If Democrats Went To Church

Morton Kondracke writes a lovely essay on what the Democrats need to learn about religion, specifically evangelical Christianity. We commend the entire piece to the reader but would like to highlight a couple of paragraphs which are particularly good and a couple of others which merit comment. Kondracke writes:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, next to Charles Krauthammer the owner of the highest I.Q. on the nation's op-ed pages, wrote last week that "my problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote division and intolerance at home and abroad."

Friedman's vaunted intelligence evidently abandons him when it comes to thinking about religion in the public arena. Why is it okay for Kerry to say that he's motivated by religious principles when it comes to fighting for equality and justice and for the environment, all of which involve imposing his values on other people, but it's not okay for Bush's positions on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and the importance of freedom around the world to be informed by his religious principles? Why are Bush's positions on these issues divisive, when roughly half the country agrees with him, but Kerry's positions are not divisive even though half the country opposes him? For people like Friedman being divisive means proposing policy that Friedman doesn't like, being intolerant means not tolerating different things than Friedman doesn't tolerate.

Kondracke goes on to say that:

If fair-minded secular Democrats went to church - they are open to the public, by the way - here's some of what they'd learn: Lesson No. 1: Far more than abortion, evolution or homosexuality, Evangelical Christianity is about love, redemption, forgiveness, charity, humility, hope and self-sacrifice.

The best Evangelicals I know truly change lives - they turn around people who are addicted to drugs and pornography. They give the despairing and the guilt-ridden reason to persevere. They restore marriages. They transform criminals in prison.

They try to follow Jesus, who, if they studied him a little, no Democrat could possibly be scared of. I think this is what Bush's faith is all about - not arrogance or mindless certitude, but humility and a sense of duty.

Lesson No. 2: Evangelicals are scared, too. They are scared of the fruits of secularism and the deterioration of the culture in which they're trying to raise their children. Of hip-hop lyrics that encourage rape and murder. Of PG-13 movies and "family hour" sitcoms that tell children that if they're not having sex at 16, they're out of it. Of the scuzzy showbiz people who often surround Democrats.

I'd guess that most Evangelicals are "homophobic." Some are so in the bigoted sense, but many more in the sense that what they know of the "gay lifestyle" scares them. And they also are scared (I think, wrongly) that the already-battered institution of marriage will be demolished if committed gay couples are permitted to share in it.

This is a fine piece of writing and we're reluctant to quibble with it. Everything he says about Christians and Christianity would be plain to anyone who really tried to get past media stereotypes, but we have to disagree with Kondracke on his belief that gay marriage would not jeopardize traditional marriage.

As Viewpoint has noted on previous occasions, once the gender of the spouses is no longer a matter of law there will no longer remain any non-arbitrary basis for legal limits upon the number of wedded spouses. If legislatures no longer establish the gender, there will be no logical ground for establishing the number, and perhaps even biological relatationship, of the betrothed. Once society has set a tentative foot onto this slippery slope it will quickly find itself tobogganing downhill, unable to stop its plunge until marriage has been transformed into a union between any combination of people (and why limit it to people?) who desire to join together in wedlock for whatever purpose and for whatever length of time.

When this comes to pass marriage will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. The left has always seen the abolition of marriage, and thus of the family, as a progressive desideratum. Many Christians disagree, and in the minds of their critics that makes them bigots and homophobes. So be it.

The Democrats' Dilemma

An article on the Democrats' "religion predicament" by Jonah Goldberg is worth calling to our readers' attention. He writes that:

In the final presidential debate, John Kerry, a Catholic, did his level-best to talk about his faith. It is, he explained, "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."

But, at the same time, Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action - issues his faith is largely silent on - based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.

The larger problem for the Democrats is that liberalism itself, or what we erroneously call liberalism today, is in a crisis. It recognizes that politics must have an underlying morality to it, but it is antagonistic to traditional morality. This is foolish since our greatest political movements - abolitionism, civil rights, etc. - were religious before they were political. Moreover, attempts to construct new, secular, moralities have been failures, even at the seminar level. At the national level (think feminism, Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning," socialism, etc.), they've been non-starters.

Goldberg puts his finger on something very important in the penultimate sentence. Liberal secular Democrats scorn "traditional morality" largely because they disdain the religion through which it comes and ultimately the God upon which it is based. In their rebellion against God they insist that they can create their own morality based upon reason, but such attempts are chronic failures. Reason, by itself, cannot invent an ethics. It can only help us to see where our ethics leads us given a particular starting point. Unfortunately for the Democrats, if we start from a position of secularism or naturalism then, if we follow our reason, we must end up as either subjectivists, egoists, or nihilists, or some combination thereof, and none of these are conducive to a healthy polity.

Subjectivism says that right and wrong are a matter of one's own individual preferences and tastes. We prefer some behaviors for the same reason we prefer some flavors or colors - we just like them. Subjectivists recognize that if right and wrong are matters of taste then no one's morality is any better than anyone else's and we should not pass moral judgment upon others (which is, by the way, a self-contradictory claim since it itself implies a moral judgment on others). We need to be tolerant of others' values, the subjectivist insists, unless, of course, the values in question are abhorrent to the subjectivist, like racism or homophobia, etc.

In discussions about morality subjectivists can be depended upon to utter inanities like "that's just your opinion" or "who's to say what's right or wrong", or "If it's right for him then it's right". Each of these statements assumes that moral disagreements are simply disputes about matters of taste, but this is a pretty shallow assumption when one thinks about it. Most subjectivists, for example, would be reluctant to say of Adolf Hitler that if killing millions of Jews was right for him, then it was right.

A subjectivist outlook leads inexorably to egoism, the conviction that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others. If this life is all there is then I might as well make the most of it, and if whatever I feel is right is right, then there's no good reason why I shouldn't seek to maximize my own good regardless of the effect that conduct has on others.

Whatever other ethic men might try to live by, whether the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill or the duty-based ethics of the Kantians, or any other, there is no satisfactory answer to the question why one should adopt that particular system. Why should I seek the greatest good for the greatest number, as the utilitarians propose, rather than seek the greatest good for me? Why should I accept the idea of acting in a way that I could want everyone to act, as the Kantians teach, rather than acting in a way that benefits me regardless of its effects on others? Once we step away from the idea that there is a transcendent moral authority we no longer have any satisfactory answer to the question of why I shouldn't just live for myself.

Some will reply to the previous assertion by saying that I shouldn't live egoistically because people get hurt when we only look out for ourselves, but why should I care if people get hurt as long as I don't? The response to that is often that I wouldn't want people to do things that hurt me, and that's true, of course, but that's not a reason why I shouldn't do something that hurts others if it benefits me, and if I can get away with it.

The third possibility, not really very different from the first two, actually, is to simply acknowledge that in a world without God moral right and wrong don't even exist. People just do what they do and there is no moral dimension to it, anymore than there's a moral dimension to a cat's torturing a mouse. Where, after all, does something like moral obligation come from if not from God? Can nature impose moral obligation? Can evolution impose it? Can society impose it? Reason tells us that in the absence of God moral right and wrong are empty concepts. Man is his own creator of values (subjectivism) as Nietzsche wrote, and there is no wrong in choosing to live for oneself (egoism). This is nihilism and it is where our reason eventually brings us if we start from a position of atheism and follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Secular man often makes his starting point the principle that we should not harm others and employs his reason to arrive at the best way to implement that principle in his life. But it's his starting point which is in question. If his first principle is challenged he has no satisfactory answer. He cannot give a compelling explanation of why harming others is wrong. To many people, of course, it just seems self-evident. It's wrong to harm others, they believe, because, well, because anyone can see that harming others is wrong. In fact, the starting point is not self-evident at all. It is an arbitrary assumption, and it is quite indefensible.

This is the liberals' dilemma. They wish to secularize society, to construct a secular value system based upon our shared humanity and the harm principle, but the whole enterprise is an exercise in walking on water. By declaring religious reasons to be illegitimate in the realm of public discourse they have neutered all ethical defenses of any public policy proposals. State secularism gives us no foundation for moral obligation or moral judgment. Every time a secular ethic is tried it collapses, as it has in communist countries around the globe.

The Democrats wish to push Christianity out of the public square and yet hold on to the concept of morality, but that's like trying to remove the foundation from a building without having the building collapse. It can't be done in the moral world any more than it can be done in the physical world, and a lot of people just aren't going to trust the Democrats to run the country as long as they keep trying it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost calls our attention to this rather bizarre result of a compilation of surveys of atheists done by the Barna Group.

