Bad Mommy

Lest anyone be influenced by Sarah Palin's decision to have a retarded child Nicholas Provenzo feels it important to affirm that it is indeed moral, even obligatory, to kill such children. Provenzo writes:

Like many, I am troubled by the implications of Alaska governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's decision to knowingly give birth to a child disabled with Down syndrome. Given that Palin's decision is being celebrated in some quarters, it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with Down syndrome (or by extension, any unborn fetus)-a freedom that anti-abortion advocates seek to deny.

A parent has a moral obligation to provide for his or her children until these children are equipped to provide for themselves. Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child's life upon others.

In other words, Provenzo seems to be saying, if a parent cannot provide adequately for a Down's syndrome child throughout its life the parent has a moral obligation to terminate the pregnancy.

This from someone who titles his blog The Rule of Reason. Rule of Reason is an Objectivist blog based on Ayn Rand's philosophy and presumably embraces Rand's atheism, which causes me to wonder. How does reason lead us to moral obligation? Why are we obligated to care for our children, and why do they think it appropriate to affirm the morality of aborting a child? Why, if one is an atheist, think that abortion is a moral matter at all, or that anything is?

But the irony of atheists talking about moral obligation aside, the implication running through all this is that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in having her Down's syndrome child because she set a bad example for other women and is therefore a bad mother.

See here for more of this kind of purge-the-race-of-all-defectives thinking. Upon visiting these blogs one can almost hear the jackboots marching in the background and smell the crematories of Auschwitz.

RLC

Authoring a Crisis

While Barack Obama assigns the blame for Wall Street's current woes to eight years of "George Bush's failed policies" Kevin Hassett at Bloomberg.com tells a different tale. Hassett recounts the history of the Fannie and Freddie crisis and lays the blame squarely at the feet of the Democrats in Congress, particularly those, like Senator Obama, who have been on the take from these failed institutions throughout their political careers. After recapping events leading to 2005 Hassett writes:

What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by [Republicans in] the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different....But the bill didn't become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn't even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. The SEC's chief accountant, Peter Wallison, wrote at the time: ``It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.''

Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.

But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.

Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.

Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.

There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.

Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that's worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.

Nevertheless, who do you suppose is going to be blamed by the media and by voters come November?

RLC

The Duty to Die

A U.K. Telegraph article begins with these jarring words:

Elderly people suffering from dementia should consider ending their lives because they are a burden on the NHS and their families, according to the influential medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock.

This is disturbing not least because it sounds as if a presumably intelligent ethicist is suggesting that people with dementia are nevertheless capable of making a reasoned decision about what to do with their lives. Actually, as we'll see, what she's suggesting is much more sinister than that:

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain. She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.

Her comments in a magazine interview have been condemned as "immoral" and "barbaric", but also sparked fears that they may find wider support because of her influence on ethical matters.

Lady Warnock, a former headmistress who went on to become Britain's leading moral philosopher, chaired a landmark Government committee in the 1980s that established the law on fertility treatment and embryo research.

A prominent supporter of euthanasia, she has previously suggested that pensioners who do not want to become a burden on their care-givers should be helped to die.

Lady Warnock claims that dementia sufferers should consider ending their lives through euthanasia because of the strain they put on their families and public services.

If people should be given the choice whether to dispose of their life when they become a burden how long will it be before people are told they have a duty to end their lives when they become a burden? Evidently it doesn't take long at all since Lady Warnock takes that very step just a few paragraphs on:

Recent figures show there are 700,000 people with degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in Britain. By 2026 experts predict there will be one million dementia sufferers in the country, costing the NHS an estimated 㿏 billion a year. Lady Warnock said: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives - your family's lives - and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

"I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die. "Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."

So we've slipped smoothly from the right to choose to die to the obligation to die. But Lady Warnock is not through. She also wants to see the decision taken out of the hands of the individual and placed in the hands of an "advocate", i.e. the state:

"If you've an advance directive, appointing someone else to act on your behalf, if you become incapacitated, then I think there is a hope that your advocate may say that you would not wish to live in this condition so please try to help her die. "I think that's the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you'd be licensing people to put others down."

