A Call For Balance

Byron Borger, a dear friend and valued critic of occasional posts on Viewpoint has taken exception to some of what I wrote here and here. His comments can be found in the Feedback forum. My reply follows with passages from Byron's critique in block quotes:

By,

Thanks for your criticisms of my view of poverty in America. I know that the opionions I express are controversial and that some will find them offensive. Nevertheless, I stand by them as I think them to be largely correct insofar as they describe the situation of a significant percentage, perhaps even a majority, of the chronically poor in this country.

Those who are poor in the U.S. have suffered from the influence of a culture that has seduced them into adopting behaviors that are guaranteed to keep them poor, a prevailing social science that has provided excuses for them to rationalize their poverty, and government policies (like some welfare programs) which have encouraged values that lead to trans-generational poverty.

You wrote that:

[My kids] spent some time this summer on a church mission trip doing some renovation in a very rural and poor part of Appalachia. Unbelievable lack of local resources and no jobs. No tax revenue, poor schools, little opportunity. The cycle of poverty and the ensuing social deterioration causes an ethos and environment...well, I don't have to tell you. Or do I? I think you are way, way off the mark here.

I do not doubt that those who dwell in such regions have few resources and job opportunities. That doesn't mean that there are no opportunities for them anywhere. In the 18th and 19th century millions of Irish in even worse situations than those in Appalachia emigrated at great hazard to themselves and their families to this country to find or create opportunities to improve their lives. During the 1930s "Dust Bowl" hundreds of thousands of "Okies" and others migrated from the mid-west to the west coast to find or make opportunities for themselves. Today one of our most serious problems and perhaps Bush's greatest failure is the problem of illegal immigration brought about by the fact that millions of poor know that there are jobs in this country that will allow them to provide for their families if only they are able to get to them and are willing to work them. And so they come.

Just because there are no jobs in one's town or neighborhood does not mean there are no jobs at all. People are faced with a trade-off. They can move, perhaps with great difficulty, to where work is or stay where they feel they have roots. It's their choice to make. One choice gives them a chance, one doesn't.

But to just blame poverty on poor choices is not matching up with my (albeit) limited experience. And it sure doesn't square with what the Bible says are the causes of poverty (personal immorality or poor choices being only one of the less mentioned causes.)

Poverty in Biblical times was not like poverty today. It was, in fact, completely different. Biblical poverty was more like what people endured in this country during the Great Depression when there really weren't any jobs. In Biblical times the masses were poor and a small minority were well off, usually because they exploited the poor. Today's poor live in the wealthiest country with the largest middle class, the greatest opportunity for socio-economic mobility, the greatest economic freedom, and one of the most just societies in the history of the world.

In terms of health care, comforts like refrigeration, air conditioning, heat, entertainment, and transportation, today's poor are rich beyond the wildest dreams of anyone living in a Biblical culture. They have access to public libraries and public schools, they are eligible for government programs that buy their groceries, pay their energy and medical bills, and subsidize their housing. To compare the causes of American poverty today to the causes of poverty in Biblical times, or even the poverty that exists in modern times throughout much of the rest of the world, is to compare apples and oranges.

You also say:

These drastic statements though, that will sound less than charitable to those that work or live among the poor, will just turn them off.

A lot of these sorts of people, though maybe not a majority of them, if they know they can speak freely and not be hooted down, would agree with what I'm saying. I've talked to people who do social work, who are police officers in poor neighborhoods, who are teachers in poor schools, and pastors who counsel poor people. Their experience has made them some of the most discouraged people I know. They do their jobs with compassion and professionalism, but they feel their task is like trying to bail the water out of the Titanic with a bucket because the culture of poverty is so ingrained in people that they will simply not make the choices they have to make to rise out of it.

You then write:

That post about the debate in England between some wild and crazy lefties who then had even crazier people in the audience. Have you EVER met anybody anywhere who would say "who cares?" about helping people in Afghan?...Which makes me (a) worry a bit about the veracity of the report and (b) wonder why you post such stuff....Anybody that is that hard, hard left is just so much on the fringe that they do not deserve to be given the time of day..

George Galloway is very far to the left, but he's not that far that he's of no consequence. You might remember that he's the British politician that somebody at Gideon's blog said he admired for his anti-war stance, and you and I had an exchange about it. Galloway is one of the most prominent critics in England of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, and has a large following. Christopher Hitchens is one of the most well-known journalists in the United States among intellectuals. They may be wild and crazy (though I wouldn't say that about Hitchens, as much as I disagree with him), but they are men of consequence and their debate was widely reported on. That's why I post such stuff.

As for whether I've ever met anyone who would say "who cares" about the people in Afghanistan (or Iraq), the answer is that I've read about lots of them and talked with a few. Almost everyone who says we need to pull out of Afghanistan (or Iraq) right now is tacitly saying "who cares about those people," we've got to look out for ourselves. Everyone who has said that our involvement there is costing too much money and that we should be spending that money at home is tacitly saying "who cares about those people."

Has the left adequately protested brutal leftist regimes? Not adequately, although you are historically wrong to suggest that they haven't at all. (Whether they've reached your ears is not quite the issue, really.) Has the right adequately protested brutal rightist regimes? Not adequately. either. So what is your point? That the left never really cares but the right wing does? Hmmmm.

Nice put down, By, although I don't recall making myself the issue. I simply meant to say that if leftists have been seriously critical of leftist states, other than the obligatory acknowledgments that "of course, Kim Il Sung is a despot, but..." sort of thing, it hasn't been particularly obvious. The issue is that the left sees anyone who is an enemy of the U.S. as their friend (See Paul Berman's book Terrorism and Liberalism) or at least has a hard time seeing him as an enemy. I do not dispute that the right suffers, mutatis mutandis, from a similar blindness, but the fact of the matter is, as your own examples attest, one has to go back 20 to 25 years to come up with an example of a tyrannical rightist government that conservatives were not critical of.