1 out of every 2 atheists and agnostics say that every person has a soul.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that Heaven and Hell exist.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that there is life after death.

1 out of every 3 atheists and agnostics talks about faith-related matters during a typical week.

1 out of every 3 atheists prayed to God, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 3 atheists want 'creationism" taught in the public schools.

1 out of every 8 atheists and agnostics believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior probably makes life after death possible.

1 out of every 10 atheists believes that absolute moral truth exist.

1 out of every 12 atheists read from the Bible, other than while at church, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 25 atheists attended a church service, other than a special event such as a wedding or funeral, in past 7 days.

Yikes! And atheists criticize and scoff at Christians for not practicing what they profess to believe!

Buy Generic

Andrew Sullivan directs our attention to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker on prescription drug costs. The essay, which is ostensibly a book review, actually does an excellent job of explaining how prices get set and what factors influence them.

Most people tend to believe that pharmaceutical companies bear the entire responsibility for high prices, but, in fact, according to Gladwell there are plenty of guilty parties. Not just manufacturers but the FDA, insurance companies, doctors, and even consumers all share much of the responsibility for driving prices up.

Nexium provides us with an example of how the pharmaceutical manufacturers manage to boost the price and increase their profits. The story is fascinating so we'll copy a portion of it here:

Ten years ago, the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launched what was known inside the company as the Shark Fin Project. The team for the project was composed of lawyers, marketers, and scientists, and its focus was a prescription drug known as Prilosec, a heartburn medication that, in one five-year stretch of its extraordinary history, earned AstraZeneca twenty-six billion dollars. The patent on the drug was due to expire in April of 2001. The name Shark Fin was a reference to what Prilosec sales-and AstraZeneca's profits-would look like if nothing was done to fend off the ensuing low-priced generic competition.

The Shark Fin team drew up a list of fifty options. One idea was to devise a Prilosec 2.0-a version that worked faster or longer, or was more effective. Another idea was to combine it with a different heartburn remedy, or to change the formulation, so that it came in a liquid gel or in an extended-release form. In the end, AstraZeneca decided on a subtle piece of chemical re�ngineering. Prilosec, like many drugs, is composed of two "isomers"-a left-hand and a right-hand version of the molecule. In some cases, removing one of the isomers can reduce side effects or make a drug work a little bit better, and in all cases the Patent Office recognizes something with one isomer as a separate invention from something with two. So AstraZeneca cut Prilosec in half.

AstraZeneca then had to prove that the single-isomer version of the drug was better than regular Prilosec. It chose as its target something called erosive esophagitis, a condition in which stomach acid begins to bubble up and harm the lining of the esophagus. In one study, half the patients took Prilosec, and half took Son of Prilosec. After one month, the two drugs were dead even. But after two months, to the delight of the Shark Fin team, the single-isomer version edged ahead-with a ninety-per-cent healing rate versus Prilosec's eighty-seven per cent. The new drug was called Nexium. A patent was filed, the F.D.A. gave its blessing, and, in March of 2001, Nexium hit the pharmacy shelves priced at a hundred and twenty dollars for a month's worth of pills. To keep cheaper generics at bay, and persuade patients and doctors to think of Nexium as state of the art, AstraZeneca spent half a billion dollars in marketing and advertising in the year following the launch. It is now one of the half-dozen top-selling drugs in America.

In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge-and the extraordinary profits they enjoy-by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn't to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we'd already solved. "The Prilosec pattern, repeated across the pharmaceutical industry, goes a long way to explain why the nation's prescription drug bill is rising an estimated 17 % a year even as general inflation is quiescent," the Wall Street Journal concluded, in a front-page article that first revealed the Shark Fin Project.

Gladwell goes on to explain how consumers almost always have cheaper options but often doctors don't inform them of those choices. The over-the-counter Prilosec is almost identical to prescription Nexium and virtually as effective, and it only costs twenty dollars a month, one sixth the cost of Nexium.

There is much else of interest in this article. Gladwell points out, for instance, that it is a myth that the U.S. has the highest drug costs in the world. In fact, our overall costs are just about the cheapest if one excludes name brands and calculates costs on the basis of generic equivalents. Moreover, patents on many widely-used name brands are scheduled to soon expire, which will open the market to generics and cause overall costs to drop even more. Good news, indeed.

Good Sources On Iraq War

For the latest on Fallujah check out The Fourth Rail, Belmont Club, and Strategy Page. They each have excellent analyses of the fighting and pull together all the latest news reports from the city.

Fools, Knaves, and Radicals

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times that, "President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is." Carl Bernstein repeated a similar allegation on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Tuesday night.

The assertion is either absurd or dishonest, or both, and those who make it are either fools or knaves, or both. To see why let's look at what the claim is based upon.

George Bush is said to be a radical because he opposes gay marriage and proposes a constitutional ammendment to prevent it. Bush is accused of trying to impose a religious belief on the rest of the nation, but this is silly. He is not trying to impose anything, rather he's seeking to preserve a two thousand year old institution which is essential to the well-being of our children and of our society. Indeed, it is his opponents who are attempting to impose a radical change upon society by by-passing state legislatures and having judges override the will of the people on this matter through the exercise of judicial fiat.

George Bush is called a radical because he opposes abortion on demand and would probably appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would roll back Roe v. Wade. At least three justices on the Court today believe that Roe is an extra-constitutional overreach on the part of the Supreme Court in 1973 and that it was very poorly decided. Even many liberals, Michael Kinsley comes to mind, who do not want it overturned have said the same thing. Maybe half the country agrees that it should be reversed and the decision as to whether abortions should be legal returned to each state so that the people of that state can decide the issue for themselves. Why is that radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he opposes the use of federal tax dollars to subsidize embryonic stem cell research. His policy is essentially an extension of the state of affairs as it was under Bill Clinton. He believes that the embryo is a living human being and, therefore, if it is going to be sacrificed for scientific research, taxpayers should not be compelled to pay for its destruction any more than they should be compelled to pay for abortions. If private industry or universities wish to carry out this research, Bush has put no barriers in their way. He has only declared that such research will not be funded by tax dollars. How does that make him radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he believes that God grants world leaders wisdom if they seek His will, and he believes that God acts in human history. This belief places him in the company of a long line of great presidents including George Washington and Ronald Reagan. It also puts him in the company of some Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter. Most of the people in this country, whether they are Christian or not, believe pretty much what George Bush believes. In fact, the convictions George Bush embraces place him in the historical mainstream in this country, so what is radical about that?

A radical is one who seeks to overturn the settled practice and norms of a society. A conservative seeks to preserve them. A radical is a member of a minority who is well out of the mainstream of social and political thought. A conservative may be in the minority, but usually he is not. George Bush either does not wish to overturn settled norms, or, if he does, as in the legal acceptance of abortion on demand, his position is not out of the mainstream. Fifty percent of the country agrees with him. Krugman and Bernstein know this, but it suits their purposes to simply paint the President as an extremist even though they're fully aware that he's not. That's why their claims are both foolish and dishonest.

A Little Bit of Heaven

We hear that some Democrats, Lawrence O'Donnell for instance, are recommending secession of Blue states from the union as a viable response to Bush's election. Presumably, these desperate souls hope to form a country where women will be able to abort their babies willy-nilly, unhindered by the sort of qualms voiced by those dreadful pro-lifers; where gays will be able to marry freely and marriage will mean whatever "enlightened", "reality-based" people want it to mean; where entertainment celebrities will decide how the police and military will be employed, if at all; where no Christians will be admitted to the public square, in order to insure social tranquility; and where 70% tax rates, or higher, will be imposed on the wealthy to insure social equality. Sounds like heaven on earth.

The Moral Apostasy of the Left

Atheist Christopher Hitchens recognizes an important difference between left-wing atheists and the Christian George Bush: The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The President fights them. In an excellent essay for Slate Hitchens delivers an indictment of his erstwhile allies on the ideological left. A couple of salient excerpts:

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda?

Suicide murderers in Palestine-disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO-described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time....

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he-and the U.S. armed forces-have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary-that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL.