So, in a few brief paragraphs we've seen the entire slippery slope unfold. From the right to choose to die, to the duty to choose to die, to having the state license people to decide you have to die. This is the brave new world envisioned by the secular left.

It reminds me of the insistence of some that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in not choosing to abort her mentally retarded son. From the right to choose an abortion we've "progressed" to the duty to choose an abortion. How long will it be before, as in Communist China, the state tells women they must have an abortion?

The one virtue in Lady Warnock's dark social prescription is that it is completely consistent with the basic assumption of secular leftism: There is no God but the state. Thus human life has no value except as it is valuable to the state. When people cease to be valuable to those who govern they should be done away with, like farm animals no longer productive for the farmer must needs be removed from the herd.

Perhaps it's convenient that the Europeans never tore down all of Hitler's extermination camps. Who knows but that they might be pressed into service yet again if people who think as does Lady Warnock ever manage to acquire political power.

RLC

The Party of Liberalism

An AP-Yahoo News poll found that one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks-many calling them "lazy," "violent" or responsible for their own troubles. See the results here, especially on page 21f, although I was unable to figure out how they arrived at the numbers for Democrats and Republicans from this data.

At any rate, if liberals feel that way about minorities what must conservatives think? The article says that:

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president-white, black or brown.

No support from the survey was adduced to support either of these claims although a sidebar does show that Republicans harbor more negative views toward blacks than do Democrats.

The interesting thing about the survey, however, is not that Republicans tend to be more critical of blacks than Democrats, but that so many Democrats harbor opinions about blacks that are totally at odds with the party's reputation for liberalism.

RLC

Priestly Piffle

Gerry Coyne is an astronomer and Catholic priest whose views about God and creation seem a little out of step with those of his church. He recently gave a lecture at The College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College) in which he said that although he believes in God, and believes God created the universe, he cannot as a scientist believe in intelligent design:

"God gave the universe a certain structure so we could come about, but he didn't predetermine it. He created the universe and then let it go."

This is standard-issue deism which seems odd coming from a Catholic priest, but I suppose such theological tepidness is no less uncommon among Catholic clergy than it is among protestant clergy.

According to Coyne, it is the parents' duty to teach their child about God, if they want, but its not the science teacher's responsibility.

Well, yes, but what does this have to do with intelligent design? Coyne is neither stupid nor new to the debates over ID so one has to think that he's deliberately dissembling here when he implies that teaching ID in a science class would amount to teaching about God. As he surely knows ID is silent on who or what the designer of the cosmos is.

But let's play along. Suppose we agree with Fr. Coyne and banish ID and all of its intellectual cousins from the public school science classroom. Will we then be teaching nothing about God? Actually, no. By implicitly teaching that the universe and life came about by purely mechanical, naturalistic means we are tacitly teaching that God is neither necessary nor in any way relevant. We're subtly teaching, in fact, that if God exists he's little more than the same remote and impotent deity that Fr. Coyne believes in. How convenient.

Excluding God from the science classroom is not nearly as easy as Fr. Coyne thinks. Even if God is never mentioned students are still being taught theology. They're being taught that God has almost nothing to do with life as it has developed which is certainly a theological claim.

Freshman Stephanie Laurent got the message. Asked about the lecture she said:

"It was good. It really cleared up a couple of things I had been wondering about. Religion is abstract and you can't really touch it. Science, you could find evidence and actually believe that it's true. Religion only uses the Bible, and you can't really explain it."

This is depressing. It's certainly the case that its easy to believe a particular explanation if the only evidence you're allowed to consider is the evidence supporting that explanation. That's the state of affairs that Fr. Coyne wants to see prevail in our public schools.

RLC

Market Forces

George Will gives us a primer on the nature of capitalism and markets all centered around the lowly wooden pencil. It's a good read and important instruction for the student just beginning to develop an awareness of economics.

HT: Jason

RLC

Pots and Kettles

Woody Allen, the man who married his step-daughter, instructs the rest of us on the ontology of disgrace:

"It would be a disgrace and a humiliation if Barack Obama does not win," Allen avers. Well, I guess Allen should know about such things.

