From the Mail

The following is from a friend in response to this post of August 15, the offending part of which is here:

The scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." -- Ronald Reagan

"Help is on the way." -- John Kerry

When politicians talk about "helping" it's time to hide your wallets.

My friend writes:

I've been away a bit and haven't kept up with your daily postings. Good stuff! But I feel I must comment on your post of 8-15 suggesting that it is bad for the government to help. Of course your quote from former President Reagan speaks volumes, capturing as it does the whole neo-con view, which you obviously promote here, and it's claim that it is somehow bad for the government to help people. Or, that "helping" equals taking from your wallet (stealing, is it?) Well. I suppose you presume that the "you" is an upper middle class reader, who doesn't believe in allowing the government to do justice, help the poor, build roads, pay teachers, enforce EPA guidelines, prosecute criminals, fund research on public health, wage wars, and all the other good stuff government sometimes does (and sometimes does well). Are there really people out there that don't appreciate the proper use of legitimate taxes?

If one, however, believes that it is a good thing, in principle, that the government administers funds for the public good (a proposition I have previous maintained in this column to be a Biblical one) then this assumption of Reagan and Cleary that the government is stealing from your wallet, and you'd better look out, is cyncial and just dead wrong. I think you should renounce this odd claim. (And, while your at it, renounce the cheesy partisan dig, as if to imply that the Bush administration doesn't want to help anybody. Was it wrong for him to fly to Florida yesterday to offer help to the storm victims there? Doesn't he claim to want to help the people of Iraq?)

And, further, if the reader is actually one who has been seriously helped--beyond the common assistance of good school books, nice roads, safe traffic lights, well-trained police, pure water (more or less) and due process when necessary--of the reader really is economically poor, and has received food stamps, then the claim is worse than theoretically inadequate, it is offensive.

You are a man that desires to love neighbor and you want our public order to be normed by justice. Why this regular gripping about taxes and government? Are you really opposed to food stamps, a verifiably helpful and cost-effective government aid program? Do you think that the government ought not to be involved in any disaster relief? Can you imagine how those below the poverty line hoping for a small assistance grant for job training or allowance for heat take your attack?

I'd say, pick on somebody your own size, and let the children who are forced to live below poverty line alone. Let the handicapped elderly alone; stopping complaining about our modest help to the emaciated in the third world. Because, finally, that is who this "priceless" critique is aimed at. I sincerely ask you to reconsider.

I'll post an apologia tonight.

Loathing Bush

Victor David Hanson has an excellent piece at NRO titled On Loathing Bush. Hanson argues that there are rational reasons why millions of people won't vote for Bush in November, but the impetus which will drive many to push the lever for Kerry has nothing to do with reasons or rationality but pure irrational hatred. The phenomenom that Hanson then addresses is the genesis of that hatred. It derives, he writes, not so much from what Bush does but because of who he is.

He argues that there are four characteristics of the President that make him loathsome in the eyes of the left: He's perceived as a southern conservative; he's a Christian; he sees the world in black and white, good and evil; and he has spurned his aristocratic, northeastern heritage and disdains the elite culture indigenous to that part of the country. Some of these may seem implausible bases for hatred, perhaps, until one reads Hanson's reasoning behind them.

The most salient of the above sources of the left's pathological animus toward George Bush, in Viewpoint's opinion, is his Christianity. Hanson says this about Bush's religion:

Bush's Christianity seems evangelical and literal. It comes across as disturbing to liberals of the country who see religion as a mere social formality at best, useful for weddings and funerals, perhaps comforting at Christmas and Easter of course, but otherwise a potential threat to the full expression of lifestyle "choices."

American politicos like their candidates to be Episcopalian, Unitarian, or Congregationalist, perhaps even mainstream but quiet Methodists or Presbyterians. Baptists of the southern flavor, or anything not found in a New England township, reflect a real belief in the literalness of the Bible - primordial ideas that religion is not a social necessity but a fire-and-brimstone path to eternal salvation.

It could be argued that the last two reasons that Hanson gives for the unprecedented invective that has been directed at this man can really be conflated into the second, his religious faith. Bush's Christianity is the basis for his rejection of a jaded, effete culture. It's the reason why he tends to see things in terms of good and evil, two categories that have faded into desuetude in the increasing secularization of the last twenty five years. Bush's Christianity is also the well from which he derives his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Indeed, there is no non-arbitrary reason to oppose either of these unless one's aversion flows from transcendent moral springs.

The left has always hated Christianity and Christians, but the American people have always been at least respectful or reverential toward the faith, if only out of a guilty conscience resulting from their own personal luke-warmness toward it. As long as the overwhelming majority of people were sympathetic to the church and the Christian religion its enemies have bided their time and masked their hostility. Popular sympathy, however, is passing away with the WW II generation, and the left is now emboldened to bare its teeth against its enemy. George Bush, being the most prominent representative of that which they detest, has therefore become the focal point of their loathing.

Winning Hearts and Minds for Islam

A must read on the Sudan crisis by Donna Hughes at NRO. Hughes gives an overview of the history and looks at an aspect of the genocide not much discussed by other sources - the Islamist terror against women and girls.

The widespread and systematic rape and sexual enslavement of women and girls in Darfur has been documented by Amnesty International in a report called "Rape as a Weapon of War: Sexual Violence and Its Consequences." As part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing, rapes are carried out in public, in front of family and community members. Those who resist or intervene are beaten and killed. Victims' arms and legs are broken to prevent escape. The intent is to impose terror on a village, and destroy the victims' and communities' integrity and identity. One rape victim was told by her attacker: "You, the black women, we will exterminate you, you have no God."

Additionally horrifying is the participation of Arab women in the atrocities. According to Amnesty International, Hakama - female traditional singers who praise male fighters - accompany the raiders and rapists. By singing and ululating, they provide encouragement and a song track to rape and pillage.

In western Sudan, many of the women and girls previously have been subjected to female genital cutting, including clitoridectomy and infibulation. These crude, mutilating practices of cutting away of genitalia leaves scars and inelastic tissues. Rape for these women is excruciatingly painful and can cause severe physical injuries.

There is also cultural meaning to these acts of violence: females' genitalia are considered "unclean," and by cutting them away, the girls are supposed to be made "clean" and their virginity and chastity preserved. The victims' own belief in these cultural norms causes them additional psychological trauma when they are raped.

Rape is a violation that destroys the whole of the person in the eyes of society. Sadly, the families of the victims often complete the devastation of these victims' lives by rejecting them. Fearing this, women who have been raped may avoid seeking help in refugee camps because they fear family or community members will discover their rapes.

We...need to take a sobering look at the atrocities in Sudan, past and present, and understand that this is Islamic fundamentalism in practice. It is a threat to all women, everywhere.

Just as world-wide totalitarian communism and fascism were threats to all people everywhere in the twentieth century so too is totalitarian Islamofascism an even greater threat in the twenty first. When will the fifty percent of the electorate that thinks the greatest enemy to peace in the world is George Bush wake from their inexplicable slumber and realize this?

Historic Undertaking in Iraq

Arthur Chrenkoff has part 8 of Good News From Iraq. He introduces this installment by saying:

The challenges still ahead in Iraq are considerable, but the media in its manic rush from one disaster to the next and from one "quagmire" to another rarely provides the context that would help us understand the situation. Having followed the mainstream media coverage, one can be forgiven for thinking that our task in Iraq is merely to return the country to its pre-war status quo. More often than not lost in reporting is the realization that Iraq has to recover not just from the violence and destruction of the last year and a half, but of the past 30 years. Iraq of March 2003 was not a normal, well-functioning state thrown into chaos and mayhem only by the arrival of the Coalition forces. In reality, the pre-invasion Iraq was a wreck of a country whose great potential of the 1950s and 1960s has been all but completely squandered for the sake of the aggrandizement of one man and the hegemony of his party. It's important to bear that in mind before rushing to criticize the Coalition authorities for failing to rebuild in a year what took three decades to destroy.