Now if Hitchens were only willing to see that the strong sense of moral purpose and judgment which inspire his writing are without any substantial foundation in a universe without God, perhaps he would abandon not only the left but also the left's atheism. After all, a consistent thinker like Mr. Hitchens must recognize, once he reflects upon the matter, that one cannot be both an atheist and a moralist. Ultimately, one or the other must be thrown over.

If there is no God then there is no right or wrong apart from our subjective tastes or preferences. Our personal predilections, however, offer us no ground at all upon which to stand while passing judgment on the behavior of others, and Mr. Hitchens has built his career upon the passing of such judgments.

The Good News Keeps Coming

Arthur Chrenkoff's 14th edition of Good News From Iraq is on-line, and there's a ton of it. One wonders how many Democrats know about this site. Surely they aren't aware of it at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN else their reportage on Iraq wouldn't be so consistently gloomy and pessimistic.

Speaking of Iraq, and more particularly, Fallujah, Belmont Club is on top of military developments there.

PEST

Captain's Quarters offers some pungent thoughts on the self-absorbed snifflings of Florida Democrats who are seeking therapy for what's being called Post Election Selection Trauma:

Just when I thought it was impossible for Democrats to sink any lower in their post-election tantrums - after all, it's hard to top secession as a political strategy for the arrested-development set - now they have their very own psychological disorder, according to the Boca Raton News:

The Boca Raton News reported Tuesday that Palm Beach, Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

"We're calling it 'post-election selection trauma' and we're working to develop a counseling program for it," said Rob Gordon, the Boca Raton-based executive director of the American Health Association.

I have a theory that Democrats are secretly thrilled to have lost this election to George Bush, and this report confirms it. Nothing makes a Leftist happier than to belong to a victim class, and now they have created one that may exceed any that came before. It makes them feel more complete than even an official apology would. Next up, of course, is forcing employers and health-care providers to recognize it as a disability under ADA.

I would have thought that such a report could only be published by the Onion, but unfortunately this may be the least irrational reaction by Democrats this week. We've had MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell call for secession, his colleague Keith Olbermann proclaim the election rigged (while providing no evidence whatsoever), and massive requests for immigration information from Kerry supporters to everywhere except, oddly enough, France.

So far, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are anything but; in order to support democracy, one has to accept when their candidate loses as well as when they win. I'd like to ask how it feels to be less committed to democracy than the Afghanis, whose opposition candidates readily accepted their election results despite numerous hardships and difficulties. It's embarrassing when mainstream voices in a major party call for the breakup of the United States, and it's an insult to the men who gave their lives to keep the Union together less than 150 years ago, especially since the stakes are so superficial and petty.

At least they gave the "illness" a good name. Post-election selection trauma, or PEST, describes these summer patriots to a T.

The symptoms of the disorder make the sufferers sound like spoiled, self-centered brats who are so used to having their way that they can't believe they didn't get it in the election. One wonders how many of Mr. Schooler's clients beat their legs with their fists and stomped their feet when they realized that George Bush was going to win.

Hewitt On Specter

Hugh Hewitt has been arguing persuasively against denying Arlen Specter the chairmanship of the judiciary committee. His latest on the subject is here. He asks a number of pointed questions of those, like us, who think that Specter's intemperate and ungrateful remarks at a press conference last week make him unfit to serve. We find his argument compelling and are willing to abide a Specter chairmanship until the moment the Senator shows any sign of wavering with regard to a qualified Bush nominee.

Hewitt asks the following questions:

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that he would vote for Bush nominees to move from the committee to the floor?

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that Specter would vote to end filibusters on the floor?

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that Specter would vote to confirm nominees once they had made it to the floor and once a filibuster had been broken?

What would the effect of blocking Specter have on the conduct of his colleagues from the GOP's "center-left" wing, especially Senators Snowe and Collins of Maine and Chafee of Rhode Island? Would blocking Specter increase the likelihood of their opposition to Bush nominees? Can opponents of Specter guarantee that they can have their cake and eat it to, or might these four (and perhaps Hagel of Nebraska) respond by returning fire on nominees?

Specter's opposition to Bork in 1987 was 15 years ago. Specter supported Clarence Thomas and every Bush nominee since W's election in 2000. On what basis do opponents of Specter base their belief that he will oppose Bush nominees in the second term?

The answer to the last question, of course, is that he as much as said he would, but nevertheless, Hewitt is correct that bumping Specter could be counterproductive, especially by making an enemy out of him and hence his liberal Republican allies in the Senate.

Even so, the outcry that Republicans heard in Washington about Specter's pending selection is salutary. It sends a message to both the Republican senators in general and Specter in particular that the base back home is watching their every move and the good folks who comprise that base expect that the President's agenda will not be unfairly impeded, especially by members of his own party.

Tightening the Ring of Fire

Excerpts from the fourth rail, a milblog which is providing good analysis of the Fallujah battle:

Power has been cut off in the city, and all roads have been closed. The only people permitted to exit the city are women, children and boys under 15 and men over 50 years of age. The task force is using the full compliment of tools at its disposal: tanks, Bradley infantry vehicles, artillery, airstrikes, JDAMs, UAVs, robots, and the most effective tool in the U.S. military, the Infantryman and Marine trained in urban warfare (Military Operations on Urbanized Warfare - MOUT). The U.S. military seems to have perfected urban warfare and took historically low casualties in Fallujah last spring and in Najaf last summer. But the insurgents in Fallujah have had seven months to prepare the battlefield. Expect heavily fortified bunkers, roads littered with IEDs and buildings extensively booby-trapped.

A look at the map below [at the link] indicates that the city is effectively surrounded (blue boxes indicate suspected troop positions, keep in mind my assumptions on the Coalition forces both West and Southwest of the city). The neighborhood believed to be the stronghold of the insurgents is Jolan. Expect a box to form around this neighborhood as the Coalition forces segment and destroy all opposition in their area of operations; everything moving in this box will be fair game. The Marines and infantrymen will take buildings that will give then tactical superiority, then proceed to segment the Jolan neighborhood and clear the areas block by block, leveling any buildings deemed a threat to Coalition forces and clearing lanes of fire if needed. The railroad embankment to the North of Fallujah, the highway to the East (not pictured) and the Euphrates River to the West are effective man-made and natural boundaries that will help prevent the escape of insurgents fleeing the battlefield.

We haven't seen anything to suggest that there are simultaneous operations going on in Ramadi and other Sunni cities. Apparently, the commanders on the ground have decided that they would deal with these cities seriatim rather than all together as had been thought a possibility a couple of weeks ago.

Sudden Death

Belmont Club has a fascinating anecdotal account of U.S. capabilities in Fallujah. Here's part of it:

The Daily Telegraph has an atmospheric article which describes the terrible effect of networked forces on enemy forces inside Fallujah.

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing. Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."

... The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley, a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last.

"Everybody's curious," grinned Sgt Anyett as he waited for a sniper with a Russian-made Dragonov to show his face one last, fatal time. A bullet zinged by....

His officers said that the plan to invade Fallujah involved months of detailed planning and elaborate "feints" designed to draw the insurgents out into the open and fool them into thinking the offensive would come from another side of the city. "They're probably thinking that we'll come in from the east," said Capt Natalie Friel, an intelligence officer with task force, before the battle. But the actual plan involves penetrating the city from the north and sweeping south. "I don't think they know what's coming. They have no idea of the magnitude," she said. "But their defences are pretty circular. They're prepared for any kind of direction. They've got strong points on all four corners of the city." The aim was to push the insurgents south, killing as many as possible, before swinging west. They would then be driven into the Euphrates.

Stay tuned.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Ever since the day after the election despondent Democrats have been casting their aspersions far and wide across Red America. Bush voters, we're told, are "stupid" and "ignorant". A headline in the London Daily Mirror asked the question that many American Democrats were asking, "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?". Kerry voters by contrast are "reality-based" i.e. they are too sophisticated and smart to embrace all that religious hokem that the Bush people in their unbelieveable stupidity actually think is true. The spin on the election is that there are just too many dimwits out there voting for Bush and not enough of the enlightened crowd who voted for Kerry. The spin, however, collapses as soon as we start asking some questions about it.

Let's ask who's more stupid and who's more grounded in reality.

Is it those who believe that Kerry would have made a good leader, or is it those who in vain searched his twenty year record in the Senate for some scintilla of evidence of a predisposition to lead and an ability to do so?