Then there was the ethically challenged Charlie Rangel calling Sarah Palin "disabled". Here's the report:

The question was simple: Why are the Democrats so afraid of Palin and her popularity?

The answer was astonishing.

"You got to be kind to the disabled," Rangel said.

That's right. The chairman of the powerful House Ways & Means Committee called Palin disabled -- even when CBS 2 HD called him on it.

CBS 2 HD: "You got to be kind to the disabled?"

Rangel: "Yes."

CBS 2 HD: "She's disabled?"

Rangel: "There's no question about it politically.

Charles Rangel, chairman of the committee charged with writing our tax laws, is being investigated for not paying taxes he claims he didn't know he had to pay. I don't know what kind of disability he thinks Palin has - such an odd word to use in the context. Was it an oblique reference to Palin's youngest child? - but people who write the laws about taxes and don't know what those laws are certainly shouldn't be calling others disabled.

RLC

Meanwhile, in Palestine

Strategy Page gives us an update on what's happening in the West Bank and Gaza:

Israel has refused to free 1,500 Palestinians from jail, in return for the release of an Israeli soldier held (for two years) by Hamas. Israel has offered to release 450 Palestinians (mostly low level offenders, not the killers and terrorist leaders Hamas wants). Thus negotiations with Hamas are deadlocked.

Meanwhile, the Israelis have been warning their citizens to beware when visiting nations with large Moslem populations, because Hezbollah has begun a large scale effort to kill or kidnap Israelis overseas, this being the easiest way to strike at Israel (at least according to Hezbollah thinking.)

Hamas is in a downward spiral. Opinion polls show that Hamas would receive only 29 percent of the vote if elections were held today, versus 43 percent for Fatah. The problem is that the economic problems in Gaza (largely the result of Hamas insisting that its main goal is the destruction of Israel) have changed attitudes towards Hamas (but not towards Israel, which most Palestinians still want destroyed, or at least hurt in a big way.) The hatred of Israel by Palestinians appears to be implacable, and unlikely to change any time soon.

There is growing armed opposition to Hamas in Gaza, largely from al Qaeda affiliated groups. But this opposition is not strong enough to really threaten Hamas control. The Hamas reaction to its problems has been to build a police state in Gaza. This is not popular, but Hamas has sufficient support (at least a third of the 1.5 million population) to make it work.

Egypt is concerned that Hamas will provide a base for Islamic terrorists, and their attacks into Egypt. A solution being talked up in Egypt is the takeover and annexation of Gaza. Israel would have to agree to this, and is apparently giving serious consideration to the idea. That has resurrected the old proposal that the West Bank be given back to Jordan (which used to control it, but gave up its claims after the Palestinians decided they were a separate people four decades ago). Jordan already has many Palestinians, who comprise over half their population. Jordan has never been keen on acquiring more Palestinian citizens (the royal family that rules Jordan is Bedouin, and relies on the Bedouin minority to stay in power.)

Meanwhile, Israel has made it very difficult for Palestinians to travel between the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli counter-terror operations in the West Bank are as active as ever, keeping the terrorists neutralized (as they have been for several years).

Israel has supplied Fatah with several thousand assault rifles and pistols, as well as vehicles (armored and unarmored.) Israel has also released about a thousand West Bank residents from jail. Most of these were being held for low level offenses, but the gesture has made Fatah more popular.

The question the Palestinian people must face is, to paraphrase Golda Meir, whether they hate the Israelis more than they love their own children. The only way their children have a future is through peaceful rapprochement with Israel. Endless war will only keep the Palestinians poor and miserable, but that's all that Hamas offers them.

RLC

Why the Sisters Hate Sarah

Cathy Young examines the feminist teeth-grinding over Sarah Palin's ascendancy and marvels at how women who should be rejoicing at the success of a strong woman are instead resorting to, well, cattiness:

Left-wing feminists have a hard time dealing with strong, successful conservative women in politics such as Margaret Thatcher. Sarah Palin seems to have truly unhinged more than a few, eliciting a stream of vicious, often misogynist invective.

