Nine Objections To Christianity

David Wayne at JollyBlogger invites his readers to submit their ten most frequently encountered objections to Christianity. It's an interesting challenge. I can only come up with nine off the top of my head, so if Viewpoint readers, Christians or non-Christians, want to weigh in on this topic feel free to do so via our Feedback Forum.

Here are the nine objections which I've encountered most frequently from non-Christians and which they tend to feel most strongly about. They are also, incidentally, perhaps among the most challenging for a Christian apologist:

1)The difficulty of reconciling suffering with an all powerful, benevolent deity is perhaps the most formidable impediment to belief in God and hence in accepting Christian faith.

2) Christianity, by restricting eternal life only to Christians, is incompatible with a God who allegedly loves all people, and is offensive to those whose deceased loved ones may have been very pious and moral but not Christian. Moreover, it is a belief that few Christians even hold themselves.

3) Christianity is based upon the authority of the New Testament which is historically questionable.

4) Christianity is contingent upon miracles, or at least one miracle, the Resurrection, but belief in miracles is philosophically problematic.

5) Similar to #1, the doctrine of eternal punishment is incompatible with any notion of a just God. Eternal punishment for one's sin, no matter how egregious, is by definition disproportionate to the offense and is therefore unjust.

6) Christians try to impose their morality on others and that, many say, is offensive.

7) Many Reformed Christians hold to a view of predestination that is impossible to reconcile with the notion of human accountability and also with the concept of a just and benevolent God.

8) The Christian creation story is scientifically unsound and the doctrine of original sin is literally incredible.

9) Christianity derives from ancient pagan myths of dying saviors and virgin births. The similarities between these myths and Christianity make it unlikely that Christianity is independent of them.

It might be worthwhile to attempt to tackle some of these objections, if a humble layman might have the impertinence to undertake such a daunting task, in future posts. In fact, Viewpoint has already addressed some of them in past essays. Objection #1, for instance, is discussed here and here, and objection #3 is considered here. If anyone else wishes to take a shot at some of these, either pro or con, please feel welcome.

What the World Needs Now...

More peace, love, and humanistic sentiments from the leftists at The Guardian:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

Let's all sing together: "What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Not just for some, but for everyone...." Even the depraved souls in the editorial offices of The Guardian.

Dems Behaving Badly

Here's video of Lawrence O'Donnell's meltdown on MSNBC's Scarborough Country with Pat Buchanan filling in. Note: If you click on this link you will witness a man lose his sanity right before your eyes. O'Donnell is transmogrified from a calm, reasonable, articulate journalist into a raging, abusive lunatic. It's fun to watch.

If you do visit the site you might think, at first, that you're watching an advertisement for Prozac; or, you might think it's a role-play in a Rhetoric 101 class on how to win a debate when you have no case; or, you might conclude that you're simply watching a liberal just doing what comes naturally. Perhaps it's all of these.

Speaking of Dems behaving badly, the Democratic strategy for election day is crystallizing in the early voting in Florida and in Arizona the thuggery proceeds apace.

A Kerry supporter of our acquaintance, left with nothing much to say when confronted with these reports, rejoined that she's sure that Republicans are employing the same sorts of ugly, fascistic tactics. While we're prepared to entertain that as a logical possibility, of course, we felt the need to point out to her that the only way one can be "sure" of that is to cite examples of it happening. Perhaps it is the case that, somewhere, to some degree, some Republican is acting somewhat like a Democrat, but she couldn't point to an example, and we haven't come across any yet. Perhaps our readers are aware of some.

In any event, Lawrence O'Donnell should be fired after this pathetic performance.

The Hip Hop Debate

Evangelical Outpost directs us to the site of the Hip Hop debate between John Kerry and George Bush. The two contenders meet in an alley and engage in a valiant struggle witnessed only by their closest associates. Don't miss it. It's an historic, an epic, battle between the two men.

VDH on Kerry's Chances

Victor David Hanson offers up a sterling analysis of why John Kerry, despite so many advantages, still seems to lag behind Bush in the polls. Indeed, Hanson all but predicts that Kerry will continue to trail and will lose the election:

There is a good chance that no matter what Kerry says or does in the final two weeks of this election - barring some major catastrophe in Iraq, a presidential gaffe, or massive voting irregularity - he will lose. And he may well take much of the Democrats' remaining control of government down with him. After all, Putin wants Bush, while Arafat prefers Kerry - and that is all we need to know.

Beyond this, Hanson offers six reasons why he believes Kerry will fail to close the gap by election day. It makes for very interesting reading, but whether he's correct or not won't be known for another twelve days.

Wolves and Nuisances

Here's the site for the new Bush ad which is supposed to start running in battleground states today. It's entitled "Wolves".

Wolves are an apt metaphor for the terrorist enemy we're facing around the world. Much better than, say, prostitutes and gamblers and other "nuisances".

It is odd that Senator Kerry would describe the attack on the U.S.S. Cole that took nineteen lives, and the first attack on the World Trade Towers, as mere nuisances. It's very unlikely that the families of the victims think that these horrendous attacks were only nuisances.

Et Tu, John Kerry

Charles Krauthammer advances a startling hypothesis about John Kerry's strategy for regaining the affection of our European allies. Krauthammer argues that either Kerry is just blowing smoke or he's serious about trying to woo the French et al back to our side. If he's serious, which Krauthammer thinks he is, there really is only one way he could persuade them to get on board with us in Iraq and elsewhere:

Think about it: What do the Europeans and the Arab states endlessly rail about in the Middle East? What (outside of Iraq) is the area of most friction with U.S. policy? What single issue most isolates America from the overwhelming majority of countries at the United Nations? The answer is obvious: Israel.

In what currency, therefore, would we pay the rest of the world in exchange for their support in places such as Iraq? The answer is obvious: giving in to them on Israel.

If Krauthammer is correct, this would be the nadir of American history. Unfortunately, it doesn't require much of a stretch of imagination to believe Kerry capable of such a sellout. He demanded it in Vietnam and got it and he has called for it in Iraq as well.

And if he abandons Israel, what logic would prevent him from also abandoning Taiwan or South Korea?

Isn't it about time that the media starts insisting that Kerry reveal to the voters what's contained in those two or three dozen "plans" he claims to have for when he accedes to the presidency?

You can read the reasoning behind Krauthammer's allegations at the site linked above.

There's Something About Mary

The New York Observer has a very funny parody of John Kerry and his reference to Mary Cheney's sexual orientation, which reference he declares with an air of wounded innocence, was made with the purest motives and the deepest respect and admiration for his vict...er, the young lady. He had no idea his totally sincere remarks would be so misconstrued. He certainly had no intention whatsoever of trying to embarrass anyone. Here's the Observer's rendition of what Kerry wanted to say:

"We're all God's children. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was. She's being who she was born as. Which is a lesbian. All of us need to feel comfortable being who we are, even if someone happens to be a lesbian, which is what Dick Cheney's daughter is. Even if a young woman prefers to have sex with other women, like Dick Cheney's daughter does, she should feel comfortable. Being a lesbian. This really underscores the problem with the American health care system. It's not working for the American family. And it's gotten worse under President Bush over the course of the last years. Especially if you're a lesbian, like Dick Cheney's daughter. Let's say you're a lesbian, like Dick Cheney's daughter, and you need to see a doctor because your partner-let's say she's a bull-dyke-say one of her cats bit you. So you're a lesbian with a cat bite-I'm sure at some point in her life, Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, was bitten by another lesbian's cat-maybe they were having a sort of lesbian party, talking about how awful men are, how they want to castrate all men, and one of the bull dyke's cats got overstimulated and lunged at Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, and so Dick Cheney's daughter, being a lesbian with a cat bite, needs to see a doctor. So she and her bull dyke hop in their Subaru, they've got the Melissa Etheridge playing, or those Indigo Girls, as they drive to the doctor, but then they find out that under George Bush's health-care plan, a lesbian like Dick Cheney's daughter will have a hard time being reimbursed, so then you have an angry lesbian on your hands, a steaming mad dyke, not even a cup of chamomile tea is going to calm this lesbian down. Now I respect chamomile tea-I was raised a Catholic, I grew up a Catholic, I was an altar boy, and we probably had some of those pissed-off lesbian types coming to church, though I don't know if Dick Cheney's daughter, the lesbian, goes to church, if she puts on a really nice flannel shirt and goes to church, or if instead she takes part in lesbian, or pagan, rituals-orgies, I guess some people call them-but I'm sure that when she went to the next lesbian ritual, after the cat bite, Dick Cheney's daughter told the other lesbians about the cat bite and how she couldn't get reimbursed by the insurance company-not that she could see their faces, because from what I understand, at these lesbian rituals they all wear hoods of some sort, and there's usually a mandolin or something, music playing, because lesbians like to dance with each other ... and some of them probably look very much like men, now I don't know if Dick Cheney's daughter is one of those mannish type of lesbians, or if she is more the feminine type who enjoys sex with a mannish woman, but as a very gay lesbian, I'm sure Dick Cheney's daughter was wearing the latest lesbian fashions, though presumably she'd have a bandage on the cat bite, a bandage which her bull-dyke lover probably put on, so you've got a room full of very angry lesbians in hoods, a few of them playing the mandolin, or flutes, now my faith affects everything I do and choose, there's a great passage in the Bible that says, 'What does it mean, my brother, to say you have faith if there are no deeds?' Faith without works is dead. And I think everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith. Now I'm not saying that Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, burned a Bible at this ritual-it's possible another of the lesbians, who are friends and probably sex partners of Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, burned the Bible, it was probably dark and hard to tell which of the very angry lesbians tossed the Good Book into the flames. But the first and most important thing is to start creating jobs in America. The jobs the President is creating pay $9,000 less than the jobs we're losing. And this is the first President in 72 years to preside over an economy in America that has lost jobs-1.6 million jobs. Take 5 percent of that, and you've got 80,000 lesbians out of work, very angry lesbians, could be on the brink of a riot, spurred on by Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter, 'cause by now that cat bite is very likely infected. But let me just say to America, I am not proposing a government-run program. That's not what I have-I have Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Senators and Congressman have a wide choice. Americans ought to have it, too. Ask yourselves: Do we really want to live in a country of angry lesbians with untreated puncture wounds, right down the street from you? I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you no."