Or the silence of the American conservatives on those scores doesn't get your goat the way it does mine?

Perhaps if I had had my blog going 25 years ago there would have been occasion to condemn the lack of outrage at some of the atrocities committed by our Central American surrogates. As it is, you might remember from our years of discussing these things that I was very much opposed to many of the horrific rightist governments around the world and supported measures to defeat them. I opposed South African apartheid, I supported Britain's war against Argentina and Clinton's war against Milosevic as well as Clinton's and others' attempts to end fascism in Haiti. I also supported Bush '41 when he went to war against the fascist Hussein and Bush '43 when he went to war against the extremely conservative Islamo-fascist Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's socialist fascism (a sort of Arab naziism) again in 2003.

I think most conservatives, with the exception of many paleo-cons, also supported these actions. In fact, I think the conservative record against rightist tyranny is a lot stronger than the left's record against leftist tyranny, and has been ever since liberals changed their mind about Vietnam.

(And here is another concern: the liberals whose silence about human rights abuses on the left didn't cause it, really, as if you can blame red diaper babies for Stalin, or Jane Fonda for the Khmer Rouge. But you can blame those who voted for Mr. Reagan, say, for the contras brutalities in villages in Nicaragua. You can blame U.S. magazines on the right for advocating and getting financial support for Pinochet, for the horrors of the Shah, for passing bills that funded military support of dictators like Marcos and the torture chambers of apartheid era South Afriica....But when you fail to offer similiar critique of the right who really could have spoken out against their own guys, the ones they sent arms to your imbalance becomes disconcerting.

I think your premise is mistaken. To the extent that the left crippled American administrations and hindered them from taking strong action against communist tyrants, they encouraged them in their tyranny. Every time anti-war protestors marched or Jane Fonda called American soldiers war criminals, it gave hope and encouragement to the communists in Hanoi. The failure of the leftist dominated media to speak out strongly against Stalin's crimes and instead to apologize for them, emboldened him to commit new ones. Every time some naive leftist returned from Havana or Managua to tell the rest of us what wonderful people the Castroites and the Ortegans were and what a wonderful society they were building, it just stripped the Armando Valladares of the world, languishing in their filthy gulags, of hope.

I do not deny that conservatives have, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, found themselves in bed with unsavory people, but the fact that such things happened 25 years ago is no reason not to call to account people who are hopping into bed with unsavory people today, and today it's almost exclusively the left who is doing it. Nor do I feel that I have to qualify my criticisms of this by saying "I know that conservatives have done this in the past, too." That's the same sort of silliness that afflicts people who feel they have to preface every discussion of race by acknowledging that there's still lots of racism around to be condemned. I don't think it's necessary in addressing the difficulties of the world we face in the 21st century to revisit the arguments we had in the 1970s and 80s over whether we should have been supporting the contras and in what fashion. That argument is interminable.

If you want to cite an example from the contemporary world of how conservatives are behaving abominably and ask me why, in the interest of balance, I don't post on that I'll certainly examine it as sincerely as I can.

BTW, the one example of execrable behavior on the right that I can think of offhand was Pat Robertson's call to assassinate Hugo Chavez. I wrote several very critical posts on that. Perhaps you missed them.

Best,

Dick

Free Will

Last week we noted Joe Carter's list of fifty propositions that comprise his religious creed. Evidently, some of his readers have questioned him about a couple of those theses, focusing their criticism on #38 and #39. Joe seeks to answer their concerns here.

The discussion is essentially over whether God determines or predestines who will be saved and who will be lost. Joe accepts the Calvinist view that one's eternal destiny is completely chosen by God.

I have enormous respect for those in the Reformed tradition, which embraces the Calvinist view of predestination, but even though there are verses in the Bible which support their view of predestination, I have problems reconciling that doctrine with other things that the Bible teaches about God. Let me try to explain:

The question of whether we are free to choose in the sphere of morals or religion is perplexing because for one thing it's hard to describe what a completely free choice would be like. It certainly wouldn't be an uncaused choice so if the choice is caused then we need to ask whether the cause determines or compels the choice. If not, how do explain a choice which is caused by something, say, environmental factors, but is nevertheless free.

The second reason it's perplexing is that the Bible in some places certainly seems to teach that our spiritual fate is predestined (eg. Rom.8:29, 30). Yet in other places it seems to strongly imply that we have freedom to choose our destiny for ourselves (Rev. 3:16). So there's a tension that has troubled philosophers and theologians for two thousand years. Let's start with a basic premise upon which all Christians can agree:

God is perfectly good and supremely just.

We might also agree that since we are made in God's image our concepts of both goodness and justice are similar to His and there's no conflict between them. If there were then it would make no sense for God to adjure us to love goodness and justice since we'd have no idea what exactly He was talking about and what was expected of us.

Now what follows from this? If God has predestined every choice people make in their lives, then:

1. God is responsible for our evil choices. He has predestined them to happen. It's not merely that He allows evil as a consequence of man's Fall, it's that He actually produces it Himself from before the creation of the world. Christians often attribute suffering, grief and death caused by human volition to man's wickedness, or to Satan, but if predestination is true the source of these evils is neither of those. It's God. This, however, seems impossible to reconcile with God's perfect goodness.