There's lots of good information here. For example:

In oil news, the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced that it plans to dig 2000 new oil wells and extend the existing oil pipelines by 3000 kilometers in 2005. In the meantime, the Iraqi authorities are planning to construct four new oil refineries in central and southern Iraq.

The media is missing this story completely. This is perhaps the greatest humanitarian undertaking in history, certainly since the Marshall Plan after WW II. One would think that the media would be cheering this effort on, but instead they act as if the only thing they want you to know about are the casualty statistics, and the only thing they want you to see are photos of rag-tag criminals and thugs strutting about with RPGs.

The news blackout will probably persist as long as the Democrats can't claim any credit for this historic accomplishment.

Undereducated Teachers

Here's a blurb which inadvertently, apparently, acknowledges a sad fact about the background knowledge of American teachers:

History teachers need an independent hotline to evaluate books and instructional materials on Islamic history, writes Sandra Stotsky on History News Network.

After September 11, it is clearly urgent to teach K-12 students about Islamic history and culture. It is also crucial for their teachers to have suitable instructional materials that do not inadvertently promote some person's or group's religious or political agenda.

Workshops for teachers confuse faith with history, she writes. One source given to teachers, The Arab World Studies Notebook, "claims not only that Muslims from Europe were the first to sail across the Atlantic and land in the New World, but also that they reached Canada where they intermarried with the Iroquois and Algonquin nations." It's not true, but few teachers know enough about Islamic history to evaluate the credibility of what they're given.

Viewpoint asks why it is that teachers, especially history teachers, would have to know anything at all about Islamic history to know that Muslims were not the first to arrive in the New World or to ask for some corroborating evidence when told that Muslims intermarried with Indians.

It would seem that the only thing teachers would have to know in order to avoid falling for this fantasy would be simple, rudimentary American history. The fact that educators are susceptible to Muslim propaganda about something they should have learned themselves in elementary school is troubling.

Help!

The Evangelical Outpost relays this clever observation from Infinite Monkeys:

David from Infinite Monkeys posted this priceless contrast of quotations:

The scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." -- Ronald Reagan

"Help is on the way." -- John Kerry

When politicians talk about "helping" it's time to hide your wallets.

Need More To Worry About?

A report in The Guardian of England indicates that "the numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered. In the late 1970s, there were around 3,000 deaths a year from these conditions in England and Wales. By the late 1990s, there were 10,000."

This is an incredible increase in just one generation. The Guardian goes on to say that:

The team stresses that its figures take account of the fact that people are living longer and it has also made allowances for the fact that diagnoses of such ailments have improved. It is comparing death rates, not numbers of cases, it says.

The causes were most likely to be chemicals, from car pollution to pesticides on crops and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of modern life, from processed food to packaging, from electrical goods to sofa covers, Pritchard said.

Food is also a major concern because it provides the most obvious explanation for the exclusion of Japan from many of these trends. Only when Japanese people move to the other countries do their disease rates increase.

You can read the whole article here. Thanks to The Drudge Report for the tip.

What's Ahead In Najaf

As he has throughout the Iraqi war, Wretchard at Belmont Club offers up interesting analysis of how coalition forces will likely proceed now that the cease-fire in Najaf has broken down. An excerpt:

It is what must not happen next that matters. The tactical problem facing coalition commanders is how to kill or capture Sadr's forces with Iraqi personnel while avoiding unnecessary deaths and damage to the Shrine. That rules out the textbook solution of leveling it with fires. Because of the subdivided interior of buildings and the fact that Sadr may have wired the Shrine with demolitions a direct assault will probably be excluded for the present. The problem with an assault is that once friendly forces are in contact, one is bound to support them and that imperative will compel the scene commander to order the fires he sought to avoid in the first place. Besieging forces have traditionally used time to weaken resistance without applying direct force. In this case time can also work against the investing forces because Sadr will attempt to run countersiege operations by organizing marches and cavalcades by his supporters to Najaf. Given enough time, he probably reckons that the international media and possibly the United Nations will ride to his rescue. (Heritage site, blah-blah).

Without knowing what the operational commanders will do next, one can still surmise that they will attempt to compress the effects of time by applying unrelenting pressure on the garrison using disturbances, sniping and probes. They would be justified in using nonlethal agents such as CS (tear gas) to stir the pot. Things may still go wrong. Janet Reno's assault on Waco resulted in starting an accidental conflagration that turned the Koresh compound into a charnel house. What is important is to avoid building up the pressure to a climax, to avoid precipitating a self-inflicted Gotterdammerung by Sadr. I suppose one could set up loudspeakers and blast out Koranic verses at levels the EPA would rule illegal, etc. The whole idea is to make a day into an eternity until the days all run together in a jumble.

One hopes that the coalition forces will not vacillate as we seem to have done in Fallujah which has become a festering sore. Once Sadr falls or is taken, the insurgency will have lost a key to whatever legitimacy it still might have with the Iraqi people (although see here and here for Iraqi opinion on al Sadr), and it's disintegration will be accelerated.

Lexicon Update

A couple of weeks ago Viewpoint noted that the Democrats have substantially revised the political lexicon and offered a few examples. Today we offer our readers a review and an update.

The Review:

Lie: Anything that turns out not to be true or might not be true, or which has not yet been proven to be true. Note that it is only a lie when a Republican, especially the president, says something which satisfies these criteria. When a Democrat does it, it's interpretive spin or personal narrative, or if, say, a meteorologist is wrong about a weather forecast that would be an honest mistake resulting from inadequate data.

Censorship: Any instance of someone expressing any manner of disagreement with what a liberal says. E.g. If people refuse to buy Dixie Chick CDs, that's censorship. If, on the other hand, a conservative speaker gets shouted down on a college campus that's a sign of a healthy exercise of first amendment rights.

Leadership: Securing permission from the French, no matter how much groveling it may take to get it, to defend ourselves from those who are determined to kill us.

Political Mainstream: Any current of opinion found on the left of the ideological spectrum. More specifically, any idea held by Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, or John Kerry.

Extremist: Anyone who opposes the mainstream idea that we should be able to kill unborn children for any reason whatsoever, or who rejects the mainstream view that the 2nd amendment is obsolete, or who is so far out of the mainstream as to believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman, or who flouts the mainstream by holding any traditional religious conviction.

Unilateral: Any action taken either by oneself or with any number of partners but which does not include France.

Hero: Anyone who applies for a Purple Heart after suffering a self-inflicted wound requiring a band-aid. Alternatively, anyone who is awarded a Silver Star for conduct which is in violation of the Geneva conventions and the United States' Military code.

The Updates:

Quagmire: Any war not over in three days.

Negative campaigning: When Republicans cite their opponents' record in order to show the public where they stand on the issues.

Cowardice: When a Democrat (e.g. rep. Mark Alexander) switches parties to become a Republican. Not to be confused with a Republican switch to the Democrat party (e.g. Sen. Jim Jeffords) which is a move which requires courage.

Nuance: An admirable intellectual quality evinced by a Democratic presidential candidate who takes every conceivable side of an issue to the point that no one has any idea where he stands.

Desperate Men

Matt Drudge has a report that Senator Kerry is going to change his Cambodia adventure story from having occured on Christmas eve in 1968 to actually having taken place in January of 1969. Evidently, almost everything about this episode, which was "seared into his memory", was misremembered. PowerLine directs us to the Captain's Quarters for an excellent analysis of the impending revision. Look for further clarifications in the weeks ahead.

Viewpoint wonders how many stories the good senator from Massachussetts is going to have to revise and recant before his candidacy simply collapses under the weight of accumulated incoherence.

We also wonder how long this story can be ignored by the major media which has been playing a good game of "don't ask, don't tell" with it for almost a week now. They apparently think it would seriously damage Kerry so they don't want to come out with it until Kerry can cobble together some sort of semi-plausible response. Then the media will run the two together and hope that they can make it look as if Kerry's reply refuted the charges. Thus they'll make the whole matter look like a one day flash-in-the-pan story with no real substance to it. It's dishonest, but it might work.

