Nature's Destiny

I finally got around to reading Michael Denton's outstanding work on design in nature called Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (1998), and I deeply regret my tardiness in getting to it. This is surely one of the most important works ever to have been written on the subject of design in the universe, and it should be studied by everyone with an interest in the topic and a background in the relevant science. It's Denton's thesis that every single aspect of the cosmos and life is precisely calibrated for the emergence of living things. He does not simply claim that there are some amazing coincidences in the structure of the cosmos but rather that every single fact of the physical world is optimally suited for the emergence of life. The case he builds in defense of this thesis is beyond impressive, it seems overwhelming.

Denton is an evolutionist who denies that evolution is a contingent phenomenon. It could not, he argues, have followed any path other than the one it did. Given the constraints imposed by the physical and chemical properties of matter, evolution inevitably led to relatively large mammals capable of technology and rational thought. In other words, human evolution is pre-planned and built into the laws and properties of the cosmos. The universe was built to accommodate us, and everything about it seems to confirm this conclusion.

Denton, who is himself an agnostic, scarcely mentions who might be responsible for this planning or purpose (what philosophers call teleology), but he mounts a compelling case that the universe is indeed telic, i.e. purposeful. His case is compatible with that of the intelligent design people, but antithetical to both Darwinians (who deny any purpose in nature) and special creationists (who deny that a Designer might have used evolution over deep time as It's modus operandi).

In fact, one comes away from the book with this impression: It is possible to say of virtually any scientific proposition about the universe, any trait or characteristic that might be revealed by science from the microcosmic level to the macrocosmic, that it is a good thing that it has precisely the properties it does because if it did not, we could not exist. There seem to be very few, if any, completely gratuitous facts about the cosmos or about living things. Whether the universe is uniquely fit for life we can't say, but that it is supremely suited for life is undeniable.

Whether it is the age or size of the universe, the properties of the elements of the periodic table, especially carbon and oxygen, the properties of water, carbon dioxide, and bicarbonate, the geophysical structure of the earth and its location in the solar system, the type of solar system we find ourselves in, the properties of light and electricity, and on and on for four hundred pages, every aspect of the physico-chemical structure of our world is ideally suited to give rise to living things. And were any of these even minutely different than what they are human beings would never have emerged.

Denton points out that whether one accepts or rejects the design hypothesis, whether one thinks of the designer as the Greek world soul or the Hebrew God, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the world at least "looks as if it had been uniquely tailored for life: it appears to have been designed." He writes that, "All reality appears to be a vast, coherent, teleological whole with mankind as its purpose and goal." It is therefore incumbent upon the skeptic to offer a compelling reason to reject the design inference. They cannot fall back on the canard that the design hypothesis is not testable because it certainly is:

The hypothesis can be refuted by, for instance, "the discovery of some alternative liquid as fit as is water for carbon-based life, or of a means superior to DNA of constructing the genetic tape, ... or of alternatives superior to oxidation, ... proteins, ... the bilipid cell membrane, ... to the bicarbonate buffer system, ... just one clear case where a constituent of life or a law of nature is evidently not unique or ideally adapted for life, and the design hypothesis collapses."

The materialist explanation for all this evidence of design, on the other hand, is that it's a result of chance or the inevitable outcome of the existence of an infinity of worlds, but these claims cannot be tested and are impossible to refute. The design hypothesis possesses a status, therefore, that is epistemically or scientifically superior to its materialistic competitor.

Nature's Destiny is a dense read. It's packed with information, most of which is fascinating but which probably would be a little overwhelming for someone with little background or interest in science. For one who is fascinated by the debate between design and materialism, however, and who possess an interest and understanding of the relevant science, this will surely prove to be one of the top two or three most important books one could read on the subject.

Naming the Turtle

Joe Carter outlines fifty theses of his religious credo at Evangelical Outpost. If you've ever wondered what it is, exactly, that evangelical Christians believe, Carter's post is an excellent summary.

You'll have to read his post to figure out what turtles have to do with it.

Cold and Timid Souls

Michael Kinsley is no friend of this administration so when he writes a great perspective on the recriminations being levelled at the Bush administration by people who are merely trying to deflect attention from their own culpability we sit up and take notice:

Recriminations are all the rage today. But really, does anyone ever pay attention to the prophets of doom until it's too late?

As a good American, you no doubt have been worried sick for years about the levees around New Orleans. Or you've been worried at least since you read that official report in August 2001 - the one that ranked a biblical flood of the Big Easy as one of our top three potential national emergencies. No? You didn't read that report in 2001? You just read about it in the newspapers this last week?

Well, how about that prescient New Orleans Times-Picayune series in 2002 that laid out the whole likely catastrophe? Everybody read that one. Or at least it sure seems that way now. I was not aware that the Times-Picayune had such a large readership in places like Washington, D.C., and California. And surely you have been badgering public officials at every level of government to spend whatever it takes to reinforce those levees - and to raise your taxes if necessary to pay for it.

No? You never gave five seconds of thought to the risk of flooding in New Orleans until it became impossible to think about anything else? Me neither. Nor have I given much thought to the risk of a big earthquake along the West Coast - the only one of the top three catastrophes that hasn't happened yet - even though I live and work in the earthquake zone. Of course, my job isn't to predict and prepare for disasters. My job is to recriminate when they occur. It's not easy. These days the recriminations business is overrun with amateurs, who are squatting on all the high ground. The fetid aroma of hindsight is everywhere.

Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and other Louisiana politicians, for instance, have been flashing their foresight all over the tube. They say they asked repeatedly for more money so that the Army Corps of Engineers could strengthen the levees, but repeatedly the Bush administration actually cut the corps' budget instead.

The Corps of Engineers itself is feeling pretty smug. It has long wanted money to build levees that would even survive a Category 5 hurricane, let alone a measly Category 4 like Katrina.

Sure, and if there were a Category 6 or a Category 473, there would be a dusty Corps of Engineers report in a filing cabinet somewhere, asking for money to protect against that one too. The Corps of Engineers has done many marvelous things. But it would cement over the Great Lakes and level Mt. Rainier if we would let it. Its warnings about natural disasters are like the warnings of that famous economist who has predicted 10 of the last five recessions.

Likewise, a senator may not be the best judge of the need for a vast federal construction project in her state. Landrieu's I-told-you-so's would be more impressive if the press release archive on her website didn't contain equally urgent calls to spend billions of dollars to build boats the Navy hasn't asked for in Louisiana shipyards, self-congratulations for having planted a billion dollars of "coastal impact assistance" for Louisiana in the energy bill (this is before the flood), and so on. Did she want flood control or did she want $10 million to have " America's largest river swamp" declared a "National Heritage Area"?

Obviously - obviously in hindsight, that is - we should have spent the money to strengthen the New Orleans levees. President Clinton should have done it. Presidents Bush the Elder and Reagan should have done it. As Tim Noah notes in Slate, warnings about the perilous New Orleans levees go back at least to Fanny Trollope in 1832. In fact, the one president who is pretty much in the clear on this is our current Bush - not because he did anything about the levees but because even if he had started something, it probably wouldn't have been finished yet.

Everybody is having a fine fit about our politicians, governments at every level and "institutions" (current vogue word) for failing us in this crisis and others. The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to "get angry." But just Google a phrase like "commission warns," or "urgent steps" or "our children's future" - or simply "crisis" - and you may develop a bit of sympathy for the people who stand accused today of ignoring the warnings about anything in particular. Far from complacent about potential perils, we suffer from peril gridlock.

Did all the attention and money devoted to protecting us from a terror attack after 9/11 leave us less prepared for a giant flood? Undoubtedly. And if the flood had come first, the opposite would be true. We, the citizens, would have demanded it, and then blamed the politicians and the "institutions" when it turned out to be a bad bet. There is no foresight. We fight the last war because hindsight is all we really have.

There really are few people more unpleasant than armchair quarterbacks who know nothing of why a coach makes the decisons he does but who are consistently critical of him nonetheless. These people abound in our media (turn on MSNBC, for example) and they call to mind the words of Teddy Roosevelt who wrote:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never tasted victory or defeat."

The Late, Great Hasty Conclusion

Evangelical writer Hal Lindsey has a special place in my heart for reasons that need not concern us here, but I don't see how he can say this:

Since America has forsaken the Christian principles on which our country was founded and on which all our founding documents were based, God's gracious protection that is so evident in American history is being withdrawn. We are also forcing God's people, Israel, into indefensible positions in the land God swore on oath to give them forever.