2. If God has predestined who will be lost and who will be saved, then God has, in effect, created some of us to live for a relative few short years, programmed us to reject Him and His plan of salvation, and then He punishes us for doing what He compelled us to do by condemning us to suffer hell forever. Imagine writing a software program for a computer which the computer runs perfectly but with which you, the programmer, are dissatisfied. Where is the fault? With the computer or with the programmer? The Calvinist says it is with the computer, and that the programmer is being completely reasonable if he destroys the computer because it did what he programmed it to do. This seems to me to be incoherent.

3. There is no real moral responsibility. Moral responsibility requires personal, metaphysical freedom. Someone who suffers from Tourette's syndrome is not at fault if he blurts out obscenities. His condition robs him of control over certain behaviors so we absolve him of blame for them. Likewise, if we are incapable of choosing to do good then we, like the Tourette's sufferer, are not really responsible for what we do choose.

Reformed theologians respond by saying that we are free to do what is right, but that because we have a corrupt nature (which, of course, we can't help), we don't make good choices. We don't chose to do what is right. We had no alternative but to be what God destined us to be, but we're nevertheless free to choose what He has destined us to choose, which is to do evil. How this constitutes genuine freedom and responsibility escapes me.

The only way I can see to reconcile God's goodness and justice with predestination is to adopt the doctrine of universal salvation which would mean that ultimately God saves everyone, no matter who they are and what they did. If no one is punished for their sin, if no one is eternally lost, then God might be just in making us to be whatever kind of person He wants us to be, since our "wickedness" would be but an infinitesimally brief period of time relative to eternity. However, since I don't think universalism is Biblical, I don't think that particular solution is open to the predestinarian.

Predestinarians recognize these difficulties, but they insist that God's sovereignty is such that we have no right to question Him. They will often cite Rom. 9:19 - 21 where Paul says that the pot doesn't ask the potter why he has made it thus. Nonetheless, whatever Paul is talking about in this passage, if he's talking about our personal salvation then its hard to see the aptness of the analogy.

A clay pot does not have an eternal soul, it doesn't have feelings, it's not loved by others, nor does it experience pain and suffering. It's one thing to mold clay for whatever purpose one pleases, it's something else entirely to create a human being only to have it live a few years and then be damned for an eternity. As I said, I have difficulty reconciling that with what I believe about God's goodness and justice.

The Calvinist believes that the sort of human freedom we're talking about here would somehow diminish God's sovereignty, but our freedom to choose is a gift God Himself bestows. He could revoke it if He wished. His sovereignty consists in being able to do whatever He cares to. His sovereignty is in no way subject or subordinate to our freedom.

In summary, there are two basic positions on the question of human free will and predestination: The Calvinist or Reformed view is largely the product of the work of John Calvin (1509 -1564) who believed that man is totally corrupt and cannot do anything to save himself. If he could then he would not need God and Christ's sacrifice was unnecessary. If a man could save himself, the Calvinist believes, then salvation would be based on what he did, it would not be based on faith, and the man might have something about which to "boast."

Thus God chooses some from among those He creates to work in their hearts. He changes their heart so that they are then able to accept Christ's offer of eternal life, which they will inevitably do since God has predestined them to do so.

The other view is called Arminianism after James Arminius (1560 - 1609). According to this view man is lost, as if stuck in quicksand. He's sinking and can't extricate himself. All men are in this predicament, but God reaches down and offers each a hand. Some reach up to grasp it, some refuse it. The choice is up to each. Those who take God's offer of rescue are not doing anything meritorious, any more than a drowning man can claim some sort of virtue in seizing the life preserver thrown to him. He may not recognize the seriousness of his peril, but he knows he's in trouble, so he takes hold of the hand offered to him.

Which of these two views is correct, I can't say for certain, but for the reasons I discussed above, I lean strongly toward the Arminian side. If it should turn out, though, that the Calvinist position is correct then I can hardly be blamed for not accepting it. God will have predetermined me to believe what I do, and I never really had any choice in the matter.

Carter closes with a question aimed at the Arminian Christian. He asks this:

If Christians believe that God is omniscient then it is only reasonable that he would know, even before they were born, which people would accept him and which would reject him. Since this is the case, why would he even bother to create those He knows will reject the gift of salvation? Why didn't he merely decide to only create those who will accept his gracious offer, providing, in effect, universal salvation?

This is the question that plagues non-Calvinists. They must either reject the notion that God is omniscient or they must proffer an explanation for how God could have known who would be saved if it is completely within the human's will to accept or reject him.

It's a bit surprising that Joe would ask this question since he's familiar with the arguments of Alvin Plantinga and others which show that there's no genuine logical conflict between human free will and God's foreknowledge. To know in advance that a particular choice will be made is not inconsistent with the freedom of the agent to do otherwise than what God knows he will do. Viewpoint has previously discussed the problem here and here.

Another answer to Carter's question is that offered by what is called Open Theism which is discussed briefly here.

With Friends Like These

A group of 38 Nobel winners, led by Elie Wiesel (Elie Weisel?!) have written a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education asking them to keep any criticism of evolution out of the state science standards.

Thirty eight Nobel winners might sound like a powerful voice advocating on behalf of evolution, but we shouldn't be too hasty to allow ourselves to be impressed. The letter contains these words:

Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

Thirty eight Nobel winners, 34 of them scientists, signed off on this definition. Why is this remarkable? Two reasons: The first is that this statement accurately defines Darwinian evolution, but it does not define a scientific theory. How can the claim that evolution is unguided and unplanned ever be subjected to testing? What experiments or observations would count for or against it? The answer, of course, is that there are none. These brilliant scientists are in effect calling for schools to teach metaphysics in public school science classes while at the same time demanding that a competing metaphysical theory, Intelligent Design, be banished from science classes because it can't be scientifically tested.