Okay, Senators Edwards and Kerry, we get the message. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

What the Democrats Have Wrought

Once upon a time there was a man who gazed across a ravine toward the people who lived on the other side and decided he wanted to build a bridge so that he could bring people on both sides together. He announced his intention to undertake this unprecedented attempt at unity, and everyone watched as he set out to do just that. But there were people on the other side who didn't want to be joined with those across the divide, so every time the man laid a new span in the bridge these people pulled it down and tore away part of their side of the chasm making it virtually impossible to reach them.

Then, when the bridge building project finally seemed hopeless, when the gulf between the two sides seemed wider than ever, the saboteurs stood at the edge and taunted the bridge builder with his own promises. You told us, they scoffed, that you would be a uniter not a divider, but we're more divided now than ever. So much for your deceptions and empty promises.

This, of course, is pretty much what has occurred over the last two years in Washington, D.C. When George Bush came to office he tried to build bridges to the other side. He invited Senator Kennedy to write his No Child Left Behind legislation. He brought the Senator to the White House to honor his brother, John F. Kennedy. He tried to bring people together so that the nation would benefit from a government whose parties were able to transcend their differences and do what was best for the American people. He sought to restore civility and mutual respect to our political discourse, but it was not to be.

Senator Kennedy thanked the president for his courtesies by accusing him of the most nefarious crime imaginable, sacrificing young men's lives in the Midlle-East just to enrich his friends in the oil industry. Then other Democrats jumped on the president, blocking the President's nominations to the Federal judiciary, libelling the reputations of good, honest, and highly qualified men and women purely out of partisan self-interest. They frequently and loudly proclaimed that Bush was a liar, that he betrayed the country, that he knew about the 9/11 plot beforehand, that he was another Hitler, that he was a war criminal, a gang leader, that he was a stupid, incompetent, brain dead, buffoon.

The scurrilousness of the accusations grew increasingly worse. No insult was too nasty, too base, too hysterical for the Democrats to employ. They weren't shy about telling whomever was paying attention how much they hated him. Their meanness grew in intensity as Michael Moore released the grossly dishonest Fahrenheit 9/11, and the Democrats found themselves swooning over the man who once called the passengers aboard the hijacked airliners that crashed into the Trade Towers cowardly white people because they didn't overwhelm their attackers like Black passengers would have.

Meanwhile, as the stomping of the president continued, the left encouraged efforts to undermine two thousand years of settled tradition concerning marriage. Anyone who wanted to keep the institution of marriage as it had been for two millenia was branded a hateful homophobe. Those who opposed tinkering with an already fragile, but vitally important institution, were said to be "divisive". President Bush was labelled "an ignorant man", a "divisive figure", because he believes the only way to guarantee the survival of that tradition is to shelter it in the constitution.

The left was relentless also in it's attempts to undermine the morale of our troops in Iraq and greeted every setback with an unseemly satisfaction. They were quick to declare both our efforts there and Bush's leadership in those efforts an unqualified failure. His opponents reflexively distort the situation in that theater in order to make Bush look incompetent. They ridicule his claim that Saddam was trying to build WMDs even though virtually all of them believed themselves that Saddam possessed these arms, and despite the finding of the Duelfer Report that Saddam had a strategy for ending sanctions and restarting his WMD program.

Then came the election campaign and the hysteria and acidulousness of the left were ratcheted up several notches. The MSM suppressed reports on the economy and on the war that would favor Bush and hurt Kerry and gleefully ran any story they could find that made Bush look weak, confused, or malicious. NBC's The Today Show gave Kitty Kelly three days to promote her veridically-challenged smear of the Bush family, but refused the Swift Boat vets even a single interview. CBS went so far as to run a story that made Bush look like he had refused orders during his National Guard service based upon documents that turned out to be an obvious fraud. The political news director at ABC put out a memo which essentially instructs his staff to slant their coverage toward Kerry. Chris Matthews at MSNBC plays Hardball with Bush supporters and throws Batting Practice to the Kerry folks.

The MSM grills Bush with tough questions every chance they get, distorting his record whenever they can, criticizing and blaming him for everything from 9/11 to the shortage of flu vaccine, but they never ask Kerry anything that might reveal his flaws. Never has he been asked why he won't release his records from his Vietnam service, for example, nor has he ever been asked what there is in his twenty year Senate career that he thinks qualifies him to be president, or what there is in that record that gives the voters grounds for thinking he can provide the leadership he assures us he will provide.

Now the President is being accused of having a secret plan to cut social security benefits to retirees in a patently cruel attempt to play on the insecurities and fears of the elderly and to drive a wedge between them and George Bush.

Desperate to solidify their African-American base, the Democrats have resurrected the old canard that Bush has another secret plan to disenfranchise Black voters. Remember Florida in 2000, they ask, when hundreds, maybe thousands of black votes were disallowed? They never mention that there were even more white votes which were rejected, and the reason they were was because the voters were ineligible, many of them being felons. Nevertheless, televison ads are appearing which show footage from the 1960s of Blacks being knocked down by fire hoses with the clear implication that this is the sort of thing African-Americans can expect in a second Bush term.

Hoping to discredit the president among those anxious for the promise of stem cell research to cure some human afflictions, they completely misrepresent the president's position on stem cells, making him appear either cruel or stupid or both, and they misrepresent as well the potential for success that stem cells hold. Senator Edwards has even promised that if John Kerry is elected, parapalegics and quadrapalegics will get up out of their wheelchairs and walk, perhaps the most despicable political promise ever made anywhere by anyone in the history of American politics.

On top of this have come allegations of yet another secret Bush plan, this one to reinstate the draft, preying upon the fears of millions of young people and their parents. In fact, the only people trying to reinstate the draft are Democrats in both the House and the Senate. The bills to resume a draft were introduced by Democrats, and only Democrats voted in favor of them. The most likely party to reinstate the draft is, in fact, the Democratic party, since it is only Democrats who are making the case for one.

Following close upon these calumnies are news stories about voter fraud in heavily Democratic districts and threats to litigate the election results, tying them up in courts, perhaps indefinitely, if Kerry doesn't win.

Having done all this and more, having sundered every bond of good will and decency, the Democrats now stand before the nation and have the insolence to blame George Bush for having divided us. They taunt him with his own promise to be a uniter not a divider, and deride him for having failed to achieve that which they themselves have made impossible.

Through this entire storm of invective neither Bush nor any of his team have answered in kind. He has kept his word about trying to change the tone of discourse in Washington despite the disgusting viciousness of his political opponents' slanders and utter lack of moral restraint. There is an ugliness and depravity in the rhetoric and tactics of the political left which is symptomatic of a sickness of the soul. There's been nothing remotely comparable to it on the Republican side of this campaign. President Bush has kept faith with his promise. He did what he could do. His honor and dignity are intact and that of the Democrats is in tatters.

They may win the White House, but it will be a Pyhrric victory if they do. They've done more in this election to destroy the public's faith in our political system than Nixon ever did with the Watergate scandal. They have injected so much poison into the process that, should they win in November, our political discourse and the public's trust may not recover for a generation, if ever.

This matters not at all to the left. Like a cocaine addict who will do or say anything, no matter how degrading or self-destructive, in order to satisfy her addiction to the narcotic, the Democrats are prepared to do whatever it takes, even if it means destroying the careers and reputations of anyone who stands in their way, in order to sate their lust for the narcotic of political power. It would be a travesty of calamitous proportions if the majority of voters in this country chose to reward this sordid record by putting these people in the White House.

