The War Against WW IV

Davi Bernstein of Commentary magazine writes to PowerLine.com to announce an article by Norman Podhoretz entitled The War Against World War IV:

I'm writing, now, to let you know about Norman Podhoretz's latest article, "The War against World War IV," in which he takes vigorous aim at the enemies of the Bush Doctrine--the rising domestic chorus of voices calling for disengagement from the "failure" of Iraq and prophesying both near- and long-term damage to American interests around the world if we persist. The unlikely bedfellows include isolationists both left and right, conservative superhawks, foreign-policy realists, liberal internationalists, and more.

"The War against World War IV" analyzes this new domestic offensive against the Bush Doctrine, systematically taking up and refuting the arguments of the critics. Podhoretz's conclusion is that Bush is determined to stay the course, but that the obstacles facing him--and us--are formidable: not the insurgent forces of violence on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere, but the powerfully gathering culture of defeatism at home.

Podhoretz's essay is indeed a masterful tour de force. We highly recommend it to anyone interested in the greatest struggle of our time, the struggle to prevail against an implacable enemy determined to destroy us. But the article is also more than that. With concision and wisdom Podhoretz lays out the foreign policy challenges which face, not only George Bush, but the American people in the years ahead and makes the case that an irresolute America would be a calamity for the world. It is truly a remarkable piece of writing and analysis.

Nice Try

A Lutheran study group reminds us of the old Boy George lyric from Karma Chameleon to the effect, roughly, that he's a man without conviction who doesn't know how to spot a contradiction. The task force has come up with an interesting solution to the problem of how to appease everyone in the controversy over whether the Church should ordain gay pastors and celebrate gay unions.

This major study on human sexuality by the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) recommends that no change be made in the church policy that precludes the ordination of gay or lesbian people in same-sex relationships. It also recommends that no official church ceremony be adopted to bless same-gender unions.

But on both of these hotly divisive issues, the landmark task force report suggests discretion be granted to local congregations acting in "good conscience" to "make judgments appropriate to each situation." It also suggests the church refrain from disciplining those congregations who may approve partnered gay or lesbian candidates for ministry, out of respect for "the deep divisions among us."

In other words, the ELCA should not change the rules governing homosexuality in ministry, but local congregations don't have to follow them if they don't want to. The ELCA can thus stand four-square against homosexual ordination while at the same time allowing gay pastors to serve in its pulpits and blessing gay unions among its congregants. This is a positively brilliant and fittingly post-modern demarche, and we wonder why it hasn't been thought of before.

Unfortunately, the task force's recommendations will have to be voted on in the Church-wide convention in August in order to become Church policy (whatever that means in view of the recommendations), and here we may expect that more rational heads will prevail.

Not For Sale

Now it turns out that a couple of big time blogs were in the bag for Howard Dean last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that The Daily Kos, the ninth biggest blog in the blogosphere, was paid $12,000 to serve as "technical consultant" to the Dean campaign.

The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.

In their defense the two popular bloggers insist they breached no ethical boundaries:

The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn't believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean's campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.

Mr. Zuniga said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.

Be that as it may, Viewpoint wishes its readers to know that we are not for sale. We have never accepted any money from anyone in return for our support. Of course, we have never been offered any either.

Punishing Syria

This UPI article gives some details about possibly imminent Coalition strikes against Syria.

New York, NY, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Bush administration hard-liners have been considering launching selected military strikes at insurgent training camps in Syria and border-crossing points used by Islamist guerrillas to enter Iraq in an effort to bolster security for the upcoming elections, according to former and current administration officials.

Pressure for some form of military action is also coming from interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, these sources said.

Some former and serving U.S. intelligence officials who have usually been opposed to any expansion of U.S. military activities in the region are expressing support for such strikes.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told United Press International, "I don't usually find myself in sympathy with the Bush neo-cons, but I think there is enough fire under this smoke to justify such action."

Referring to the escalating attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by Iraqi insurgents, he added, "Syria is complicit in the (anti-U.S.) insurgency up to its eyeballs."

"Syria is the No. 1 crossing point" for guerrillas entering Iraq," Gary Gambill, editor of the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, said. He added that Damascus "does nothing about it."

An administration official said Syria has "camps in which Syrians are training Iraqis for the insurgency and others where Iraqis are training Syrians for the same purpose" which could be hit by U.S. air strikes.

Recently, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that senior Baath Party officials from Iraq are operating from Syria where they provide financing and direction to the cells of Iraqi insurgents killing Americans, sparking new discussions within the administration about possible measures against Syria.

U.S. officials told United Press International that money, direction, weapons and personnel are flowing into Iraq from Syria, ending up in Iraqi cities such as Iskanderiya, Baqouba, Latafiya and Fallujah.

Damascus is also home to associates of a top insurgency commander now affiliated with al-Qaida, Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who is responsible for many major suicide bombing attacks in Iraq, U.S. officials said.

The presence of a Zarqawi branch in Damascus, discovered last summer, was said to have acted as a major spur in uniting France and the United States in supporting U.N. Resolution 1559 that demanded Syria withdraw from Lebanon and that elections be held in April 2005, U.S. officials said.

Gambill charged that a major Zarqawi deputy lives in Damascus.

In addition to Syria being used as a rear area for insurgents, it is a key center of finance for former Saddam Hussein officials who are leading the insurgency, thanks to stashes of Iraqi cash that could run as high as $3 billion, which is all in the Syrian banking system, according for former and serving administration officials.

There are also allegedly "many millions of dollars" from Palestinian groups flowing into Syria that are also being used to help finance anti-American guerrilla groups in Iraq, these sources said.

The Bush administration has applied increasing pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to halt the activities of militant groups inside Syria, and to arrest and extradite former Saddam Hussein officials who are the leading financiers, according to several U.S. government sources.

So far there has been no positive response, they said.

The article goes on to talk about the dilemma faced by Bashar Assad and the difficulties he confronts in trying to avoid Coalition assaults on Syrian territory. Perhaps making these plans public is an attempt to intimidate Syria into cooperating, or perhaps it is a signal that such attacks against targets in Syria have already begun. If not then we're left wondering why, if we are going to undertake such missions in the future, we would telegraph that warning ahead of time and afford the targets the opportunity to evade us.

At any rate, it's hard to see how Syria can escape when Bush clearly announced in his initial "Bush doctrine" speeches that nations which harbor terrorists would not be spared. It would seem that both Syria and Iran are daring him to back up his threat.

Say It Ain't So, Armstrong

Whether or not it is illegal for a government agency (the Department of Education) to pay talk radio hosts to promote their programs (in this case, No Child Left Behind), it certainly seems unethical for the radio host to accept a government check, promote the program, and not explain to his audience that his endorsement has been purchased. Armstrong Williams is a good guy and he's on the right side of most issues, but he showed poor judgment on this one. He has forever diminished his credibility with his listeners, and that is a shame.

Conservatives have been rightly clamoring for thirty years for disbanding the Department of Education. If what the Department did in paying Williams $240,000 to promote NCLB is in fact illegal then the DOE has just reinforced the case against maintaining this useless bureaucracy.

Theism and Philosophy

To read the first part of this paper by Quentin Smith one might not guess that professor Smith is an atheist. Smith calls upon his fellow atheists to recognize that Christian philosophers have, over the past thirty five years, done brilliant work in the field of philosophy and have become a significant minority of the practitioners of the discipline and have virtually taken over the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion. Here are a few highlights:

This is not to say that none of the scholars in the various academic fields were...theists in their "private lives"; but theists, for the most part, excluded their theism from their publications and teaching, in large part because theism was mainly considered to have such a low epistemic status that it did not meet the standards of an "academically respectable" position to hold.