A good example of the liberal media's adamant aversion to the the pursuit of truth in favor of the pursuit of political victory was Chris Matthews' Hardball show Thursday night. John O'Neill, the author of Unfit For Command was Matthews' guest and Matthews simply wouldn't let O'Neill present the evidence that Kerry's war record is not as distinguished as the senator and the Democrats would have us believe.

Each time O'Neill would try to explain why Kerry's highly touted medals and heroics were something less than meets the eye, Matthews would ask why, then, the Navy awarded them, and why nine or ten of his boatmates supported him. For Matthews, if two groups support you and only one opposes you then that settles the matter. The majority decides what's true.

Matthews' argument was silly. It boiled down to the conviction that the Navy wouldn't have awarded the medals if Kerry didn't deserve them. When O'Neill tried to explain why the Navy did award undeserved medals, Matthews simply replied that Kerry's boatmates support him. When O'Neill tried to show that his supporters are in a small minority, Matthews reverted back to the Navy's citations.

He obfuscated the issue by reciting the awards and what they were for and questioned how O'Neill could claim that these events, such as saving a man's life, didn't happen. He refused to acknowledge that it wasn't the events themselves which O'Neill was challenging but rather the circumstances surrounding the events. To Matthews it was all the same.

The Hardball host also trotted out the canard that the sailors who oppose Kerry weren't on his boat and therefore aren't as qualified to judge him as those who served in closer proximity. This, however, is like arguing that an outfielder is too far removed from the pitcher to be able to judge the pitcher's performance and character. The men who testify against Kerry are men who lived, ate, slept, and worked with him every day. They were eyewitnesses to the events for which Kerry received medals. The fact that they didn't serve on his boat is not significant.

Finally, Matthews took refuge in the absurd claim that whatever the facts of Kerry's service might be, he served in a combat zone and Bush didn't so that makes Kerry a better man than Bush. This sort of reasoning, of course, would also lead us to conclude that Lt. Calley is a better man than virtually anyone who never saw combat.

These kinds of arguments reveal more about the desperation of the Democrats than the weakness of their opponents' testimony. The Democrats can't answer the charges of Unfit For Command other than to employ ad hominem attacks against the motives and character of the witnesses and so their hope is to suppress the information to keep the larger public from finding out that their candidate is not the man he purports to be.

Latest Gallup

Kerry Spot at NRO has the most recent Gallup poll numbers. If they're accurate they aren't good news for the Kerry campaign. They show Bush moving ahead 50 - 47 among likely voters.

Bush has several tactical advantages going into the next several months and one possible pitfall (at least the Dems will see it that way. It's not clear that it really is a pitfall). Bush has the release of the book Unfit For Command coming up next week, he has the convention in about two weeks from which he will probably derive a modest boost, and he has a lot of ad material on Kerry that makes Kerry look very indecisive, even silly. If Bush does reasonably well in the debates he'll be holding all the cards. Kerry has no ammo left to shoot. He'll be on the defensive about his military fictions for the next month or so and will find it hard to regain the offensive momentum that he had coming out of his convention.

If Iraq continues to move toward stability and democracy, if oil prices moderate, and if there is no national emergency, three big but not improbable "ifs", Kerry will be bereft of a major issue.

His only hope for persuading the electorate to switch horses is a big win in the debates. He shouldn't be over-confident, however. Gore and his supporters thought he would wipe the floor with Bush in the 2000 debates, but it didn't work out that way. Bush has been fortunate in his opponents who seem almost psychologically unable to resist the temptation to "misunderestimate" him.

Paging Howard Dean

For many Democrats, the whole point of wedding themselves to John Kerry was the chance to oust the hated George Bush from the Oval Office, and the main reason for wanting Bush ousted, ostensibly, was the Iraq war. For these left/liberals Howard Dean was their first love, but they realized that Dean was too volatile to be elected so they abandoned Dean to elope with Kerry.

Kerry wooed these starry-eyed lovers away from the hapless governor of Vermont by whispering into their ears that enticing sweet talk about Bush lying to us about WMD and leading us into an elective, unnecessary war in Iraq. Kerry seduced them by fueling their anti-Bush hysteria with all the right words and consummated the seduction at Boston.

Now the Democrats find themselves in an awful state. They have yielded themselves to Kerry only to wake up Tuesday morning to find that, on the most critical issue of the election, he has chosen to sidle up so close to the devil himself that his position is now indistinguishable from what Bush has been saying all along.

The sense of betrayal, one would think, must be surging through the Democrat rank and file like a stadium wave. Yet, if there is outrage out there, it's pretty hard to find. William F.Buckley writes about this in a column here. Buckley says:

The statement made on Monday by John Kerry is the climactic event in this matter. Sen. Kerry said that notwithstanding all that is known now, whatever have been the developments in the past year, if he had it to do again, he'd vote as he did: in favor of giving the president the power he requested, before going on to wage war in Iraq.

Buckley is emphasizing here an incredible admission by the Massachussetts senator. Kerry is evidently acknowledging that war with Iraq was justified even if there were no WMD there. His objections to what Bush did turn out to be little more than procedural quibbles. This must be causing rank and file Bush-haters to break out in hives. They hate Bush because of Iraq, and Kerry is telling them that he would vote to authorize war with Iraq again even if he knew Saddam had no WMD!

Perhaps equally as maddening for Democrats, one must assume, is what Kerry said about how long troops should remain in Iraq. Buckley writes:

[H]ere is how Kerry put it: "I believe if you do the kind of alliance-building that is available to us, that it is appropriate to have a goal of reducing our troops over that period of time. Obviously we have to see how events unfold." Indeed. How events unfold. What events?

Here is where Kerry underwrote the Iraq venture in terms extraordinarily comprehensive. "The measurement has to be, as I've said all along, the stability of Iraq, the ability to have the elections, and the training and transformation of the Iraqi security force itself." Get from your paper supplier the thinnest sheet in the inventory, and you won't succeed in wedging it between the Republican and the Democratic position on the nature of our strategic objectives in Iraq.

Liberals who were ecstatic about Kerry at the convention in Boston have no one to blame but themselves. They should have known that when a flip-flopper flips you never know which side he'll wind up on, and he definitely won't respect you in the morning.

Coulter and Old Faithful

Ann Coulter has a great column on the Swift Boat veteran controversy. Here are just a few of the highlights:

With the media playing their usual role as Truth Commissar for the now-dead Soviet Union, the Swiftees are having to purchase ad time in order to be heard. No Tim Russert interviews, no "Today" show appearances, no New York Times editorials or Vanity Fair hagiographies for these heretics against the liberal religion. The only way Swift Boat Veterans for Truth could get less attention would be to go on "Air America" radio.

If the 254 veterans against Kerry got one-tenth as much media coverage for calling Kerry a liar as Clown Joe Wilson did for calling Bush a liar, the veterans wouldn't need to buy ad time to get their message out. (Wilson, you'll recall, was a media darling for six or seven months before being exposed as a fantasist by Senate investigators.)

With their commitment to free speech and a robust exchange of ideas (i.e., "child pornography" and "sedition"), the Democratic National Committee is threatening to sue TV stations that run the Swift Boat Veterans' paid ads. Sue? Can you tell already that there are two lawyers at the top of the Democratic ticket? These are the same people who accuse John Ashcroft of shredding the Bill of Rights.

Ron Brownstein, Los Angeles Times reporter and Bill Clinton's favorite reporter, compared the Swift Boat Veterans' ad to a "snuff film." He claimed the veterans have "strong Republican ties." Apparently, before being permitted to engage in free speech against Democrats in this country you have to: (1) prove that you are not a Republican, (2) take a vow of poverty, and (3) purchase the right to speak in a TV ad. On the basis of Clown Wilson, Michael Moore, George Soros, Moveon.org, etc., etc., etc., I gather the requirements for engaging in free speech against a Republican are somewhat less rigorous. Hey! Maybe John Edwards is right: There really are two Americas!