I believe unless there is a major national repentance, America is in for worse catastrophes than can possibly be imagined. God help us.

Well, Hal might be right, but his reasoning is unpersuasive. I'm not sure when in our history we enjoyed such supernatural protection as Lindsey suggests. Were our losses from Katrina, both economic and in terms of human life, unprecedented? Hardly. Every war we've fought from the revolution through the civil war up to the world wars of the twentieth century, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq have been far costlier certainly in terms of human life and probably in economic terms as well. Numerous natural disasters and epidemics throughout our history have been far more destructive of human life than has Katrina. After all, the death toll from Katrina may not exceed a couple of thousand. It is indeed a devastating economic blow, but even at a cost of 100 billion dollars it's about the annual cost of the war in Iraq.

I'm not arguing that God hasn't blessed this nation. I'm simply saying that it's hard to point to Katrina as evidence that we've entered a unique epoch where He's stopped blessing us and is now punishing us.

Parenthetically, in the same article Lindsey describes the effects of a nuclear explosion in an American city from a terrorist suitcase bomb with the approximate yield of a Hiroshima fission bomb. The Hiroshima bomb was a 13 kiloton (the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT) airburst over a city made largely of wood. The devastation that Lindsey describes sounds cataclysmic but is highly exaggerated. I might well be wrong, but I'm skeptical that a ground explosion of a 13 kt device in a city made largely of brick and steel would produce the destruction he describes. In fact, I question whether his facts are based upon a 13 kt weapon at all. They sound more like the results of a one megaton (the equivalent of one million tons of TNT) nuclear blast. Of course, it's possible, I suppose, that a suitcase bomb could be produced with such explosive power, but the sources that Google comes up with (See here, for instance) are all pretty much in agreement that any bomb which could fit in even a large trunk would have probable yields of much less than 3 to 5 kt. and probably much less than one kiloton.

This is not to minimize the threat posed by any sized nuclear bomb, since even a small weapon would release a lot of radiation and take a lot of lives, but Lindsey's article makes the effect of such an attack seem far worse than it would probably be.

The Assault on Tal Afar is Over

The assault on Tal Afar seems to be over. The Fourth Rail claims there were 156 terrorists killed and 246 captured. The towns of Rabiyah and Sinjar are next. As the towns are cleansed Iraqi forces will occupy them to keep the insurgents from filtering back in.

The western province of Anbar along the Syrian border had long been a haven for the insurgents since the coalition lacked the manpower to do more than launch occasional attacks on concentrations of the enemy to try to keep them off balance.

Now as the Iraqi troops are coming on line, gaining in skills and competence and increasing in confidence, the insurgents are facing a permanent loss of these towns as staging areas and refuges.

Iraq may never be completely pacified, but it is beginning to look as though the coalition's strategy of training the Iraqis to win their country for themselves and providing them with the support to do it is working.

Belmont Club's Wretchard offers some keen analysis of the effort and also an interesting discussion of where future military historians will place the tipping point of this conflict.

The Recriminators

Jack Kelley blasts the recriminators in this column in the Post-Gazette:

It is settled wisdom among journalists that the federal response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was unconscionably slow. "Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever during a dire national emergency," wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in a somewhat more strident expression of the conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is the opposite of the truth.

Jason van Steenwyk is a Florida Army National Guardsman who has been mobilized six times for hurricane relief. He notes that:

"The federal government pretty much met its standard time lines, but the volume of support provided during the 72-96 hour was unprecedented. The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne."

For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three.

Journalists who are long on opinions and short on knowledge have no idea what is involved in moving hundreds of tons of relief supplies into an area the size of England in which power lines are down, telecommunications are out, no gasoline is available, bridges are damaged, roads and airports are covered with debris, and apparently have little interest in finding out.

So they libel as a "national disgrace" the most monumental and successful disaster relief operation in world history. I write this column a week and a day after the main levee protecting New Orleans breached. In the course of that week:

More than 32,000 people have been rescued, many plucked from rooftops by Coast Guard helicopters.

The Army Corps of Engineers has all but repaired the breaches and begun pumping water out of New Orleans.

Shelter, food and medical care have been provided to more than 180,000 refugees.

Journalists complain that it took a whole week to do this. A former Air Force logistics officer had some words of advice for us in the Fourth Estate on his blog, Moltenthought:

"We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on 'Star Trek' in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree while the grown-ups actually engaged in the recovery effort were studying engineering.

"The United States military can wipe out the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican Guard far more swiftly than they can bring 3 million Swanson dinners to an underwater city through an area the size of Great Britain which has no power, no working ports or airports, and a devastated and impassable road network.

"You cannot speed recovery and relief efforts up by prepositioning assets (in the affected areas) since the assets are endangered by the very storm which destroyed the region.

"No amount of yelling, crying and mustering of moral indignation will change any of the facts above."

"You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere," van Steenwyk said.

Guardsmen need to receive mobilization orders; report to their armories; draw equipment; receive orders and convoy to the disaster area. Guardsmen driving down from Pennsylvania or Navy ships sailing from Norfolk can't be on the scene immediately.

Relief efforts must be planned. Other than prepositioning supplies near the area likely to be afflicted (which was done quite efficiently), this cannot be done until the hurricane has struck and a damage assessment can be made. There must be a route reconnaissance to determine if roads are open, and bridges along the way can bear the weight of heavily laden trucks.

And federal troops and Guardsmen from other states cannot be sent to a disaster area until their presence has been requested by the governors of the afflicted states.

Exhibit A on the bill of indictment of federal sluggishness is that it took four days before most people were evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome.

The levee broke Tuesday morning. Buses had to be rounded up and driven from Houston to New Orleans across debris-strewn roads. The first ones arrived Wednesday evening. That seems pretty fast to me. A better question -- which few journalists ask -- is why weren't the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck?

In fact, Mayor Ray Nagin was asked this last question by Tim Russert on Meet the Press. His general answer was that that's one of the things that'll be debated in the weeks ahead. His more specific answer was that he didn't have drivers for the busses. That may have been true by Monday, but if the evacuation had begun on Saturday when Bush declared a disaster and the NWS was calling for a cat 5 storm to hit New Orleans directly he would have.

If we're going to point fingers, at least let's point them in the right direction. Unfortunately, the fingers of liberal journalists, like compass needles, always point in only one direction - toward the White House. It's all so puerile and pathetic.

Like Waiting For Godot

The New York Times, having published the usual nonsense from Dowd, Krugman, Herbert and Rich, finally steps forward with two pieces from which the reader cannot escape concluding that failure to apply the talents of the Corps of Engineers to the levees around New Orleans was in substantial measure the fault of senate Democrats like Mary ("I might have to punch him (Bush) - literally") Landrieu, and that the delay in getting troops to the city was largely due to reluctance on the part of Governor Kathleen Blanco to give up her authority and her confusion over what steps were necessary for the federal government to get troops into the area.

John Tierney writes that:

[S]uppose [Congressional] investigators try to find out why the Army Corps of Engineers didn't protect New Orleans from the flood. Democrats have blamed the Iraq war for diverting money and attention from domestic needs. But that hasn't meant less money for the Corps during the past five years. Overall spending hasn't declined since the Clinton years, and there has been a fairly sharp increase in money for flood-control construction projects in New Orleans. The problem is that the bulk of the Corps' budget goes for projects far less important than preventing floods in New Orleans. And if the investigators want to find who's responsible, they don't have to leave Capitol Hill.

Most of the Corps's budget consists of what are lovingly known on appropriations committees as earmarks: money allocated specifically for members' pet projects. Many of these projects flunk the Corps's own cost-benefit analysis or haven't been analyzed at all. Many are jobs that Corps officials don't even consider part of their mission, like building sewage plants, purifying drinking water or maintaining lakeside picnic tables.

The Corps is giving grants to improve New York City's drinking water. In Massachusetts, the Corps offers BMX-style bike jumps at a lake near Worcester and runs a theater next to the Cape Cod Canal showing a video of "Canal Critters."

In rural Nevada, an area not known for hurricanes or shipping channels, the Corps has been given $20 million for construction projects. When I asked an official why so much was being spent in Nevada, he said that the money was paying for wastewater treatment and mentioned the name of Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat's leader in the Senate.

"Senator Reid is a great and good man," the Corps official explained, "and he is on our committee."