The second problem with this definition is that it contradicts the assurance that evolutionists keep offering to the public that there is no real conflict between evolution and religion. Evolutionists like Eugenie Scott, president of the National Council for Science Education, spend a good deal of time seeking to allay parents' concerns that their children will be given the impression in their science classes that God is either non-existent or irrelevant. If, however, The Nobel winners' definition is correct, and it certainly does define Darwinism, then the truth is out, and Scott and her accomplices must be beside themselves wondering why they need enemies with friends like these.

The evolutionists, or at least the Darwinian variety, may have thirty eight Nobel Prize winners on their side, but it doesn't seem to be helping the cause much.

The New Flu

As if we didn't have enough to worry about along comes this very disturbing report. We apparently face a distinct possibility this winter of an outbreak of virulent avian flu that kills 55% of the people who are infected, and we don't have any vaccine and only a limited amount of the only effective drug for treating it.

Once again we are unprepared for a natural disaster, only this one could make Katrina seem like a summer-time zephyr by comparison. At present avian flu is transmitted only through birds, but scientists fear it will mutate to a form that allows it to be transmitted from human to human. If it does it could kill a billion people worldwide and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, in the U.S.

Sleep tight.

Strange Reasoning

The Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, puts ideology above competency as he delivers himself of a strange piece of constitutional reasoning:

"In July, following the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court, I stated clearly that I wanted to hear a clear indication that Judge Roberts accepts Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. After days of testimony and intense questioning at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Americans have had a glimpse into the thinking of Judge Roberts.

"While I am impressed with the deep intellect and understanding of the law that Judge Roberts has shown and believe him to be a man of integrity, I am unconvinced that Judge Roberts accepts the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling as settled law. What I was waiting for, as were many Americans, was a clear affirmation that the life-altering decision as to whether or not to have a child must be a woman's decision. Unfortunately, Judge Roberts' response did not indicate a commitment to protect a woman's right to choose.

"At the hearings, Judge Roberts spoke with clarity and, of course, correctly, that he agreed with the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. And this most important decision, the evil practice of segregation, is now considered settled law.

"What I was hoping to hear was the same simple affirmation of Roe v. Wade, a decision which has had a long-lasting, profound impact in improving women's health and lives. There can be no turning back and for that reason I oppose the nomination of Judge Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court."

In other words, Roberts has a deep intellect and understanding of the law and is a man of integrity, but he seems insufficiently convinced that the founding fathers really did insert a right for mothers to kill their unborn children into the constitution, so Bloomberg can't support him.

Maybe the mayor's right. We can't have people on the Supreme Court, no matter how bright, honest, and knowledgeable they are about the law, if they think their job is to determine what the constitution actually says rather than what people like Bloomberg wish it said.

A Real Slugfest

Clive Davies has comments from people who were in attendance at the big debate between far, far left British politician George Galloway and just plain far left-wing British journalist Christopher Hitchens in New York the other night. Some of the commentators remarked about the crowd's responses. Unsurprisingly, some of the Galloway supporters were notable for their abominable rudeness in general and for this reaction in particular. It is as incredible as it is disgusting:

The guys behind us, greying, rumpled academic types, were definitely Galloway dittoheads. Some were downright rabid. When Hitchens requested a moment of silence for the Iraqis who were sadistically murdered by the insurgency, they were among those shouting "NO! NO!" When Hitch praised the US for making life better for the Afghan people, they shouted "Who cares?"

Well, of course lefties, or at least these representatives of it, don't care about the plight of real people. How else to explain the left's indifference to the atrocities committed by communist governments throughout the twentieth century that resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people and the suffering of untold millions more. The misery continues today in the gulags of China, North Korea and Cuba, but if the left has ever expressed any outrage about these awful abuses the sound of their protest hasn't carried to our ears.

Another member of the audience, himself a man of the left, makes this observation:

I've got lots of mates on the left... who are democratic and civil in the best sense, highly attentive to what other people say and respecting someone else's right to disagree and to say so. But tonight demonstrated that some on the hard left, the ones who congratulate themselves that they are not evangelical fundamentalists, and who tell themselves that they are the more sophisticated, more nuanced ones, are the ones who turn out to be the most intolerant, the most intimidatory and the most anti-democratic in their attitude to debate. And in their tactics. They turned up not to hear and engage, but to shout down people who disagree. Because, you see, they are so, so right that there isn't time for this messy dialogue thing.

For a more detailed report on the debate read Alex Massie's column at National Review Online. According to Massie the vitriol flowed freely between the two antagonists, making the debate a contest to see who could deliver the most cleverly devastating insult.

For example, Massie writes:

Citing Hitchens's transformation from an opponent of the 1991 Gulf War to an ardent supporter of regime change in Iraq now, Galloway claimed that "What you have witnessed is something unique in natural history - the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug" and that "the one thing a slug leaves behind it is a trail of slime." Later, Galloway accused his opponent of "Goebellian" tactics and asked, "are there any depths to which you will not sink? You've fallen out of the gutter and into the sewer."

Sounds like it was a lively, if not a particularly edifying, evening.

One Toke (At Least) Over the Line

Matt Drudge has this from the woman the left has been promoting as a typical mom and anti-war spokesperson:

Celebrity anti-war protester, fresh off inking a lucrative deal with Speaker's Bureau, has demanded at the HUFFINGTON POST and MICHAEL MOORE'S website that the United States military must immediately leave 'occupied' New Orleans.

"I don't care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don't care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don't care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power. The only way America will become more secure is if we have a new administration that cares about Americans even if they don't fall into the top two percent of the wealthiest."

