1930s all over again.

RLC

Stealth Socialism

Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN insider, talks about ACORN's strategy for imposing socialism on our country by stealth through the Obama presidency.

Moncrief quotes Graham L. Strachan by way of explaining what she means by "stealth socialism:"

"Why did the Western media persist in calling the social system in the Communist bloc 'Communism' instead of Socialism? They did it to manufacture a false reality: to protect the reputation of another form of Socialism which existed in the West....so-called 'Democratic Socialism', socialism by stealth, socialism achieved through the 'permeation' of existing political institutions by members of organisation such as the Fabian Society, in order to influence the policies adopted by those institutions towards socialism.

"Democratic Socialism itself was based on a lie: that Socialism could be implemented peacefully through the ballot box. The implication was that if the voters didn't like it they could vote it out again. That was a hoax. Since Socialism does not permit private ownership of property, it cannot be 'democratic' in the sense of allowing a choice of political Parties. This is not a matter of ideology, but of logistics. It would be impossible to have a two Party system of genuine democracy, for example, under which the state nationalised all property including business when the Socialists were voted into power, then sold it all back to the people again when they were voted out. The intention of Democratic Socialism was (and still is) to be democratic just long enough to gain power. Then it will declare the 'end of history' and entrench itself forever, enforcing its politically correct speech and thought on everybody, and being just as tyrannical as its Marxist revolutionary counterparts."

The article is a little long but it's an eye-opener, especially for those who think that ACORN is just some innocent, community based organization trying to help poor people make it through the day.

RLC

Sin Nombre

With the debate over illegal immigration once again heating up let me recommend a movie, with reservations, that gives an idea of what it must be like for many who seek to enter this country illegally. The film is Sin Nombre, and I qualify my recommendation because it's brutal, raw and certainly not suitable for children. Nevertheless, mature viewers will find it riveting.

The film recounts the story of a member of the Salva Maratrucha gang in Mexico by the name of Casper, who wishes to break away from his past and start over in America. His flight from Mexico and the psychopaths bent on killing him is harrowing and the secondary narratives are fascinating. It's very troubling to ponder that this gang, also known as MS-13, has thousands of members in cities across the U.S.

If you're interested in seeing what a lot of people south of the border have gone through to get here, add Sin Nombre to your Netflix queue.

RLC