This week Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat, lambasted Mr. Bush on the Senate floor. "Everybody anticipated the breach of the levees, Mr. President," she said. But she and others from the Louisiana delegation have been shortchanging the levees themselves. As Michael Grunwald reported in The Washington Post, they've diverted large sums to dubious Corps projects aimed at increasing barge traffic, not preventing floods. Ms. Landrieu forced the Corps to redo its calculations when a project to deepen a port flunked its cost-benefit analysis.

As for the responsibility of Democrats at the state and local level for the delay in getting aid to the evacuees in the days after the flood a trio of writers from the Times notes that:

For reasons of practicality and politics, officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and then at the White House, decided not to urge Mr. Bush to take command of the effort. Instead, the Washington officials decided to rely on the growing number of National Guard personnel flowing into Louisiana, who were under Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco's control.

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established.

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

"Can you imagine how it would have been perceived if a president of the United States of one party had pre-emptively taken from the female governor of another party the command and control of her forces, unless the security situation made it completely clear that she was unable to effectively execute her command authority and that lawlessness was the inevitable result?" asked one senior administration official, who spoke anonymously because the talks were confidential.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area.

Viewpoint offers no criticism of Ms Blanco. She was in a terrible spot and may have thought she had good reasons for her delay. We only wish to point out how despicable it is of the Left which was almost obsessively scathing in its criticism of the administration in the days after the storm to have used this calamity to attack Bush politically. Not interested in waiting for the facts to be brought forward, they were determined to hang him first and have the trial later. He was called a racist, incompetent, oblivious, dangerous - every mean, hurtful adjective that mean, hateful people could put into print and some they could only put on blogs.

Now it turns out, as more sober observers were saying from the beginning, that though there may be lessons to be learned from this disaster on the federal level, the great share of the responsibility for how events unfolded in the immediate aftermath must be borne by the victims themselves, some of whom displayed atrocious behavior and very poor judgment, the administration of New Orleans, and Louisiana state officials, including Senator Mary Landrieu.

We'll be waiting in the days ahead for the apologies to start rolling in to the White House, but we won't be surprised if we have to wait for a very long time. The sorts of people that were so quick to say the contemptible things about another human being that Bush's critics were saying about him, the sorts of people who were so quick to pull the trigger on the shotgun of blame and recrimination, are not the sorts of people who have the class, the character, or the maturity to acknowledge that they were wrong.

Handsitting in the Governor's Office

Robert Washington at International House of Punditry takes Governor Blanco to task for a mistake we hadn't yet heard about. It appears that Mr. Washington's father is a doctor licensed in Wyoming but not in Louisiana. He and numerous other doctors went to Louisiana to render medical care to those who needed it but Governor Blanco waited several days to sign the waiver that allowed them to practice in her state. For four days after the hurricane all that medical expertise sat on its hands waiting for the Governor to act.

Here's the relevant portion of the story:

A lot of doctors (including him) rushed to New Orleans (at their own expense) to help in the effort. Doctors (especially in refugee centers like the convention center and the Superdome) were overworked and there weren't enough to deal with the health needs of refugees.

Dad doesn't have a license to practice medicine in Louisiana. He's licensed in Wyoming. Since licenses are issued by states, it's illegal for him to practice medicine in a state where he's not licensed. He can't (for example) just drive to South Dakota and go to work in a hospital there. He would need to be licensed by that state's medical board. He holds licenses in multiple states, but not Louisiana.

In emergencies like natural disasters it's normal for states to suspend this requirement and offer temporary reciprocity with the other 49 states, recognizing their licenses as being valid in the affected state. In an emergency, who cares where your doctor's license comes from? Usually this requires a proclamation from the governor stating that there's an emergency and that out-of-state licenses will temporarily be as good as in-state licenses.

In Louisiana, it took several days for the governor to issue such a proclamation. Meanwhile, doctors from all over the country just sat around in New Orleans, unable to do anything. Before you say "they should have helped people anyway" you should know a little about what could happen to them if they did. Practicing medicine without a license recognized in the state you're in is a major crime, usually a felony with a long prison sentence. Even if the state doesn't prosecute you for it, doing it voids your malpractice insurance which means you may lose your ability to practice anywhere. And if Dad practiced medicine without a license in Louisiana, he could face disciplinary action here in Wyoming. Committing a felony (even in another state) is often just cause for stripping someone of their medical license. And if anyone he treated in Louisiana later sued him for malpractice, he would have no insurance and no defense. Under the law, all unlicensed medical practice is malpractice, even if you don't do anything wrong.

These laws are designed mostly to protect people from impostors who aren't really doctors or who have lost their license for some reason. But they apply as much to people with out-of-state licenses as people with no licenses at all.

So how long did the governor of Louisiana take to issue the proclamation allowing out-of-state doctors to practice there? Several days. She didn't issue it until September 2, and even then some doctors in the state couldn't even find out it was issued because they didn't bother to tell much of anyone. The only reason my dad found out is because someone from the medical licensing board in Texas managed to get a copy and did everything you can imagine to get word to doctors on the scene.

A lot goes on in a disaster, so maybe you're thinking the governor of Louisiana had too many things to worry about. I think that's bulls**t. Preparing for a disaster means making lists of the things you're supposed to do when disaster strikes. Issuing a reciprocity proclamation is standard procedure. Other states have done it the same day as other disasters. New York issued theirs on 9/11. Florida has issued them several times as hurricanes struck. Someone is supposed to have the list and make those things happen. In the meantime, the governor of Louisiana was all over tv, bawling her eyes out and tearfully congratulating herself and other politicians.

In Mississippi, the reciprocity proclamation was issued days earlier. I guess their governor spent less time on tv and more time doing his job.

The waiver was issued four days after the storm. If FEMA had been this slow the media would be roasting them on a spit for it. Tim Russert would be calling for Chertoff's scalp. Will we hear calls for Ms Blanco to resign her office? Nah, she's a Democrat.

Journalistic Suicide Bombers

The Islamic jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere wrap themselves in explosives and run into the streets yelling "God is great. Death to America" as they blow themselves to kingdom come in an attempt, sometimes successful, sometimes futile, to destroy others. Here on the home front we have our own version of the suicide bomber ensconced in the editorial offices of several of our nation's major newspapers.

The Roberts nomination and the post-Katrina blame game have inspired liberal journalistic jihadis, waving their incendiary scribblings in their hands, to rush into the streets and blow to smithereens, if not themselves, then certainly any reputation for credibility, objectivity and clear thought they may have still possessed. Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Robert Herbert and now Richard Cohen - it seems like a human wave of lefty scribes hurling their columns at the White House hoping to damage it with awesome blasts from their word processors. To their great disappointment, given the lameness of their efforts, they may as well be throwing firecrackers at Godzilla.

The WaPo's Richard Cohen straps on the bomb belt and sashays forth into public view with an unfortunate column in which he confesses up front that as a young man he flunked out of college. He mentions this detail as a prelude to lamenting that John Roberts has a record which is "appallingly free of failure."

Mr. Roberts' record of success means he hasn't had to struggle like common folk and thus probably doesn't understand our problems. He doesn't say why a Supreme Court Justice should be someone who understands the difficulties of the poor. He is not, after all, being nominated for Chief Pastor. Presumably, Mr. Cohen thinks that someone who has consistently demonstrated that they don't make bad decisions is manifestly unsuited for the Supreme Court.

Somehow he manages to extricate himself from the awkwardness of that argument and glides from John Roberts' nomination to the New Orleans debacle:

It took a certain kind of cold arrogance to come up with the evacuation plan that New Orleans devised: Get everyone out of town. But what about those who could not get out of town? What about those with no cars or those already living on the streets? In other words, what about the very poor?

The poor? It's as if the idiots up and down the line never heard of them. It's as if no one at the top of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or at the White House knew they existed. Check that. They knew, but it was theoretical: Oh, they'll manage.

Somebody please send a memo to Mr. Flunked out of College: Evacuation plans and execution are the province of the local municipality, not the feds. If the city chooses not to put its plan, such as it was, into effect, the feds are hardly to be faulted for not doing it for them. This is a simple concept, but perhaps the memo should repeat it so that Mr. Cohen has a better chance of comprehending it.

Our intellectual hero, who does not shrink from labelling people trying to do the right thing in Katrina's stressful aftermath "idiots", next leaps in a single bound to the Intelligent Design controversy trying to touch all the liberal bases and weave together all of Mr. Bush's alleged faux pas into one neat tapestry:

[T]he Supreme Court is no place for a sluggish thinker who thinks -- if that is the word -- that in the schools the non-theory of "intelligent design" ought to be taught along with the theory of evolution. (What next, alchemy and chemistry?).