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga's influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga's even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Gr�nbaum, and other naturalists.

Theists, whom hitherto had segregated their academic lives from their private lives, increasingly came to believe (and came to be increasingly accepted or respected for believing) that arguing for realist theism in scholarly publications could no longer be justifiably regarded as engaging in an "academically unrespectable" scholarly pursuit.

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga's writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion....Of course, some professors in these other, non-philosophical, fields are theists; for example, a recent study indicated that seven percent of the top scientists are theists. However, theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work.

If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected, requiring them to write secular articles if they wanted to be published. If a scientist did argue for theism in professional academic journals, such as Michael Behe in biology, the arguments are not published in scholarly journals in his field (e.g., biology), but in philosophy journals (e.g., Philosophy of Science and Philo, in Behe's case). But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, "academically respectable" to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

The great majority of naturalist philosophers react by publicly ignoring the increasing desecularizing of philosophy (while privately disparaging theism, without really knowing anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion) and proceeding to work in their own area of specialization as if theism, the view of approximately one-quarter or one-third of their field, did not exist.

Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging from philosophy of science ... to epistemology ... being theists. The predicament of naturalist philosophers is not just due to the influx of talented theists, but is due to the lack of counter-activity of naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not "dead" in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.

A hand waving dismissal of theism, such as is manifested in the following passage from Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, has been like trying to halt a tidal wave with a hand-held sieve. Searle responds to about one-third of contemporary philosophers with this brush-off: Talking about the scientific and naturalist world-view, he writes: "this world view is not an option. It is not simply up for grabs along with a lot of competing world views. Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather than in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remained convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith."

Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist, which is similar to the attitude expressed by Searle in the previous quote, the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true. This philosophical failure (ignoring theism and thereby allowing themselves to become unjustified naturalists) has led to a cultural failure since theists, witnessing this failure, have increasingly become motivated to assume or argue for supernaturalism in their academic work, to an extent that academia has now lost its mainstream secularization.

If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that "no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith," although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.

These are remarkable admissions. Smith goes on in the rest of the article, which grows rather technical, to describe what he thinks needs to be done in order to take philosophy back from the theist interlopers.

A Moderate Muslim Perspective

We came across the following remarkable article by Mustafa Akyol from the December issue of The American Enterprise at the The Road to Emmaus. Akyol says so many important things that we've decided to post his entire essay. We're sure our readers will find it well worth reading:

A moderate Muslim's prayer for American faith and family values.

"Why do you hate us?" Since the horrendous events of 9/11, Americans have been posing that question to Muslims across the globe. The first answer from someone like me, who is repulsed by terrorists who kill in the name of Islam, is that most of us do not hate you. Yet it must be acknowledged that radical Muslim rage is real in many countries.

This rage is often irrational and ill founded. However, there is one crucial source of anti-Americanism that is built on a genuine threat. Many Muslims detest the moral decline that seems to have pervaded American culture during the second half of the twentieth century. They worry that it will be exported to their own children and societies.

Many Americans would agree that such a moral decline does exist, and would trace it to a view asserting that material life is all there is to existence. Philosophical materialism denies the existence of higher beings, such as God, and higher principles than self-maximization. When applied to human societies, it encourages pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and hedonism, and the consequences are horrifying to many devout Muslims around the world. Through American popular culture such as Hollywood movies, MTV, or pornography, they encounter a culture in which God and religious principles seem to be disrespected, neglected, even attacked or ridiculed.

In his recent book, Why the Rest Hates the West, historian Meic Pearse notes that many people around the globe see Western societies as being ones that "derogate religion, exalt triviality (sports, entertainment, fashion), endorse sexual shamelessness, deprecate family, and discard honor." Pearse argues that these tendencies do indeed have bad results: "social atomization; personal irresponsibility; dehumanizing impersonality; and other wounds to traditional families, communities, and conceptions of the person."

"The al-Qaeda hijackers did not target the Vatican, the capital of Western Christianity," notes writer David Kelley, but rather the World Trade Center, "a temple of modernity." He points out that "Hamas's suicide bombers usually attack Israeli pizza parlors, hotels, and nightclubs, not synagogues." Kelley (who is himself an atheist) concludes that "Islamist hatred of the West is not directed at Christianity as a rival religion but at modernism as an alternative to religion as such."

But of course, the West is not monolithic. Materialism is just one side of the West-on the other side, Judeo-Christianity stands firm. This state of affairs is evident only vaguely in Europe, but crystal clear in America. Americans possess one of the most religious societies in the world, and in fact the world's most determined battle against materialism-on cultural, philosophical, and scientific grounds-is going on right now in America.

Muslims who recognize this fact make a distinction between "righteous Westerners" and other ones. For example, take a look at these lines from an article titled "The Final Jihad," published on a popular Muslim Web site:

Western secular materialism takes us from our prayers, takes us from our Islamic culture...gives us a society of crime, violence, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, exploitation of people and resources, and reduces life to a meaningless exercise in futility. [But] we must know who and what is the enemy. It is important to realize that...many good people in Western nations trying to live right lives.... These people are not our enemy; they also are victims of Western secular materialism.

Most Muslims, however, fail to appreciate the distinction drawn above, and don't know anything about the "culture war" going on in American society. They see America only through its materialist pop culture. Distaste for materialism thus translates into a distaste for America.

This distaste derives not only from culture but also from ideas. When "Western ideas" are mentioned, many Muslims think not of Jefferson, C. S. Lewis, Lincoln, or Burke, but rather of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Carl Sagan. The behavior of some Westernized local elites in Muslim countries make the situation even worse. In my country of Turkey, one popular stereotype of the Westernized Turk is of the soulless, skirt- and money-chasing man drinking whiskey while swearing at Islam. Although a caricature, it carries enough truth to further a bad image of the West.

These negative images, however, can be reversed. Many Muslims are inclined to appreciate the tradition of "family values" in America. During my childhood, in the early 1980s, the most popular TV series among conservative Turkish Muslim families was Little House on the Prairie, which portrayed the life of a very devout American family. People were saying that such ethics were what made America strong. Today, Turks complain about the "corrupt American culture" streaming into their houses through the TV and Internet. They would love to see the America of Little House again.

It would provide an antidote to Islamic radicalism and its inherent anti-Americanism if more Muslims realized that today's Hollywood portrayals don't accurately reflect the moral lives of most Americans. The masterminds of Islamic radicalism work hard to mask the religiosity and decency of average Americans. They insist that America is totally materialistic and that even its religious practices are superficial and insincere.

Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of Islamic radicalism, alleged that even churches in America were tools for profitmaking and publicity seeking. He insisted that America is not Christian or Jewish at all, but jahiliye-a term used to define the pre-Islamic, barbarian, pagan Arabia. Although this is a bigoted and often intentional misrepresentation, it feeds anti-American feeling.

Note that Osama bin Laden defines Americans as "crusaders" (lustful plunderers) rather than "Christians." The Koran, after all, declares that Christians are "nearest among men in love to the Muslims, because amongst them are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant." To attack the U.S., radicals have to de-Christianize it. And this is exactly what they do�-with a big assist from the entertainment and news media of the United States itself.

Obviously, that is a distortion of the truth. America stands out in the Western world as "a nation under God," particularly compared to "Old Europe." The aggressive secularism of Europe is one reason why European Muslims are especially radicalized. (Another spur is the lesser opportunities for upward mobility in Europe as compared to America.) As a Muslim, I feel at home in America when I see people saying grace at the table, praising the Lord, filling houses of worship, and handling currency inscribed "In God We Trust." When I'm in Europe, on the other hand, with its empty cathedrals, widespread atheism, and joyless cynicism, I feel alienated.