Is it those who took him at his word when he claimed to have a plan for every contingency, economic, social and military, or those who asked to no avail to see those mysterious plans or to be told how, exactly, the plan differed significantly from what the President was already doing?

Is it those who believe he would stick it out in Iraq until the insurgents were defeated, or those who believed that since Kerry said that it was wrong to ask a man to die for a mistake in Vietnam and since he believes that Iraq is also a mistake, he could not be expected to ask soldiers to continue to die in Iraq any more than in Vietnam?

Is it those who believe Kerry would've been able to persuade the French and Russians to join us in killing the goose that was dropping golden eggs into their avaricious and unscrupulous hands, or those who believed that if something is right to do then it's right to do even if you have to do it by yourself?

Is it those who believed that Bush would end Social Security for the elderly, reinstate the draft, and suppress the black vote, or those who demanded evidence that any of these allegations was true?

Is it those who believed that Kerry could lower the deficit, keep all his spending promises, and yet not raise taxes on the middle class, or those who believed that this was all political posturing and flummery?

Is it those who believed Kerry's claims to piety, or those who thought these claims just as phony as his Ohio goose hunt?

Is it those who believed John Edwards' claim that he and Senator Kerry would have quadraplegics up and walking within a few years of being elected, or those who laughed in derision at such asininity?

Is it those who didn't believe any of the Senator's twaddle but voted for Kerry anyway knowing he didn't mean a word of it, or those who didn't believe it and refused to vote for someone who was so obviously untrustworthy?

Is it those who believe that anyone who refuses to go along with their sage plans to reform American society and culture is an intolerant bigot, or those who believe that it's wiser not to tinker with millenia-old institutions whose stability is crucial to our social and individual well-being?

Is it those stuck in menial jobs earning less than $30,000 a year who voted overwhelmngly for Kerry, or those who have the talent and drive to earn over $50,000 a year who voted overwhelmingly for Bush?

Is it those who received their education in blue counties where schools are often abysmal and drop-out rates are the highest in the nation, or those who received their education in red counties where public schools are often excellent and drop-out rates are low?

Is it those who paid money to see Michael Moore's patently dishonest and spiteful movie and came away thinking they'd just learned something profound, or those who saw the movie for what it was?

Is it those who based their vote on hate and spite for a candidate, or those who based their vote on respect and admiration?

Is it those who saw Teresa H. Kerry as a potentially impressive first lady, smart and sassy, or those who saw her as a self-absorbed whiner who's pretense at profundity was evidently delusional?

Is it those like George Soros who saw millions of dollars of his personal fortune spiral down the toilet of his foolish hatreds?

Is it those like Dan Rather, who, in his obsession to unseat the President, got taken in by an amateurish fraud, and, like Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale, sacrificed whatever credibility and integrity he had as a journalist that he might heroically slay George Bush's candidacy with forged documents?

Is it those who are so despondent and angry that they've cancelled family visits because their families live in red states?!

We here at Viewpoint may not be the brightest lights on the Christmas tree, but we don't think it's hard to see in this instance who's smart and who isn't and who's been grounded in reality in this past election and who hasn't.

Success of the Simpletons

Mark Steyn favors us with another enjoyable column on the Democrat's seemingly invincible inability to face up to the fact that the reason they're rapidly fading into oblivion is that their message is frozen in the 1960s like a wooly mammoth in the arctic permafrost.

Steyn writes:

I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

The rest of the piece is just as good.

Iran's Options

The Monterey Institute of International Studies offers an analysis of difficulties and consequences of an Israeli or American preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and concludes that the negative long-term liabilities of such a strike would negate any short-term benefit. It's the best argument we've seen for essentially doing nothing about Iran's imminent nuclear weapons capability.

The problem is that many of the dire consequences the above report cites as reasons for declining to attack Iran's nuclear facilities are already upon us. They argue, for example, that Iran would certainly work hard to undermine the nascent democracy in Iraq and bring our efforts there to grief, but as this article makes clear, Iran is already doing pretty much whatever it can to destablize Iraq.

It seems likely that whatever Iran can do to hurt and thwart the United States it will do whether or not we take out its weapons-making capability.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

Yasser, We Never Knew Ye

We never would have guessed, but apparently it's an open secret that Yasser Arafat is homo/bi-sexual and is currently dying from AIDS. The cause, if it is the cause, of his grave condition is shrouded in secrecy because such a lifestyle, and such a denouement, would be an intolerable affront to Muslim piety. If word got out that Arafat was a homosexual it would severely tarnish his image in the Arab world. There is, nonetheless, considerable evidence that he is, in fact, dying from AIDS. See here for the scuttlebutt, so to speak.

The Assault Begins

The assault on Fallujah has begun. For analysis of events visit Adventures With Chester:

The New York Times is reporting that the hospital was seized by the 36th Iraqi Commando Brigade in conjunction with US Special Forces. This is important in that it shows the high initial involvement of Iraqi National Forces.

NYTimes also reporting (same article) that thousands of Marines are moving from their base to a point north of Fallujah. Their base is likely Al-Taqqadam airfield, and they are likely moving across the western bridge they just seized. This makes sense; a large armored force will now be positioned on the eastern side of the Euphrates, and north of the city. That means it can either rapidly move along the highway toward Baghdad in pursuit of insurgents, or it can use the same highways to position itself on three different sides of the city, with the Euphrates on the fourth.

There's much more at his site.

The Coming European Civil War Pt. II

Readers who thought that perhaps Viewpoint was overstating the case somewhat when we expressed our concern that Europe is hurtling toward a religious civil war might wish to check out a pair of AP articles in the Washington Times. The first is titled Netherlands Braces For 'Jihad' and the second covers some of the same ground but provides a little more detail.

Europe, like the United States and Israel is confronted with an implacable enemy which believes that it is doing the will of God by destroying Western civilization. Those who see the war in Iraq as disconnected from the war against Islamic terror do not see things the way the Islamo-fascists do. For them there is only global jihad. They do not think in terms of national boundaries which are, in any event, artificial constructs imposed upon them in a time of weakness by the infidel nations of the West. Amsterdam and Fallujah, Madrid and New York are just different theaters in the global war that all Muslims everywhere are obligated to wage against the infidels.

One of the shortcomings of Senator Kerry's candidacy for the presidency was that he showed no indication that he grasped this crucial fact. His insistence that the war in Iraq is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time reinforces the impressison that he is oblivious to the Islamic threat to the West. He seemed to think that terrorism is merely the product of difficult or unjust economic "root causes", and that the way to end terror was to negotiate better living conditions for poor Muslims. This would reduce terrorism to the level of a "nuisance". The Senator's plan, of course, is as naive as Neville Chamberlain thinking he could negotiate peace with Adolf Hitler by conceding Czechoslovakia.

As Bernard Lewis, perhaps the foremost scholar on Islam today, reminds us, for Muslims there is only Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam in which Muslim law prevails and Dar al-Harb, the House of War, which is the rest of the world. In Dar al-Harb jihad will continue, interrupted only by temporary truces, until all the world either adopts Islam or submits to Muslim rule.

The Netherlands has long been regarded as one of the most tolerant of nations. It will be instructive to see how far their tolerance can be stretched.

Those Horrid Christians

NewsMax.com reminds us that religious bigotry is alive and well in America, but except for a few marginal folks no one listens to, the bulk of the hostility comes not from the right, but from the left and is directed specifically at Christianity and Christians.

Catholic League president William Donohue has compiled the following examples from newspapers and Internet sites after Bush's victory. Viewpoint thinks it appropriate to note that we don't think that all of these are examples of religious intolerance. Several of them evince an intolerance of common sense, perhaps, and others simply seem to be merely the ravings of the paranoid left, but here they are with our comments:

* In the Wichita Eagle, Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press wonders if President Bush understands that "he was not chosen god, bishop, rabbi or high priest?"

We're sure he does, Mr. Albom, so you're free to wonder about something a little more weighty, like why, as a reporter, you don't exert yourself a little more to understand better the people you write about.

* The publisher of Harper's magazine, John R. MacArthur, blasts President Bush and Sen. John Kerry for advertising "their subservience to Jesus Christ and the Christian god, without the least concern about whether it might offend me" and others like him.

Why should Mr. MacArthur be offended because George Bush and John Kerry claim to be subservient to Christ? And why should Mr. MacArthur's tender sensibilities be permitted to exercise a veto over a Christian politician's right to acknowledge that subservience when asked? And who is Mr. MacArthur that he thinks a man's religious freedom should be constrained by what he personally finds offensive?