Alchemy. Ha, ha, Good one. Well, Mr. Flunked out of College, perhaps you, being among the cognoscenti which looks with such scorn upon those dim bulbs, like the president, who think ID should be taught in school and which holds these rubes in derision at your Georgetown cocktail parties - perhaps you would like to publicly debate someone, like, oh, almost anyone in the ID movement, on the issue. How about David Berlinski, an outstanding mathematician, or Bill Dembski who has two or three PhDs? No? Are you backpedalling, sir? Science is not your field, you say? Well, you must be expert enough to feel safe in insulting those who suggest ID be taught in public schools by calling them "sluggish thinkers." Come on, Mr. Quick Thinker who has exactly no degrees, put up or shut up. You demur? You'd rather not employ your finely honed mind to show off your superior grasp of the issue? Too bad. It would've been fun to watch.

Like the columns of his colleagues, Mr. Cohen's article offers no argument. It makes no case. It's a simple screed which he should be embarrassed to publish, but as a devout journalistic jihadi, he's unmoved by his own inadequacies. His column, like those of the aforementioned writers, is an editorial page version of the suicide bomber's shout of Allahu Akbar, Death to the Great Satan Bush, just before he blows himself to bits.

Ed Morrissey at Captains' Quarters finds much else not to like in Cohen's essay.

Good News, Bad News

The good news is that it turns out that all those frantic reports of sexual assaults and dead children in the Convention Center were, ah, somewhat overblown:

Conditions at the Convention Center may not have been as bad as initially thought, said New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass. He said no bodies of children have been found and there has also been no evidence of sexual assaults.

The bad news is that our media is so desperate for stories that they'll apparently report anything that sounds shocking based on nothing more than rumor. Among those who have lessons to learn from this hurricane are the reporters who reported that these things occured without any confirmation that they had.

He's Down With Sounding Stupid

Are all rappers this dumb or is it just Kanye West? He's beginning to sound almost Michael Mooreish.

When are people going to start holding these nitwits accountable for their asinine and overtly incendiary remarks?

The Widow's Mite

This is a wonderful gesture on the part of the Iraqi military:

Iraqi soldiers serving at Taji military base collected 1,000,000 Iraqi dinars for victims of Hurricane Katrina. Iraqi Col. Abbas Fadhil, Iraqi base commander, presented the money to U.S. Col. Paul D. Linkenhoker, Taji Coalition base commander, at a Sept. 5 staff meeting.

"We are all brothers," said Abbas. "When one suffers tragedy, we all suffer their pain."

The amount of money is small in American dollars - roughly $680 - but it represents a huge act of compassion from Iraqi soldiers to their American counterparts, said U.S. Army Maj. Michael Goyne. "I was overwhelmed by the amount of their generosity," Goyne said. "I was proud and happy to know Col. Abbas, his officers, NCOs and fellow soldiers. That amount represents a month's salary for most of those soldiers."

Abbas read a letter he wrote after giving the envelope to Linkenhoker:

"I am Colonel Abbas Fadhil; Tadji Military Base Commander," Abbas wrote. "On behalf of myself and all the People of Tadji Military Base; I would like to console the American People and Government for getting this horrible disaster. So we would like to donate 1.000.000 Iraqi Dinars to help the government and the People also I would like to console all the ASTs who helped us rebuilding our country and our Army. We appreciate the Americans' help and support. Thank you."

It's a bit of a clichè to say that it's the thought that counts but gifts like this remind us of how true the clichè is.

Crackpots and Relativists

Rosa Brooks at the LA Times apparently thinks that the call for teaching both sides of a controversy over where a metaphysical truth lies is equivalent to denying that there is any truth in the first place. She draws the peculiar conclusion that advocates of Intelligent Design, because they wish to see ID taught alongside Darwinian explanations of complex structures and processes, are epistemological relativists who believe that truth is simply a cultural construct. Ms Brooks is seriously confused. Either that, or she's deliberately misrepresenting the ID side of this debate. Here are some excerpts from her column along with commentary:

Sometimes it seems like secular intellectuals just can't win. In the 1980s and '90s, they were attacked by the right for their "relativism" - an alleged refusal to accept the existence of absolute truth. Today, they're under attack once more, only this time the right is mad because secular intellectuals aren't relativist enough. At any rate, that appears to be the charge put forward by conservatives who advocate the teaching of so-called intelligent design.

This is a distortion of what ID theorists are advocating. They're not saying that there is no truth or that truth is relative. What they're saying is that the Darwinian materialist's account of biological complexity is insufficient and inadequate and that a more complete picture of the truth would include intelligent, purposive agency.

These are not your daddy's creationists. When scientists and other members of the reality-based community declare that evolution is the only valid and provable account of our planet's natural history, intelligent design boosters don't cite the Bible. Instead, they earnestly insist that no one ought to claim a monopoly on truth, and that in the interests of intellectual and moral pluralism, "alternatives" to evolution should get a fair hearing in schools.

"Reality-based community" is an odd moniker to affix to those who dogmatically insist that it is a fact beyond doubt that the astonishing fitness of the universe for sustaining life is just a coincidence. It's a strange name to assign to those who believe that the fact that matter has precisely the chemical and physical properties necessary to produce complex organisms is just a brute given, that the geo-physical properties of the earth are simply fortuitous, and that the amazing complexity of life from proteins to organisms to ecosystems is explicable merely in terms of blind forces and random chance.

These "reality-based" folk, among whom Ms Brooks numbers herself, can no doubt believe a dozen impossible things each day before breakfast. Indeed, belief that Darwinian processes alone produced life is statistically similar to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airplane, to borrow Fred Hoyle's memorable metaphor. That's an interesting reality Ms Brooks is so proud to be a part of.

Nor is she correct when she equates the demand for teaching alternatives to materialism with the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth. Perhaps someone somewhere among the burgeoning population of ID supporters has made such a statement, but I've never heard it. Even so, the claim that no one has a monopoly on truth is not, pace Ms Brooks, a relativistic claim. One can agree that truth is not the exclusive possession of a single group without affirming that truth is "all relative" or without denying that there is an objective truth.

This week, Arizona Sen. John McCain became the latest Republican politician to urge that "all points of view" be presented to students studying the origins of life. He joined President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who argued recently that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution because people in "a pluralistic society should have access to a broad range of fact, of science, including faith."

It's the new relativism: when scientific truth can't be squared with your religion or ideology, wax eloquent about the value of pluralism and intellectual diversity.

Perhaps Ms Brooks will answer a question: What is scientific or true about this proposition: No non-material, non-natural processes or forces were involved in the creation of the universe, of life, or the development of life. That statement is the crux of the controversy. Darwinians affirm it. ID'ers deny it. Neither the affirmation or the denial are scientific claims, although those who make them may be scientists and they may use the findings of science to buttress their positions. Moreover, if Ms Brooks wants to say that the statement expresses a truth I invite her to explain how she, or anyone, knows it to be true.

So it's a tad ironic that conservatives and the religious right are now arguing that intelligent design should be taught on the grounds of intellectual pluralism. Needless to say, from the perspective of virtually all reputable scientists, evolution isn't just one theory among many, it's the only scientifically proven account of the origin and development of life on Earth. Denying evolution isn't merely "another perspective." It's like insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth, or that the moon is inhabited by little green guys. Whatever happened to truth?

This assertion is a tad preposterous. Not only did evolution have nothing to do with the origin of life, scarcely anything about the origin of life has been proven. Scientists have no idea how life originated. For Ms Brooks to blithely inform her readers that it has been proven that life originated through an evolutionary process of some sort is very naughty on her part.

[I]f intelligent design must be taught just because a few crackpot scientists are on board with it, we'll also have to teach about the UFO landings at Roswell and the numerous Elvis sightings that occur each year.

This statement is so dumb as to make one want to throw up his hands in despair at the state of contemporary journalism. First, for the writer to call scientists who embrace intelligent design "crackpots" is a tendentious slander. Ms Brooks is hardly qualified to make assessments of the professional qualifications of the people who are at the front of the ID "movement."

Second, she claims that teaching students that the cosmos and life bear the impress of design and that some scientists and philosophers believe this design points to an underlying teleology necessitates teaching about UFOs and Elvis sightings. How she arrives at such a weird conclusion totally escapes me. What do UFOs and Elvis have to do with the question of whether design in the cosmos is real or just an illusion?