Dead Or Alive?

Gregory Djerejian at The Belgravia Dispatch joins the growing number of analysts who are concluding that Osama's body lies moldering on some Afghanistan mountainside. After an examination of the evidence, Djerejian sums it up with this:

Folks, bottom line: we have to go all the way back to December 26th 2001 to see a video of UBL that really seems to get close to passing a smell test evidencing that's he actually, you know, alive (and he didn't look too smashing in it either).

Now, does anyone seriously believe that UBL wouldn't, if he were alive, be doing his very damnedest to release a tape, soonest, rubbing Bush's nose in it for not having caught him--dead or alive? Just as a little pre-election present, say, maybe to give the opposition a little assist in hyping the disingenous Tora Bora meme? Doubtless, he would, no? Unless, of course, he's dead. Which, I'm beginning to feel pretty comfortable concluding, may well be the happy reality as we sit here today.

Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

See How They Love One Another

Evangelical Outpost directs us to a Christian lady by the name of Jane Stillwater who interprets Jesus' injunction to love one another in a most peculiar fashion. The gracious Ms Stillwater writes the following at her blog:

"Praise the Lord and pass the information!" Did you know that in the undecided states, only 26 electoral votes are up for grabs - while the red states supposedly have a lock on 228 votes.

Are we going to let George Bush get away with that? Having almost half of our nation living in heathen darkness, believing un-holy lies and practicing baby-killing? That's just plain un-Christian!

Don't send me to some swing state to persuade undecided voters. Send me to Alabama! Send me to Texas! They need me more. Their eternal souls are in danger. Being a God-fearing Christian, it's the least that I can do.

Undecided voters aren't causing our economy to crash, aren't putting us in mortal danger from terrorists, aren't responsible for the deadly typhoid plague in Iraq, aren't sponsoring genocide in Darfur, aren't threatening our children's future, aren't trampling on our flag and Constitution and aren't spitting on the teachings of our Lord Jesus. The red state voters are.

Send me to Georgia! Send me to Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Utah! I'll preach fire and brimstone to those heathens. "In the future, if you want to become patriotic Christians, you gotta start honoring Jesus, stop voting for those White House pagans and their drive-by-shooting foreign policies that are endangering our safety - and jail George Bush for his attacks on our freedom, our liberty, our safety and our Constitution!"

Red state heathens, it's time to step up to the rail and come to Jesus!

What would Jesus do? Does "Thou shalt not kill" sound familiar? And how about "Love thy neighbor" too.

Jesus was the ultimate Brave Man. Definitely braver than you and me. Always remember that Our Lord was brave enough to face down a terrible, painful and lonely death rather than deny his principles and resort to violence and/or dirty tricks. Did you see Jesus in the court of Pilate begging for his life? Did you hear Him wetting His pants and crying, "Oh spare me! Spare me! Kill somebody else!" Or did you see Special Forces op Jesus in his camo toga out murdering civilians in the Roman Green Zone? If He had done that, He would not have been the Son of God. He would have been just one more faceless "Bring it on!" demagogue in an endless historical parade of bullies, pimps and thugs. And we today would be worshiping some pantheon of gangster punks instead of Him.

If the red states elect George Bush this year, they also need to think about this: Who will they elect in 2008? Another demagogue just like him? And then another and another -- until finally one of them just calls an end to the election charade altogether. That's just plain SINFUL.

And if Americans are clambering for demagogues NOW, how will they act when there is no more oil? Will we then just descend into barbariosity altogether? Our great-grandparents managed to live good Christian lives without oil - and without killing babies for it either! America, we need to make some serious choices here. What would Jesus do?

Need more fire and brimstone to persuade you? Here it is! "Vote for that lying baby-killer George Bush again, red state guys, and you will surely go to Hell!" Vote for Kerry-Edwards and you may POSSIBLY stand a chance of redemption.

Whoever hid Ms Stillwater's meds please return them to her this instant.

Ashley's Story

Here's a link to a new pro-Bush ad called Ashley's Story. It's a powerful piece. You might send it to some undecided voter if you know any such people.

One thought that impressed itself upon me as I watched it was how different it is in tone from so much of the Democratic stuff out there. The Kerry ads, or at least many of them, are trying to scare the bejabbers out of old folks, African-Americans, and young men with complete fabrications about social security, vote suppression, and the draft.

This ad doesn't resort to calumny or lies, it just shows George Bush as the kind of man one hopes our president would be. Watch the ad and try to imagine John Kerry doing this.

Thanks to Power Line for the tip.

The Terrorists' Candidate

Vladimir Putin notes that the terrorists have a definite preference as to who they want to see elected in November:

"I consider the activities of terrorists in Iraq are not as much aimed at coalition forces but more personally against President Bush," Putin said at a news conference after a regional summit in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.

"International terrorism has as its goal to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," he said. "If they achieve that goal, then that will give international terrorism a new impulse and extra power."

Pretty scary, especially when we reflect that this would make absolutely no difference to most of those who plan to vote for Mr. Kerry in November.

Senator Kerry's Record

George Bush claims that Senator Kerry, in twenty years of service to the taxpayers of Massachusetts and the nation, has authored only five bills which became law. Kerry testily replies that he has fifty six laws to his credit. Fact Check.org has done the heavy lifting and lets us know what's what.

Evidently, when Bush said Kerry passed five bills, he was counting only those measures Kerry authored which passed the Senate, the House, were signed by the president, and became law. That's technically accurate, but it omits six other pieces of Kerry legislation that have become law.

Kerry's twenty years in the Senate have, therefore, yielded the following legislative accomplishments:

A grant to fund small businesses run by women, a bill to name a federal building in Massachussetts after a WWII hero, a measure to limit the accidental taking of dolphins during commercial fishing operations, another to promote better understanding of coastal resources, and a bill to grant a visa and admission to the U.S. to one Kil Joon Yu Callahan.

The Bush campaign omitted mention of two other bills authored by Kerry which passed the Senate and later became law in a slightly different form approved by the House, under the same titles and mostly same substance. (This occurs when House and Senate versions differ so slightly that one house adopts the other's version rather than go to the trouble of a House-Senate conference to work out a compromise.) These were a bill to award Jackie Robinson a Congressional gold medal (posthumously), and another to increase research grants for small businesses.

Finally, there four "joint resolutions" that are not technically "bills" but which have the same force when passed by both houses and are signed into law by the president. All four created national events.

A resolution to make the week of Oct. 22 - Oct. 28, 1989 "World Population Awareness Week"; a resolution to renew "World Population Awareness Week" for 1991; a resolution to make Nov. 13, 1992 "Vietnam Veterans Memorial 10th Anniversary Day"; and a resolution to make Sept. 18, 1992 "National POW/MIA Recognition Day."

Even giving Kerry credit for eleven measures which became law rather than the five the president referred to his record amounts to a fraction more than one half piece of legislation per year served. The mediocrity of the accomplishment is matched only by the mediocrity of the laws themselves. It's little wonder that the Senator chose not to mention this lackluster narrative in his nomination acceptance speech.

Visit the Fact Check.org link above to see how Mr. Kerry arrived at the number fifty six. It reveals something dismaying about Senator Kerry's standard for legislative accomplishment. It's also a bit of a hoot.

What is there in the above tabulation that might lead anyone to believe that Senator Kerry has the qualifications to lead the United States through the difficult struggles that lie ahead? The times call for a leader, one who has demonstrated that he has what it takes to accomplish something significant. Viewpoint doesn't find much in the Kerry record in which to take comfort. In fact, it finds nothing in which to take comfort.

In Memorium: Jacques Derrida

Christianity Today's Books and Culture Corner has a eulogy to Jacques Derrida written by James Smith, associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College.

Smith seems to tell us more about himself than he does about Derrida, but there is one paragraph which reveals something important of the personal qualities of the man:

When I last saw Derrida, I was presenting a paper at the American Academy of Religion - a fairly blistering critique of his notion of hope, and Derrida was in the audience. We didn't have a chance to discuss the paper because he had to hurry off to a book-signing (he was such a rock star). While I stand by the critique, I'm disappointed we didn't have that conversation, and more disappointed by the asymmetry of my brashness and Derrida's graciousness. For what I always found most disarming about this intellectual giant was his personal humility-a kenotic humility that could put his Christian critics to shame. I've been plagued by a nagging sense that Derrida was somewhat hurt by the critique, and I had been hoping that Derrida: Live Theory could be a sign to him of my profound debts and respect.

Reading this paragraph makes one want to read more of Derrida, even if only out of admiration for one who can be so exalted by the academic establishment and yet so humble. There is something deeply attractive about the confluence of those two qualities.