* Ex-seminarian Garry Wills writes in the New York Times, "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" He ends by saying that "moral zealots" will scare moderate Republicans with their "jihads."

Perhaps most people find a miracle engineered by a Divine mind to be much more plausible than a miracle engineered by Chance and mindless matter. The fervency with which the former is believed has nothing to do with how "enlightened" one is but rather with the implications of the belief. If the virgin birth did in fact occur it suggests that Jesus was in some sense divine. If evolution, or macroevolution, which is what Wills has in view here, did occur, it suggests that God is superfluous, life is a meaningless accident, death is the end for both individuals and ultimately the human race, moral obligation is a delusion, and nothing really matters. It may be "enlightened" to believe all that, but people can hardly be faulted for not being overly fervent about the depressing consequences of the belief.

* Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who hates Bush, says the president "ran a jihad in America so he can fight one in Iraq."

If someone can explain what this means please be so kind as to explain it to us via our Feedback Forum. Meanwhile, we recommend Ms Dowd limit herself to decaf for a couple of days.

* Dowd's colleague Thomas Friedman accuses Bush's base of wanting "to extend the boundaries of religion" and of promoting "intolerance."

Imagine. Wanting to extend the boundaries of religion. How unspeakably insensitive and ignorant these yokels must be. And how tolerant of Mr. Friedman to refuse to tolerate it.

* Without providing one example, Margaret Carlson opines in the Los Angeles Times that Catholic bishops "demonized" Kerry's supporters by warning them that "they could go to hell just for voting for him."

We feel we're given a taste of hell whenever we're subjected to Ms. Carlson's tortured cogitations and witless slanders on CNN's Capital Gang. Sartre said that "hell is other people." We suggest that hell would be having to read the confused outputs of Ms Carlson's ruminations for eternity.

* Sheryl McCarthy of Newsday accuses Bush of "pandering to people's fears, petty interests and prejudices" against gays and others.

How so, Ms. McCarthy? How is it pandering to people's fears and prejudices to propose a constitutional ammendment that would codify what "enlightened" people have believed for over two thousand years, that marriage is a union of one man and one woman? Why is it somehow all of a sudden now disreputable for people to be concerned about the consequences of tinkering with the institution of marriage? Presumably Ms McCarthy would praise the president if he were to recognize the legitimacy of people's concerns about, say, corporate outsourcing of jobs. Why does she think it shameful of him to recognize people's concerns about the state of perhaps the most important institution in our cultural and social life?

* Sidney Blumenthal, writing in Salon, nervously claims that the new Senate majority is "more theocratic than Republican."

We need to thank Mr. Blumenthal for clearing this up. We had been led by the "old media" to believe that "theocratic" and "Republican" meant the same thing.

* In the same spot, Sean Wilentz embarrasses his fellow Princeton faculty by saying "religious fanaticism" has "seized control of the federal government."

Again, we stand corrected. We thought John Ashcroft had planned to resign.

It may be that some of the new senators have made some rather intemperate comments in the past, but this is not anything new in American politics. The problem for the secular left is that they are terrified of anyone who takes their faith seriously unless it is faith in the superstitions of the left such as the inherent justice of high taxes and the salutary effects of government regulations on small businesses, etc.

The lefties are in a panic over the prospect that there may be a couple more prayer groups and Bible studies on Capitol Hill now that a few more of the dreaded Christians are moving in. They recoil in horror from the nightmarish future they imagine these evil dolts have planned for us. Imagine the obscenity, they cry, of not being able to kill one's child as it's being born, or of not being able to marry however many people one wishes. Imagine how ghastly it will be if manger scenes turn up in the public square this Christmas and people start praying again at high school football games. The Republican jihadis doubtless have an odious secret plan to uphold their standards of decency on television. The trend toward cutting edge performances like that of Justin and Janet will surely be reversed. Creativity in the arts will be suffocated. Ads for male enhancements will lamentably no longer be able to provide essential and explicit information about how long their particular effects might be enjoyed. Women will no longer be portrayed as sex objects in beer commercials if these horrid Bible-thumpers have their way. The very thought of all this stifling, regressive censorship is enough to make one resolve to move to Canada, or France. Anywhere one can get away from people so stupid and ignorant as to actually believe in God, for heaven's sake.

Promises, Promises

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.com includes this in an article she writes on despondent democrats who plan to move to Canada in the wake of George Bush's reelection:

"If the country votes for Bush, then 51 percent of the people in this country are psychos," one Colorado resident told the Denver Post before the election. He'd already opened a bank account in British Columbia.

Last week's Ottawa Citizen reported that Scott Schaffer-an assistant professor of sociology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania - had already lined up an immigration lawyer and was applying for jobs in Quebec.

We also heard that Robert Redford had promised to move to Ireland if Bush won. Unfortunately, these people are no more likely to leave the country than were Alec Baldwin and Barbra Streisand who promised us in 2000 that a Bush win would cause them to take up residence elsewhere. These people are secular liberals and keeping one's word is not a trait one associates with secular liberals. It's too bad.

Stupid Voters

Slate.com has been running a series of very interesting essays written by Democrats on the topic of what their party needs do to gain back some political clout. Some of these, like the ones by Timothy Noah and Katha Pollitt are quite perceptive. They acknowledge that in fact there's not much the Democratic party can do without prostituting itself. For example, as Pollitt observes, the party simply can't try to win over pro-lifers without alienating the pro-choicers that comprise so much of its base. They can't sidle up beside the anti-gay marriage folk without causing serious distress among the gay rights crowd from which they draw economic and electoral sustenance. Nor can they become more hawkish on foreign policy without earning the ire of the Michael Moore/Howard Dean wing of the party. Noah and Pollitt acknowledge that the party is in a very bad way.

Then there are other essays in the series, like that which emerges from the pen of novelist Jane Smiley, a screed which reads like something from a rejected Saturday Night Live script. One suspects at first that it is a parody until it becomes gradually clear that Ms. Smiley is, to put the best face on it, non compos mentis. Perhaps the polite course is to avert one's eyes while she delivers herself of one embarrassing fatuity after another, but since she apparently insists on being taken seriously let's resolve to wade through her sophomoric rant wherein she delivers claims like the following:

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry.

Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you-if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question. A corollary to this point is that they make sure you understand that Satan resides in the toils and snares of complex thought and so it is best not try it.

The history of the last four years shows that red state types, above all, do not want to be told what to do-they prefer to be ignorant. As a result, they are virtually unteachable.

We see the outcome now - Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Red state types love to cheat and intimidate.

In other words, conservatives are stupid, dishonest, and cruel. Let's set aside the fact that she offers no empirical support for her allegations. She simply asserts them and expects her readers to accept them uncritically, an expectation which demonstrates that she attributes to her leftist audience precisely the same intellectual weakness for which she condemns conservatives.

But as we said, let's not dwell on the logical incoherence of her piece. Let's look instead at the three vices she imputes to the political right. She accuses them of being ignorant and stupid, but take a moment to study the vote-by-county map here. Even a cursory examination shows that Democratic strength in the United States is concentrated in precisely those sectors of the country where schools and education are the worst, where the population is the most poorly educated and often barely literate. This is the Democratic base. Remember, it wasn't Republicans who couldn't figure out how to use a ballot in Florida in 2000.

She alleges, further, that conservatives are dishonest. Apparently, she is unaware of the howlers Senator Kerry's supporters tried to fob off on the public during the campaign. Almost everything they said, from their candidate's war service to their charges that the Bush team had banned stem cell research, planned to take away social security from the elderly, suppress the black vote, and reinstate the draft, was a total fabrication. Likewise the Democrats' allies in the media, like CBS, did not hesitate to press fraudulent documents into service to discredit the president. ABC's Mark Halperin urged his staff to abandon objectivity and tilt toward Kerry in their political coverage. No one in the MSM ever bothered to ask the Senator why he refused to release his military records so that the controversy over his service could be laid to rest. Evan Thomas at Newsweek wrote that the media would be worth 15 points to Kerry on election day and they probably were. When it comes to dishonesty the Republicans are light years behind the competition.