One can reasonably ask why, then, radical Islamists target the U.S. more than Europe. The answer comes from the image of a monolithic West. For the average Middle Eastern Muslim, there is no difference between Americans and Europeans in terms of secularism-he thinks they are both Godless-but America is more powerful, more effective, more omnipresent. The U.S. is viewed as the citadel of Western civilization (the civilization that has turned its back to God), and therefore the logical place to attack.

To erase this false image, America must help Muslims see that it is indeed a nation under God. The culture it exports should celebrate more than materialism, disbelief, selfishness, and hedonism. America must do a better job of portraying the principles of decency that undergird its society. Otherwise it will be despised by devout Muslims throughout the world, and radicals will channel contempt into violence.

Of course, avoiding radical Islamist rage is only one reason for Americans to resist empty materialism. A deeper reason is because materialism is a mistaken philosophy. If they will save themselves from its disappointments, America will enjoy many benefits-including a better chance to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, and avert a clash of civilizations.

There is a rich irony implied in this excellent article. The decadent, secular left, both at home and in Europe, hates America because they see us as being too Christian, and the Islamic radicals in the Arab world hate us because they see us as being too decadent and secular.

Another irony is that as much as we believe that Islamism is a curse on the world and needs to be defeated, as much as we find Shari'a a ghastly distortion of God's will, as much as we oppose Islamic irredentism, we can't help but agree with Akyol's Muslim critique that there is much in American culture to despise. Indeed, we know no one who is a Christian who wouldn't agree with almost everything Akyol writes.

Sullivan's Silliness

We respect Andrew Sullivan's political independence and often admire his opinions, but this one must have been written while still groggy from a mid-afternoon nap:

ATHEISTS NEED NOT APPLY: What was Bush thinking with this statement: "President Bush said yesterday that he doesn't 'see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord,' but that he is always mindful to protect the right of others to worship or not worship." So, out of his beneficence, he won't trample on others' religious freedom. But the White House? That's for Christians only. No Jews? Or atheists? Notice also the evangelical notion of a personal "relationship" with the Lord. That also indicates suspicion of those Christians with different approaches to the divine. I must say this is a new level of religio-political fusion in this administration. To restrict the presidency to a particular religious faith is anathema to this country's traditions and to the task of toleration. The president surely needs to retract the statement.

The president merely said that he doesn't know how presidents can serve in such a difficult job without being able to turn to God. He didn't say that they shouldn't be allowed to so serve. The difference between the two is so obvious that one wonders what motivated Sullivan to make an issue of it, and, even more, to demand a retraction.

The End of American Patience

Victor David Hanson argues that Americans are growing world-weary. It is certainly true that we see ourselves as doing so much good, as being so essential for the peace of the world, of making so many sacrifices so that others may enjoy the fruits of freedom, and yet we're hated and despised by so many of the world's people who couldn't care less about the help and welfare we bring.

We are, moreover, growing increasingly apprehensive that the world is determined to destroy itself. It doesn't want what we offer, either materially or spiritually. Nor does it want peace. The world has gone mad and the feeling is that there isn't anything much we can do about it. Here are a few highlights from Hanson's take on the situation:

An American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople - huddled in their churches and shuttered schools - almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets.

After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker. It was precisely that paradox between impotent high-sounding rhetoric and blunt-speaking, roughshod courage that lay at the heart of the classic Western from Shane and High Noon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven.

The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves - swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices - to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims - as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.

China, flush with billions in trade surplus, first offers a few million to its immediate Asian neighbors before increasing its contributions in the wake of massive gifts from Japan and the United States. Peking's gesture was what the usually harsh New York Times magnanimously called "slightly belated." In this weird sort of global high-stakes charity poker, no one asks why tiny Taiwan out-gives one billion mainlanders or why Japan proves about the most generous of all - worried the answer might suggest that postwar democratic republics, resurrected and nourished by the United States and now deeply entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of democracy, capitalism, and humanitarianism, are more civil societies than the Islamic theocracies, socialist republics, and authoritarian autocracies of the once-romanticized third world.

All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory - and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.

In an earlier post Viewpoint recalled the theme of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which Rand imagines a world in which those who produce wealth, ideas, and benefits for all the rest of us finally weary of all the obstacles put in their way by those jealous of their greatness and resentful of their success. At length these Nietzschean supermen decide they've had enough and they all retire from the affairs of the world, leaving the paltry parasitic classes to fend for themselves. Perhaps, Hanson is correct and Americans are beginning to see themselves as the characters in Rand's novel. If so, if we do turn inward and embrace an isolationist foreign policy, the consequences for the world would be catastrophic.

In a post last June we wrote the following:

Consider, for example, what would happen in Asia if the U.S. ceased to be able [or willing] to project power into this region. North and South Korea would quickly be at each other's throats, as would the Peoples' Republic of China and Taiwan. Japan and other states in the region would be unable to remain neutral and would get sucked into a hellish vortex of war that would consume the entire Pacific rim.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel's Arab neighbors would seize an opportunity they had been denied by American might for fifty years and invade Israel, spawning a conflict that would almost certainly result in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

A similar scenario would doubtless play out on the Indian subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and would also almost certainly culminate in a nuclear exchange. Africa, too, would likely break out in renewed tribal and racial violence.

Europe would be thrown into turmoil by its Arab populations and by renewed fighting in the Balkans. These stresses would exacerbate old hatreds and open old wounds between the countries of Europe which have warred repeatedly against each other for two thousand years, and would doubtless bring at least some of them into conflict with each other again.

It's hard to imagine the carnage that would result from all of this. The world teeters on a tightrope over a hellish chasm, and it is only the balance pole of American force that has kept us from plunging into that abyss.

The only thing that's changed in the last six months, Hanson tells us, is that some Americans feel a little more like maybe we should just let nature take its course.

Whitewash

Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard offers a succinct critique of CBS's investigation into the Dan Rather affair. He concludes, for compelling reasons, that the report was a whitewash that failed to answer the most important questions.

FOX blocker

Here's an interesting indication of the depths of desperation that liberals are beginning to feel. The following is an article from the New York Daily News:

Attention, blue-state parents. Are you worried about what your children are seeing on TV? Have you caught them ogling Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity as they engage in explicit acts of love with Bush administration policies? Now you can protect your little liberals from hard-core right-wing positions the same way you censor cable porn. For just $8.95, The FOXBlocker eliminates the risk of exposure to Fox News Channel.

Sam Kimery and Joshua Montgomery, who are marketing the device, say it employs the technology already used to filter adult content.

And every time someone orders one of the gizmos from Foxblocker.com, Fox advertisers receive E-mail telling them that another consumer has just said no to Rupert Murdoch's brand of "fair and balanced news."

"We hope that companies will see people actually paying to block channels that won't offer alternative views, and then rethink how they spend their advertising dollars," Montgomery tells Variety V Life magazine.

Is Fox worried about this new product?

"I mean, clearly, it's not working," a Fox News rep told us. "Our ratings continue to skyrocket."

Since it seems clear that the marketers of this product are at pains to prevent children from watching Fox News (adults can be presumed to be able to select their viewing fare unsupervised), it's interesting that their implicit comparison is of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, et al. to sleazy, pornographic television content. Here's an irony and a difference between the way liberals and conservatives see the world. In the conservative world-view obscenity is a perversion of the intimacy, privacy, and marital context of sex. In the liberal world-view obscenity is the expression of conservative political ideas. Let the tots see as much illicit coitus on screen as they wish, let them hear as much scatological language as they want, let them see the love which dare not speak its name proclaim itself from the rooftops, but conservative political notions must be concealed from the children with programming blockers lest the little ones secretly view Hannity, Hume, O'Reilley, et. al. and be seduced by conservative thinking. If we don't act now to prevent this, the liberals fear, our children will surely grow up to be degenerates.

Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for the tip.

Dem Says Let <i>Roe</i> Go

No Left Turns discusses an article by Benjamin Wittes in The Atlantic who argues that the time has come for the Democratic Party to stop defending Roe v. Wade. Wittes gives two reasons why this makes sense for Democrats. The original article is subscription only so the following is from No Left Turns' post:

Part of Wittes' argument is that the criticisms conservatives have made against it are not totally off the mark.

"Since its inception Roe has had a deep legitimacy problem, stemming from its weakness as a legal opinion. Conservatives who fulminate that the Court made up the right to abortion, which appears explicitly nowhere in the Constitution, are being simplistic--but they're not entirely wrong. In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky; abortion policy is a question that the Constitution--even broadly construed--cannot convincingly be read to resolve."

Of course, this comes as no news to any conservative. But his more interesting argument concerns how a reversal of Roe v. Wade would place the Republicans in a deep dilemma.

"Roe gives pro-life politicians a free pass. A large majority of voters reject the hard-line anti-abortion stance: in Gallup polling since 1975, for example, about 80 percent of respondents have consistently favored either legal abortion in all circumstances (21 to 34 percent) or legal abortion under some circumstances (48 to 61 percent). Although a plurality of Americans appear to favor abortion rights substantially more limited than what Roe guarantees, significantly more voters describe themselves as "pro-choice" than "pro-life." Yet because the Court has removed the abortion question from the legislative realm, conservative politicians are free to cater to pro-lifers by proposing policies that, if ever actually implemented, would render those politicians quite unpopular."

He makes a valid point; as long as Roe stands Republicans can fulminate against it, secure in the knowledge that they don't really have to do anything about abortion. We've spent a good bit of time talking about the divide in the Democratic Party between moderates and ultra-liberals, but a reversal of Roe would no doubt expose a fault line within the GOP that is just as wide--the one separating die-hard pro-lifers from those of us who, while favoring certain restrictions on abortion, see considerable moral and practical problems with an outright ban.

Three things should be mentioned here. First, when Wittes says that Conservatives have not been entirely wrong about the lack of constitutional support for the 1973 Roe decision what he's really trying to say is that Conservatives have been completely correct. Everything he says in that paragraph confirms this. He just doesn't want to state it that baldly for fear of incurring the censure of his liberal associates.

Second, it's not at all clear that the statistics are as Wittes sees them. There is reason to believe that the nation is much more sympathetic to placing restrictions on abortion than pro-choicers would have us think. This is why Kerry tended to downplay and waffle on the issue during the campaign and George Bush didn't.

Third, whether an overturn of Roe would create a political problem for Republicans depends upon how they react to it. If they point out that remanding the matter to the states gives the people greater say in formulating their state's abortion policy, it may well work to Republicans' benefit. Removing abortion from the judiciary and giving it to state legislatures empowers people to decide for themselves where to draw lines on this issue and should be presented that way by Republicans.

It is also not irrelevant that if the pro-choice throng is as numerous as Wittes' suggests it is, then they should have nothing to fear from having state legislatures, which are much more responsive to the will of the people than is the Supreme Court, establish the law. The fact that Pro-choicers are generally loath to have abortion law handled by the states gives the lie to their proclamations of substantial majorities in support of their position. We strongly suspect that they resist throwing the issue back into state houses because they fear that the majority of citizens in most states favor restrictions which they oppose.

The CBS Fallout

We confess to savoring a bit of schadenfreude at the fallout from the RatherGate affair at CBS. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. Well, perhaps that's not quite true. Maybe the New York Times deserves it just as much. At any rate, CBS and the cashiered foursome is getting what it, and they, deserve. They wanted with all their might for this story to be true. They wanted so badly to discredit George Bush that they convinced themselves that the forged memos were genuine. They were blinded by their own wish-fulfillment and threw all professional standards and caution to the winds, chancing their careers on this one throw of the dice.

At least that's the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that they knew going in that the documents were suspect, but didn't care. They thought they could damage the president with fabrications, and no one would be the wiser. They may well have done it before and thought they could do it again. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the blogosphere they doubtless would've gotten away with it.

The difference between the two interpretations is the difference between being reckless, careless, and gullible because of ignoble political motives and being overtly malicious and vicious because of ignoble political motives.

Some bloggers are a little miffed that the CBS report didn't come down harder on what they perceive to be the obvious political motivations of the principal players in this farce, but motivation is much easier to discern than it is to prove. Even so, in this case there can be little doubt, whether the report makes it clear or not, that the impelling force was a desire to destroy the Bush presidency.

Here's what Bernard Goldberg, former CBS reporter and author of the expose Biased, said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

"And I'm going a step further. I'm saying there was an agenda at work. I'm not saying that Dan Rather went into this saying, I'm going to get George Bush. It's never -- that is not the nature of bias in the news. It never, ever happens that way. But I am saying that he wanted this story to be true, and Mary Mapes sure wanted that story to be true. And did he depend too much on her? Yes, that's obvious. But if he didn't want this story to be true, if it didn't fit the culture of CBS' preconceived notions about liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans, it would have never seen the light of day and we would never be talking about it..."

"I think when you're working with investigative producers -- and it's the scariest thing in the world -- I've worked with them -- when they fall in love with the story, head for the hills. Because you may have big, big problems, as we see here. But what I'm saying is, they didn't simply fall in love with a great story. They would have never -- I know these people, I know these people. And even more than knowing these people, I know the culture at CBS News. They would have never fallen in love with a story that made the other side look as bad as they made George Bush. They just wouldn't have."

We hate to sound like Madame DeFarge, but we're satisfied that the job-ending guillotine at CBS is doing condign work. The only injustice is that Dan Rather is allowed to walk away with his dignity and dubious reputation somewhat intact while underlings suffer a season of public humiliation. Rather's head should have rolled with the rest of them, metaphorically speaking of course. The good news is that everyone knows it.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

In Dover, PA the school district is being sued for allegedly trying to smuggle religion into the school curriculum under the guise of Intelligent Design. Meanwhile, in Toledo, OH a school is being sued for trying to keep religion out.

Superintendent Luci Gernot prohibited a Christian Rock Band, comprised of both students and graduates from the school, from performing in what would have been an optional anti-drug assembly. Now the band's parents and others are planning to sue the school for abridging students' freedom of speech.

Why are school administrators so afraid of an optional assembly that might present a Christian-oriented anti-drug message? Students would only attend if they wanted to. They would not be a "captive audience". What, exactly, is wrong with that? The only plausible answer we can think of is that administrators like Ms Gernot believe that Christianity is somehow deleterious to student welfare. They must believe that the harm of exposing students to Christian themes outweighs the good of exposing them to the anti-drug lesson.

It is rather astonishing that such bigotry exists and is tolerated in our educational system. We hope the parents follow through with their suit.

Pacifying Mosul

Here's interesting news just released by Central Command about progress in the terror war in Iraq:

THREE OF FOUR KEY TALHA LEADERS CAPTURED IN MOSUL

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Multi-National Forces detained a key leader of the al Qaida-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul on Dec. 22.

Following a thorough investigation, the individual detained was positively identified as Abdul Aziz Sa'dun Ahmed Hamduni, aka Abu Ahmed.

Abu Ahmed served as a deputy to the emir of Mosul, Abu Talha, and assumed command of terrorist operations in Mosul in Abu Talha's absence. Abu Ahmed admitted to receiving money and weapons from Abu Talha as well as coordinating and conducting terrorist attacks in Mosul.