Ms Brooks doesn't seem to understand that there are only two alternatives in this controversy. Either the universe and life are ontologically contingent upon intelligence, or they are not. That's the issue upon which the whole dispute rests. It's really that simple. So simple, in fact, that even a "crackpot" journalist should be able to comprehend it.

Armageddon on Capitol Hill

John Hinderaker explains the challenge Bush faces in replacing Justice Rehnquist. The pressure on the Democrats from their left-wing base to fight a conservative will be enormous. Another conservative with as meager a paper trail and as easy to confirm as Judge Roberts will be hard to find. Almost anyone Bush picks, Hinderaker predicts, will launch the political equivalent of WW III.

Maybe so, but Bush may surprise the Dems with a nomination that would please the conservative rank and file while short-circuiting the Democratic attack machine. He could do this by nominating someone out of the Senate, like, say, Sam Brownback. Brownback is widely respected, unflinchingly conservative, and, being a senator, will be harder for Senate Dems to attack as savagely as they would someone from the outside.

Even so, there is so much at stake that almost any conservative is going to find him- or herself at the center of a firestorm. The left can live with Roberts as a replacement for Rehnquist, but they will not submit to a Scalia-type conservative as a replacement for O'Connor. Such an appointment could tip the court to the right for decades, undoing much of the mischief the left has accomplished since the sixties, and blocking most of what they have planned for the next twenty years. Hence, this next nomination, Hinderaker argues, will trigger an Armageddon on Capitol Hill.

We expect that Bush won't allow that to deter him from doing what he believes is right, but it may deter wobbly Republicans from supporting his nominee. It looks like it'll be gut-check time in the Senate once Roberts is confirmed.

See here for more possibilities from the Senate as well as several women and Hispanics whose nomination would delight conservatives.

The War Along the Rat Lines

The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio continues to keep us updated on the war along the Syrian border towns which foreign fighters use as rat lines to infiltrate Iraq. The battle for Tal Afar is set to commence once the evacuation of the citizens is complete. It will not be a search and destroy mission but rather a "clear and hold" operation where the enemy is cleared out and Iraqi forces are left in place to keep them from returning. Insurgent leadership continues to suffer losses from targeted airstrikes which suggests that there is a lot of good intelligence coming from citizens on the ground.

Read Roggio's report for more information, and don't miss the analysis on Strategy Page of the effect that coalition pressure in this region is having on the insurgents' ability to find safe havens from which to mount operations.

Where Was the Red Cross?

Representatives of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, a state agency, turned away truckloads of food and other supplies that the Red Cross was trying to deliver to the Superdome and convention center after the storm passed but before the levees broke. Fox News' Major Garrett was interviewed about the story by Hugh Hewitt. Here's part of the transcript:

MG: Well, the Red Cross, Hugh, had pre-positioned a literal vanguard of trucks with water, food, blankets and hygiene items. They're not really big into medical response items, but those are the three biggies that we saw people at the New Orleans Superdome, and the convention center, needing most accutely. And all of us in America, I think, reasonably asked ourselves, geez. You know, I watch hurricanes all the time. And I see correspondents standing among rubble and refugees and evacuaees. But I always either see that Red Cross or Salvation Army truck nearby. Why don't I see that?

HH: And the answer is?

MG: The answer is the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, that is the state agency responsible for that state's homeland security, told the Red Cross explicitly, you cannot come.

HH: Now Major Garrett, on what day did they block the delivery? Do you know specifically?

MG: I am told by the Red Cross, immediately after the storm passed.

HH: Okay, so that would be on Monday afternoon.

MG: That would have been Monday or Tuesday. The exact time, the hour, I don't have. But clearly, they had an evacuee situation at the Superdome, and of course, people gravitated to the convention center on an ad hoc basis. They sort of invented that as another place to go, because they couldn't stand the conditions at the Superdome.

HH: Any doubt in the Red Cross' mind that they were ready to go, but they were blocked?

MG: No. Absolutely none. They are absolutely unequivocal on that point....I want your listeners to follow me here. At the very moment that Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans was screaming where's the food, where's the water, it was over the overpass, and state officials were saying you can't come in.

Garrett states that the reason the Red Cross was given for being turned away was that the authorities didn't want people staying at the Superdome or convention center, and if there was food and water there it would be harder to get them to move on.

Contrary to what the paranoid fantasists at the NYT doubtless suspect, the relief wasn't turned away because a phone call from Bush forbade the state authorities from allowing it in.

There's much more at the link.

By the way, there has been nothing about this report on MSNBC. They're still too busy blaming Bush and focussing on the body count.

Trying to Pin it All on Bush

Despite the best efforts of the Democrats and their associates in the MSM only 13% of the people surveyed in a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll blame President Bush for the New Orleans debacle. The 13% probably encompasses the splenetic Bush-haters who, like the poor, we will always have with us, and maybe a few others.

That all the energy, newsprint and air-time invested in pinning the post-hurricane disaster on Bush didn't yield greater rewards to those who see it as their mission in life to do everything possible to tear down this president must be extremely discouraging to the Left.

Shed a momentary tear, for example, for the disappointment that poor Bob Herbert of the New York Times must feel at this poll result. Mr. Herbert is so consumed with loathing for the president that in a column on Monday he wrote the following:

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.

Colossal failure? Exactly what was Mr. Bush's failure? What could he have done that he didn't do that would have made a difference? Mr. Herbert chooses not to tell us, quite likely because Mr. Herbert has no idea.

Mr. Herbert seeks to drives the point home. Reciting a litany of suffering and degradation suffered by the victims of Katrina, Herbert concludes by claiming that "the president didn't seem to notice." He offers no support for his libel, but then it's a bit awkward to insist upon factual support from someone whose intent is only to assassinate someone's character and not to uncover truth.

When he senses that the stage has been set and the moment is right, Mr. Herbert dramatically trots out the venerable old warhorse named Racism:

He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.

Yes. While the black folk were suffering, Bush was no doubt traipsing gleefully around his Crawford ranch in white sheets and hood. It would not surprise us to see such an absurd claim from the pen of Mr. Herbert since in his world no evidence is necessary to justify any calumny against the president. Just saying that Bush is a racist is enough to make it so for the cerebrally-challenged, among whom Mr. Herbert must feel at home.

He ends his indictment of the president with this summation:

Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.

And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.

Well. Has it occured to Mr. Herbert to examine Mr. Bush's total tenure in order to form a judgment of the prospects for our future? Evidently not. He prefers to pick a single event, one in which the facts are as yet unclear about Mr. Bush's responsibility, and extrapolate from that to the most dire warnings about the next three years under such an incompetent bumbler.

No thought enters the hate-soaked labyrinths of Mr. Herbert's mind about Bush's response after 9/11, or his liberation of 50 million people and the toppling of one of the most evil men in modern history. Nor does Mr. Herbert deign to remind us of Mr. Bush's widely acclaimed response to the devastating hurricanes which hammered Florida last year. Nor does Mr. Herbert mention how Bush took an economy that was heading into recession when he came to office and which subsequently suffered the heavy blows of 9/11, war in the Middle-east, and sky-rocketing gas prices, and nevertheless nursed it back to a state of health that is absolutely astonishing given the obstacles that had to be overcome.

These facts are all irrelevant to Mr. Herbert. For a day too long after Katrina, Mr. Bush allegedly hesitated when he should have been doing some unspecified thing, and therefore he's the worst person imaginable to be leading us into the days ahead.

Mr. Herbert's entire case reduces to this. People suffered. Help was slow. Bush was president. Therefore Bush is an incompetent racist. Mr. Herbert displays no awareness that there may be reasons why help was slow for which Mr. Bush cannot rationally be held responsible. He displays no inclination to place any blame for the failure to get people out of the city on the mayor and governor, who, with every passing day it becomes more clear, it squarely belongs. He evinces no sign that he is aware of the governor's inexplicable 24 hour hesitation to invite the feds into the state. Indeed, he shows an abject unwillingness to actually engage in any kind of sophisticated thought or analysis at all.

In fairness, perhaps Mr. Herbert, from his exalted perch atop the Mt. Olympus that is the New York Times, is privy to information that is being withheld from us mere mortals, and which he is not at liberty to share - information that would explain exactly what Mr. Bush's fault was and why it is so damning.