The Senator's God-Talk

Jonah Goldberg has a good fix on Kerry's religious talk. The excerpts begin with a quote from Senator Kerry:

"I think that everything you do in public life has to be guided by your faith, affected by your faith, but without transferring it in any official way to other people," Kerry explained repeatedly, usually prompted by the abortion issue. "I believe that I can't legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn't share that article of faith."

What I [Goldberg] object to is this: While Kerry says he's opposed to "legislating" his faith on abortion, he insists that he's in favor of legislating his faith elsewhere. He said more than once Wednesday night, and plenty of times on the stump, that faith must be backed up by deeds. His religious faith, he says, is "why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith."

So, let me get this straight. Fighting for the environment, equality, and education - in the name of God - is righteously doing the Lord's work, but abortion must be kept legal because otherwise we'd be legislating religion?

It seems to me that you shouldn't pick and choose at all. You shouldn't infringe on, say, the property rights of citizens out of religious convictions about a clean environment and then conveniently fall back on the argument that it would be outrageous to invoke religion when it comes to abortion. Either your faith informs your views or it doesn't.

I say you shouldn't pick and choose, but I understand that sometimes you have to - but in completely the opposite way John Kerry picks and chooses. Kerry invokes God's guidance on the little stuff, the easy stuff, the boilerplate. He turns his back to God on the big issue, abortion (and, with a wink, gay marriage).

It seems to me this is exactly backwards. God doesn't have a position on the minimum wage or Superfund, so politicians shouldn't feel the need to consult Him about that stuff. It's only on the grave fundamental questions in politics that God should speak to one's conscience. Thomas More didn't put his life on the line about how Henry VIII handled crop rotation.

And that's what I find a little galling about all of Kerry's God talk. Beyond the naked pandering of it, it's morally and religiously empty. He may talk about deeds backing up faith, but where his faith is unambiguous he wants no part of it. When it comes to the tough issues, what he really seems to want is grace on the cheap. It's as More said: "If honor were profitable, everybody would be honorable."

Kerry has had much to say about matters of faith lately, but he seems distinctly uncomfortable when he has to do so, and never goes deeper than vague references to the "Almighty". He gives the impression of a man just going through the motions because he knows it's expected of him. Doubtless he'd much rather be talking about something else and wouldn't be speaking of religious matters at all if there weren't votes out there to be mined.

Speaking of Senator Kerry and religion, a PowerLine reader asks: "Why is it that when President Bush goes to church it is to worship and when Senator Kerry goes to church it is to campaign? The Democrats are the ones hollering constantly about separation of church and state and they are the only ones on the national ticket attending church to campaign."

Yes, and they do it with great panache. John Kerry has probably been in church more in the last six weeks than he has in the last six months, at least if his church attendance is anything like his Senate attendance. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Democrats regularly use churches as political platforms. As Power Line notes: Is it legal? No. And a Republican who did it would be in trouble. Or, rather, the church where he campaigned would be.

Church/State separation Democrat style means that Democrats can use churches to preach politics, but Republicans can only use them for worship.

Pat Buchanan Is Coming Home, Sort of

Pat Buchanan makes news with his endorsement for president. He is scathing in his condemnation of the Iraq war and of the neo-conservatives surrounding Bush, but he is completely contemptuous of John Kerry. Some excerpts:

... in the contest between Bush and Kerry, I am compelled to endorse the president of the United States. Why? Because, while Bush and Kerry are both wrong on Iraq, Sharon, NAFTA, the WTO, open borders, affirmative action, amnesty, free trade, foreign aid, and Big Government, Bush is right on taxes, judges, sovereignty, and values. Kerry is right on nothing.

The only compelling argument for endorsing Kerry is to punish Bush for Iraq. But why should Kerry be rewarded? He voted to hand Bush a blank check for war. Though he calls Iraq a "colossal" error, "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," he has said he would - even had he known Saddam had no role in 9/11 and no WMD - vote the same way today. This is the Richard Perle position.

Assuredly, a president who plunged us into an unnecessary and ruinous war must be held accountable. And if Bush loses, Iraq will have been his undoing. But a vote for Kerry is more than just a vote to punish Bush. It is a vote to punish America.

There is a final reason I support George W. Bush. A presidential election is a Hatfield-McCoy thing, a tribal affair. No matter the quarrels inside the family, when the shooting starts, you come home to your own. When the Redcoats approached New Orleans to sunder the Union and Jackson was stacking cotton bales and calling for help from any quarter, the pirate Lafitte wrote to the governor of Louisiana to ask permission to fight alongside his old countrymen. "The Black Sheep wants to come home," Lafitte pleaded.

It's time to come home.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It really is an outstanding precis of the conservative case against the Bush administration and even more against John Kerry.

If the Democrats lose it'll be largely because no one has a reason to vote for John Kerry. He's a perfect denotation of the term "empty suit". The majority of voters who pull the lever for Kerry wish only to vote against George Bush. Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example of this phenomenon on the other side of the ballot that we've seen emerge thus far.

Pollster Hankey Pankey

For people interested in such things this site gives an interesting graphical analysis of poll results over the last two months. The author, Steven den Beste, concludes that the only explanation for the pattern of results is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the election in Kerry's favor. He also believes the attempt has failed.

Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

Is UBL Dead?

Froggy Ruminations, a blog written by a former navy SEAL, offers this line of reasoning for believing that Usama bin Laden is currently composting in the Afghanistan mountains:

Usama bin Laden is Dead

You hadn't heard? Well, I'm not breaking news, President Bush knows damn well that UBL has been dead for quite some time. But why would Bush keep it to himself? If he were to disclose his knowledge that UBL is dead he would blow John Kerry's doors off in the election, and yet he remains silent. Why?

Maybe you're wondering how I know he's dead. Perhaps one of my SEAL buddies let me in on the secret? NO. I know because a publicity whore and grandstanding scumbag like UBL could not possibly resist the multitude of opportunites to inspire his cult members. His number 1, Zwahiri, has appeared on video or audio broadcasts every few months since 9/11. UBL has not been heard from since Tora Bora despite developments in the GWOT in Afghanistan and Iraq that make it unthinkable for him to have remained silent. Not to mention successful attacks in Bali, Madrid, Turkey, and Jakarta to name a few that remain unremarked upon by UBL. The invasion and occupation of an Islamic state by the US and not a word. Elections held for the first time in Afghan history, and he had nothing to say about it in the lead up.

AQ tried once early on to air a tape that never mentioned key developments in the Afghan campaign and was quickly discredited as an attempt to put one over on his followers by airing a previous recording. Zwahiri decided that it was better to just pretend that UBL was alive because there was no plausible martyr story to tell. UBL went out running for his life like a coward. He is dead. His remains are turds shat by scavenging animals in the mountains of Afghanistan blown by the wind and stomped on by US troops.

By why not make it public? After all, this is the one thing that could ensure the President's re-election. Have you noticed how coy DOD officials and high ranking officers are when the question is posed? They know. They certainly have intelligence to this effect. Of course, the President could have instructed subordinates to start saying that intel indicates UBL is dead. This would have put pressure on him to prove otherwise by issuing a statement which he is clearly unable to make. This process could have started 6 months ago, and if UBL did not answer, it would in effect prove the case. But it didn't happen. Why not?

Because the President knows that making UBL a martyr would serve to further inspire his minions, and he realizes that preventing this from happening is more important than his re-election. Instead, UBL remains forever silent even as his recruits yearn to hear his voice. Eventually these cultists will realize themselves that UBL went out like a punk, not a martyr and that the AQ head shed has been lying to them for years. That realization combined with US combat boots knocking their teeth down their throats will go a long way to beating this cult into submission. But it is important to recognize that the President's committment to killing terrorists supercedes his committment to his own re-election. I'm sure he hopes that the American people will come to this conclusion on their own and vote for him anyway, but it is quite a risk to take in the ultimate ME situation.

This kind of integrity and commitment stands in sharp contrast to his opponent. Kerry has proved to be a Blue Falcon (sic), a traitor, a louse, a shameless opportunist, and a lazy bureaucrat who pads his resume. Kerry is a smart guy too, and he realizes what is going on. But it hasn't stopped him from trying to bait the President into abandoning a critical propaganda victory in the GWOT by incessantly peddling his Tora Bora "outsourcing" charge in all three debates. He knows that the President will not respond to this charge so he is free to make it. Just like the Cheney lesbian scheme, this is a coordinated hatchet job, but this is on an issue that Kerry knows the President must choose to either defend the SOF troops that got the job done or remain silent. To his personal credit he never took the bait, but to his professional detriment he must let an unanswered charge linger. Do you have that kind of discipline? Especially in crunchtime? I don't know if I do, and I'll be happy to never have to find out.

President Bush, meanwhile, has just continued to keep the pressure on the terrorists, get us out of a recession, protect the homeland, and generally put the country's interests ahead of his own. He deserves your vote.