O'Neill, the author of "Unfit for Command" and founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, can be heard on the Nixon tapes - unaware that he was being taped - telling Nixon that he came from a family of Democrats and voted for Hubert Humphrey in the prior election. Unlike Joe Wilson, Anita Hill or Richard Clarke, Woodward and Bernstein, et al., O'Neill has said he will take no royalties on his book but will donate all his profits to the Navy.

For a rather dramatic illustration of the power of the Swift Boat veterans' testimony go here.

As Coulter says the major media have pretty much ignored this issue so far, but they won't be able to ignore it much longer. Like a subterranean geyser, it's quickly reaching the point in the blogosphere and the conservative media where its temperature and pressure are about to reach critical levels. How will Kerry handle this story when the geyser erupts? Up to this point their response has been to try intimidation through lawsuit and character assassination.

Eventually, however, they'll have to respond to the charges themselves. If they can't, the danger for the Kerry campaign is, as Viewpoint has argued before, that a lot of the people who would otherwise vote for Kerry, but who don't particularly despise Bush, will be disillusioned and either switch to Nader or sit it out.

Truth Will Out

The response of the Kerry campaign to the accusations made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has not been to respond to the charges themselves but rather to threaten television stations who run their ads with a lawsuit for libel. Henry and Erika Holzer have an excellent piece at FrontPage magazine.com which dissects Kerry's initial strategy for dealing with the SBVT and shows how the claim that the SBVT members are not telling the truth collapses under the weight of common sense. They also explain how the threat of libel is as hollow as their candidate's resume. The Holzers close their essay with this:

Kerry, as a public official, has a constitutionally required burden of proof in a libel case to produce evidence showing that the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth witnesses either knew their statements were false, or recklessly disregarded knowledge of falsity. Kerry's lawyers must realize their client can never satisfy this burden of proof.

For these reasons, and others, the democrat lawyers' threatening letter to TV station managers was an unconscionable attempt to protect their candidate from the damning truths spoken by Vietnam veterans who have earned the right to exercise their First Amendment freedom of speech.

To their credit, TV stations in some marketplaces have refused to surrender to the bullying tactics of Kerry's lawyers. This presents the democrat party and the Kerry campaign with two choices: put up or shut up.

They can slink off the field for having threatened TV stations with a baseless libel lawsuit, or, despite how they eventually hedge their threat, they can actually sue those TV stations that aren't intimidated.

The latter course would be utter disaster-and Kerry's lawyers have to know this. Kerry would no longer be able to hide behind spin masters. He would have to file a written complaint. Sworn depositions (including Kerry's) would have to be taken. He would have to respond to requests for factual admissions. He would have to answer written interrogatories. He would have to produce documents.

There would have to be a trial. That means sworn testimony, cross examination, documentary evidence-all in front of a jury, reporters, perhaps even TV cameras. Once all that happened, America would know who told the truth-and who lied.

Indeed. Of course all of this controversy over his military service might be stopped dead in its tracks if Kerry would do what the Democrats insisted that George Bush do, which is to release his service records. Kerry, however, refuses to do this. One particularly clever explanation for his refusal to release the records is that he anticipated long ago that his VietNam service would be an issue and has decided to sit on his records while his political opponents dig themselves into a deep pit. Then, at the climactic moment, he will release the records which will vindicate Kerry and bury his enemies under an avalanche of public scorn and ridicule.

It's possible, in the same sense that Martians are possible, but there are two things working against the strategy. First, the Republicans aren't cooperating. No one in that party has embraced the SBVT ads or the vets themselves. On the contrary, they've somewhat distanced themselves from them.

Second, the records must vindicate Kerry in order for the strategy to work, and it's hard to believe that Kerry wouldn't have released them years ago if they truly did confirm his claims. It's also hard to believe that over two hundred men would be lying about this, would be subjecting themselves to the Democrat slime machine, when they have no real motive for doing so other than to defend their own honor and to set the record straight.

The Fox News Sunday panel all agreed that this would be a non-issue by Labor Day. Viewpoint is not so sure. It's a story, as journalists like to say, that has legs, and the legs are going to get stronger when Unfit For Command is released next week.

Anybody But Bush

Bill Gertz is a Washington Times correspondent well connected to the defense and intelligence people in D.C. His most recent column discusses intelligence information that suggests that the next terrorist attack will be triggered by a message from Osama bin Laden and will consist of a wave of assassinations beginning, perhaps, in Yemen or Saudi Arabia and spreading across the United States. It is believed that the terrorists have in mind as targets political and business figures whose murders would rock the American economy and the coming election. According to one official, "The goal of the next attack is twofold: to damage the U.S. economy and to undermine the U.S. election," the official said. "The view of al Qaeda is 'anybody but Bush.' "

So, if this official's analysis is correct, al Qaeda sees the re-election of George Bush as the worst possible outcome for them. Any serious citizen of this country, i.e. anyone who realizes that we are in a fight to the death with an implacable enemy, should view al Qaeda's hope of swinging the election toward John Kerry as the strongest conceivable reason to vote for George Bush.

Just Do It

Omar at Iraq the Model gives some interesting anecdotal evidence as to how Iraqis view the fighting in Najaf and Sadr City. In short, they despise Muqtada al Sadr and will be happy to see the end of him. What they do not want to see is another round of indecisive fighting that returns them to the status quo ante. Omar and his friends want to see a resolution to this, and no doubt our Marines do, too:

It seems that it's time at last! I hope they get Muqtada this time and also all his deputies. People here are not only disgusted and upset with this gang but also most of them showed extreme anger and some of them went as far as condemning Islam and even the Mahdi himself!! I don't agree of course with that, as Muqtada has nothing to do with Islam.

A She'at taxi driver told me, " Why are we doing this!? Why among all religions we commit such horrible crimes?? If this is Islam then s**t on it and on Mahdi himself, we don't want this! They went as far as attacking peaceful churches and I really don't understand why! This is not the Islam we were raised to believe in, the Islam of peace and tolerance. I wish I could see this idiot dead."

One of my colleagues; a She'at who used to sympathize greatly with Islamist whether She'at or Sunni, told me today that he is shocked with what the Mahdi army is doing, " When he revolted the 1st time and they called him an outlaw we didn't like it. How can they call a cleric who's the son of Iraq's most respectable Ayetullah, an outlaw. Now I cannot and I do not want to defend him. He's a criminal and so are all his followers. They have killed civilians, policemen, destroyed a gas station in Sadr city, and are threatening to burn down the oil pipelines now! Why and for what!?"

Check out his posts for both Wednesday and Tuesday. There's lots of insight into the Iraqi people's attitude toward all this on them.

Understanding ESC

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost explains some things about stem cell research that the average voter is probably not aware of. He writes:

Since the average American voter believes the President controls the economy, it's not a surprise they would believe that he would control federal funding for ESC also. But Bush's executive order didn't really initiate a ban at all. In fact, all it did was clarify what the executive branch is supposed to do - enforce the law. The ban had already been put in place by former Arkansas congressman Jay Dickey.

In 1996, Dickey attached an amendment to the Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill that prohibits the use of federal funds for research that destroys or seriously endangers human embryos. The Dickey Amendment, which has been reimplemented every year since '96, reads:

None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for- (1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.

While the law is rather straightforward, the Clinton Administration was able to find a way around it. They reasoned that if private funds were used to destroy the embryo then it would clear the way for government funding. They would allow the private sector do the dirty work and then slip them funding for their efforts. Although this violates the clear intent and spirit of the law, it was nevertheless ruled to be a "legally valid interpretation."

The Clinton Administration adopted this stance as their policy but was unable to implement it before Bush took office. Unlike his predecessor, Bush came in with the intent to obey the law as it was written. But by the time he made his decision, a number of embryonic stem cell lines had already been derived and were in various stages of development, growth, and characterization. Since the damage had already been done to the embryos, Bush agreed to a compromise which allowed federal funding to be used for these specific lines. Funding of ESC research would be allowed without having the government be complicit in the destruction of more human embryos.