Or, more likely, perhaps Mr. Herbert is simply a buffoon who believes that an argument is won by whomever can cram the largest number of unsubstantiated and outrageous allegations into the smallest number of column inches.

Dowd's Dishonesty

Maureen Dowd tries to kick George Bush in the shins with her most recent column but just winds up looking foolish, petty, and dishonest instead. Her column can be read here. Like much of her work, it's short on facts and long on baseless invective. Let's consider her more serious allegations in the order she makes them.

She alleges that money that could have gone to shoring up the levees around New Orleans has been squandered in Iraq:

Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq.

The implication, of course, is that there were not enough National Guard troops at home to do the job of securing the city. This is, however, completely false. James Robbins sets forth the truth of the matter at National Review Online.

She goes on to imply that the Bush administration is culpable for the deaths of New Orleanians because they cut the Corps of Engineers budget request last year:

Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million.

Aside from the delightful irony of seeing lefties like Ms Dowd harrumphing that the Corps of Engineers, a governmental entity absolutely loathed by the Left, did not get the funding it requested, there is another problem here. Let's suppose the Corps had received everything it asked for. Would the money have been spent on levees or on marshland reclamation? If it would have been spent on the levees would they have been upgraded by the time Katrina hit? Would the money have made any real difference by this date? If not, why mention it? Until we know the answers to these questions Dowd's complaint is meaningless.

She goes on to express amazement that Bush doesn't start metaphorically executing people willy-nilly in the wake of the calamity:

Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.

Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

So far from being a flaw in Bush's character his reluctance to cashier his people reveals a strength. It certainly shows a vast difference between Bush and Dowd. Bush believes in sticking by his subordinates and supporting them until all the facts are in. It's one reason he inspires such fierce loyalty among his staff and cabinet. Dowd, like some Middle-East despot, believes in cutting off peoples' heads as soon as they give the appearance of having screwed up, regardless of what the ultimate facts might turn out to be. It's one reason that so many people find her repellant.

A lot of conservatives think Brown should be fired, too, but the difference between them and Dowd is that they see Bush's willingness to take heat for his people as a virtue and Dowd sees it as a vice. Actually, she sees everything Bush does as a vice.

She then shamelessly insinuates that Bush's people don't care about Katrina's victims because they're just blacks, don't you know.

[I]t is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.

A lack of empathy? How does she know what Bush and his staff were feeling and doing behind the scenes. As time goes on it's becoming clearer that much of the fault for the predicament of the people trapped in New Orleans, to the extent it wasn't their own, was the fault of their mayor and their governor. Why does she not condemn their lack of empathy? Might it be that they're Democrats (and minorities) while Bush is a white Republican male, a legitimate object of obloquy in the eyes of northeastern liberals like Dowd?

When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed.

This is the most egregiously dishonest thing she says in the piece. It demonstrates her utter disregard for the truth when a lie will better serve the purpose of slipping the stiletto into Bush's ribs. First, she implies that the administration is racist, but worse, she strongly suggests that the 700 guests of the Hyatt were sent to the front of the line by the feds because the people they were butting ahead of were only poor blacks. What actually happened was this: The people from the Hyatt were tourists who were sent to the head of the line under orders by the black mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

It might be worthwhile to ask Ms Dowd why she chooses not to tell her readers who was responsible for greasing the tourists' exit from town. Evidently, when you need to tarnish a man like the president it's okay at the NY Times to deceive your readers any way you can.

That's Howard

How long will rank and file Democrats allow themselves to be led by people who have so few scruples that they'll do something like this:

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean has told one of the nation's largest black church groups that racism was a factor in the rising death toll from Hurricane Katrina.

Dean told the annual meeting of the National Baptist Convention of America in Miami that the nation must "come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not."

He also said the funds that now support the Iraq war could be used to rebuild New Orleans or to aid the poor and elderly.

The ugly truth is that Howard Dean is a mendacious demagogue who is a disgrace to American politics. If he's going to make the claim that skin color was a factor in determining people's fate in Katrina's aftermath he should at least have the decency to offer some supporting evidence aside from the simple-minded observation that there was a large number of blacks in the Superdome.

Does Mr. Dean have information that people were denied the ability to evacuate because they were black? Were they refused helicopter rescue because they were black? Were they denied access to shelters, food, water, or medical care because they were black? Exactly how did skin color play the role that Mr. Dean alleges? Tell us, Mr. Dean, precisely how were African-Americans singled out for discriminatory treatment?

Of course, he won't answer these questions because demagogues never get down to specifics - it would enable people to see through their scam. Sadly for this country, Dean and others like him in the Democratic party will continue to set one American against another for political advantage as long as they can get away with it.

It's disgusting. It's criminal. It's Howard Dean.

The Calm Before the Storm

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail informs us here and here of preparations for a big battle at Tal Afar, an Iraqi city that has become a haven for insurgents. The coalition is evacuating the citizens in preparation for a massive combat operation along the lines of the assault on Fallujah. Already two hundred insurgents have been killed. The city is cordoned and escape is doubtful. The battle is imminent.

Requesting Your Help

As you know from our announcement at the head of our posts, we've been having trouble with our server not always responding to readers' requests to access it. The problem persists for a few minutes and then seems to miraculously heal itself. Being somewhat skeptical of the doctrine of the infinite extent of God's mercy and doubting that it reaches to healing machines several times a day, we've been trying to pinpoint a more mundane cause.

We'd like to enlist the aid of our readers in the effort. If you have gotten a "web site not responding" message when trying to access Viewpoint anytime within the last four weeks you can help us by going to the Feedback button and telling us whether this has happened once or twice during this period, or if it has happened more frequently.

If the Feedback button doesn't work with your browser feel free to e-mail me at 74@aol.com. Bill and I appreciate your help with this.

Thanks,

RLC

Saving the Beer From the Coelacanths

Years ago scientists dredged up a primitive fish off the coast of Madagascar called a coelacanth that had been believed to have been extinct for millions of years. Such finds are called "living fossils." I thought of the coelacanth when reading an article about Muslims who killed a woman for having a romantic relationship with a Christian and then went on a rampage destroying the homes of Palestinian Christians.

In the standard view, you see, man has evolved through stages of barbarism and savagery culminating in the civilized form he takes today as "thinking man", Homo sapiens. According to this version of human evolution man had to overcome along the way cognitive abilities on the level of an imbecile and religious beliefs that require that the gods be appeased through human sacrifice - the bloodier, more terrifying, the better. Think of the thugees in Raiders of the Lost Ark sacrificing their victim by ripping his still pulsing heart out of his breast.

We've advanced beyond this primitive savagery thanks largely to the influence of Christianity on the Western world, but there are still pockets of "living fossils" found throughout the world which still function cognitively at the level of an imbecile and hold to religious beliefs that cause them to revel in bloody human sacrifice. These people belong to the genus Homo, but they can hardly be considered sapiens. One such very large pocket stretches across the vast Arab world and produces stories like this on an almost daily basis:

Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched.

The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured.

The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week. The 30-year-old woman, according to Palestinian Authority security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

"When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison," said one source. "Then they buried her without reporting her death to the relevant authorities."

When the PA security forces decided to launch an investigation into the woman's death, her family protested for fear that the relationship would be exposed. The family was further infuriated by the decision to exhume the body for autopsy.

The attack is one of the worst against Christians in the West Bank in many years. Residents said it took the PA security forces several hours to reach Taiba. Others complained that the IDF, which is in charge of overall security in the area, did not answer their desperate calls for immediate help.

"More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night," said a Taiba resident. "They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances."

With the exception of large numbers of PA policemen, the streets of Taiba were completely deserted on Sunday as the residents remained indoors. Many torched cars littered the streets. At least 16 houses had been gutted by fire and the assailants also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

"It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs," said another resident.

"Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there. Then they tried to enter the local beer factory, but were repelled by PA security agents. The fire engine arrived five hours later."

Col. Tayseer Mansour, commander of the PA police in the Ramallah area, said his men arrived late because of the need to coordinate their movements with the IDF. "The delay resulted in the torching of a number of houses and cars in the village," he said.

Taiba, the only West Bank village that is completely inhabited by Christians, is famous for its Taiba Beer factory, which was established by the Khoury family in 1994.

The residents are Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic. The village was originally called Ephraim, and is thought to be the city to which Jesus came with his disciples before his crucifixion: "Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim" (John 11:54).

According to some accounts, Salah a-Din, who led the war against the Crusaders, was responsible for the name change. He is said to have found the villagers there to be nice and kind - in Arabic, taybeen - and the name stuck, to become Taiba.