Viewpoint offers a second to the motion.

Cold, Hard, Electoral College Facts

No Left Turns offers a good analysis of the electoral college numbers and why they break in the President's favor:

Steve Hayward notes the Riley Poll found that Bush is leading among likely voters in Oregon 48-43% (a month ago in a Riley poll it was Bush 46-45%) and Oregon may well be shaky for Kerry. Gore won Oregon by only 3,000 votes in 2000. Steve may well be right and this leads to a small thought.

Along with Oregon keep your eye on the following states won by Gore in 2000: Wisconsin (by circa 5,000 votes), Iowa (by 4,000 votes), and New Mexico (by 400 votes). The short of it is that should Kerry lose any one of these states, he can't be elected because there is no serious movement in his direction in any state that Bush won in 2000! To repeat what you already know: Kerry has to take every state Gore took plus add one that Bush won.

For a while the Kerry campaign thought they had a chance to take Missouri (no) or North Carolina (no) or maybe even Lousiana (no). Although they are pretending that they have a chance in Nevada and Colorado, I don't see it. Now they are in the position of having to struggle just to keep what Gore had!

This is what the elite media means when they say that the battleground states have shrunk to about eight or nine; Kerry's opportunities are progressively more limited. Bush is ahead in most polls in Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Mexico (and now Oregon?). It is not yet a serious argument for Democrats (or NBC or CNN) to make that the race is so close in Colorado or Nevada or Ohio that Kerry has a serious chance. Bush leads in all three (although Zogby shows Kerry up by one point in Nevada, and there is a bit of variation of polls in Ohio).

Please note the latest poll from New Jersey: the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll finds Kerry leading 44-42% among decided voters, but "when leaners are included in the race" it is 46-46%. This explains why Bush is heading to New Jersey (and why is he going to Michigan, I wonder?).

How would I advise Kerry, given all this? Plant yourself in Ohio for the next two weeks, it's your only shot (and yet it may not be enough even if you take Ohio). If Bush takes Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Oregon (7) and--maybe--even New Jersey (15) for a total of 44 electoral votes, it doesn't matter if Kerry takes Ohio (or Bush could just replace the 20 electoral votes lost with Ohio with Wisonsin (10), Iowa (7), and New Mexico (5).

There is too much territory for Kerry to cover and he will not be able to do it. It doesn't matter how much CBS and the others try to cover this up. Take a look at the useful map with the latest state polls at Tripias and all the useful information at Realclear politics.

In one sense the election is close, but in the only sense that counts it's an uphill struggle for Senator Kerry. The real problem will be if the election is close in several states like it was in 2000. If it is, the results of the election will not be known for weeks as we are put through counts, recounts, claims of fraud, and all manner of lawsuits. Let's hope it's not close.

In the Name of Justice

Blogger Derek Melleby relates the following encounter with a friend:

Recently I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine who is working on his Ph.D. in religion from Temple. Currently he is working on focusing his dissertation topic and much of his reading and thinking has been around democracy and religion. What is interesting to him (and other writers in this field) is how nations become "religions." To illustrate this he asks students in his undergraduate classes if they think people should kill others, or go to war in the name of Jesus. In other words, should Christians attempt to conquer the world, by violent force, for Christ? All of the students say "no," we shouldn't kill others in the name of any religion, particularly in the name of Jesus. But then he asks, "should we kill, go to war, in the name of democracy?" Or, in the name of America? Why is it that it is easy to say "no" to killing in the name of Jesus, but harder to say no to killing in the name of a political ideal, or a country? I know the question is simplistic, and doesn't do justice to all of the angles when thinking about war from a Christian perspective, but it does raise interesting questions about how we understand our faith in Christ, and our relationship to America.

Derek raises the question but leaves it for his readers to answer. He's correct that the question is simplistic and doesn't directly relate to the conflicts in which we find ourselves engaged as a nation. Nevertheless, to the extent that there are Christians who really would find one question harder to answer than the other, it should be addressed.

The short answer to the query is that we should never go to war "in the name of" Democracy or America. We should, however, be prepared to go to war for Justice. Justice may entail defending ourselves and our families, or it may entail defending others who are threatened and oppressed and who live in fear and deprivation.

Justice is a necessary condition for going to war, but it may not be a sufficient condition. There may be times when a war is justified but not wise. If, for instance, success is doubtful then, even though there might be just cause for waging war, actually doing so may be unwise.

The Bible, which is the Christian's guide to faith and morality, does not proscribe war. It calls evil the motives for which most wars are fought: avarice and the lust for power and blood. The protests against the Iraq war often tried to focus on this point. The protestors argued that we were going to war to slake our greed for oil, a claim which is absurd on its face. If it were oil we wanted we could've invaded Saudi Arabia or Kuwait with a lot less trouble. The Bible repeatedly calls upon us to do justice in the world, and there may be circumstances in which doing justice entails the use of deadly force. In such cases war may be a Biblically and morally legitimate option.

The question posed by opponents of the Iraq war - if invading Iraq was justified why didn't we invade Iran or North Korea which are also threats to peace - is both disingenuous and foolish. Disingenuous because the critic knows that if invading Iraq was justified then whether we invade other countries has nothing to do with the rightness of invading Iraq, and foolish because it demands that we do everything all at once.

Invading Iraq was both justified and wise. It delivered 25 million people from a most brutal oppression, it eliminated a major abettor of terrorism and a future threat to peace in the region and the world. It was wise in the same way it would have been wise to have acted preemptively against Hitler before 1938, rather than waiting until he had amassed the strongest military on the continent. Moreover, by attacking Iraq and disposing of the most powerful army in the Arab Middle East in a matter of weeks other countries, such as Libya, which might be considering emulating Saddam's example of pursuing WMD were put on notice that they would do well to reconsider.

There is something of a myth circulating among people who talk about these issues that war should always be a last resort. The truth is that war must never be a last resort. The last resort is to surrender or to do nothing that is effective in relieving an injustice. Making war a last resort is code for never making war at all. Those who say, as Senator Kerry has in the current campaign, that George Bush did not make war a last resort are really saying that as long as the other side is willing to "negotiate", as long as there is a glimmer of hope that they are prepared to concede here or there, as long as they haven't actually attacked us, as long as we can't prove they're going to attack us, as long as .... but this is to keep putting off ending a threat until the other side is so powerful that he makes ending it impossible. It is precisely the lesson Neville Chamberlain learned in the 1930s, and as the Duelfer Report makes clear, it was Saddam's strategy throughout the last thirteen years.

No, we should never fight a war in the name of "Democracy" or in the name of "America", but we should be prepared to fight in the name of Justice. Pacifists argue that war is by its nature inherently unjust, but it is hard to see how this could be so. How is it unjust to rescue people from evil? If, in the course of rescuing a nation, innocent people are accidentally killed does that tragic fact make the rescue of the nation unjust? Were the passengers aboard the hijacked plane which crashed in Pennsylvania wrong to use force, perhaps even deadly force, certainly force which resulted in the deaths of innocent passengers, to save the intended victims in Washington, D.C.?

The pacifist argues that war violates the principle of loving one's enemies, since it entails the deliberate killing of those enemies, but love for one's enemies must be tempered with love for all people. With deep respect for those who consider themselves pacifists and who strive to understand the Bible's teaching on war and peace, it must be said that pacifism is not always an expression of Christian love.

It is not love to see, as in Iraq, your fellow man living in fear, having his children tortured in front of his very eyes, being forced to watch his daughters scream in horror as they are being raped and horribly abused, watching helplessly as his children starve because the oppressors won't let them have food, and ultimately finding himself being tortured and murdered - it's not love to see all this and refuse to do anything more to alleviate the awful suffering of these people after peaceful attempts to end it have met with failure. To be able to end the horror through force, but to refuse to do so because it is believed that it is wrong to kill the people who are responsible for it, is perverse. To be able to end it and to refuse is the exact opposite of love.

What, one wonders, would be the pacifist response to a Beslan here in the United States? Would the pacifist counsel that we negotiate endlessly while the hostage children are delirious with thirst? And when the negotiations come to naught, what then? Give the terrorists whatever they want? Refuse to yield to their demands and stand by and watch as they murder our terrified children one at a time? Do nothing because we don't want to be responsible for the deaths of the terrorists and because the use of deadly force might also inadvertently cause the deaths of some of the children?

There are times in the course of events when the demands of justice and compassion, honor and prudence, come together and make the use of force both necessary and right. God grant us the wisdom to recognize when force is justified and wise, and when it is not.

Is <i>Rap Artist </i> An Oxymoron?