In the middle of her muddled piece Ms. Smiley launches into an extended discursion on the wild west, and, to the extent that her point can be deciphered, it seems to be that people in red states are mean. Perhaps the reader can bring more exacting exegetical skills to bear on the relevant paragraph and offer an alternative interpretation. Here it is:

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states. There used to be a kind of hand-to-hand fight on the frontier called a "knock-down-drag-out," where any kind of gouging, biting, or maiming was considered fair. The ancestors of today's red-state voters used to stand around cheering and betting on these fights. When the forces of red and blue encountered one another head-on for the first time in Kansas Territory in 1856, the red forces from Missouri, who had been coveting Indian land across the Missouri River since 1820, entered Kansas and stole the territorial election. The red news media of the day made a practice of inflammatory lying-declaring that the blue folks had shot and killed red folks whom everyone knew were walking around. The worst civilian massacre in American history took place in Lawrence, Kan., in 1862-Quantrill's raid. The red forces, known then as the slave-power, pulled 265 unarmed men from their beds on a Sunday morning and slaughtered them in front of their wives and children. The error that progressives have consistently committed over the years is to underestimate the vitality of ignorance in America. Listen to what the red state citizens say about themselves, the songs they write, and the sermons they flock to. They know who they are-they are full of original sin and they have a taste for violence. The blue state citizens make the Rousseauvian mistake of thinking humans are essentially good, and so they never realize when they are about to be slugged from behind.

This sounds like the maunderings of a drunken sot, but to the extent that there is some allegorical significance buried in the text, she seems to be implying that conservatives are a violent and brutal lot. Yet where is there any evidence to substantiate such a libel? Whatever evidence there is from the last campaign points the finger in the other direction. Almost every instance of campaign thuggery that occurred over the last several months was perpetrated against Republicans. It is not Republicans who hoped for "a thousand Mogodishus" in Iraq. It wasn't Republicans who made a movie about how to assassinate the president. It wasn't Republicans that pined for Lee Harvey Oswald and John Hinckley "now that we need them". It wasn't Republicans who've been arrested in Michigan for slashing the tires of their own GOTV vans, and on and on.

The Democrats are in a tough spot. They're stuck with an ideological message that does not resonate with the majority of the population. They can either abandon their message, or they can try to convert enough people to their message that they become a majority, or they can follow Ms Smiley's example by taking leave of their senses and accuse 59 million people of being stupid, dishonest, and cruel.

Fortunately for the public perception of the Democrats, not all of the essays in the series are so mindless. Some of them are very thoughtful. Viewpoint will take a look at some of those in the days ahead.

The Kind of Fighting Lying Ahead

More insight into what the Coalition is, and has been, facing in and around Fallujah can be found at the Strategy Page:

What kind of fighting will occur in Fallujah? It will be a game of wits, as well as weapons. The most professional and experienced anti-government gunmen are in Fallujah, and they have developed many countermeasures for the coalition advantages. A major disadvantage is the coalition control of the air, and the constant presence of UAVs, aircraft or helicopters. Too many gunmen have seen their buddies ambushed, or jumped by unexpected coalition troops, to ignore the possibility of a UAV above sending live video of the battlefield to coalition commanders. So the gunmen try to set up movement routes that cannot be seen from the air.

Rugs or sheets are spread across alleys to make this possible, and sometimes even short tunnels are dug. The downside of this is that movement is inhibited. In fact, American troops do not always have a vidcam equipped UAV over the battlefield. But Department of Defense public affairs people like to distribute videos of such operations. The implication that American troops can "see everything" is meant to intimidate the enemy. It does, and slows down enemy movements, often fatally so.

Fighting in Fallujah will be a war of surprise and ambush. Whoever first figures out what the other side is up to will have an edge. The smart money is on the Americans. For while the "insurgents" have received lots of positive press for their unequal struggle, they have by far gotten the worst of it. In thousands of little battles, the anti-government forces are almost always defeated. Most of the time they just flee, but all too often they are killed or captured. Coalition intelligence officers know who they are fighting, and how they fight.

There's more at the link.

The Coming European Civil War

Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a descendent of the famous artist, was shot and stabbed to death on a Netherlands street last week by a young Dutch Muslim because Van Gogh was an outspoken critic in his films of Islamic misogyny and bigotry. His murderers pinned a note to his body with a knife. It read in part:

I know for sure that you, Oh America will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Europe, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Holland, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh Hirsi Ali, will go under; I know for sure that you, Oh unbelieving fundamentalist, will go under.

The note concludes by threatening several Dutch politicians with death.

As Andrew Sullivan asks, "What part of that do we not understand?"

More pertinently, perhaps, what part of that doesn't the left, both in Europe and in the American media, understand?

Power Line cites the New York Times opinion on the murder and highlights the Times' penchant for turning the wrong way on every one way street. Power Line writes:

Here is how the New York Times responded today to the horrific murder of Theo Van Gogh and the ensuing arrest of nine Islamic militants:

"Something sad and terrible is happening to the Netherlands, long one of Europe's most tolerant, decent and multicultural societies."

Yes, that is true. Van Gogh was shot, and then, while still alive, he was stabbed repeatedly and his throat was cut. The murderer then stuck a five-page letter to Van Gogh's body with the knife; the letter threatened certain Dutch politicians. That is indeed "sad and terrible," although we would be more inclined to rage than sadness.

But what does the Times propose to do in response to this terrorist murder?

"Urgent efforts are needed to better manage the cultural tensions perilously close to the surface of Dutch public life. The problem is not Muslim immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society. One very real danger is that the public trauma over the van Gogh murder may lead to a clamor for anti-Muslim policies that could victimize thousands of innocent refugees and immigrants. The challenge for Dutch political leaders is to find ways to reverse this disturbing trend of politically motivated violence without making it harder to achieve cultural harmony."

Notice how blame for Van Gogh's murder rests not with the killers, but with the Dutch government's "failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse society." Whatever that means. And, of course, in the Netherlands as in the United States, the Times' chief fear is that popular outrage at Islamic terrorism might lead to "victimization" of innnocent immigrants. Let me just hazard a guess here: there won't be any innocent immigrants having their throats cut. Except, perhaps, for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others who have been threatened with death by the Islamist terrorists.

The Times concludes with a wistful plea for "cultural harmony." I think harmony went out the window some time ago; the Times just wasn't paying attention. At this point, the goal should be not so much "cultural harmony" as rounding up the terrorists before more innocent people get killed.

Power Line has more here, and there is a Dutch blog which is focussing almost exclusively on this episode here.

The New York Times' pleas for cultural comity notwithstanding, the fact is that unless moderate Muslims soon start speaking out against the radicals in their midst, unless they soon begin to purge their mosques and communities of these savages, there will result a war of extermination in Europe and perhaps even in North America.

In Europe one of two situations is likely to obtain given the evident indifference of the larger Muslim community to the cancer in its midst. Either the European people will be so cowed by the terrorists that, emboldened by the weakness of their prey, the Islamists will launch a holy war on European soil to hasten the Muslim eschaton of world Islam, or the Europeans, in an uncharacteristic fit of resolve in the face of evil, will begin mass deportations and violence against the Islamic communities within their borders. Such aggressive self-defense will itself precipitate a violent reaction from the Muslims and religious civil war would likely ensue.

Given the silence of the "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, and the aspirations of the radicals, one of these two outcomes is almost inevitable. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future as the Islamists see it, imagine a knife sawing at a human throat, for ever.

Inside the Kerry Campaign

Inside glimpses of the Kerry campaign are starting to leak out. My brother Bill passes along this one by Tim Reid of the U.K. Times Online. Here are a few interesting excerpts:

JOHN KERRY constantly squabbled with his difficult and hypochondriac wife, ran a campaign team riven by internal feuding, and repeatedly begged the Republican senator John McCain to become his running-mate, according to a riveting inside account of his doomed presidential bid. The Massachusetts senator was so obsessed with getting advice from a multitude of rival advisers that one aide confiscated his mobile telephone. His wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, became such a moody distraction that in the closing weeks of the campaign another aide instructed her to stop whispering advice in his ear and back off.

One of the untold stories of the presidential campaign was the erratic behaviour of the candidate's wife, the Heinz heiress Mr Kerry married in 1995, according to Newsweek. She drove her Secret Service detail mad with her chronic lateness, constantly demanded attention, including her husband's (who seemed to tread on eggshells when around her). She even sent him off on errands, such as fetching bottles of water. She clashed with Mary Beth Cahill, Mr Kerry 's campaign manager, and Mr Kerry was caught in the middle.