Sheehan is in the middle of a bus trip across America in support of her cause.

"Occupied New Orleans"? We think the left should find a few more spokespersons like Ms Sheehan to champion their cause.

The President's Speech

President Bush was magisterial last night, instructing the nation by example on the meaning of the term compassionate conservatism. Those who have been seeking to label the President a right-wing conservative will find themselves flummoxed by George Bush's FDR/LBJ style rhetoric and program. Those conservatives who fear the president has slipped over to the liberal dark side should take note of his emphasis on enterprise zones, home ownership, and the role of the private sector in rehabilitating the Gulf coast.

His critics will charge that he has completely abandoned his small government conservatism, but the allegation is baseless. In the first place, Bush has never been fiscally conservative. In the second, his conservative principles, upon which he campaigned, do not exclude the sort of projects upon which so much of his spending has been lavished. Dick Morris noted last night that George Bush's basic principle is that the federal government has essentially two major roles: To fight wars and to provide relief in disaster. He is one of the few presidents to have occasion to employ government assets in the service of both. Carrying out these functions costs money and Bush is not loath to spend it in order to insure their success. Nor is he violating his principles in so doing. Conservatives are complaining about the spending, but Bush is going to do what he thinks is right for people even if it antagonizes his base.

One of the indirect consequences of Bush's reconstruction program may well be a political realignment that lasts for a generation or longer. When minorities see exactly who their champion is, when they see that under Democratic leadership for sixty years they simply sank, like New Orleans steadily sinking deeper below sea level, deeper into poverty, there is a chance that blacks will migrate in large numbers to the Republican party and consign the Democrats to permanent political minority status. Even the most tight-fisted conservative might acknowledge that this happy outcome would be worth a decade or so of deficit spending.

Viewpoint predicts that Bush's approval ratings are going to commence a long steady rise throughout the next year, much to the chagrin of the lefties, to above 50%. Furthermore, if Iraq ratifies a constitution and appears to be holding together, and oil prices moderate, Bush may conclude his presidency at well over 60%.

The text of his speech can be found here.

Moving Beyond Me to We

A friend passes on an article (subscription may be required) by Yonce Shelton of Sojourners magazine in which he calls for a greater sense of community in the wake of Katrina, all the while implying that such community is presently deficient in the United States. It is, of course, true that we could always benefit from stronger social bonds and that there are centrifugal forces in our culture which pull us away from each other, but his article reads as if it were written in 1960 rather than in the wake of Katrina. He tells us:

To fear, love, and respect God means to honor his creation and our neighbors, especially the less fortunate. Hurricane Katrina is a striking opportunity for us and our national leaders to act to show the true depths of claims of caring. That requires vision and voice, but above all action. And when top leadership in this country seems not to understand what the common good is about, it's up to us to act even more.

We have to wonder exactly what Mr. Shelton means by that last sentence. What does he base his judgment upon when he concludes that the top leadership of the country, i.e. President Bush, seems not to understand what the common good is about? Perhaps he doesn't feel the need to explain any uncomplimentary things he might say about the Bush administration because "everybody knows" Bush only cares about his rich buddies at Halliburton.

We wish to respectfully remind Mr. Shelton, though, that to "fear, love, and respect God" also means to honor our neighbor who is trying hard to do the right thing, even if that neighbor is a Republican president. It means making sure that whatever criticism we offer of him is absolutely justified, and it means avoiding the drive-by cheap shot, especially when our neighbor is also a brother in the Lord.

Mr. Shelton goes on to note that:

The Bible does not condemn prosperity - it just insists that it be shared. An accumulation of wealth that allows some people to live in luxury while others are left behind was unacceptable to the prophets and should be unacceptable to us. How Jesus treated others - especially poor people - was anything but "fair" compared to the economic, social, and political norms of his time and ours.

Mr. Shelton's implication here - that Americans are not sharing their wealth with the less fortunate - demonstrates a stunning lack of historical perspective. Since 1965 the American people have spent over 6.5 trillion dollars on the War on Poverty. That sounds like a lot of sharing to me. No one is being deliberately left behind in our society. Indeed, New Orleans is a synedoche for the last forty years of government efforts to rescue the underclass from chronic poverty. The municipal government in New Orleans urged the people to move out, and offered assistance to those who couldn't move, but a lot of people refused to go. They were willing to take their chances and accept their fate. The mayor of New Orleans decided that he couldn't force people to save themselves so they were left to their own devices.

Similarly, over the last forty years the federal government has done virtually everything possible to raise people out of poverty, but it can't force them out. People still choose to squander their schooling, they still choose to spurn marriage even while they're having children, they still choose to emulate the most degenerate characters in our depauperate culture and scoff at the examples of those who have made their way to a better life, and they still choose to do drugs even though a multitude of voices cautions them against it. Many, if not most, people who remain poor in our society, who find themselves stuck in the underclass, have only their own choices to blame.

Mr. Shelton adds this:

The aftermath of Katrina is illustrating the increasing wealth gap between rich and poor. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently said: "The income gap between the rich and the rest of the U.S. population has become so wide and is growing so fast that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself."

Mr. Shelton's point here is not clear because he doesn't offer an explanation for why the gap between rich and poor is widening. There are perhaps two causes of the growing disparity.The rich and poor might both be growing richer, but the rich may be gaining wealth faster than are the poor; or, the poor are actually getting poorer in absolute terms while the rich are staying the same or getting even richer.