On Salon.com last week, Cintra Wilson branded her a "Christian Stepford Wife" and a "Republican blow-up doll." Wendy Doniger, religion professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, added on the Washington Post blog, "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

You'd think that, whether or not they agree with her politics, feminists would at least applaud Mrs. Palin as a living example of one of their core principles: a woman's right to have a career and a family. Yet some feminists unabashedly suggest that her decision to seek the vice presidency makes her a bad and selfish mother. Others argue that she is bad for working mothers because she's just too good at having it all.

Read the rest at the link.

HT: Jason

RLC

Religion is Science

The atheist philosopher of science Daniel Dennett was interviewed in Science and Spirit and along the way uttered this remarkable claim:

There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim as its own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have not considered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are no factual assertions about the origin of the universe or its future trajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas, burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about the existence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science. After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lack of purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertions about the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance, poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview of science.

I say this is remarkable because it completely undercuts the rational for excluding intelligent design from the science classroom. If ID is, as its critics insist, a religious theory, and if, as Dennett says, all religious claims are ultimately matters which science can investigate and assess, then why would ID not be appropriate in a science classroom? If religion just is science then what's the problem?

Richard Dawkins, another adamantine atheist, makes a claim similar to this - but even more strongly worded - in The God Delusion. So, will Dennett and Dawkins be called upon to testify for the ID side the next time there's a prominent court case over teaching ID in schools? If so, will they stick to their guns or will they start backpedaling like an NFL defensive back as soon as they realize the harm they're doing to the materialist cause is causing their comrades in the cause to grow furious with them?

Dennett certainly proves his point that people who accept the claim that religious assertions are within the purview of science don't consider its implications. He and Dawkins are exhibit A.

RLC

Finger Pointing

There's lots of finger pointing going on as to who should shoulder the blame for the mismanagement of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Bros., AIG and other failing finacial institutions. The Obama campaign instinctively faults the policies of George Bush and John McCain for the debacle that has rocked Wall Street this week and last, but their indictment is rich in hypocrisy which I will explain below.

Meanwhile, Jim Wallis of Sojourners tends to agree that there's something wrong with the prevailing ethos in Washington:

In the search for blame, some say greed and some say deregulation. Both are right. The financial collapse of Wall Street is the fiscal consequence of the economic philosophy that now governs America - that markets are always good and government is always bad. But it is also the moral consequence of greed, where private profit prevails over the concept of the common good. The American economy is often rooted in unbridled materialism, a culture that continues to extol greed, a false standard of values that puts short-term profits over societal health, and a distorted calculus that measures human worth by personal income instead of character, integrity, and generosity.

Wallis is right, I think, as far as he goes, but it's not the whole story. If we're looking for villains we should examine the political prostitutes who were in bed with the corporate CEOs throughout the last twenty years. Turning our gaze toward Washington we discover an interesting irony in Senator Obama's indictments of Bush/McCain:

In 2003 George Bush requested that Congress act to reign in Freddie and Fannie, but he was resisted by Barney Frank and other Democrats who insisted there was no crisis and that Bush's request would stifle home loans to poor people and minorities. Congress did nothing, partly, at least, because the financial giants were flooding Capitol Hill with cash through their lobbyists.

Two years later John McCain co-sponsored legislation that would impose regulations on Freddie, Fannie and other mortgage institutions that would force them to do a better job of bookkeeping, make them more accountable and tighten up their lending practices. McCain predicted in 2006 exactly what came to pass these past weeks, but the legislation he endorsed died in committee. The committee was chaired by Democrat senator Christopher Dodd.

The lenders didn't want to be regulated, and they had bought influence in Washington with millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Records show that Senator Dodd ranked first among over 300 recipients of such contributions, receiving over $165,000 from the lobbyists over twenty years. John Kerry was third. Barack Obama, the man who criticizes John McCain for not doing anything to prevent the collapse, managed to be second, having collected over $123,000 from the lobbyists, even though he had only been receiving these emoluments for just three years.