Mr Kerry...grew increasingly frustrated. After a faltering press conference by Mr Bush in April, and with Iraq in turmoil, Mr Kerry exclaimed: "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot".

During the early summer, Mr Kerry implored Mr McCain, the maverick Republican who ran against Mr Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, to become his running-mate, meeting him seven times. He even offered to expand the vice-presidency to include running the Pentagon. "I can't say this is an offer because I've got to be able to deny it," Mr Kerry told Mr McCain. "But you've got to do this."

Mr McCain told him he was out of his mind, and went on to embrace Mr Bush. "Goddammit," a furious Mr Kerry said to an aide. "Don't you know what I offered him? Why the f*** didn't he take it?"

James Carville, Bill Clinton's former strategist [joined the campaign]. So appalled was he by the chaos inside the campaign, and so desperate to see Mr Bush defeated, that in early September he decided that Miss Cahill had to be ousted, and Joe Lockhart, Mr Clinton's former spokesman, inserted as manager. When he called a meeting with the pair, he was so worked up, he began to cry, screaming to Miss Cahill: "You've got to let him (Mr Lockhart) do it!"

None of this is very flattering to either the Senator or his campaign. There's more at the link.

De-elect Arlen Specter

John Miller of The National Review wrote an article last spring which concluded that Arlen Specter is the worst Republican Senator in the Senate. His reasons were numerous, but chief among them, perhaps, was the fact that Arlen Specter joined Teddy Kennedy in killing the nomination of Robert Bork. Even so, at a time when Specter was fighting for his political life last spring in a tough primary fight against Pat Toomey, President Bush weighed in to lend his support to Senator Specter.

Specter ran the President's endorsement in his ads over and over, but once he had defeated Toomey, solely because the endorsement of the president and his fellow Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum persuaded a lot of Republicans to ignore their better judgment, Specter never again identified himself with George Bush. His gratitude to Bush didn't extend to mentioning the President in any of his ads for the general election. Having exploited the President's endorsement to garner him a win in the primary, he didn't wish to risk defeat in the general election by being too closely identified by liberals with the despised George Bush.

For some reason that we'll leave to the psychiatrists to fathom for us, Republican voters reelected him to the Senate and now he shows his true character by essentially warning the President that sending up pro-life judges to the judiciary committee he is in line to chair would be pointless. He as much as told the president that he will personally kill the nomination of any judge who might be less than enthusiastic about Roe v. Wade. This is as incredible an arrogation of power as it is a monumental act of political ingratitude. One Republican senator is threatening to thwart the will of 59 million Americans who voted for President Bush's agenda.

His arrogance has created a storm of criticism and he has subsequently backtracked, but the man is not to be trusted. Once he is ensconced in his chairmanship he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He needs to be prevented from being elected to the chair in the first place.

The Republican caucus may vote on committee chairmanships as early as next week. If you feel the same about Senator Specter as does Viewpoint you can do something about it by contacting your senator (if you have a Republican senator) by phone or e-mail (check here for numbers and e-mail) and tell them you believe Arlen Specter is unsuited to be chairman of the judiciary committee. If you don't have a Republican senator, (or even if you do), contact Bill Frist the Senate majority leader and make your concerns known to him. Let them know that this is a very important matter to those of us who comprise the base of the Republican party.

There's a lot more on Arlen Specter at NRO's The Corner.

How Bad Can it Get?

This Reuter's report pretty much puts the kibosh to the left's complaint that the economy under George Bush is in such miserable shape:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - New U.S. jobs soared at the sharpest rate in seven months in October, the government reported on Friday, helped by a surge in construction activity as hurricane-battered areas in the Southeast were rebuilt.

A surprisingly strong 337,000 jobs were added to payrolls last month -- twice the 169,000-job growth that Wall Street economists had forecast and the strongest since March when 353,000 jobs were created, the Labor Department said.

Still, the unemployment rate edged up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent in September, but that was because more people joined the search for employment, a potentially hopeful sign.

Not only was October a strong month but the number of jobs created in the two prior months was revised up -- to 139,000 in September instead of 96,000 and to 198,000 in August instead of 128,000.

The dollar, which has been under pressure, strengthened broadly on the news while bond prices weakened in the expectation that a resurgent labor market may foster higher interest rates and that investors may favor stocks.

"It looks like the job situation is improving and that this will support consumer spending going into the holidays and offset some of the drag caused by high oil prices this year," said economist Gary Thayer of A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St, Louis, Missouri.

If things get any "worse" under the evil Bush we'll have to bring our troops home just to guard our borders to keep the rest of the world from pouring in.

Analyzing the Election

If you're a political science type or just a junkie you'll find Jay Cost's analysis of the recent election well worth reading. You can read it at Horserace Blog here

The Clock is Ticking

Chester at Adventures With Chester explains how we are shaping the battlefield in Fallujah. An excerpt:

Folks, many of the psychological aspects of the battle are starting to become clear. Let's see what we end up with when we try to calculate the overall effect on the enemy that the following combination of military and political events will have:

1. Bush has won re-election in the US with a clear victory that is unchallenged. This shows unity in the American populace.

2. Four Arab-language media outlets have been forced from Fallujah by the insurgents for refusing to display stock footage of civilian casualties. This is a huge plus for us, especially when we learn that Iraqi journalists are being embedded with US forces. Remember how well embedding worked for us during the invasion? No reason it won't work again in swaying Iraqi public opinion. Note that the article states that Al-Jazeera declined to embed a reporter. If the battle goes well for the US, and Iraqis and other Arabs watch it go well on their TVs, but Al-Jazeera reports negatively, the US can publicize AJ's "no thanks" to being included to AJ's detriment. Another note: I bet the US has some very solid signals intelligence, or other human intelligence that many of the fighers in Fallujah are not Iraqi. Being able to show them on TV as the US assaults will be a huge plus for Allawi. I don't think he would take this risk if he didn't know for sure.

3. There is a British report that the Black Watch will be patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah. The article states that the Brits are based in Camp Dogwood. If that's the case, then the idea that they are patrolling the outskirts of Fallujah is spin, pure and simple. Camp Dogwood is a good 50 miles as the crow flies from Fallujah. The Brits are serving as a blocking force, and are going to be watching one of the high-speed avenues of approach running north-south from Baghdad to Iskandriyah (I can't find the name of this highway at the moment) to clean up any fleeing insurgents. I bet the US will leave them one avenue of escape. This is because:

a) it will definitely be very bloody if all the jihadi's have nowhere to go and fight to the finish in the city, b) if they flee, we can attrit them from the air very effectively (a highway is a relatively open battlespace), and c) the British, maybe coupled with US Army units, will be in a position to bat cleanup as the bad guys move toward them.

The analyses we've seen point to a commencement of battle within days if not hours.

The Current Civil War

There's a lot of buzz on talk shows and the internet about how Christian Evangelicals turned out in big numbers to swing the election for George Bush. Something like 25% of Ohio voters, for example, identified themselves as Evangelical Christians and they voted three to one for George Bush. Similar numbers prevailed throughout the country, and the Democrats are now commencing an extended season of self-examination to determine why so many of these people, especially in states which had been traditionally Democratic, have defected to George W. Bush.

The very fact that they have to ask the question, of course, reveals part of the problem. Democrats, at least liberal Democrats, which is almost all of them in the leadership, are tone deaf when it comes to religion and morality. They just don't get it. They can't understand why people who hold a Christian worldview, especially one which is theologically conservative, would feel alienated by the Democratic party. In an act of graciousness in the wake of victory Viewpoint offers them the following brief tutorial.

There is a second Civil War taking place in this country, not a war fought with guns but a war fought with ideas and the artillery of culture. Indeed, it is a culture war, a war that has riven this nation more deeply than anything since the first Civil War, and surprisingly, some people on both sides are just now coming to realize it. For at least three generations the secular left, the "progressives", concentrated in Hollywood, the academy, the television and music industries, and in the legislatures and judiciaries of government have been assiduously undermining and assaulting the traditional values that much of the rest of the country holds dear. The traditionalists, for their part, have complained about these attacks on their values but felt impotent to do much about them. The progressives controlled the levers of power and it just seemed to many, especially among the progressives, that their ultimate victory is inevitable. Maybe it is, but in this election the traditionalists finally felt they had an opportunity to stand against the tide, if only for a moment, and shout "enough."