"The capture of Abu Ahmed, and the subsequent capture of Abu Marwan on 23 December, show significant progress in the inevitable destruction of the Abu Talha-led Al-Queda-Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul," said Brig. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel III, spokesman for Multi-National Forces-Iraq.

Security forces in Iraq have previously announced the capture of Abu Marwan, also a senior-level terrorist in the Talha organization. Security forces also recently captured another senior Talha member whose name cannot be released due to operational security reasons.

"Currently, security forces in Iraq have three of Abu Talha's four most senior leaders in custody," Lessel said.

The capture of these key members has led to additional captures throughout the Mosul-based AQ-AMZ network. More than 20 percent of Talha's key members have been captured in the past few weeks.

Abu Ahmed's capture removed one of Abu Talha's most valuable officers from the Mosul-based AQ-AMZ terrorist network. Abu Ahmed remains in detention and is providing information regarding the Talha network.

The use of car bombs and other explosive devices by Abu Ahmed and his affiliates shows disregard for the well-being and security of innocent Iraqi civilians. The Central Criminal Court of Iraq is committed to providing a fair trial to those allegedly engaging in terrorist activities. Those found guilty will be punished accordingly, and thus lose the ability to provide for the future of their families.

Hmmm. Wonder what they mean by that last sentence. And who is the unnamed terrorist leader who was captured? We wonder if he isn't the gentleman whose capture was bruited about the Arab press last week as being that of abu Zarqawi himself.

Thanks to Adventures of Chester for the tip.

New Development in the WOT

Strategy Page gives us a look at a new development in the war in Iraq. A couple of brief extracts:

The puzzle of the growing, at least in the number of people killed, anti-government attacks shows a lot of the key people, especially the money guys, operating across the border in Syria.

So the government has told the coalition to do whatever it takes to suppress the Baath Party and its supporters. This could get very ugly, because it means sending in raids with orders to take certain people "dead or alive." Family members will be arrested and held hostage (a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender). Specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab police SWAT teams will be used for a lot of this, supervised by American Special Forces. Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year, but the Iraqi government has now authorized the use of a much larger list of suspects.

In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up. This will be seen, and reported by the media, as "war on Sunni Arabs." Well, not quite. It will be war on a minority of the Sunni Arab community. The war will extend into Syria, where the attacks will be made by Iraqis or Syrians hired for the occasion. There are a lot of hired guns in that part of the world. There might even be a smart bomb or two going off in the middle of the night, in the middle of Syria. And the Syrians, knowing the alternatives, may feel compelled to ignore all of this. Who wants to go to war to defend Saddam's war criminal buddies.

The reports from both January 7th and January 9th at the Strategy Page will interest anyone following the war against the Iraqi Baathists.

Gonzales and Torture

Jonah Goldberg on the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings:

As befits the funhouse logic of such hearings, a number of issues are being confused, conflated and confounded. First of all, most of the things that are being called torture are something a bit shy of torture. Being forced to sit in a cramped area until you give up valuable intelligence is rough, but this ain't beanbag. Being draped with an Israeli flag or even being "waterboarded" - where a detainee's face is surrounded with a wet blanket and he's made to feel like he's drowning isn't torture either. Our own cadets at the Air Force Academy have been water-boarded in training. The war against torture should begin at home!

Second, much of the stuff that does qualify as unacceptable treatment is not condoned by the White House or the Pentagon. The Pentagon is prosecuting the Abu Ghraib offenses, not defending them, and it has always said the Geneva Convention would apply in Iraq.

As for the Geneva Convention and al Qaeda, you'd have to be higher than a moonbat to treat them as signatories to it. Everything they do is a violation of the convention. It may be fun to mug for the cameras and criticize Gonzales for saying that the Geneva Convention is "outdated" when it comes to al Qaeda. But unless you think Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed deserves an allowance in Swiss francs that he can spend at the local canteen, you have to concede Gonzales is right.

For excellent insight into how our military interrogators actually handle their job, as opposed to how the Democrats imagine them to be handling it, this outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal is a must read. Mac Donald gives us the most thorough and interesting account of the American use (or non-use) of torture in the WOT. It's a lengthy piece, but well-worth the read.

For our part it is astonishing that we claim to be engaged in a life and death struggle against terrorists, but act as if we're playing a child's game, punctiliously observing rules designed to insure that we lose. The article will make you wonder how serious the paper-pushers in the Pentagon really are about protecting American lives.

Time's Up on Newdow's Fifteen Minutes

Even the thoroughgoing secularists at Dispatches From the Culture Wars are weary of Michael Newdow's jejune attempts to banish any and all traces of religious expression from our public life:

I am obviously one of the more staunch advocates of church/state separation one is ever likely to encounter, as volumes of my writing can easily attest. But let me say this: it's time for Michael Newdow to go away. He is the father who filed the lawsuit to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, a lawsuit he won on the merits at the appeals court level only to have the Supreme Court overturn that decision due to a lack of standing. He has since refiled that suit on behalf of other parents and the whole process has begun anew. I think he's correct on the Pledge case, though I think it was argued pretty badly, and overall I just don't think it's a big deal.

His latest case, however, takes nitpicking to a whole new level. He has now filed suit in Federal court claiming that the fact that Bush (and all other presidents, as far as I know) will have a minister say a prayer at his inauguration constitutes an illegal "establishment of religion". Now, it's one thing to say that the government cannot force school children to pray, as the courts did in 1963. It's quite another to say that a President cannot choose to have a prayer spoken at his own inauguration ceremony.

The government is forbidden from taking official positions on religious matters, but that doesn't mean that government officials cannot offer their opinions or participate in religious ceremonies or, for that matter, spend 12 hours a day praying if they want to. They just can't give those things the force of law, demand that the government endorse their beliefs, or force others to participate in them.

Michael, it's time for you to go away. This is no longer about taking a principled stand for the establishment clause, it's now about your ego and your desire to stay in the public eye. Your 15 minutes are up.

Precisely. Perhaps Newdow should read David Gelernter's essay in Commentary that Viewpoint featured on Saturday. For that matter, so should Dispatches From the Culture Wars.

Social Security Reform

Whether reforming the Social Security system results in improving it or not, one thing is pretty certain and that is that Republicans are going to do their best to change it. It won't be an easy process, however, since Democrats will fight them every step of the way.

David Brooks lays out some of the political difficulties facing reform and then discusses what the president's role in getting reform enacted might look like. He writes:

The president's role - at the Inauguration and the State of the Union address and after - will be to educate the country about the problem and lay out some parameters. He doesn't need to say what the legislation should look like. That's too wonky. He should talk about what the country should look like. Social Security is more than accounting; it's values.

Here are some of the values he might endorse:

First, Social Security reform should liberate our kids, not shackle them. It should eliminate the fiscal overhang so they have the money to tackle the problems that will arise in their own day.

Second, the reform should be transparent, so that people can see what kind of return they are getting on the money they put into the system. People should have information about their own lives.

Third, it should enhance people's control over their own retirement. In a self-governing democracy, citizens should do for themselves what they can do for themselves.

Fourth, people should be encouraged to work longer. In an age in which many live into their 90's, we should be making better use of people in their 70's and 80's.

Fifth, we need a savings revolution. The plan should encourage the nation to save more, to create more capital for America's future greatness.

This is a time to trust the legislative process. Social Security has a better chance of passage if Congress leads. It's also time to think big. Social Security reform plus tax reform go a long way toward getting you to an ownership society.

Brooks' outline of the political obstacles to reforming the system are also interesting. Follow the above link to the whole column to read what he says.

Americanism

David Gelernter has a remarkable essay in Commentary which examines what he calls the religion of Americanism. Gelernter scrutinizes its origins and attributes and the reasons for the hatred much of the world has for America. Some main points follow, but it should be borne in mind that Gelernter elaborates on each of these at some length. We encourage you to follow the link and read the essay in its entirety.