Well, at least the PA police prevented the destruction of the brewery by the human coelacanths. There's no word yet, however, as to how Allah views this intervention to preserve the iniquitous manufacture of the vile fluid from the expression of his righteous anger. Maybe the police can atone for thwarting Allah's will by permitting the murder of a few more women and/or Christians. That will likely satisfy his wrath.

A closing question for the moral equivalence crowd: When was the last time you read about Israelis doing anything like this?

The World Begins to Step Forward

This is good to read although given the wealth of some of these countries one hopes that this it just a first step:

CAIRO, Egypt - Donations to Hurricane Katrina relief poured in from around the world Sunday, with Kuwait offering $500 million and other Mideast countries offering aid and condolences despite widespread opposition to U.S. policies in the area.

The European Union and NATO also stepped up to provide aid following rare requests for help from Washington, while the 22-member Arab League urged countries across the Middle East to "extend aid to the United States to face the exceptional humane circumstances."

Spain, Belgium, Britain, Germany and Italy announced they had started or were about to send aid and experts to the U.S. to help with the logistical operation of getting help to hurricane survivors. Britain's Ministry of Defense said Sunday the government would send 500,000 ration packs. Germany and Italy sent flights of supplies, including food rations, bed supplies, inflatable dinghies and water purifiers.

The $500 million offer by Kuwait - which owes its 1991 liberation from seven months of occupation by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army to a U.S.-led coalition - is the largest to date, surpassing the $100 million pledged by Qatar, another U.S. ally in the Mideast. "It's our duty as Kuwaitis to stand by our friends to lighten the humanitarian misery and as a pay back for the many situations during which Washington helped us through," Kuwait's energy minister, Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, said in a statement.

Kuwait's offer includes $400 million in oil products and $100 million in humanitarian relief, Al Sabah's spokesman told The Associated Press. Another close U.S. ally, the United Arab Emirates, is sending tents, clothing, food and other aid. The United States enjoys close relations with most Gulf states, particularly Kuwait, which was a launch pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam, and Qatar, a base for the U.S. military in the war's initial stages.

Bitter U.S. foes Iran and North Korea - which Washington pressured over their respective nuclear programs - offered to help rescue efforts, and Syria - another longtime opponent - was among numerous Middle Eastern states offering condolences. And Arab League chief Amr Moussa said the Arab world should support the United States, which "always expresses solidarity with nations that face natural catastrophes and extends most of the aid they receive."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime opponent of the Bush administration, said Sunday he had offered 1 million barrels of gasoline and $5 million, but criticized the U.S. government for failing to evacuate the victims before disaster struck. "The rich were able to leave, by their own means. It was the poor that remained there," the leftist leader said on his weekly television and radio show. The United Nations said Sunday the U.S. had accepted its offer of U.N. assistance and expertise.

"A small U.N. coordination team is in Washington now consulting with government officials on how best the U.N. can complement the United States' own emergency efforts," said a statement from the U.N. spokesman. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has also said its 26-member nations would release the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil per day from strategic reserves.

These offers of aid should not be turned away, even if we don't need them. To spurn the offer of a gift is to encourage resentments. To accept the gift is to make the giver feel good, not only about himself but about the one upon whom the gift is bestowed. Acts of kindness generate kind feelings in the doer. Feelings follow actions. When people or nations act in kind ways they find themselves experiencing much more positive feelings toward the object of their beneficence than perhaps they did before. We should encourage all the acts of kindness toward the U.S. that others wish to bestow.

Dwarf-Tossing

PowerLine does a complete smackdown of the NY Times' Paul Krugman who looks more intellectually diminutive every time he writes a column. In his latest he takes a potshot at the administration for its alleged tardiness in the wake of Katrina by citing the example of the U.S.S. Bataan:

The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn't deliver.

But the federal government's lethal ineptitude wasn't just a consequence of Mr. Bush's personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good.

Bad choice of stories to employ against Mr. Bush, this one. As it turns out, a simple check of the facts would have shown Mr. Krugman that he was embarking down the road to personal embarrassment by building his case upon this story, but checking facts is for right-wingers. Lefties are unconstrained by such bourgeois and infra dig considerations. Read PowerLine to find out what has really happened with the U.S.S. Bataan.

PowerLine is going to have to start picking fights with people its own size. Picking one with Krugman is analogous to dwarf-tossing.

The Thuggery Was Predictable

Here's a question I've had ever since the frenetic stories of media reporters stationed at the Superdome and the Convention Center started coming in about the desperate state of people who were being victimized by thugs and rapists: Was the crime rate at these places significantly different than it is in New Orleans under normal conditions? Probably not, I thought.

Now City Journal writer Nicole Gelinas comes to a similar conclusion. She rejects Al Sharpton's feeble apologias on behalf of the looters in N.O. and proceeds to dissect the problem and apportions blame where it belongs. Her article, written before the military moved in to establish order, makes a lot of sense.

New Orleans' vicious looters aren't the real face of the city's poor-their victims are.

New Orleans hasn't even been disarmed yet, but the story of those who looted, trashed, and terrorized the city this week is already being re-written. Al Sharpton went on MSNBC Thursday night to say that "looters are people who pay their taxes whose infrastructure caved in on them." The final PC version of the story is likely to go like this: The desperate people left behind in New Orleans, nearly all black, had justification in brutally attacking their city because the help they frantically sought didn't come.

In truth, the looters, rapists, and murderers who have terrorized New Orleans since Monday began their post-Katrina reign of terror a full day before the situation grew truly desperate-and it was their increasingly lawless behavior that kept willing but unarmed professional and volunteer rescue workers away from the city and from the poor people who needed saving.

Let's go back to last Sunday morning-such a long time ago, it now seems. Most New Orleanians with means-the most resourceful poor, the middle class, and the affluent-left the city of nearly half-a-million residents that day, 24 hours before Katrina hit. They took planes, they drove, they hitchhiked, and some walked. Save for the home and business owners who valued their property more than their lives, most of the 100,000 or so who stayed behind were those not only poor in financial resources but in human capital as well.

Some who stayed behind are the New Orleanians who depend on the government on a good day-impoverished women, children, and elderly folks who went to the Superdome and to the Convention Center Sunday, expecting their government to take care of them. And those were the smart ones-those who moved rationally and proactively, despite a lack of transportation out of the city and a lack of government co-ordination, to secure their own physical safety. Thousands of others who stayed in their low-lying homes in the 9th Ward (which predictably flooded, as it flooded 40 years ago during Hurricane Betsy) drowned or now find themselves trapped-starved and dying of dehydration.

And the others who stayed behind, unfortunately, are those who terrorize New Orleans on a low-grade level on a good day-and have now taken over the stricken city. What's happened is the predictable civil deterioration of a city whose fragile civil infrastructure can't control or contain its core criminal class in peacetime.

Katrina didn't turn innocent citizens into desperate criminals. This week's looters (not those who took small supplies of food and water for sustenance, but those who have trashed, burned, and shot their way through the city since Monday) are the same depraved individuals who have pushed New Orleans' murder rate to several multiples above the national average in normal times. (New Orleans, without Katrina, would have likely ended 2005 with 330 or so murders-compared to about 65 in Boston, a city roughly the same in size.) Today may not be the best day to get into New Orleans' intractable crime problem, but it's necessary, since it explains how this week's communications and policing vacuum so quickly created a perfect storm for the vicious lawlessness that has broken out.

During the mid-1990s, New Orleans made some progress in cutting down its murder rate from its one-time peak as the Murder Capital of America. With the help of the feds, the city weeded out the worst of its police force (including two murderers) and implemented some new policing techniques borrowed from successful cities like New York, including COMSTAT. But New Orleans-and the state judicial system-has never cemented a sustainable institutional infrastructure to build on early progress, and the murder rate had risen perceptibly again.

New Orleans, first off, doesn't have the middle-class or affluent tax base to afford the professional police or prosecution force it needs-crime has created a vicious cycle, pushing out taxpayers who fund the police. Nor have the city and state cemented the command-and-control direction of financial and human resources that police, detectives, and prosecutors need to do their jobs.

In New York, the mayor, police, and prosecutors know that taking one killer off the streets means preventing more killings, because a murderer frequently murders again. In New Orleans, killers and other violent criminals remain free, because in many cases, they aren't arrested or tried; conviction rates remain abysmal. The lawlessness these criminals create in pockets of the city breeds more killers and more lawlessness. Witnesses and crime victims in the inner city fear to come forward: they know that even if a criminal winds up arrested, his associates will be free to intimidate them.