A rap artist, a person named KRS-One, finds much to be satisfied about in the fall of the Twin Towers. Evidently he was once turned away by security guards there for talking and dressing like, well, like a rap artist, and now justice has been served. Three thousand people paid with their lives for the affront. Or something like that. Here's the story:

If Osama bin Laden ever buys a rap album, he'll probably start with a CD by KRS-One. The hip-hop anarchist has declared his solidarity with al-Qaida by asserting that he and other African-Americans "cheered when 9-11 happened," reports the New York Daily News.

The rapper, real name Kris Parker, defiled the memory of those who died in the terrorist attacks as he spouted off at a recent New Yorker Festival panel discussion.

"I say that proudly," the Boogie Down Productions founder went on, insisting that, before the attack, security guards kept Blacks out of the World Trade Center "because of the way we talk and dress. "So when the planes hit the building, we were like, 'Mmmm - justice.'"

The atrocity of 9-11 "doesn't affect us the hip-hop community," he said. "9-11 happened to them, not us," he added, explaining that by "them" he meant "the rich ... those who are oppressing us. RCA or BMG, Universal, the radio stations."

Parker also sneered at efforts by other rappers to get young people to vote. "Voting in a corrupt society adds more corruption," he added. "America has to commit suicide if the world is to be a better place."

Having availed himself of his first amendment right to sound like an moron as well as dress the part, KRS has evidently taken umbrage again at the way the story was reported.

He offers a resounding non-rebuttal here. The fellow claims in his reply to be a philosopher and a keen observer of social events. Viewpoint has no doubt that as a thinker he's a fine rap lyricist.

Profiles in Shamelessness

Charles Krauthammer has commentary on the utter dishonesty of the Kerry/Edwards exploitation of the stem cell issue, and John Edwards' shameless promise to heal paralysis victims if he and John Kerry are elected. Krauthammer, who has himself been confined to a wheel chair since he was a medical student, finds the Democrats' pandering on this issue completely repugnant. Some excerpts from Krauthammer's column:

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.

The implication that Christopher Reeve was prevented from getting out of his wheelchair by the Bush stem cell policies is a travesty.

George Bush is the first president to approve federal funding for stem cell research. There are 22 lines of stem cells now available, up from one just two years ago. As Leon Kass, head of the President's Council on Bioethics, has written, there are 3,500 shipments of stem cells waiting for anybody who wants them.

Edwards and Kerry constantly talk of a Bush "ban" on stem cell research. This is false. There is no ban. You want to study stem cells? You get them from the companies that have the cells and apply to the National Institutes of Health for the federal funding.

In his Aug. 7 radio address to the nation, Kerry referred not once but four times to the "ban" on stem cell research instituted by Bush. At the time, Reeve was alive, so not available for posthumous exploitation. But Ronald Reagan was available, having recently died of Alzheimer's.

So what does Kerry do? He begins his radio address with the disgraceful claim that the stem cell "ban" is standing in the way of an Alzheimer's cure.

This is an outright lie.

Krauthammer closes his column with these words: "There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected."

Ditto that for John Kerry.

The Kerry Gaffe

Hugh Hewitt doesn't seem ready to let go of the Kerry remark about Mary Cheney's sexual orientation any time soon.

Personally, although the statement seemed to have been thoughtless and gratuitous (We wonder how Kerry would've felt had someone chosen to publically comment on his daughter's choice of a totally transparent dress at a recent soiree), we'd be willing to give the Senator the benefit of the doubt that he had no malicious intent.

We would, that is, if it weren't for the fact that Kerry no doubt knows dozens of public figures in his own party that he could have used as examples, but he choose someone who is intimately related to the opposition (Hmmm). We would be willing to give Senator Kerry the benefit of the doubt if it weren't for the fact that John Edwards pulled the same stunt in his debate with Dick Cheney, and if it weren't for the fact that Mary Beth Cahill declared Mary Cheney's sexual orientation to be "fair game" (What's next, "open season"?), and if Kerry himself had had the grace to offer a sincere apology for having precipitated such a misunderstanding.

So far from getting an apology, what we got from Mrs. Edwards was a totally graceless comment that Lynne Cheney's pique at Kerry's remark shows her to be ashamed of her daughter. This crass statement by Mrs. Edwards is, in our opinion, even worse than Kerry's original blunder, assuming that Kerry's original blunder was indeed a blunder and not a calculated and cynical attempt to discredit the Bush/Cheney ticket by announcing to the world, or that part of it that may have been unaware, that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter.

The Flu Vaccine Shortage

The Democrats have been quick to accuse the Bush administration of dropping the ball on the matter of flu vaccine supply, but this is an example of political opportunism masquerading as profound concern for human welfare.

The available supply was cut in half because that portion of it produced in England was found to be contaminated by a bacterium. This raises the question, of course, of why we have to rely on foreign manufacturers to supply our vaccine in the first place. The answer is that over-regulation by the FDA and the fear of litigation have made domestic production unprofitable. In 1988 there were twenty five companies in the United States producing vaccines. Today there are only two. The rest weren't able to make enough money to cover the cost of insurance and R & D, so they decided to get out of the vaccine business altogether, and we were forced to seek our vaccines abroad. As a result, possibly thousands of people, perhaps many of them children, will die this winter because there isn't enough medicine with which to innoculate them against the flu. It's a good illustration of how government screws everything up when it tries to control too much.

Another problem is that demand for flu shots fluctuates from year to year as public interest waxes and wanes. Last season brought huge demand for a flu shot; the year before saw little interest. But flu shots have to be made six to eight months in advance, so the manufacturers must rely on projections which puts them at risk of creating far more vaccine than there is demand for. Since they can't store it, whatever they can't sell is a total loss. Companies often have to discard millions of doses a year.

Yet a third problem is that the government has become the most important purchaser of vaccines and now controls the market. This is because public health agencies have stepped into the market to help the poor by providing low-cost vaccinations. While this sounds like a laudable goal, the "public customer" has come to dominate the market. This has lowered prices for these medications.

With prices low, the risks associated with vaccine manufacture have become relatively more important. Vaccine manufacturers continue to be sued in vaccine-related lawsuits. Over the past 15 years, such litigation has chased several companies out of the vaccine business altogether.

What we need is more companies making vaccines in the United States. That means it has to be more profitable with less liability risk and fewer economic restraints. These important medicines save thousands of lives each year. To burden the manufacturers with onerous pathways to regulatory approval, unrealistic standards and exorbitant and unreasonable legal judgments, and to depress profits and innovation with price controls, is to cheat the American people.

It's hard to see how the Bush administration, which advocates all of these measures, can be fairly held responsible for this year's vaccine shortage, but it's not hard to see that an administration in thrall to trial lawyers and "big government" regulation of industry will be a major part of the problem, not part of the solution. John Edwards, who, as a lawyer, has enriched himself by bringing suit against medical practitioners, and his running mate, John Kerry, have consistently opposed measures that would effect genuine tort reform and are also strong advocates of government regulation. Despite Senator Edwards' claim the other day to possess supernatural powers of healing, both his and Kerry's records give the beleaguered flu sufferer little hope of any future relief.

<i>Viewpoint's</i> Bias

A friend writes to chide us for Viewpoint's partiality to George Bush (See Get Tougher On Bush on the feedback page) and for our reluctance to be as critical of his shortcomings as we are of Senator Kerry's. His concern is well-taken, not only because he's a very bright, reasonable, and honest guy, and not only because he has written a very thoughtful piece, but also because he happens in this instance to be correct. Viewpoint has indeed been on Bush's side in the current campaign and we have withheld criticism of the President while trying to make the case that Senator Kerry lacks the most important qualities we want our president to possess.

It might be helpful to explain why we don't adopt a more neutral stance. My brother Bill and I started Viewpoint last May for several reasons. One was that we felt that our culture was becoming increasingly secularized, even to the point of being hostile toward the Christian faith. There is a widely accepted belief in the Western world to the effect that religion is outmoded and obsolete; that it is nothing but myth and superstition; that it lacks any credible epistemic basis and has nothing to say to modern man. We wanted to add our voice to those who believe that socially, culturally, and philosophically this belief is a grave mistake.

A second reason for starting our web log was that we were dismayed by the failure of the Mainstream Media (MSM) to present a balanced picture of the policy issues confronting our nation and the men who would lead us. We believe there is not only a deep-seated bias against George Bush in the MSM but, more than that, a profound antipathy, even hatred, for him.

Bill and I hoped that we could perhaps be a voice, albeit a small one, in our little corner of the world, that might offer a tiny dissent against the roar of the MSM megaphone. In order to do this we felt we had to concentrate on the positives about George Bush and his policies since his opponents in the MSM were already engaged in the business of denigrating them. We also felt that much of the criticism of the president was manifestly unfair, even dishonest, and that the only realistic alternative to Bush, John Kerry, is completely unsatisfactory.