Americanism is potent stuff. It is every bit as fervent and passionate a religion as the anti-Americanism it challenges and rebukes.

That Americanism is a religion is widely agreed. G.K. Chesterton called America "the nation with the soul of a church." But Americanism is not (contrary to the views of many people who use these terms loosely) a "secular" or a "civil" religion. No mere secular ideology, no mere philosophical belief, could possibly have inspired the intensities of hatred and devotion that Americanism has. Americanism is in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion. Unlike England's "official" religion, embodied in the Anglican church, America's has been incorporated into all the Judeo-Christian religions in the nation.

Few believing Americans can show, nowadays, how Americanism's principles are derived from the Bible. But many are willing to say that these principles are God-given. Freedom comes from God, George W. Bush has said more than once; and if you pressed him, I suspect you would discover that not only does he say it, he believes it. Many Americans all over the country agree with him. The idea of a "secular" Americanism based on the Declaration of Independence is an optical illusion.

I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism. This new religion was the end-stage of Puritanism: Puritanism realized among God's self-proclaimed "new" chosen people-or, in Abraham Lincoln's remarkable phrase, God's "almost chosen people."

The idea of an "American creed" has been around for a long time. Samuel Huntington lists its elements as "liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property." I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions.

The fundamental fact: the Bible is God's word. Two premises: first, every member of the American community has his own individual dignity, insofar as he deals individually with God; second, the community has a divine mission to all mankind. Three conclusions: every human being everywhere is entitled to freedom, equality, and democracy.

In the American creed, both premises and all three conclusions refer back to the Bible.

When I say that Americanism equals American Zionism, I am in one sense merely adding up statements by eminent authorities. John Winthrop in 1630: "Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us." Thomas Jefferson in his Second Inaugural address: "I shall need . . . the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life." Abraham Lincoln declared his wish to be a "humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this, His almost chosen people."

Hundreds of other statements along the same lines might be gathered from the whole formative period of Americanism, from the early 1600's through the Civil War.

There have been at least four crucial turning points-"climacterics," Churchill would have called them-at which Americans spoke explicitly and simultaneously about the religious content and the world mission of Americanism. The first was when the colonies declared their independence.

The second climacteric was the Civil War. Lincoln's understanding of that conflict, writes Edmund Wilson, "grew out of the religious tradition of the New England theology of Puritanism." In 1862, Lincoln made "a solemn vow before God" to free the South's slaves.

World War I marked the third turning point...During Wilson's administration, Americanism accomplished a fundamental transition. It had always included the idea of divine mission. But what was the mission? Until the closing of the frontier in the last decade of the 19th century, the mission was to populate the continent. With the frontier closed, the mission became "Americanism for the whole world."

The final climacteric was the cold war-its start and its finish....President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine. From then on, the Soviets would no longer be allowed unlimited scope for their imperialist ambitions; the United States had decided to get into the game.

Truman's announcement was in the spirit of classical Americanism. It recognized America's message and duty to all mankind: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure....The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. Although historians often skip over this point, Truman's world-view centered on the Bible nearly to the extent Lincoln's had."

The end of the cold war was presided over by Ronald Reagan, who returns us (once again) to the nation's beginning.

That Americanism is the successor of Puritanism is crucial to anti-Americanism. In the 18th century, anti-Americans were conservative, monarchist anti-Puritans. (Boswell reports Samuel Johnson's announcement that "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.") In the 19th century, European elites became increasingly hostile to Christianity-which inevitably entailed hostility to America. In modern times, anti-Americanism is closely associated with anti-Christianism and anti-Semitism.

Anti-Americans are still fascinated and enraged by Americans' bizarre tendency to believe in God.

And we needn't go to Norway or Britain to find angry denunciations of President Bush and the Americans who support him in religion-mocking terms. The President's faith, said one prominent American politician in September 2004, is "the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, and in many religions around the world."

The speaker was former Vice President Al Gore. His comments were offensive and false. Today's radical Islam is a religion of death, a religion that rejoices in slaughter. The radical Christianity known as Puritanism insisted on choosing life. Americanism does, too.

It has become commonplace in some Christian circles to reject the notion of American exceptionalism, and for good reasons. If unchecked, it tends to foster an attitude of national infallibility and arrogance. Even so, Gelernter prods us to consider that in our commendable desire to remain nationally humble we tend to go too far in the other direction and ignore, or forget, the fact that America really is in many ways a special land.

Specialness, however, comes at a price. As Europe has become increasingly secular, and the Muslim world grows rich from the oil beneath its feet and less isolated from the West, expressions of jealousy and rage directed at nations which retain at least a simulacrum of their Christian or Jewish heritage grow increasingly frequent and virulent. Hatred for Jews has always been with us, but hatred for Christians and for America is a relatively recent phenomenon. Gelernter's point is that Christianity is an extension of Judaism and Americanism is an extension of Christianity. Together the combination is an irresistible target for the roiling animosities and resentments of secularists and Islamists everywhere, including here. Gelernter says in a footnote that, "It has been many centuries since Christians in the West have been routine objects of organized hatred; they do not even have a word for it. But they had better find one."

We should mention, too, that Gelernter is exactly right when he ascribes the creed or values of Americanism to the fundamental theism of the Founders and their successors. The emphasis in America on freedom, equality, human rights, and so, derive from only one possible source. These are not the deliverances of Enlightenment Reason, nor are they grounded in human biology or evolutionary history. They are grounded in the fact that we are created in the image of God and that we are loved by Him. Take God out of the picture, secularize the nation, scrub the public square clean of all religious residue, and freedom, equality, and human rights will, like a plane out of fuel, glide along at ever decreasing altitude until they crash to the ground. We refer you to an earlier discussion of this topic on Viewpoint here.

Evangelical Outpost has made this essay the focus of a blog symposium so one can find much more commentary and, no doubt, much more insightful analysis of it there than we're able to offer here.

Fossils and Human Evolution

Derek at Weapons of Mass Distraction links us to an article in the Telegraph on fossils and human evolution. The article mentions that in the past "fossil-hunters" were quick to place new fossil finds into different species so that today,

"The number of human species claimed by fossil-hunters now stands at around 10, while the total number of human-like species exceeds 50. Such claims have long been based on supposedly significant differences in sizes and shapes of fossil bones. Now they have all been thrown into doubt by research showing that the differences lie within the range expected for just a single species."

In other words, all those charts we saw in high school showing man evolving through several progressive stages until finally arriving at his present exalted state as Homo sapiens are now lining canary cages.

Prof Henneberg found that the fossils show clear evidence of evolution, with substantial increases in both skull sizes and body-weight. However, he also found that the fossils show no evidence of being anything other than a single species which had grown bigger and smarter over time. According to Prof Henneberg, the much-vaunted differences in fossil size used to identify "new" species all lie within the normal range expected for one species.

Notice here the subtle bit of professional CYA the good professor is indulging in. He claims on the one hand that all the fossils of early hominids are really H. sapiens, but not wanting to give succor to the creationists who have been saying precisely this for the last fifty years he notes that they nevertheless show "clear evidence of evolution." He uses the word evolution here to mean simple variability (microevolution), but the general reader will perhaps assume that he means that the fossils show clear evidence of having evolved from one basic form of life into a radically different form (macroevolution). By this locution he manages to undo a century and a half of Darwinian orthodoxy without exposing himself to the charge of heresy.

Henneberg's findings suggest that disputes among scientists as to the evolutionary relationships among the various types of fossil hominids are meaningless, as they ignore the possibility of huge differences within the same species.