Which is it? Mr. Shelton doesn't say, but it makes a lot of difference. If the poor are getting wealthier then to complain because they're not catching the rich is not only an absurd complaint, but it is also to fall prey to the sin of envy. It is to resent that the improvement in my life is not coming as fast as it is for someone else who made better choices in his life. The poor in this country have every opportunity to improve their lot, and indeed, the poor in this country have a higher standard of living than most people in the world today and are certainly "richer" than most people who've ever lived. To complain because they're still not as rich as the very wealthiest is not going to garner them much sympathy.

Unlike 9/11 where Bush was able to point to an enemy, the enemy which caused the current calamity, Mr. Shelton suggests, is God:

It's hard for President Bush to articulate "us versus them" when "them" is a God we should have been fearing and respecting all along.

In telling us that it was God who caused the devastation that was visited upon the poor and infirm along the Gulf coast, Mr. Shelton is asserting that the same God who has a special love for the poor and who insists we treat them with compassion, nevertheless demonstrates His wrath against the callous Bush administration by pretty much wiping out the very people He demands we save. What a strange theology this is that Mr. Shelton holds to. Mr. Shelton's God destroys the lives and property of poor people in order to punish the rich for not caring enough about the poor.

Perhaps wishing to avoid further embarrassment, he draws his essay to a close, but not before tossing the reader one more odd remark:

We must mourn for the greater community and struggle with the pain before us. But we must also cry out in ways that challenge the church and the world to move beyond "me" and to "we." Unfortunately, we have continued to bowl alone since 9/11 and are seeing the negative effects.

We can only conclude from this that Mr. Shelton has been living in a cave for the last three weeks. Hasn't he seen the incredible outpouring of community that followed hard upon the storm? Hasn't he seen the outpouring of compassion and generosity that has surged toward the devastated residents of the Gulf coast? Has he not heard of the citizens of Texas and other states who are welcoming millions of evacuees into their communities, or the hundreds of millions of dollars in donations made by Americans everywhere to charitable and relief organizations, or the thousands of volunteers who have rushed to the disaster area to render aid and rescue.

How can he say that "we must move beyond 'me' and to 'we' " as if we haven't done precisely that? The obliviousness and self-righteousness of this statement in light of what has happened in this country as millions have opened their hearts and pocketbooks makes Mr. Shelton seem completely out of touch with the America he is writing for.

He would do well, before once again taking pen in hand on this topic, to read Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post. He might wish that he had read it before writing his own unfortunate piece.

He might also keep in mind that calls to "do something" are callow and silly in the absence of solid suggestions as to specific courses of action that people and governments can follow. Mr. Shelton's essay is one long call to "do something" but he never says precisely what he has in mind for us to do.

Moreover, to the extent that a sense of community is wanting in this country it's largely the fault of race hustlers and other African-American "leaders" who, rather than express gratitude for the enormous outpouring of assistance from white America, have chosen instead to whine about how the plight of the New Orleans poor reflects the racism still extant in white America. This is the sort of offensive stupidity that only engenders resentments among the millions of whites who are trying hard, sometimes at considerable personal sacrifice, to do what they can to mitigate the suffering of the storm's victims regardless of their race.

The day when money can be extorted from white pockets by calling whites racist and trying to make them feel guilty is largely fading, except perhaps among Democratic liberals. If Shelton wants a stronger sense of community he might direct some of his chastisement toward these black "leaders" for their intemperate and addlepated remarks.

Tal Afar After Action Summary

Col. H.R. McMaster gave a press briefing on the Tal Afar operation in western Baghdad that is very enlightening. He first made an opening statement and then fielded questions from the press. The whole thing is worth reading. Here are some of the main points from is his opening statement:

First of all, the purpose of this operation is to secure the population of Tall Afar from the terrorists who have infiltrated this city and set up a safe haven support base here in Tall Afar. The whole purpose of the operation is to secure the population so that we can lift the enemy's campaign of intimidation and population -- intimidation and coercion over the population and allow economic and political development to proceed here and to return, really, to normal life.

The enemy in this area is -- this is the worst of the worst in terms of people in the world. To protect themselves here, what the enemy did is they waged the most brutal and murderous campaign against the people of Tall Afar.

I'd like just to briefly characterize the enemy, describe who we're fighting here. This is an enemy, who when they came in, they removed all the imams from the mosques, and they replaced them with Islamic extremist laymen. They removed all the teachers from the schools and replaced them with people who had a fifth-grade education and who preached hatred and intolerance. They murdered people. In each of their cells that they have within the city has a direct action cell of about 100 or so fighters. They have a kidnapping and murder cell; they have a propaganda cell, a mortar cell, a sniper cell -- a very high degree of organization here. And what the enemy did is to keep the population from performing other activities.

To keep the population afraid, they kidnapped and murdered large numbers of the people here, and it was across the spectrum. A Sunni Turkmen imam was kidnapped and murdered. A very fine man, a city councilman, Councilman Suliman (sp), was pulled out of his car in front of his children and his wife and gunned down with about 30 gunshot wounds to his head. The enemy conducted indiscriminate mortar attacks against populated areas and wounded scores of children and killed many others. The enemy here did just the most horrible things you can imagine, in one case murdering a child, placing a booby trap within the child's body and waiting for the parent to come recover the body of their child and exploding it to kill the parents. Beheadings and so forth.

So the enemy's grip over this population to maintain the safe haven was based on fear, coercion, and these sort of heinous acts. And not only were they targeting civilians, brutally murdering them, torturing them, but they were also kidnapping the youth of the city and brainwashing them and trying to turn them into hate-filled murderers.

So, really, there could be no better enemy for our soldiers and Iraqi army soldiers to pursue and defeat and deny the enemy the safe haven in this area.