It's not that we think President Bush is perfect. We don't, and in fact the last time we talked about it, Bill was not even prepared to vote for him. George Bush is wrong, as far as we're concerned, on spending and immigration, among other things. He can also be faulted, perhaps, for some aspects of the post-war in Iraq. Even so, there are three issues which trump everything else in this election: The war on terrorism (of which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are a subset), the appointment of federal judges and supreme court justices, and the economy. On the last, Bush's judgment on spending (and, for Bill, globalism) is questionable, but his opponent's is worse. On the first two issues there is simply no contest between the two candidates in either of our minds.

For this reason, Viewpoint has taken the position that it is imperative for the welfare of this nation and the future of our children that Bush be re-elected. Four more years of George Bush will not guarantee success in the three paramount matters mentioned in the previous paragraph, but we can't accept replacing him with a man who has spent twenty years in the Senate without having a single major accomplishment to his credit and whose votes, and the political company he keeps, are uniformly indicative of a man whose policies would be quite detrimental to the long-term good of this nation.

We're not neutral about this nor do we pretend to be. We have religious and political points of view which we believe are preferable to their opposites and we wish to use our humble little forum to advocate them. There will be time enough after the election to explain our disappointments with the president, but now is not the time. Too much is at stake.

Justice For Saddam

The BBC has an article about the discovery of another mass grave in Iraq. This one is more heart-breaking than most:

US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s. The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said.

One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.

The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.

"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.

"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."

Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.

Iraq's human rights ministry has reportedly identified 40 possible mass graves across the country.

Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.

The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.

Forty mass graves! And still the squeamish Europeans don't want to get involved. Yes. By all means, the Europeans should not help to accumulate the evidence of Saddam's crimes because, why, then they'd be helping to show that he actually deserved to die and what kind of gratitude would that express to the man who filled the purses of so many of their countrymen with cash in order to keep them quiet about his crimes. The Europeans are nothing if not loyal to an ally, at least whichever ally offers them the most lucrative bribes.

Perhaps this is all one might expect from the people whose culture produced Hitler and Stalin. The Europeans have a soft spot in their hearts for murderous savages like Saddam, they tend to regard them as existential heroes, and we should be understanding of their desire not to see a Nietzschean Ubermann get what he meted out to so many others.

As for those who have not yet descended to European levels of effete decadence there still exists the concept of Justice. Saddam deserves worse than death, of course, but that should be left to God. Our only obligation, as General Norman Schwartzkopff once said, is to arrange the meeting.

More On Fallujah

The Strategy Page has some interesting reading on the war of attrition going on in Fallujah and gives us some insight into the psychological effects of the Coalition's strategy on the insurgents:

October 14, 2004: Sunni Arabs in Iraq are becoming more agitated about being caught in a war pitting an alliance of Saddam supporters and Islamic radicals, against the majority Shia Arab and Kurds who want peace and prosperity, at any price. The Sunni Arabs are increasingly desperate to do something about their situation. Despite the threats from Saddam's old enforcers (almost all of them Sunni Arads), and the al Qaeda influenced Islamic radicals; tribal and religious leaders are suggesting that the Saddam hardliners and foreign Islamic radicals leave.

Leave Sunni Areas, leave Iraq, leave this life, it doesn't really matter. The Sunni Arabs see nothing but woe from the Saddam supporters and Islamic radicals. The American smart bombs hit Fallujah daily, while American and Iraqi troops continue to tighten the noose. The Saddam and Islamic gunmen regularly use civilians for cover, believing that, even when that tactic does not work, dead civilians make good propaganda for their cause. But most Sunni Arabs want nothing to do with seeing the Baath Party back in power, or having an Islamic Republic. The Sunni Arabs have been cowed by the terror, but not completely immobilized. Deals are being cut, to be finalized when Iraqi troops and police enter Sunni Arab towns under the shadow of American firepower. Will the Sunni Arab leaders remain with the Iraqi majority. Considering the alternative, they probably will.

October 13, 2004: Although the details are secret, American and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against Sunni Arab and terrorist gangs. Over a year of effort in building up an intelligence network among the population has paid off. Even in the Sunni Arab areas, many people are fed up with the lawlessness and violence created where the gangs operate. So information comes in about who is who and is doing what. This provides more, and higher quality, targets for raids...

There's more here.

UPDATE: Fox News reports that it looks as though an assault on Fallujah is imminent. See the report here.

Francis Crick, R.I.P.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helicoid structure of the DNA molecule, has passed away at the age of 88. Mark Steyn graces us with an excellent obituary.

Crick was an atheistic Darwinian who was most interested in taking his naturalistic assumptions to their logical conclusions, though like most such thinkers, he stops well short of going all the way.

For instance, Steyn quotes him as writing in his last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, "that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"

In other words, the human being is for Crick nothing more than a clump of chemicals, mud and blood, a muscle and bone machine. If Crick is right about this, however, it has the most distressing and devastating consequences for our view of human existence. As Viewpoint has argued on previous occasions, every major yearning of the human heart is hopelessly unfulfillable if all we are is a pack of neurons. Life and the world are completely absurd, there's no meaning or purpose to human love, striving, or suffering. There's no ground for moral judgment, no real justice, no basis for human dignity or rights. There is only, for most people who've ever lived, the prospect of pain, conflict, alienation, and finally annihilation with perhaps a few fleeting moments of joy arising briefly like the ephemeral light of a firefly in an otherwise uniformly dark and bleak night.

The worldview of such as Francis Crick leads anyone who is serious about its logical consequences into the abyss of nihilism and despair. Anything else is just whistling past the graveyard. It is an odd thing about atheism that few people are able to live consistently with its fundamental convictions that we are an accident of blind, impersonal forces and that this life is the only life there is.

Progress in Iraq

Senator Kerry claims that Iraq is in chaos, that the president is botching it so badly that Kerry has no idea what he will find when he takes office in January. He may, he claims, find that Iraq is another Lebanon, and so on. Yet everything we read coming out of that country, except what we read in the MSM, suggests that the Senator simply doesn't know what he's talking about. This is understandable, of course, since he never attends the meetings of the Intelligence Committee he serves on, but it's not excusable.

There is much news from Iraq which indicates that things are going much better there than the Senator would have us believe. One such story at National Review Online concerns the quality of Iraqi troops which are daily growing more competent, more effective and more numerous. Consider these excerpts:

The enthusiasm of U.S. Marine captains Thomas "Tad" Douglas and David Nevers can hardly be contained. Their voices, alternately crackling over a weak satellite-phone connection, are heartening as they describe the successes they are witnessing in Iraq. The insurgency is losing ground. Iraqi civilians, feeling less afraid than in previous months, are increasingly coming forward with solid information about the bad guys. And a new Iraqi special-operations force is taking the lead in wiping out guerilla strongholds, south of Baghdad.

From their operating base in Kalsu...Douglas tells National Review Online, "The Iraqis are performing well-above my expectations. Their strengths are their aggressiveness and mobility, and we are enhancing those strengths."

"This is an emerging force, and yet they are taking the lead in our operations against the insurgents," says Nevers. "We conducted an operation a month ago in which this force did most of the planning and then physically led the way. The operation was very successful, and it consequently set the stage for what we are doing right now."

Asked if those on the team are more-formidable fighters than the best Iraqi troops faced by U.S. forces during the spring 2003 invasion, Nevers is quick to respond, "Yes, and they are far better than the Iraqis we were contending with in April 2004 [during the brutal fighting in and around Fallujah and Ramadi]."

Speaking of Iraq, there is another helpful article on the conditions in Fallujah in the Washington Post (free registration may be required). Evidently, the American tactic of wearing down the insurgents in that city is paying dividends by setting the various groups against each other, and the foreigners are feeling both the heat and the fear.

Local insurgents in the city of Fallujah are turning against the foreign fighters who have been their allies in the rebellion that has held the U.S. military at bay in parts of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland, according to Fallujah residents, insurgent leaders and Iraqi and U.S. officials.

Relations are deteriorating as local fighters negotiate to avoid a U.S.-led military offensive against Fallujah, while foreign fighters press to attack Americans and their Iraqi supporters. The disputes have spilled over into harsh words and sporadic violence, with Fallujans killing at least five foreign Arabs in recent weeks, according to witnesses.

U.S. and Iraqi authorities together have insisted that if Fallujah is to avoid an all-out assault aimed at regaining control of the city, foreign fighters must be ejected. Several local leaders of the insurgency say they, too, want to expel the foreigners, whom they scorn as terrorists. They heap particular contempt on Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian whose Monotheism and Jihad group has asserted responsibility for many of the deadliest attacks across Iraq, including videotaped beheadings.

"He is mentally deranged, has distorted the image of the resistance and defamed it. I believe his end is near," Abu Abdalla Dulaimy, military commander of the First Army of Mohammad, said.

One of the foreign guerrillas killed by local fighters was Abu Abdallah Suri, a Syrian and a prominent member of Zarqawi's group. Suri's body was discovered Sunday. He was shot in the head and chest while being chased by a carload of tribesmen, according to a security guard who said he witnessed the killing.