What's more, the former CEOs of both Freddie and Fannie, men who had made millions while their companies hurtled toward collapse, have both served as economic advisors on Obama's campaign team. Whoever Senator Obama has in mind when he promises us change from the old ways of doing business in Washington, he's not thinking of himself. No one is more wedded to cronyism and big dollar politics than is Barack Obama.

Here's John Gibson's report on this sordid tale:

For more see Hot Air.

RLC

RRAD

A couple of years ago we gave out Dreyfus awards here at Viewpoint to people who, like Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series, seemed to have been driven mad by their profound hatred for Inspector Clouseau, i.e. George Bush.

Maybe we should start giving another award which we could title something like, the Randi Rhodes Award for Despicability, or something. There would be no shortage of material, that's for sure. In addition to all the distortions, sleaze and rumors about Sarah Palin we were treated to over the past two weeks there's lots else.

Here's an example: A professional photographer named Jill Greenberg was hired by The Atlantic to get some pictures of John McCain. She deliberately set him up to make him look as devilish as possible and then bragged about it on her blog. Not only is she unembarrassed by her complete lack of professionalism and ethics, she seems to think that her behavior is somehow noble and important.

Is there something in the water these people drink that makes them this way? Michelle Malkin gives a number of additional examples of the kind of deranged behavior that's come to be so common on the left, and she has more on Jill Greenberg here.

RLC

Why People Vote Republican

Jonathan Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal and an atheist, says many interesting things in an essay at Edge titled What Makes People Vote Republican?, but in the end his discussion leaves unanswered a fundamental question that is implicitly raised in his article.

It's hard to summarize his essay because it covers a lot of ground, but essentially he says that there are five domains of moral experience about which people feel strongly. He labels these harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In other words, people have moral concerns that arise out of behaviors which can either harm others or which are somehow unfair, or disloyal, disrespectful, or unchaste.

Liberals, he maintains, are concerned only with the first two of these and are actually disdainful of the last three, whereas most Americans care about all five. Thus liberals are seen by most people in this country as out-of-touch elitists. He urges his fellow liberal Democrats to recover at least the language of the last three.

But herein lies the problem. Morality itself, whether we're talking about "justice, rights, and welfare", the moral sphere of most concern to liberals, or the wider sphere which encompasses, in addition, patriotism to one's country, family, sexuality, etc., is contingent upon there being a personal transcendent moral authority. Without such an authority to obligate us to follow certain prescriptions there is no moral obligation at all. In other words, in order to sound genuinely interested in the moral realm liberals have to acknowledge that the foundation of secular exclusivism upon which they have tried to stand is crumbling under the weight. Without God there is no morality, no good or bad, no right or wrong. There are just things that people do that other people either like or dislike.

This is what conservative people tend to see, or at least intuit, and to which liberals are largely blind. Liberals talk about justice and human rights on the one hand while, often, minimizing the need to ground these in a God who made us in His image and whose property, to use a Lockean term, we are. Their moral pronouncements thus seem to float like balloons in metaphysical air, anchored to nothing.

Haidt seems to recognize this at several points throughout his essay but, being an atheist, he shies away from drawing the proper conclusion. In the end he winds up calling for Democrats to embrace the larger moral vision of conservatives but gives them no real reason to do so other than political expediency. Such a prescription can only be seen as hypocritical by the people he's trying to win over.

He concludes with these words:

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three ... foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The article is a little long but worth the time to read.

RLC

The Multiverse's Appeal

George Johnson in The New York Times reviews a book by physicist Leonard Susskind who is a strong advocate of the idea that there are a near infinite number of mini-universes in our universe, like bubbles in a bubble bath. According to Johnson this theory is appealing. Here's what he says:

Three years ago in "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, spun a tale of a multitude of different universes - nooks and crannies of a transcendent multiverse, or "landscape," each ruled by a different physics. This is probably the most controversial interpretation of superstring theory (some of Susskind's colleagues absolutely hate the idea), but it has its appeal. With so many universes out there, the fact of our own existence need not inspire worship and awe. We just happen to occupy one of the niches where the laws are favorable to carbon-based life.