Kerry's expressed policy is a reversal of this position. By "lifting the ban" he means that he'll take the position of former President Clinton and ignore the law as it is written in order to find a way around its limitations. Since both he and Sen. Clinton were unable to override the Dickey amendment in the legislature, he is attempting to do it by fiat. In essence, Kerry is promising to ignore the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives.

It would be interesting to see how many of the Democrats who criticize the President's position on this issue have themselves voted for the Dickey Amendment and its annual renewals.

Sec. Annan, Please Call Your Office

The Sudan crisis continues and the Sudanese leadership sits in Khartoum pretending it's not happening. This article provides an update. Some excerpts:

In a statement from Geneva on Tuesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs accused Sudanese forces of new helicopter attacks, denied by Khartoum, and the Janjaweed of raids on the ground. "Fresh violence today (Tuesday) included helicopter gunship bombings by the Sudanese government and Janjaweed attacks in South Darfur," the U.N. agency said.

The U.N. estimates Darfur violence has killed 50,000 and made two million short of food and medicine.

Sudan has said international pressure over Darfur aims to undermine the country's Islamist government, which Washington lists as a "sponsor of terror."

In a July 30 U.S.-drafted resolution, the Security Council gave Khartoum 30 days to take measures against the Janjaweed, or face unspecified sanctions. Khartoum denies using the Janjaweed as a proxy force and says they are outlaws.

It will be interesting to see what the U.N. does when the August 30 deadline passes. It will also be telling to read the tragic statistics of how many people died in that 30 day period. It is unconscionable that this horror has been allowed to go on this long, as if the Sudanese thugocracy were a legitimate government, and every day it is allowed to continue is another black mark on the legacy of the United Nations.

Lt. Kerry's Magical Mystery Tour

Hugh Hewitt has an interview with a boatmate of Kerry's who categorically denies Kerry's claim to have been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. The swift boat vet also puts the kibosh on Kerry's claim to have transported CIA agents into Cambodia. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

HH: Now, Steve Gardner, John Kerry has also been discovered to have been telling a story that he took a CIA man at least one CIA man into Cambodia and that he kept his hat. When you were on the boat with John Kerry, for your two months and two weeks of the tour that he served, did you ever have a CIA man on board?

SG: Number one, no.

HH: Did you ever take anyone to Cambodia and drop them off?

SG: Categorically no.

HH: Did you get near Cambodia and drop anybody off?

SG: The closest we can get to Cambodia, and that's a long swim, is 50 miles.

HH: Alright. Let me ask you about other people on the boat. Could John Kerry have just misunderstood someone on the boat was CIA when it wasn't CIA? Did you ever have any strangers on the boat?

SG: Nope. We always would have an interpreter, or something like that with us, or we would take others and take them in to areas in the Mekong Delta where they would be doing surveillance, but never did we have anybody that we would take close or could take close to Cambodia.

What does it matter, some are asking. These were events that took place thirty five years ago. If he lied about them back then, who cares? Many of the people who are going to be voting in November weren't even born in 1968.

It's of course true that the events occured a long time ago, but Senator Kerry has advanced them as his chief qualification for serving as president. He and his party have made them relevant to this campaign because evidently he feels that what he did back then far outshines anything he has done since. He wants us to believe that it is those deeds which define him as a man and as a leader.

It behooves us then to examine those events. When we do we find that either they didn't happen the way he says they did or didn't happen at all. We are thus left with the conclusion that his VietNam service is a net negative, a serious negative since he himself places such importance on it, and that our consideration of his qualifications should move past VietNam to his record in the Senate. We can't, however, because he keeps bringing us back to VietNam, reminding us often that he fought to defend this country as a young man, etc.

This last refrain is particularly disingenuous, by the way, since one of the anti-war shibboleths from the 1970s was that no American interests were at stake in VietNam and that therefore we had no business being there. This was Kerry's position as a leader of the VietNam Veterans Against the War. Perhaps some journalist might ask him if, by insisting that he was defending this country when he served, he is now of the belief that the VietNam war was indeed a war fought in defense of the United States. If so, when did he change his mind? If not, why does he keep saying that it was?

Character Counts

Mark Steyn has a great piece in the U.K.Telegraph on Kerry's weird story about Christmas in Cambodia. He writes:

I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.

Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, he doesn't have it right. He has insisted for three decades that he spent Christmas eve on an illegal mission in Cambodia, but he appears to have made the story up, and now, like a tar baby, he's stuck with it. Steyn continues:

For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me."

The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.

As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders... By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.

On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec - that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border.

For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote - the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders - what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.

In the absence of a plausible explanation for Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story, we are left to conclude that the Senator is either delusional or mendacious. If the latter, we have to ask what kind of man would slander his fellow veterans, officers, and indeed his country just to make himself look tall and to advance his own political ambitions.

An interesting question to pose to a Kerry supporter is, Why? Just because John Kerry is not George Bush is not good enough. Indeed, it's incredibly irreponsible. If Kerry supporters cannot give a convincing reason for their support beyond the fact that he's not Bush, they're tacitly admitting that it doesn't matter to them what the man is like. They're acknowledging their willingness to entrust the reins of power to a mediocrity who is either a chronic liar or a sad, deluded man living in a fantasy world if that's what's necessary to get Bush out. How long can a democracy survive in a political climate that spawns such recklessness in its citizens?

Why Bush Will Win

In the first of a pair of outstanding columns for National Review Online Michael Novak offers six reasons why he thinks the Democrats will not win in November. He writes:

1. No one - neither his colleagues nor his wife nor his supporters nor he himself - has anything good to say about John Kerry except that he served bravely in Vietnam. The nearly 30 years since then have generated few boasts on his part, few commendations from others, few successes anyone can seem to remember.

2. The Democratic elite sitting in convention cannot present themselves as they are to the American people, but must stifle their deepest feelings, be silent about their most passionate aims, and hide their turbulent loathing of George Bush Republicans (lest it frighten independents with its ferocity). The Democratic elite is saying as little as possible about same-sex marriage. And guns. And very little about abortion. And not a word about total withdrawal of American troops from Iraq - quite the opposite. Democratic elites do not want the people to know what they really think. On that ground, they fear they will lose.

3. Democrats must hide from the public what they truly think about evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Catholics. They express these thoughts mostly among themselves.

4. John Kerry looks sillier in the pale blue NASA rabbit suit than Michael Dukakis did in a tank.

5. The months of April, May, and June were so heavy with bad news for George Bush - the huge Sorosian expenditures on anti-Bush ads came at him in torrents - and still he held even with Kerry in the polls. It is hard not to believe that there will be at least a slight change in the roaring winds. When it comes (and the change is already underway), it is bound to push Bush's sails steadily ahead as the weeks roll on.

6. The worst lies told by the Democrats about Bush - those of Joe Wilson, Michael Moore, and others, saying that Bush lied about Iraq - have already been proven wrong by the 9/11 Commission (which was supposed to blow Bush out of the water just before the election, but ended up destroying his worst calumniators). These lies were also proven wrong by the British inquiry. Even the Kerry Convention in Boston ended up taking the Bush strategic line in Iraq, except for one thing: Kerry is wistful about the probability of persuading France and Germany to bear some burden on behalf of liberty in Iraq. Good luck! God knows, Bush and Colin Powell tried.

In response to this argument, the persuasiveness of which we'll leave to the reader to decide, he received several hundred e-mails roughly half of which were filled with such hate-filled invective that he was stunned by their viciousness. In a subsequent rejoinder he tells us about them:

Their sentiment was far more animus against Bush than support for Kerry. One said my word 'hatred' was inexact: 'Total disgust' is more accurate. That's what a good many people expressed - an almost inarticulate disgust beyond their powers of speech. Quite a number compared Bush to Hitler, and the present to the early Third Reich.