On a normal day, those who make up New Orleans' dangerous criminal class-yes, likely the same African-Americans we see looting now-terrorize their own communities. Once in a while, a spectacular crime makes headlines-the shooting death of a tourist just outside the French Quarter, or the rape and murder of a Tulane student. But day in and day out, New Orleans' black criminal class victimizes other blacks. Churches put up billboards in the worst neighborhoods that plead: "Thou shalt not kill." The inner-city buses shuttle what look like hundreds of war veterans around the city-young black men, many of them innocent victims, paralyzed in wheelchairs.

This week, this entrenched criminal class has freely roamed the streets-and terrorized everyone. On Monday, New Orleans still had food and water stocked in stores across the city, but young looters began sacking stores, trashing the needed food and stealing TVs, DVDs, and other equipment. If the uncoordinated, understaffed New Orleans police had even a prayer of keeping order, it was Monday. By Tuesday, the looters had armed themselves with ample weapons supplies available in stores all across the city; by Wednesday, the armed gangs, out of food and water like everyone else, were not only viciously dangerous but desperate, hungry, and thirsty.

But while the looters have reportedly killed police offers and have shot at rescue workers, they're mainly victimizing, as usual, other poor blacks. The vicious looters aren't the face of New Orleans' poor blacks. Their victims are: the thousands of New Orleanians who made their way to shelter before the storm, and who rescued others and brought them to shelter during and after the storm-but who now cannot get the help they desperately need.

This week's looting was predictable. When Hurricane Georges, another potentially catastrophic storm (it spared New Orleans at the last minute) was about to hit in 1998, I foolishly refused to evacuate my Uptown apartment. More than one person said I should evacuate not due to the storm, but because looters would terrorize the city afterward.

Was this week's looting preventable? Failure to put violent criminals behind bars in peacetime has led to chaos in disaster. New Orleans' officials had only the remotest prayer on Monday of coordinating police officers with no electronic equipment to rescue survivors while at the same time stopping looting before it descended into wholesale terror. Now, those uncoordinated police officers are themselves victims-according to multiple accounts, dead officers, their bodies marked with gunshot wounds, litter the city.

Armed marauders have now taken over every dry area of a deluged city. They've hampered rescue efforts: without wanton looting, there was at least a chance that individual police officers could have distributed food in stores to those who needed it most. And they've likely hampered rebuilding efforts down the road: they've smashed much of intact Uptown and the French Quarter, which will surely be a pyschological barrier for those who knew that the storm didn't destroy their homes and their livelihoods-fellow citizens did.

Mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco lost whatever fragile authority they ever had over New Orleans early Monday, as the waters still rose. The federal government was unacceptably slow at assessing a rapidly deteriorating situation. Now, no civil authorities can re-assert order in New Orleans. The city must be forcefully demilitarized, even as innocent victims literally starve. What has happened over the past week is an embarrassment to New Orleans-and to America.

Even in the best of times Mayor Nagin ran a dysfunctional city. For him and others to blame the feds for not responding more quickly to the crisis largely created by their own lack of preparedness, seems like an act of deflecting fault that they know is their own.

Anyway, the good news is that once the cops got some reinforcements from the national guard they found a bunch of these hoodlums and terminated their activities, as well as the hoodlums themselves, in rather definitive fashion. There are reports that at least eight of these morons are permanently out of the terrorizing business.

We're waiting for the caterwauling howls of protest from the ACLU against police brutality to begin.

Why Are They Poor?

Most of us watch the nightly news reports from the Gulf Coast and see people, human beings, in desperate straits, but not so some of our friends on the left. They look at the footage and they see proof of white racism and oppression. They are unable to view the world except through the neo-Marxist lens of race and class.

Jack Shafer at Slate writes a somewhat confused essay about the fact that news journalists seem very reluctant to mention the race and class of the victims of the Hurricane and also of those who have exploited this calamity to rob and pillage.

Like a social bloodhound Shafer thinks himself to have caught the scent of racism in these scenes of human suffering and devastation, and he bays and sniffs avidly along the trail in avid pursuit of his quarry.

Unfortunately, he just seems to get himself tangled up in his argument, as if the source of the scent had run around in circles and then off in several different directions at once. You can read it for yourself. The blind alleys and cul-de-sacs Shafer starts us down only to turn us around and set us off in another direction when it becomes apparent that there's no prey to be found where we were almost wear us out. It's hard to tell exactly what his point is until we get to the closing paragraph which might serve as a synedoche for the whole:

By failing to acknowledge upfront that black New Orleanians-and perhaps black Mississippians-suffered more from Katrina than whites, the TV talkers may escape potential accusations that they're racist. But by ignoring race and class, they boot the journalistic opportunity to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of a whole definable segment of the population.

It could be interpreted as racist, he admits, to make an issue of the color of the people who didn't evacuate and who looted stores, but it's evidently also racist to ignore these pertinent facts because we'd be papering over the salient point that these are black people who've been disenfranchised and victimized by a racist society that allows, even compels, these wretches to live in poverty. One almost expects Shafer to point to Katrina's furious white clouds as proof that the whole tragic disaster was a racist plot by evil white meteorologists at the National Weather Service, Bush appointees, no doubt, to make poor black folk suffer.

His final line is: "What I wouldn't pay to hear a Fox anchor ask, 'Say, Bob, why are these African-Americans so poor to begin with?' "

Well, he's not asking us, but if he were, here's the answer we'd give him, though I'm fairly sure he wouldn't like it:

The reasons blacks in New Orleans, like blacks elsewhere in America, are often poor is because large swatches of the African-American population have, for various reasons, abandoned, or never embraced, the set of values that enable people to become upwardly mobile in our society. What are these values? Here are two which are conspicuously and tragically absent in many African-American neighborhoods:

Getting married before you have kids and staying married afterward. Nothing is more likely to guarantee that children grow up poor than to have them raised by a young mother with no husband. Such children are not only very likely to be impoverished, they are also more likely to be socially dysfunctional, i.e. involved with drugs, crime and early sex, than those who grow up with their biological father. The revolution in attitudes which resulted in single motherhood becoming an accepted and acceptable condition has been hard on the white population, but it has been devastating to African-Americans. Twenty eight percent of white children are born to unmarried mothers, but almost sixty nine percent of black children are born out of wedlock. This is an anchor around the necks of black kids which prevents them from climbing out of their penury and reaching higher socio-economic heights.

Valuing education. African-Americans too often fail to place the premium on education that other groups do. Black parents, for whatever reasons, tend to be less involved in their children's schools, they tend to read to them less, and to offer their children fewer enrichment activities outside of school. Critics sometimes say that inner city schools are in such a deplorable state that kids can't learn in them, but one reason they're in such bad repair is that too few parents of black kids simply care enough about their schools to demand that they be maintained, supplied, and hold to high standards of discipline.

Black kids too often suffer verbal and even physical abuse if they outperform their peers and are seen as "acting white." Young blacks are often encouraged by a depauperate culture to project images of black stupidity. Schools are charged with racism by the race hustlers if they try to teach black kids to be articulate or force them to dress in a manner that doesn't make them look like morons, with their pants at half-mast and their hats turned sideways. The peer culture in which they swim too often encourages them to emulate some "gangsta rapper" rather than a Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas or Condaleeza Rice, people who are often held in contempt by black "leaders" as Uncle Toms and sell-outs.

Children who go through school and never learn to speak articulately, to read effectively, and to do basic math are doomed. As bad as our urban schools may be, a child with a concerned family to go home to could still develop these basic skills in them. Too many African-American children don't, because they don't return to a home where learning is valued.

If Jack Shafer wants to know why there is an African-American underclass, that's the answer. Those who are chronically poor and who pass on their poverty from generation to generation place a low value on both marriage and education. So far from this being the result of a racist plot, it is much more likely to be the consequence of the disintegration of both sexual mores and academic standards that liberals applauded in the 1970s and which still plagues us today.

Just like Katrina, the liberalization of social attitudes has hit and hurt everyone, but they have hit African-Americans the hardest. If we sincerely care about ameliorating poverty in this country then we need to realize that nothing we do will have any lasting effect, and may even make the problem worse, as some forms of welfare did in the 1970s, unless we change people's attitudes about the crucial importance of marriage and education.