The regiment began operating here on the 1st of May with our lead squadron, 2nd Squadron. They partnered with the unit that was doing a very effective job at disrupting the enemy here and reinforced their efforts. That was the 1st of the 14th Cavalry. They began to conduct aggressive offensive operations and reconnaissance operations in the city. The enemy noticed that we're challenging this support base, a base that they desperately wanted to hold onto, so they began to attack our forces in large numbers. And we had stand-up conventional fights against the enemy in this dense urban terrain, where up to 200 of the enemy were attacking our troopers as they conducted operations in this urban area.

The result of those operations were that Iraqi security forces and armed forces killed large numbers of the enemy in those engagements, 30 to 40 of the enemy at a time. So the enemy realized this tactic isn't working, so they went back into harassment attacks -- IEDs, roadside bombs, mortar attacks, sniper attacks against our forces, and attempted to do sort of hit-and-run operations against us.

But our troopers were very aggressive in maintaining contact with the enemy. We have an air/ground team here, so our aerial scouts were able to maintain contact with the enemy as they tried to move into the interior of the city. So we pursued them very effectively.

And we were able to gain access to intelligence here by a very good relationship with the people, who recognized this enemy for who they are and were very forthcoming with human intelligence. In one raid in the beginning of June, for example, we were able to capture 26 targeted individuals, some of the worst people here in Tall Afar, within a 30-minute period. And the enemy began to realize this isn't working either, they can't hide in plain sight anymore.

So what the enemy did in response -- and this was part of this continuous interaction we've had with them since our arrival in this area -- is they intensified their campaign of intimidation over the people. They conducted more sniper attacks against innocent civilians, more mortar attacks.

And in response, we targeted their mortar teams. We killed four of their mortar teams and captured two. We killed about 12 of their sniper teams. And we relentlessly pursued the enemy until the enemy realized that a lot of our power was building now toward Tall Afar because we wanted -- as we were figuring this enemy out, we were preparing for operations to destroy their safe haven in a particular neighborhood of the city.

So as the specter of coalition operations became apparent to the enemy, as we isolated the city, as we improved the effectiveness of our traffic control points to limit their movement, as we continued to pursue the enemy, the enemy responded by sending their fighters, many of them, into the outlying communities to hide in the outlying communities until the operation was over.

But what we did is we conducted effective operations in the outlying areas. Simultaneous with our operations in Tall Afar, we were establishing a permanent security capability along the Syrian border in Rabiya, south of Sinjar Mountain and the town of Sinjar. We took over the town of Bosh (phonetic) from the insurgents and established -- reestablished the police force and the Iraqi army there. We went to the town of Afgani (phonetic) about 12 kilometers north of here. We captured, just out of that one town, one small town of Afgani (phonetic), about 116 of the enemy in three separate operations.

One operation -- that was the most effective -- was an Iraqi army exclusive operation, and then that we established two Iraqi companies and recruited police. The police are done training and now there's a permanent security presence there. The enemy is denied that area. We operated in other outlying communities and captured many more of the enemy. So now, the enemy had that option taken away from them, and they resolved then to defend this safe haven in Sarai (district in Tal Afar). I had a chance to walk downtown today and found a lot of their propaganda in their abandoned fighting positions. And this propaganda was: we cannot afford to lose Tall Afar; we're going to defeat, you know, the coalition forces and Iraqi security forces here. It was exhorting their forces to defend Tall Afar at all costs.

So the enemy then -- as we continue to concentrate our efforts on Tall Afar, we've brought in some very capable Iraqi security forces to help us. The 3rd Iraqi Army Division, which is our partnership unit -- which over the past four months has gained a tremendous amount of capability -- integrated them into our operations completely, and then, we also brought in some additional Iraqi army battalions as well some Iraqi police formations. And the enemy then moved into some of these outlying neighborhoods outside of their support base, and they wanted to take the fight there to divert our attention. They also tried some diplomatic efforts to call off attacks for a couple of weeks and to act as if the problem was solved -- again, a desperate attempt to avoid the removal of this safe haven in Tall Afar.

But we conducted very effective combat operations against the enemy, we being the Iraqi security forces and our forces. These were very complex defenses in neighborhoods outside of the Sarai neighborhood, which was the center of the enemy's safe haven here. They had their command and control in a safe house in the center that was very heavily defended. Outside of that, they had defensive positions with RPG and machine gun positions. Surrounding those positions, they had homes that were rigged to be demolished by munitions as U.S. and Iraqi soldiers entered them, and then, outside of those, they had Improvised Explosive Devices, roadside bombs, implanted, buried into the roads.

But our forces aggressively pursued the enemy in these areas. They were able to defeat these IEDs based on the human intelligence we developed. We exploded many of them with attack helicopter fire or detonated them with our engineers. We penetrated that defense. Our tanks led with our Iraqi infantry in support. We absorbed any energy from their rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns, continued the assault into these safe havens and destroyed their leadership throughout the city. The word then went out that -- to the enemy that put other elements on notice: look, we're being slaughtered here; we need to avoid these very effective combined forces of Iraqi and U.S. forces. But we continued to relentlessly pursue them as we moved to isolate the Sarai district.

And the main engagements in this fight happened really between the 2nd and the 6th of September, a period of time during which we killed 118 terrorists and captured 137 of them. And we think at this point the enemy realized the futility of their defensive efforts.

In Sarai, the most dense urban terrain you can imagine, there was a very complex defense prepared there, with, again, these roadside bombs, buildings rigged for demolition, machine gun positions, sniper positions, and mortars integrated into this. But with our intelligence, our precision fires capability, we were able to severely disrupt that defense and really collapse it all around the enemy.