Now the political organ of the progressives, the Democratic party, is stunned. They had fallen victim to an overweening confidence in their own inevitability, concocted in equal parts by their past success and their present ideological incestuousness. They are astonished that there are still so many people out there who can't see the obvious rightness of their cause and who were able to muster sufficient political energy to thwart them on their way to establishing a completely secular polity. What some Democrats are beginning to realize, as if awakening from a slumber, is that their party has sold its soul to the ideological far left and is in thrall today to the Michael Moores and Al Frankens of the world. It has become the party of rich and powerful men like John Kerry, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy and George Soros who patronize and pander to the working class but who have nothing in common with them. It is the party of academics and intellectuals who see the masses of people only as an abstract entity residing in remote frontiers that they themselves have only personally observed from an altitude of 35,000 feet. It is the party of those who hold in contempt the values and religion which that 25% of the voting public cherishes and which an even greater number respects. And now this party sits in wonderment at their repudiation by the heartland of this nation.

Concerned Democrats might do well to reflect on the fact that their party has had exactly two presidents in the last thirty years. One was an unabashed Evangelical, Jimmy Carter, and the other, Bill Clinton, at least made a pretense of being devout. John Kerry's awkward attempts to appear pious were transparently phony and, in any event, his high church style of piety did not much impress the Christian conservatives who turned out for Bush.

So the political post-mortems are concentrating quite a lot on the party itself and questions are being raised about how Democrats can regain some purchase among the people on the moral values issue. Pundits are asking why there can't be some unity between left and right on core values. The assumption seems to be that there must be common ground somewhere and that it's just a matter of finding it. What so many don't seem to understand is that there is no common ground. The relentless advances of secularism and our silly infatuation with "diversity" and "tolerance" have swept it away.

In our grandparents' day most people, whether they were Christian or not, accepted the moral authority of the Church and of the Bible. They may not have lived by it, but they somehow knew they should. There was a shared platform upon which to stand to discuss and debate moral issues and disagreements. That is much less the case today. Today the platform has been razed to the ground in the interest of "maximizing a diverse mosaic" of views and consequently we're like people adrift on rafts that have floated away from each other and are too far apart for us to join hands, to reconnect.

People on one raft base their values upon the Bible and/or Christian tradition, while the another raft is occupied by people who are, at the very least, skeptical of those as sources of moral authority. Many on that raft are openly hostile to the Christian worldview. Much, if not most, of the gulf between the red staters and the blue staters has resulted from this fundamentally disparate way of grounding moral truth. Since the two sides lack a common vision of what is ultimately right, their goals and means will rarely converge. Indeed, those who ground their values in God's revelation are seen by the secularists as superstitious fools whose benighted ideas deserve to be sent to the nearest landfill.

It is not that we simply disagree about the best way to get from A to Z . The two sides disagree about whether Z is where we should go at all. Traditionalists see marriage, for example, as a sacrament ordained by God. The left scoffs at this and views marriage as an oppressive, undesirable social structure evolved by ancient man and obsolete in today's world. Traditionalists believe that we should protect marriage from innovations and inroads, like easy divorce and gay marriage, which would eventually prove its undoing. The left sees any rules that would limit people from doing whatever they want to do as unjust and confining. There is no common ground here upon which a debate can be held. The only course is to resort to the exercise of power by one side over their antagonist and to secure for their values the force of law. The progressives have been doing this for fifty years, and the traditionalists have been fighting a rear-guard action against them, trying to preserve their way of life until they could amass sufficient political and judicial clout to undo some of the damage.

Lacking a common set of metaphysical assumptions upon which to base our moral judgments, both political parties have long ago given up trying to convince their opponents by argument and logical persuasion. They have realized, if only subliminally, that if we aren't starting from the same basic assumptions we'll never wind up at the same end point. Thus the parties find themselves engaged now in a mining operation, trying to extract votes from people who already agree with them, but who typically don't vote. The Republicans registered millions of people in this election over the age of 40 who were voting for the first time in their lives. But what neither party will be able to do with any significant success, in our opinion, is convert many voters. The politicos may fool the uninformed into believing that they're on the same side of the worldview divide as the people are, but, because there is so little common ground between the party elites and those whose worldview they disdain, they won't be successful in convincing those people to change their minds about what they believe. They will continue to just talk past each other. Better to spend one's resources on energizing those who already agree with you.

If this is true the prospects for national comity between red state/blue state folks are dim. The civil war will continue, perhaps in an increasingly uncivil fashion, and the gulf between the two groups will only widen as resentments are nourished and reinforced by new outrages. It is an interesting coincidence, perhaps, that the electoral strength of both sides lies pretty much along the same lines as the national division in 1860. Senator Kerry's blue states lie almost completely north of the Mason Dixon Line (Maryland and California are exceptions) and George Bush's electoral college strength lies predominantly south of it. Let's hope that this is indeed a coincidence and not a portent.

A Plea For Graciousness

Megan McArdle at Instapundit has some good advice for all of us who are delighted with Bush's victory:

A DEMOCRATIC FRIEND OF MINE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL from a Republican she doesn't speak to that often, allegedly to "say hi" but transparently to gloat. This is my plea to Bush voters to give peace a chance. If we have any chance of ending the sniping and bitterness that characterise the current political scene, it's going to start with Republicans being gracious winners. If you have to indulge your schadenfreude, do it silently by lurking on Democratic websites and reading hair-tearing left-wing editorials, not by alienating people with whom we'd like to eventually build a better America.

Having endorsed Ms McArdle's plea for civility Viewpoint has to confess that we did, though, laugh at Glenn Beck's riff on the radio this morning. Beck is, in our mind, the most talented, the most entertaining, talk radio host on the air and that includes Limbaugh and Hannity. If you can find him on the dial give him a listen. In the Harrisburg, PA area he's on WHP 580 at 9:00 a.m. Sometimes you just have to laugh even though you know you shouldn't.

Random Thoughts

Yesterday's election brought the Republicans a coup of four net Senate seats, including that of Tom Daschle, which puts the count at 55 R, 44 D, and 1 Independent. There are two things about this that bode well for Bush's agenda.

First is that it will now be much more difficult for the Democrats to stonewall Bush's judicial appointments, most importantly to the Supreme Court, on which there may be as many as four vacancies over the next four years. This will reverberate through our polity for the next two generations. Secondly, some Democrats may well lose enthusiasm for serving in the minority for the foreseeable future and may soon choose to retire (or even switch). This could well produce an even larger Republican majority in 2006 and 2008.

Eleven states had a referendum on the ballot yesterday that would amend their constitutions to ban gay marriage. The measure won in all eleven states bringing to seventeen the number of states whose constitutions prohibit legal recognition of such unions.

Californians approved a $3 billion measure to fund stem cell research. How a state which teetered on the brink of insolvency a year or two ago will pay for this is not yet clear.

George W. Bush received the highest vote total ever awarded to a winner. He is the first candidate to win over 50% of the vote since his father did it in 1988. The Clinton years are looking more and more like an aberrational interruption of an otherwise steady march toward a political hegemony of traditional and conservative values that began with Reagan in 1980. The long march through the institutions continues, and there is still a long way to go, but it's conservatives which are doing the marching and it's the left which is finding itself on the wrong side of history. At least we can hope.

Winners and Losers

With word that Senator Kerry is prepared to concede the election to George Bush, Viewpoint sees a number of winners and losers in the aftermath of this national exercise in democracy. Perhaps readers might wish to add some of their own (or delete one or more of ours:

Winners:

The American People

The People of Iraq and Afghanistan

Israel

The Republican Party

Compassionate Conservatism

The Swift Vets

Hillary Clinton

The New Media (Talk Radio, Blogosphere, Fox News)

Civil and Optimistic Political Rhetoric

Political Honesty

Losers:

Jacques Chirac and Old Europe

Islamist Radicals and the Axis of Evil

Palestinian Terrorists

The Democrat Party

Leftism/ Liberalism

George Soros, Michael Moore, and Hollywood Glitterati

Terry McAuliffe

Mainstream Media (esp. CBS, ABC, AP, NYT, WaPo, LA Times)

Hate and Pessimism

Political Lies and Fraud

Exit Polls, Presidential Debates, Trial Lawyers, NEA/PSEA, Gay Marriage