About half (or maybe only a third) of the 207 letters went into painful riffs, long or short, about the vices of George W. Bush. Several of these are based on untruths - things Democratic speakers such as Howard Dean and Michael Moore say all the time that simply are not true. The revulsion against Bush expressed in these emails does not seem to depend on truth. Even those who actually believe these things could with a little effort find out that they are false. Let me just mention a few of these untruths:

1. The intelligence, academic achievement, and IQ of George Bush are too low for the job. Bush's IQ, measured by his SAT scores and academic achievements, is higher than that of John F. Kennedy and many other successful presidents. Much was published on this in 2000.

2. Bush "lied" when he said Iraq was an "imminent" danger to the U.S. Bush expressly denied that the danger was then imminent, and said when it was actually "imminent" it would be too late to counter.

3. Bush "lied" when he said Iraq had the "potential" to develop weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam must be assumed to possess weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's potential to develop weapons of mass destruction has been demonstrated from what was found after May 2003. And any reasonable leader, hearing the best estimates of all major intelligence services and observing Saddam's behavior, had to assume that he possessed them. Even the anti-war movement employed the same assumption. It used as one of its arguments the claim that war would occasion Saddam's use of WMDs.

4. Bush "lied" when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address that the British had information about the attempt of Iraq to purchase "yellow cake" in Nigeria, as charged by Joseph Wilson. (The famous 16 words.) The British Butler Inquiry said Bush's words were "well-founded." The Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that it was Wilson who had lied.

5. Bush "lied" when he landed on the aircraft carrier under a banner that said "mission accomplished." General Tommy Franks has said he suggested the symbol as a strategic move, to dramatize to reluctant allies that the offensive operations were now over. A new (but still difficult) phase of ending disorder and bringing stable political and economic institutions had begun. On this task, some Europeans had hinted they would help. Franks wanted a dramatic signal sent to them. It was also meant as a "closure" for the main Coalition offensive.

6. A big reason for the deficits are the Bush tax cuts. As even the New York Times has noted, the main cause by far was the great drop of income for the wealthy in the two-year stock-market drop, with a consequent dramatic drop in tax revenues. This was before the Bush tax cuts came into effect. Since then, tax revenues have dramatically increased, especially from the rich. The top 10 percent pay 65 percent of all income taxes.

Both of these essays have much more in them worth reading. I don't know if Bush is going to win in November, but if he loses it will be because of some of the most repugnant political tactics I've ever witnessed. The depth of hatred that justifies any means of unseating George Bush is as frightening as it is repulsive. Heed the words of one of Novak's correspondents: "First we will vote, then if we lose, we will fight." In other words if lies don't work then violence will? This is the language of fascist tyrants and Stalinist totalitarians.

Robocop

The soldier of the future is going to look like Robocop and be just as formidable according to this article. Some excerpts:

"What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."

A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out.

Another potential development is inserting "nanomuscle fibers" that can actually simulate muscles, giving soldiers more strength. Fabric is impregnated with nanomachines that create the same weight, lift and feel as a muscle. "So I coat the outside of the armor with a nanomuscle fiber that gives me 25 to 35 percent better lifting capability," DeGay explained.

The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."

I guess this is a good thing. See the article for pictures.

The Terror of Living in Saddam's Iraq

This is such a sad story and it's even sadder when one realizes that it's only one of perhaps thousands of such stories coming out of the horrifying nightmare that was Iraq under Saddam.

Read the story at Iraq The Model and then ask whether Iraq and the world are not better off now than if the United States and Britain had, like France, Germany, and Russia, done nothing.

In Their Own Words

Here's a series of quotes from Democrat leaders about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction that's making the rounds on the internet. I don't vouch for the accuracy of all of them, but interested readers should be able to verify them easily enough:

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." "The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons...." - Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years .. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do." - Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapon stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." - Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation .. And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

Now these very same people are insisting that President Bush lied about WMD. They are scoffing at any suggestion that there ever were any such weapons, and that Bush took us to war unnecessarily. The Democrats are either inveterately dishonest or they are disconnected from reality. Either way they do not deserve to wield political power nor can the American people afford to give it to them.

The 2002, 2003 quotes are interesting, in that they support a theory of mine, which, though I can't prove it, nevertheless makes sense out of the last couple of years' politics. The Democrats seem to have been trying to turn up the heat on Bush to do something about Iraq, being fully convinced that he would do nothing significant. They doubtless thought that they would then be able to use his dithering against him politically.

When Bush called for congressional approval to use force they still thought he would do nothing decisive, despite his success in Afghanistan, so they voted for it, thinking that they'd be able to portray themselves to the public as tough and Bush as wimpish, afraid to tackle the world's fourth largest army.

When it became clear that Bush actually intended to undertake something historic they were aghast. This wasn't the way it was supposed to work out. They were then forced to resort to their fallback plan which was to do everything they could to find fault with how he did it, and hope that the voters would forget their earlier hawkishness. If this is indeed what happened it's pretty hypocritical, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Let The Character Assassinations Begin

The assault on the character and personal lives of the swift boat veterans who have contradicted Kerry's account of his Viet Nam experience has begun. See here for details.

These men are apparently going to be vilified, drawn, and quartered by the press. This is ugly, disgusting,and contemptible behavior on the part of the Democrats and their media allies, but you knew it was coming. The Democratic party is the undisputed master of the politics of personal destruction.

The crucial question - whether these men are, in fact, telling the truth - is going to be lost in an avalanche of personal, irrelevant invective. This alone should be enough to move people to wonder whether this is the sort of sleazy behavior they want to vote into power, but, sadly, it probably won't.

Sen. Landrieu Meet Noah Webster

A Democrat switches parties and the senator from his state, Mary Landrieu, calls him a coward and adds that his word is now meaningless.

A coward? Switching parties may be many things but how is it cowardly? Maybe somebody in Louisianna could donate a copy of a dictionary to Senator Landrieu's office.

By the way, how many Democrats called Senator Jim Jeffords a coward when he switched from Republican to Independent so that he could caucus with the Democrats? Perhaps that's different since Republicans who jump parties are acting on principle. When Democrats become Republicans they're cowards. I get it.

God and Evil, Pt. II

In a recent post entitled God and Evil Viewpoint discussed one classical response of theists to the problem of evil based upon the assumed existence of human free will. We pointed out that although human volition may account for some kinds of evil, what we called moral evil, the question remains as to why an all-powerful, benevolent God would tolerate evil that resulted not from human free will but from natural causes like storms, accidents, famine, and disease.

Before we try to address this question, we should be reminded that in God and Evil we stipulated that the understanding of God's power that we are working with is that God can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it.

So, the question before us now is, wouldn't a perfectly good and omnipotent creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil. One way to answer this question, perhaps, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there's no potential for harm. For example, any world governed by gravity and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury. Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

At this point, it might be objected that theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't he, if he was perfectly good, create this world like that?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Perhaps the reason that there is no evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there. The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven could serve as an override to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do that here in this world as well, and, since he doesn't, he must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death. At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way apparently, that God had forbidden. It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy. If, as was suggested in God and Evil, God did not foresee this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his creator, and God would not force him to do otherwise. Grief-stricken at the rejection he suffered at the hands of his beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

God did not abandon man entirely, but he has given man his autonomy, he has set man free in the world. All subsequent history is the story of God's attempt to woo mankind back to himself, to win back the heart of his unfaithful lover. God's love for us still burns, and he wants us back despite our disloyalty. Indeed, he desires our love so much that he redeems us himself. Man's infidelity deserves eternal divorce, eternal separation, from God, but God atones for our sin himself on the cross in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The story of God's redemption is a beautiful, tragic story, a romance, a story of faithfulness, goodness and perseverance, and it's the only story that makes sense of human history.

If God does not exist, if death is the end, then all of life, all of history, is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no purpose, there is no significance. It's all absurd. The evil which besets us, the suffering, pain, and grief we experience, are all meaningless. They are all for nothing. Atheism, carried to its logical conclusion, ends in nihilism, the belief that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters.