In discussing the relationship of Neanderthals and humans, for instance, he states that "What evidence there is...is consistent with Neanderthals being from the same species as modern humans."

It's impossible to say how many of his colleagues agree with him although evidently some do:

Other authorities hailed Prof Henneberg's findings as a much-needed reality check. "Clearly there is a need to be more aware of the possibility of variation - but that is not the inclination today," said Geoffrey Harrison, emeritus professor of biological anthropology at the University of Oxford. "It has been a problem because the discoverers [of the fossils] have usually put so much effort into finding the evidence, so they want it to be important".

Skeptics, of course, have long thought the evidence for numerous hominid species was tenuous. It was, after all, based upon purely structural differences. If the bones of various breeds of dogs were pried from different rock strata they'd doubtless be classified as different species based on morphological considerations, but, in fact, every dog from Great Danes to Daschunds are members of the same species. The problem is that the concept of species is slippery. Scientists define it as a reproductively isolated population of organisms, which means that if two members of a population can produce fertile offspring then they are members of the same species. There is, however, no way to tell by looking at a few bones whether or not members of the populations from which the bones came were capable of producing fertile offspring.

Perhaps one reason why scientists were so confident that the bones they had unearthed over the years were from different species of hominids is that they were absolutely convinced that man has evolved from an ape-like ancestor. If there is no question that species evolve over time, then bones taken from rock strata separated by millions of years just must be from different species. In other words, the reproductive isolation of the hominids was assumed, based on the theory of human evolution, and then the assumption that the hominids were different species was employed as evidence to reinforce the theory that humans have evolved from ape-like ancestors.

It's a nice, tight little circle.

Bad News For Iraqi Terrorists

Strategy Page has an interesting fact about the Iraqi police:

Since November 10th, anti-government forces made twelve attacks on police stations, and were defeated every time. Earlier in November, nine police stations were overrun and no attacks were defeated.

If you read the whole post you'll come away with a much different picture of the Iraqi military and national guard than what you get from watching the evening news. As the above quote suggests, they are growing in strength and competence. The process is slow, and there are problems finding good leadership, but there is good reason for cautious optimism.

This is especially important inasmuch as our own military is being stretched. The more troops the Iraqis can field to provide for their own security, the more pressure it will take off the United States to come up with adequate manpower to keep the peace.

The Ethics of Torture

The ethics of torture are back in the news, and again the question first from our lips should be how the word torture is being defined. It's difficult to say whether or not torture is justified when we don't know what it is we're talking about.

Part I, Article I of the Geneva Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

... any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

The problem with this definition is twofold. First, the word "severe" is frustratingly imprecise. Second, the signatories to this agreement did not envision the kind of world in which we live today. World-wide terrorism and weapons of mass destruction have rendered the Geneva definition anachronistic.

Viewpoint has discussed this matter before, particularly here and here, and we don't wish to cover too much of the same ground now, but there are some things that bear elaboration. One is the problem with the use of the word "severe."

A pair of articles by Steve Weissman at TruthOut.org. illustrate the difficulty. In the first essay Weissman decries the military's resort to "torture" in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The first clue became visible at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, when American soldiers systematically put cloth sacks over the heads of their captives, whether al-Qaeda, Taliban, or some poor Afghan villager mistakenly taken prisoner.

In part, a hood, blindfold, or spray-painted goggles made prisoners easier to control. But the visual deprivation began the process of disorienting them, enhancing psychological stress as the CIA's torture manuals recommended.

The troops kept the prisoners standing or kneeling in painful positions for hours at a time, forced them into other agonizing postures, often stripped them naked, humiliated them non-stop, threatened them, deprived them of sufficient food and sleep, or left them in freight containers, where they suffered extremes of heat and cold. The soldiers also withheld medical treatment and needed medication, especially painkillers, and kicked their prisoners around a bit, just to show who was boss. For selected captives, like those on the long flight to Guantanamo, the sensory deprivation became more elaborate. Full-face hoods took away their sight and some of their hearing. Thick gloves reduced their sense of touch. The 30-hour flight to a completely unknown destination added to the effect, cutting them off from anything known and reassuring.

Weissman evidently lumps all of these acts together under the rubric of "torture", but should he? Is it torture to put a hood over someone, to limit their food or sleep, to make them stand for hours at a time? In other words, when does discomfort become severe pain? And is inflicting severe pain always wrong? If so, why so? Is there anyone reading this who would balk at inflicting severe pain upon someone if that was the only way to save the life of their child?

Imagine that terrorists have been apprehended, and the military has reason to think that their associates are planning to attack an elementary school, as happened in Beslan, Russia. The authorities don't know where or when, but they have good reason to believe that the captured men know. By putting them under stress, duress, and even some pain they might be able to get the information from them, but, heeding the advice of such as Mr. Weissman, they decline to do this. The attack takes place, it turns out to be the school to which you send your children, several hundred terrified youngsters are murdered, your child among them. Would you feel that the military had made the correct decision? If you answer yes, then the question you should then answer is: Why is the comfort of a terrorist killer more important and valuable to you than the life of your and other people's children?

Weissman seeks in Part II to reply to examples such as this. He writes:

From the viewpoint of those who would use it [i.e. torture], the inescapable problem with torture is its lack of efficiency. Interrogators never know whether their victims are telling the truth or making up stories just to end the pain. Investigators then waste valuable time chasing down false leads. In the absence of rock-hard supporting evidence, intelligence analysts never know how much faith to put in some tidbit of coerced information. And governments often end up ignoring the scrap of truth they should heed.

Well, of course, one never knows whether one is getting the truth, but this is a ludicrous argument. The principle Weissman articulates here is that nothing should ever be chanced unless it is guaranteed of success. Because the "torture" may not work, we are to believe, therefore it should not be used. We can imagine the reaction of people across the land after having witnessed New York City be vaporized in a mushroom cloud if they discover that the NYPD had apprehended the terrorist who had planted the nuclear bomb hours before it was set to go off. They perhaps could have prevented the blast, but they had accepted Mr. Weissman's reasoning that they shouldn't torture the recalcitrant mass murderer to learn the bomb's location because, after all, he just might lie to them. Better to try to entice the bomb's location from him with bon homie and free tickets to Radio City Music Hall.

We agree that torture should not be used indiscriminately, but there is no moral case against using it upon those there is probable cause to think are willfully withholding information which could save human lives. Moreover, it should only be used when it is necessary to prevent harm to others, it should never be employed simply to hurt or punish someone. This leaves a lot of room for gray areas and judgment calls, but that's the way life is.

We also think that some distinction needs to be made between depriving a person of certain comforts and doing them lasting harm. Playing loud rock music should not be considered torture. It is unpleasant, to be sure, but unpleasantness should not be a criterion of illicit torture. Nor should making terrorists stand for several hours be considered beyond the pale. If stress and discomfort constitute torture then confining criminals to jail cells would be a violation of the Geneva Convention since it certainly is both stressful and uncomfortable for most people.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this debate is the assumption that torture, however we define it, is ipso facto immoral. We need a vigorous debate in this country of the grounds for that assumption.

Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism

Books and Culture has an interview of Christian Smith conducted by Michael Cromartie in which Smith assesses the spiritual state of American youth with wonderfully impressive precision. The interview should be an absolute must read for every parent, teacher, and religious leader in America. It's an extensive piece and is filled with wisdom and insight. Indeed, Smith says things that many parents and teachers have intuitively believed to be true but seldom saw endorsed by any cultural authority and rarely so cogently. Smith is such an authority. Here's the introduction B&C gives him:

Christian Smith is Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the most influential and widely cited sociologists of his generation, he is the author of many provocative books....His latest book, due in March from Oxford, is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton. Based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, an unprecedented survey conducted from 2001 to 2005, the book opens a window on the religious beliefs and practices of American teens.