We had some very heavy fighting on the 5th and 6th of September, during which we killed many of the enemy, who engaged us from their forward defensive positions. And it was at that point that the enemy shifted their approach again to essentially running away from the area. They gave the word to retreat. They did everything they could to blend in with the civilians who were evacuating from this dense urban area to protect them, and we caught them. We were integrated with the population. The people were pointing out who the enemy was. We had Iraqi army who was very good at sensing something isn't quite right when this man is walking down the street with children, and the children look very nervous. This one man in particular was a beheader who had beheaded over 20 people. And we were able to capture him as the children fled, as we came up to talk to this individual, and the children related to us this man said that they had to walk with him or he would kill them.

We captured five of the enemy dressed as women, trying desperately to get out of the area. Just yesterday we captured 104 of the enemy in these outlying areas.

So we relentlessly pursued the enemy as they attempted to break contact with our forces. But we're maintaining contact with them, and we're continuing to hunt them down.

So I'd like to just end with that and then see what questions anybody has about the operation, what our troopers are doing, and what the brave Iraqis are doing alongside our soldiers.

Go to the DoD website for the rest of the briefing. The Fourth Rail offers some analysis here.

Poll-itics

Bush's poll numbers are sagging in the wake of high gas prices, the misperception of stagnation in Iraq, and the drubbing administered by his opponents in the wake of Katrina. A recent NBC/Wall Sreet Journal poll got these results:

Job Approval: Approve: 40%

On Iraq: Approve: 37%, Disapprove: 58%

Troop Level: Maintain: 36%, Reduce: 55%

Also, 75% say the US is not prepared for a WMD attack.

How people think the reconstruction after Katrina should be primarily funded: Reduced Iraq spending: 45%, Repeal tax cuts: 27%, Cut federal spending: 12%, Increase the Deficit: 8%, Raise income taxes: 7%

Clearly, the relentless criticism of Bush is taking its toll. It makes us wonder what Americans think the purpose of electing a president is. It's rather like electing the bull which will be sacrificed to the media matadors. Presidential politics is little more than bloodsport for journalists and politicians. We put someone through a campaign wringer and whoever the people toss the bouquet toward is then set upon, as if by wild dogs, and torn to pieces until he can no longer stand. By the time he is thoroughly bloodied we're already anticipating the next round of campaigns and frenzied attacks. We are a people who has come to delight in destroying our leaders. We're little better than the Romans who cheered lustily for death and mayhem during the gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum.

Now the champ, who had been coasting along in his fifteen rounder against a host of media lightweights, appears to be staggering under their repeated blows, and the media can barely conceal its excitement. E.J. Dionne delivers himself of a fatuous column proclaiming the end of the Bush presidency, and the talking heads and media mavens all seem to be in agreement. Katrina has finished Bush.

This is, of course, all nonsense and wishful thinking. The president's critics hope that if they pronounce him TKO'd often enough and loud enough it'll come true. In fact, poll numbers are ephemeral things, based as they often are on the opinion of people who scarcely know what's going on in the world and who respond to the pollster's call by repeating whatever they've heard others say. This poll, we're told, was based on a survey of 1013 adults. We aren't told whether the respondents were voters or likely voters. The article doesn't identify their political party. If the pollsters just randomly selected a thousand people off the street in a country where almost half of the adults don't care enough to vote and can't name their own senators the results really are uninformed at best and meaningless at worst.

Consider, for a moment, the response to the question about our preparedness for a terrorist WMD attack. Seventy five percent of the respondents said they believe we're unprepared. How on earth do they know enough to answer that question? No one, not even the president or the secretary of Homeland Security, knows for sure whether we're prepared. But skepticism and cynicism always make respondents sound sophisticated so they simply give the skeptical, cynical answer without having the faintest idea whether we're prepared or not. Tim Russert then goes on the evening news tonight and solemnly intones that this lack of confidence somehow implies that in fact we really must not be prepared and that really spells trouble for Bush. Russert should know better than to draw conclusions from such polls while Bush still has three years left in his presidency.

But even if we take the results at face value, I'm not sure why Bush's political opponents would be gleeful over them. After all, only 27% said we should rescind the tax cut and only 7% said we should raise taxes. That's not a result that Democrats should find reassuring.

Here's our prediction. Katrina will be little more than a historical blip in the Bush presidency. Bush will be defined by three things: His response to 9/11, the war on terror, including Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy, and the Supreme Court. Those like Dionne who say the Bush era is over will have lots of egg on their face, especially if Bush gets his picks, the two he has now and perhaps a third a year or two from now, seated on the Supreme Court.

The Domestic Propaganda War

Newsweek's Evan Thomas writes a column for MSNBC which is titled "How Bush Blew it." I invite anyone to read this essay and explain to me how the article supports the title. It's not that Thomas doesn't try hard enough to make Bush look bad, but, since he limits himself to the facts, it just doesn't seem to work. If it weren't for the headline a reader would not know that he or she is supposed to come away from this piece with a negative opinion of the Bush administration's handling of the Katrina crisis. It becomes more clear with every new revelation that the disaster in New Orleans was in the main a home-grown affair and that attempts to shift the responsibility onto Washington in general and Bush in particular are simply specious.

That is not to say, however, that those attempts have been futile. A large segment of the public has apparently bought the idea that Bush fiddled while Rome burned and that the president's insouciance, or racism, turned the Superdome into Hotel Rwanda. This is objectively false, of course, but that doesn't stop the Bush-haters from repeating the charges over and over until they become part of the conventional wisdom.

Truth is destined for slow extinction in a nation unwilling to go to the effort of demanding it and too willing to accept whatever flapdoodle the media talking heads and opinion writers feed them.

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.