In the face of this despair Christianity infuses life with hope, meaning, and dignity. Christianity redeems the absurdity of the world by insisting that nothing in our world is for nothing. There is a reason for our existence and a reason why there is evil. We may not know what it is, but if we were created by God we may assume that God had a purpose for doing so, and that that purpose is our purpose. If our world is beset by evil we have grounds for hoping that there is a reason why God endures it, and that in some future existence justice will be done and suffering will be no more.

Atheism offers none of this. In a world without God people are born out of nothingness, they suffer, and they return back to the void from which they came and there's no significance or meaning to it at all. Atheism offers no basis for hope that there is any ultimate meaning to life or any ultimate justice in the world. It offers no basis for believing that right and wrong are grounded in anything other than subjective feeling. It offers no basis for granting human beings dignity and significance. In a world without God there is no point or purpose to life beyond whatever short-term goals we set for ourselves to keep us from reflecting on the fact that everything we do ultimately goes for naught.

Christianity may not be true, but each of us, including the atheist, should certainly hope that it is. Inexplicably, most atheists hope for the very opposite. They hope that they are right that there is no God. The atheist, in fact, finds himself in the awkward position of holding firmly to a view which, one might think, he should hope with all his being is completely wrong.

The Journalistic Pursuit Of Truth

The "politics of personal destruction" is shifting into high gear. The Swift Boat veterans who appeared in the anti-Kerry ad and in the forth-coming book Unfit For Command were branded "liars" and "sleazy" characters by an angry Al Hunt on Saturday evening's edition of Capitol Gang.

Hunt specifically called John O'Neill, the author of Unfit For Command, a liar but offered no support for the allegation. It's hard to say how he could support it, actually, since he hasn't seen the book yet, but then evidence doesn't matter in the world of post-modern liberalism. All that's necessary for a man to be a liar in our current cultural environment is for him to say something you don't like or that you wish weren't true.

Hunt claimed that since Kerry's accusers didn't actually serve on Kerry's vessel they're not qualified to say whether Kerry actually did the things he is credited for doing. This is like saying that because some kid in your high school was a year behind you, you can't really know anything about him.

Hunt followed this bizarre claim with one even weirder. Veins almost popping in his neck, he vigorously insisted that John McCain has more authority on the matter than anyone at the table, and John Mccain has called these men "dishonest and dishonorable". Never mind that these men knew Kerry and served with him whereas McCain never did until both men were in the Senate together. As long as truth is whatever you want it to be this sort of logic will make perfect sense to you, I suppose.

Some critics have argued that these Viet Nam veterans are reprehensible because they're making an issue out of something that happened thirty-five years ago and should not be relevant today.

There are several things to be said about this objection, however. First, those who make it were themselves mute while Terry McAuliffe and other Democrats were raking through George Bush's National Guard service. I don't recall any liberal reporters, least of all Al Hunt, telling the Democrats to stop acting like political dumpster divers. According to the Democrats and the pundits the people should know whether Bush did what he claimed to do when he was in the National Guard. It was okay to call him a draft dodger and a deserter because, heck, for all any of them knew maybe he was. But it's not okay to subject John Kerry to the same kind of scrutiny. That's sleazy politics.

Second, the allegations against Bush were made by high representatives of the Democrat party. McAuliffe is the party chairman. The Republicans have nothing to do with the ad or the book, at least not that we know. These have been produced by men who are private citizens, and if they're telling the truth what they're doing is far more noble than what Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Third, John Kerry and the Democrats are the ones responsible for making his war time service an issue. In his acceptance speech he spent more time talking about his four month tour of duty in Viet Nam than he did his nineteen years in the Senate. John Edwards says "if you want to know what kind of man John Kerry is, ask the men who served with him," but when we take Edwards up on his suggestion the men who served with him are slandered and vilified by the liberals because they refuse to follow the script.

Al Hunt and his Democrat allies allege that these men, upwards of two hundred of them, are simply lying or are the manipulated pawns of rich backers who are putting up the money for these ads. It is somehow sordid for rich Republicans to finance ads critical of Kerry, but when George Soros says he would spend his entire fortune to defeat George Bush the liberals revel in the prospect.

They snickered at the obvious mendacity of rich film- maker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and rejoiced that so many people were going to see it, but when it's their guy being subject to charges which, for all they know, may be true they're outraged at such "dishonest and dishonorable" tactics.

On Capitol Gang Margaret Carlson shrugged off the claims of these war veterans, many of them decorated heroes themselves, by making the astonishing assertion that they will all soon be discredited. This is journalism? Without having read their allegations, without having seen their evidence she knows that Kerry is innocent and these men are simply fabricating this whole thing? Where is journalistic objectivity? Where's the noble journalistic pursuit of the truth wherever it may be found? In the world of the contemporary liberal, evidently, there's no need to look at evidence when you already know the truth.

Viewpoint is looking forward to the Sunday morning talk shows. They should be feisty.

Keyes is In!

No Left Turns tells us that Alan Keyes has decided to run against Barack Obama for the Illinois senate seat:

Alan Keyes has accepted the GOP nomination to run for the Senate in Illinois and Barack Obama has already agreed to a series of Lincoln/Douglas style debates. Whatever the outcome of this race, you can't miss these debates!

Indeed!

Loose Lips Sink Ships

A lot of people have wondered why our intelligence agencies announce the captures of various terrorists. It would seem that the wiser course would be to keep their Islamist comrades in the dark while we extract as much information from the captured individuals as possible. As soon as the terrorists read in the papers that someone who knows about them has been caught they are certain to change their methods, procedures, plans, addresses, and anything else they can in order to avoid capture.

Yet there is the hope that our intelligence personnel know what they're doing. We trust that their decisions, policies, and methods are well-thought out so we give them the benefit of the doubt. That benefit, however, is going to be much harder to concede after this MSNBC account of the leak of the name of the Pakistani who was the source of information for all the terrorist arrests in Europe that have occured in the last couple of days. Some excerpts:

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al-Qaida operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers. Monday evening, after Khan's name appeared, Pakistani officials moved him to a secret location.

"After his capture [in July], he admitted being an al-Qaida member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker, and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."

The Times published a story Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts. The Times identified him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name.

U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al-Qaida suspects.

Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised that Washington would reveal information that could expose the name of a source during an ongoing law enforcement operation.

"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw. It's also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.

The key word here is "unintentionally". It may be that the name was released deliberately to sow confusion or deception. Nevertheless, if whoever revealed the identity of this man did it recklessly, he/she should be fired. Naming Khan may have unnecessarily alerted dozens of terrorists who might survive to murder in the future. If so, whoever made the decision to expose Khan's arrest will be partly responsible for the deaths of the victims.

Christmas in Cambodia

Jim Geraghty who writes KerrySpot at National Review Online cites what Hugh Hewitt believes is perhaps the most devastating revelations in the forthcoming book on Kerry's Viet Nam service titled Unfit For Command. Kerry appears to have deliberately lied on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986 when he said that he was ordered into Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 (Hewitt's permalinks are down so once at his site you'll have to scroll to the piece on Kerry's Christmas Eve in Cambodia).

Geraghty quotes from Unfit for Command:

Kerry also described, for example, for the Boston Herald his vivid memories of his Christmas Eve spent in Cambodia: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

Problem One: Nixon hadn't taken office yet.

Problem Two: "During Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there. During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13's patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border...

All the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command-Joe Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George Elliott (Commander of CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and Commander, Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann (Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115), and Rear Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF 116)-deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia...

At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry's PCF 44 boat-Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner-deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book.

The Cambodia incursion story is not included in Tour of Duty [the book on Kerry's war years by Douglas Brinkley]. Instead, Kerry replaces the story with a report about a mortar attack that occurred on Christmas Eve 1968 "near the Cambodia border" in a town called Sa Dec, some fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border.

Somehow, Kerry's secret illegal mission to Cambodia, which he recounted on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986, is now a firefight at Sa Dec and a Christmas day spent back at the base writing entries in his journal.

Unless O'Neill and Corsi have made some major error in their reporting, this is pretty stunning. Either Kerry is a pathological liar, or every man in his chain of command is.