In the course of the interview Smith points out, among other things, the following:

Teenagers today (and I am talking about 13- to 17-year-olds) are invested in society as it is and in mainstream values. They are well socialized into the mainstream, they are committed to it, and they want to succeed in it. From the Sixties we've inherited the notion of the "generation gap," but that model simply isn't adequate to describe what we are dealing with today. For the most part, young people have a great deal in common with their parents and share their values. That may not be immediately apparent, but underneath, not too far below the surface, there is a lot of commonality.

We've been conditioned to look for kids who can't stand traditional religion. But that's just not the case! Most kids are quite happy to go with whatever they are raised to believe; they are not kicking and screaming on the way to church. On the contrary: most teenagers have a very benign attitude toward religion.

Lots of people think that a key category for young people is "spiritual but not religious." What we found is that this concept is not even on their radar screen. But one thing that most teens emphatically don't want to be is "too religious." They want to be religious, but they don't want to be perceived as overzealous, uncool, embarrassingly intense about their faith. They have an image in their mind of one kid in their high school who walks around with buttons and badges all day carrying a Bible, and they think that that's wacko.

It really struck us in our research that very few teens are getting a chance to practice talking about their faith. We were dumbfounded by the number of teens who told us we were the first adults who had asked them what they believed. One said: "I do not know. No one has ever asked me that before."

Very few teens are hardcore relativists. In fact, they are quite moralistic. They will confidently assert that certain things are right or wrong. What they can't do is explain why that's the case, or what's behind their thinking.

Based on our findings, I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That's teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone's good.

It's unbelievable the proportion of conservative Protestant teens who do not seem to grasp elementary concepts of the gospel concerning grace and justification. Their view is: be a good person.

It turns out when you look at the structure of teenagers' lives, and their schedules, religion fits in a very small piece of all that. It's actually amazing to me that religion has any effect in teenagers' lives. Part of the structure, too, is that what really matters to teenagers is their socially significant relationships. If teenagers have socially significant relationships that cross at church, that cross with other families of believers, then that helps out a lot. But many teenagers have their socially significant relationships almost exclusively through school; even if they have friends at church, the youth group is a satellite out there on the fringe of their life, rather than at the center.

Despite their abject failure at the level of conscious articulation of their faith, on every measure of life outcome-relationship with family, doing well at school, avoiding risk behaviors, everything-highly religious teens are doing much better than non-religious kids. It's just a remarkable observable difference....there are all sorts of other benefits from simply being connected to a religious organization-social capital, social ties, and so on-that empirically make a difference. That's not excusing the relative failure of religious educators, but the difference is there. Highly religious American teens are happier and healthier. They are doing better in school, they have more hopeful futures, they get along with their parents better. Name a social outcome that you care about, and the highly religious kids are doing better.

Non-religious teens are more likely to say, "who cares?" Who cares about suffering, who cares about old people? By every measure we have, religious kids are more likely to live out their faith in terms of volunteering and taking care of people. It's the more religious kids who are more involved in their communities, more civically active. So there are real differences.

This is one of the things that really hit us hard: that parents still have an enormous amount of influence on their kids' lives, even though I'm sure that's very hard for them to believe at times. Adolescents are not routinely coming to their parents and saying "thanks so much for steering me in the right direction. I really appreciate it. I really want you to know that you are a big influence." They don't say it, but it's still a fact. Parents have a lot more influence, and therefore responsibility, than they realize. Teenagers will never admit that they look to their parents for guidance, but most do.

Most, though not all, religious educators in this country are failing. Most young people are not being formed primarily by their religious faith traditions; rather, they are being formed by other notions and ideologies. And in part this is because adults are afraid to teach. They are afraid of young people. They are afraid of not looking cool when they teach real substance....And yet youth actually want to be taught something, even if they eventually reject it. They at least want to have something to reject, rather than an attitude of anything goes. Teens need an opportunity to articulate, to think and to make arguments in environments that will be challenging to their faith. And I don't think they are getting that. In general, religious traditions that expect more and demand more of their youth get more. And those that are more compromising, more accommodating, more anything-goes, end up not getting much.

There's much more at the link. One of the messages that comes through in this piece is that parents should not be reluctant to talk to their children about the fundamentals of their religious faith, and they should be very willing to put up with whatever resistance some kids might offer to attending religious services. The benefits to the child in the long run are, of course, immeasurable.

On the other hand, parents also should ensure that the services they take their kids to offer more than just babysitting and social interaction. Teenagers both want and need to talk about their deepest convictions. They want and need to learn what it is their religion is all about, what it's based upon, and how it answers the most profound questions of life. Even if they reject it down the road, as Smith says, they need to know that they're rejecting something substantial and consequential. If they do the chances that they'll eventually come back to it are far better than if they perceive shedding their faith to be on a par with discarding a threadbare, ill-fitting, unfashionable coat.

City of Brotherly Love

Reader Ryan H. links us to Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles who relays a notice from the journal of the American Family Association. The gist of it is that four people were arrested last October in Philadelphia for protesting at a homosexual rally:

Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America-with police approval--were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.

When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians' movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians' messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.

Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!

They were charged with eight crimes, including three felonies: possession of instruments of crime (a bullhorn), ethnic intimidation (saying that homosexuality is a sin), and inciting a riot (reading from the Bible some passages relating to homosexuality) despite the fact that no riot occurred.

If the facts are as they are related here this is an outrage. When has anyone ever been arrested for protesting at a Christian rally or event? The charges are so absurd that they could only have been concocted by a lawyer. Since when, for example, are homosexuals an ethnic group?

If these four protestors are convicted the courts will have in effect ruled that public objection to homosexuality is a hate crime, and it will be just a matter of time until opposing homosexuality from the pulpit will be ruled illegal. On that day the entire first amendment will lay in tatters.

This case represents a powerful and insidious assault on both the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion in America. We're therefore anxiously awaiting word that the ACLU has entered the fray on behalf of the protestors. In the meantime, the AFA has vowed to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. If the protestors win, let's hope they sue the city officials responsible for this travesty for every penny of the graft they've doubtless managed to stash away over the years.

More details of the whole sordid affair can be found here.

Our Friends the French

The French can always be depended upon to sink to the occasion. The Belgravia Dispatch has some commentary on a piece which appeared recently in the French newspaper Le Monde snidely venting its jealousy of the ability of the U.S. to mount a massive rescue effort in Indonesia while the French, a third-rate power whose only consolation is a much undeserved seat on the U.N. Security Council, stands by in relative impotence.

Here's a sip of French whine:

Colin Powell, who is in Bangkok and is on his way to Jakarta, tries to make sense of the [U.S. initiative]: "We are not looking for any political advantage," assured the U.S. Secretary of State. "We are not trying to make ourselves look better in the eyes of Muslims," he affirmed. "We are doing it because human beings need it, even desperately need it." In other words, the P-3 Orion American reconnaissance planes that are flying over Aceh are only surveying the destruction to facilitate the humanitarian effort. [emphasis added]

Note the sarcastic implication. The U.S. is only doing what it is because it's preparing for some military adventure against Muslims. The French, in an act of moral projection, cannot imagine any nation, least of all the U.S., doing something simply because it's the right thing to do. Viewing the rest of the world through the lens of their own cynicism and corruption, they assume there must be insidious motivation behind our willingness to amass such an effort. In the process they defame and insult the U.S. government and the American people who are funding and conducting the relief effort underway in the Indian Ocean. This is the sort of sniping one engages in, we suppose, when one bitterly resents that fact that his own nation's accomplishments are as insignificant as those of the modern French.

There's more on Le Monde's whimpering at the Dispatch.