One way or another Fallujah will be pacified by the end of November as will be Ramadi and Sadr City. Elections will be held and foreign corporations, eager to get a chunk of Iraq's oil wealth, will stream into the country to further hasten reconstruction. This will drive the left in this country to near hysteria, not only because George Bush will be largely vindicated and given the credit, and the judgment and motives of the left will be indicted, but also because once Iraq is stabilized, the attention of the world, i.e. the U.S., will perforce turn toward Iran's nuclear program. If Iraq begins to settle as November draws to a close, look for the left to employ every play in their playbook in a desperate attempt to preempt military action against Iran should it be deemed necessary.

Moreover, if Bush is re-elected in a couple of weeks look for the French, Germans, and Russians to join the coalition against Iran. They will seek to redeem themselves after their disgraceful behavior in Iraq, where they accepted bribes from Saddam in exchange for thwarting the American demarche. Unless, of course, they're also accepting bribes from the mullahs in Tehran.

Swift Vets Are Back

Transcripts of two new Swift Boat Veterans ads, set to run during Monday Night Football, can be found here. The second of the two sounds like it will be very powerful. Thanks to Kerry Spot for the tip.

Mr. Bush's Liabilities

Many people have wondered why President Bush doesn't defend his record more vigorously in the debates and attack Kerry's record, which is eminently vulnerable, more incisively. The answer, perhaps, is that Mr. Bush suffers from three rhetorical liabilities. First, he seems to assume that everybody already knows all the facts. He himself is immersed in matters of policy all day long, and it's easy for such a man to think that what's obvious to him is obvious to everybody. Perhaps he doesn't realize the depth of political ignorance and indifference that resides just outside the beltway. When, for example, he accuses John Kerry of being a "liberal", probably three quarters of citizens of voting age have no idea what he means.

Second, he's just not a quick thinker on his feet. His mind doesn't seem to work well when he's under the pressure of having to come up with gaffe-free answers in front of the whole nation. He no doubt works much better in intimate, relaxed settings where he can be himself, has time to consider options and think through problems.

Third, he's not particularly eloquent so that when he does know what he wants to say he has trouble putting it into words and using the appropriate inflections and gestures to drive the words home.

All of these liabilities work to his detriment in a debate setting, and it's quite surprising that his team didn't insist on the same sort of format that was used in the Cheney/Edwards debate which would have put him more at ease. It's also surprising that they didn't insist that he be allowed to use notes which would've made his task much less onerous.

None of this, mind you, should be taken as in any way a reflection upon his intelligence. Brilliant men have suffered the same sorts of disabilities, and absolute dolts can appear eloquent and articulate in public. Everyone is different in this respect. One reason why Viewpoint opposes Presidential debates is that they give the impression that the skills needed to do well in such events are somehow necessary qualifications for the presidency. That is not the case and never has been, and we do our nation a disservice by placing so much emphasis on the minutiae of these events.

Left-Wing Loopiness

Among the many reasons why the nation seems so divided this election season is the fact that the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party (about 90% of politically active Democrats) seems to have taken leave of their senses. Their febrile minds conjure up all manner of nightmarish fantasies that they are quite certain are accurate accounts of Bush administration plots and machinations, and out of their paranoia and hallucinogenic condition arises the most spiteful and vile rhetoric. Or they express their distaste so ineptly that it just sounds dumb. Either way most sane folk are put off by it and wish to have nothing to do with them.

Slate.com provides us with a fine illustration of the mental state of the contemporary left. They interviewed thirty one novelists to see who these writers will be voting for in November. As one might expect from such a group, twenty four responded that they will be voting for Kerry and four favor the President (three chose other options). More interesting than who they support, however, are their reasons for their selection. Here's a sample from the twenty four Kerry supporters:

Dan Chaon

He [Bush] seems truly, frighteningly dangerous and completely without scruples. I'm alarmed by his administration's attacks on civil liberties, by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war, by the gleeful disregard for the environment, by the social policies - the tax cuts, which so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else; the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy; the reckless budget deficit .... I have found myself recoiling from the newspaper, and I dread where another four years of his administration would lead us. I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed "Christianity," even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

Rick Moody

The Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece.

Jonathan Franzen

He's [Bush] the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's [Kerry] a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot.

Jane Smiley

Would George Bush steal the election if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence is that he has (disenfranchising black voters in Florida in 2000) and wants to again (attempting the same trick already this year). That such a man, an amoral prevaricator and ruthless opportunist, actually has supporters in his bid to wreck American democracy appalls me. I think that the coming election will result in a constitutional crisis of unprecedented danger. I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny.

David Amsden

A cousin of mine spent a year fighting with the Army in Iraq. He was a harder man when he returned, tweaked, difficult to relate to. His stories were crushing - did you know that there are giant spiders that creep up on sleeping soliders at night? That this is the sort of thing that causes nightmares....For all his swaggering bravado, the guy has no real backbone, no confidence in anything but his squinty little grin, which is frightening.

Well, we could go on, but why bother. After all, the level of ignorance, falsehood, anti-Christian bigotry, and plain stupidity in this brief sample of responses is just too depressing to warrant prolonging the exercise.

Despite the intellectual perversities, eccentricities, and loopiness on display here, there are a few bright lights of rationality shining amidst the liberal gloom. These are mostly provided, however, by those novelists who are supporting Bush. Click on the link above to read their statements.

George Bush Should Receive a Nobel Prize

Scott Norvell has a fine piece here on the election in Afghanistan. He writes from Kabul:

It was a regrettably typical comment from an American reporter in this part of the world. "At least it's news," he said of the Afghan election scuffle over the weekend. "Otherwise, this is just a success story."

God forbid it be a success story.

But that's what it was here, no matter how hard the international media tried to spin it. There were no car bombs raining body parts all over the polling stations. There were no last-minute assassinations. There were no drive-by shootings. The best they could come up with for "news" was grumbling from hopelessly trailing opposition candidates about washable ink and threats of a boycott. The media's disappointment was palpable.

When Kabul came out of its election-time shell on Monday, the picture was instead one of a city reveling in the chaos of commerce. Real estate prices are rising, and the din of new construction is pervasive. Foreign investment is up. There are three times as many private cars on the streets as five years ago, and women can go shopping without getting whipped by thugs from the Taliban Ministry of Vice and Virtue for baring sockless ankles beneath their burqas. It is a chaos to which Afghans have been accustomed for centuries, one they are happy to have back.

This is a Nobel prize caliber accomplishment. In fact, it surpasses in magnitude virtually anything any previous recipients of that award have achieved. What other world leader has done so much for so many of the world's oppressed in just four years? Maybe FDR in WWII (although it's questionable), surely Reagan, but it took him eight years, and even then it wasn't until after his presidency that his policies toward the communists brought about the collapse of their tyranny.

What other world leader has done as much for women's rights in such a brief period of time as has George Bush? Twenty five million women in Afghanistan and Iraq can vote for the first time ever. In Afghanistan they can go to school and hold elective office for the first time. This is monumental, but it leaves our feminists unimpressed. After all, Bush still opposes the right of a woman to kill her unborn child.

Bush's accomplishment of freeing fifty million people in Afghanistan and Iraq is probably unique in world history, but the odds that Bush will be awarded the Nobel are probably about the same as they were for Ronald Reagan. Doubtless the enlightened eminences who decide upon the recipients, if they don't select some mentally unstable virago who rants about white scientists developing AIDs in order to wipe out the black race, will choose someone who campaigned hard to prevent what Bush has achieved. Maybe Jacques Chirac, now that he's no longer receiving bribes from Saddam, can use the cash.

If You Don't Like it...

The Democrats are in a massive snit over the decision by Sinclair Broadcasting Corp. to preempt regular programming to air a film based on the book Stolen Valor which takes a very close look at the character of the Senator who would be president. The film is seen by the left, who ought to know one when they see it, as an attack piece.They're outraged that a broadcasting conglomerate would use the public airwaves to promote a partisan assault on their candidate.

One wonders where all this anger and indignation from the left were when CBS and Dan Rather were using 60 Minutes to slander George Bush with fraudulent memos.

One commentator on MSNBC said that this new film is not like Fahrenheit 9/11 because people had to buy a ticket to see that and this is coming into homes free courtesy of the public airwaves. Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown for free to students in taxpayer subsidized universities all across the country, but that's different. That was a hit piece on George Bush. Those should be subsidized. Unlike Michael Moore's movie, this film is factually accurate, however, and may seriously hurt John Kerry, so it's an obvious abuse of the public trust that must be stopped.

Anyway, what is it that the liberals always tell people who complain about the sleaze and junk network television serves up on a daily basis? "Hey, if you don't like it, don't watch it."