Hewitt fills in some details of Kerry's recollections and adds that:

[I]f he lied about being sent to Cambodia, Kerry's narrative is in trouble. It will remain true that he saved a man's life, but that day's undeiable courage does not validate or protect Kerry's record then or since. A powerful demonstration of obvious falsehood on a key claim is a major blow to Kerry.

Which is why the focus ought to be on the Cambodia story, over and over again. Did Kerry make that claim? Did he do so in the Senate as part of a political argument about Nicaragua? If so, what's that tell us about his willingness to invent personal history to serve his political ambition?

Viewpoint wonders how long it will take the major media to start reporting on these revelations. By sitting on them they are doing a serious disservice to the American people who have a right to know the truth about the men they are being asked to elect as president. One thing we can be sure of, if new questions about George Bush's integrity had emerged they would be splashed across every headline and news broadcast all weekend and every day until November 2nd.

Unfit For Command has the potential to dampen a lot of enthusiasm for Kerry, an enthusiasm which, like Lake Okachobee, is miles wide and only inches deep to begin with. The danger to the Democrats is not just that undecideds will be persuaded to move toward Bush by the indictments of Kerry's character that the book contains, but that the millions who are moderately disposed toward Kerry and who are not driven by any particular animus toward Bush will simply stay home on election day.

The Wretched of the Earth

In the Sudan the holocaust continues while Khartoum plays dumb.

Sudanese Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein says: "It is true that the situation is out of control, but we will make an effort."

"Making an effort" is not good enough. These guys have had years to "make an effort" and have done nothing to stop the militias that are murdering, terrorizing, and dispossessing millions of people in their country. Indeed, the evidence is that they have abetted it. The effort they need to make is to pack their bags and get out.

Kofi Annan announced that the Sudanese government has about three weeks left to show the U.N. Security Council that it is serious about disarming the Janjaweed [the Sudanese militia] or face possible sanctions.

That must be a real rib-tickler in Khartoum. U.N. sanctions do not have a very reassuring record of concentrating tyrannical minds on the necessity of caring for their people. Meanwhile, in three weeks hundreds more children will starve to death.

On Thursday, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum: "Our policy is that anything that the AU wants we will cooperate (with). Before that we need to sit down, study it carefully and reach agreement on how we are going to implement it."

Yes, of course. Examine the problem carefully, anything to prolong the genocide and to evade having to do anything to stop it. What's needed in the Sudan is for someone to say that the games are over in Khartoum and to send in several thousand well-equipped troops to wipe out the Janjaweed, restore the people of Dharfur to their homes and farms, and to bring them relief from their suffering.

These wretched people can't count on U.N. sanctions. How would sanctions help them anyway? Sanctions invariably hurt rather than help the poor and dispossessed. The U.N. is as useless as a space heater in hell and the African Union is worse.

Perhaps the French and Germans are available for a humanitarian mission. They should have plenty of cash on hand for such an undertaking after having profited handsomely from their deals with Saddam at the expense of the Iraqi people. Maybe someone should give Chirac and Schroeder a call on behalf of the suffering Sudanese.

Why Do So Many Home School?

An article here points out that 1.1 million kids are home-schooled by parents who feel that public schools are just not safe or morally healthy environments for their kids:

The estimated figure of students taught at home has grown 29 percent since 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department. In surveys, parents offered two main reasons for choosing home schooling: 31 percent cited concerns about the environment of regular schools, and 30 percent wanted the flexibility to teach religious or moral lessons. Third, at 16 percent, was dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.

How many more parents are disillusioned with their child's school but lack the resources to take them out? How many children would be home schooled if parents had the time, energy, and expertise to do it. How many children in our public schools would be in private schools if parents could afford the tuition? I suspect the number is substantial and that confidence in public schools is low and declining. Our schools are in trouble and the first person to come along with an affordable way of privatizing education is going to find a receptive public. Why is this?

The problems began to incubate in the sixties, but they emerged in the seventies when legislation and court decisions made it increasingly more difficult to maintain effective discipline in the halls and classrooms. At the same time, schools became more than just educational institutions, today they are full-service day care, offering all manner of social services, therapeutic programs, extra-curricular activities, etc. These burgeoning programs have become the tail that wags the dog in public schools almost everywhere. Many private schools feel that in order to compete with their tax-subsidized neighbors they have to add to their own menu of offerings.

Add to this the fact that many schools are not run by educators but rather by managers. They may have advanced degrees in education, but many of them are in administration because they really didn't love what they were doing in the classroom. Thus to them what happens in the classroom is secondary to everything else the school does. They would not admit this, of course, but it's clear where most administrators' priorities lie to anyone who has worked in the education field for any length of time. All one needs do is to observe how easy it is for students to be excused from class in order to engage in other activities.

There is much that needs to be done if public education is going to be rescued from irrelevance and obsolescence. One thing that must change before anything else will be of any effect is that schools need to be granted the authority to discipline their students, to permanently expel them when expulsion is appropriate without having to employ phalanxes of lawyers to justify the measure, and to use that authority once they have it.

A second step needs to be that people put in positions of leadership in schools need to be themselves men and women who love learning, leaders who will subordinate everything else that takes place in the school day to classroom excellence. School administrators all pay lip service to learning, they all say that the education their students receive is their highest concern, but in too many of our schools, class is simply where students go when they have no other claim on their time.

Many of the problems public schools face are problems they can do nothing about. Viewpoint, for example, has discussed the correlation between the quality of families in a community and the quality of schools in that community (See here, for instance).

Nevertheless, there are things that educators and legislators can do to make them better, and it is an indictment of our schools that so many parents are willing to go to such lengths to find an alternative. Public school educators can no longer afford to shrug these people off as malcontents and cranks. Public schools need to do better, but they won't as long as they keep telling themselves and us that the problems they face can all be fixed by giving them more money.

The Ad

They're accusing him of having betrayed his country, of lying to the American people about the circumstances of the war, of being unfit to serve as president of the United States. Sound familiar? These are the same claims made by hysterics like Al Gore and Howard Dean about George Bush, but this time the claims are being made by calm, apolitical men who have no partisan or ideological ax to grind. This time the claims are made by men who are actually familiar with the service of the man they criticize. In a thirty second television ad they can offer no evidence to support their allegations, but presumably that will be presented in the book due out next week titled Unfit for Command by John O'Neill. The book, if these men are indeed telling the truth, should flesh out the indictment presented in the advertisement.

Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily hypocritical of the left to call this ad "dirty politics", "gutter politics", and to say that it is "as low as you can go". John Kerry has made his service in Viet Nam a major qualification for serving as president, and the Democrats spent weeks seeking to make George Bush's service in the Air National Guard a proof of his fecklessness and unworthiness to hold the presidency. The Democrats want voters to believe that Kerry is a hero and that George Bush evaded war-time service. Now contrary testimony is emerging and the Democrats are acting like this is some sort of dirty trick.

They complain that the ad is funded by some rich guy in Texas, but many of the most virulent anti-Bush ads and websites out there are funded by George Soros and other wealthy donors.

John McCain calls the ad dishonest and dishonorable, but how does he know it's either? It's only dishonorable if it's dishonest. Does Senator McCain know that the men in the ad are lying? If these men are indeed telling the truth then the American people should know it. If it's true that Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts, if it's true that he was awarded a Silver Star for actions in violation of the military code of conduct and Geneva conventions, if it's true that he accepted praise for actions unworthy of praise, then the American people should know that. If it's true that he lied under oath in his Senate testimony in 1971 then the American people should also know that.

Viewpoint takes the position that a lot of men do things, especially in war, which they regret later in life and that it is better to just put all those demons behind us. Senator Kerry and his party, however, thought they could capitalize on deeds that may turn out to be something the Senator should have been content to bury in the past. Senator Kerry and the Democrats, not the Republicans, made the decision to shine the spotlight on his military record, to contrast it with Bush's, and to urge us to vote for him on the basis of it. They cannot now complain if Americans insist on having the record clarified.