Notice in what the attraction of this theory consists for Johnson. It's not that it is empirically verifiable or that it explains the data or that it is aesthetically elegant. No. For Johnson and others the appeal of the multiverse is that it allows us an out, an escape, from the conclusion that our world is so incredibly organized that it all but screams for an explanation grounded in an intelligent engineer.

According to Johnson, if a world representing every possible physics exists then a world with our physics must exist, and we shouldn't be astonished by its extraordinary fine-tuning and precision. Nor need we conclude that an intelligent designer created it. Johnson is doing metaphysics and calling it science. The multiverse is appealing not because the science confirms it but because it allows us to side-step the conclusion that there's a God.

Susskind himself once said that the only two alternatives are an infinite number of universes or a designer deity. The idea of a deity is presumably philosophically unpalatable so he opts for the multiverse, and Johnson, who also finds a deity philosophically unacceptable, follows along.

But this idea that we are justified as scientists in embracing the theory of the multiverse because it's metaphysically useful raises a host of questions: Why would a scientist, qua scientist, want to avoid the conclusion that there's something more to the universe, an intelligence, that science has been unable to discern so far? Why should a scientist, qua scientist, be invested in the answer to the question of what is ultimately real anyway? Isn't that outside the scientific purview? Shouldn't questions about the cause and structure of the universe be settled, for scientists, at least, on empirical grounds rather than metaphysical flights of fancy?

Philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote that any rule of thought that would prevent me from finding a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule. The rule of thought that says that any explanation of ultimate reality must be a naturalistic explanation - which is the rule embraced by many scientists - would prevent us from concluding that God is really the ground of creation even if God really is that ground. According to James, then, it's irrational to accept the multiverse simply because it's the only alternative to transgressing the bias among many scientists against explanations which invoke intelligent causation.

RLC

Gibson's Gaffe

I guess this is getting to be old news, but Charles Krauthammer lays the wood to Charlie Gibson for his disdainful and supercilious treatment of Sarah Palin when she seemed not to know what the Bush Doctrine is during his interview with her for ABC. It turns out that Gibson, for all his haughty condescension, didn't know what the doctrine is either.

Krauthammer concludes with this biting observation:

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

Read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

Who Am I?

Here's an interesting question which has popped up in my e-mail box:

Who Am I?

I am under 45 years old, I love the outdoors, I hunt, I am a Republican reformer, I have taken on the Republican Party establishment, I have a number of children, I have a spot on the national ticket as vice president with less than two years in the governor's office.

The answer: Teddy Roosevelt (1900) whose visage graces Mt. Rushmore today.

RLC

Voter IQ

Before and after the 2004 election there were a lot of snarky comments made about the intelligence and sophistication of people who would vote for George W. Bush. Bush, we were frequently told, was an imbecile, and we had to be imbeciles to vote for him. The insults flew so fast and furiously that if one didn't stop to think about them they might have almost believed them to be true.

But of course they weren't. It wasn't Republican voters, after all, who couldn't figure out how to use a ballot in the Florida election of 2000. Nor is it Republicans who are absolutely dependent upon the least well-educated members of our society for their success.

Nor is Bush the dolt his opponents like to portray him as. Not only did he surpass the relatively modest academic achievements of John Kerry at Yale, but also it turns out that the president is a voracious reader who reads over a hundred books a year. Nor is the stuff he reads just fluff as Steven Hayward notes at No Left Turns. Hayward quotes John Lewis Gaddis:

So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they've appeared, and I'm hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I've found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn't read the latest book on Lincoln, or on-as Bush refers to him-the "first George W." I've even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.

"Well, so Bush reads history", one might reasonably observe at this point. "Isn't it more important to find out how he uses it?" It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested-as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time-in how the past can provide guidance for the future.

Anyway, the calumnies against the intelligence of Republican voters really is a joke. The Democrats, even as I write, are feverishly at work trying to enlist young people as well as the poor and marginalized, groups not noted for their close following of political matters, in the service of Barack Obama. In other words, the Democrats realize that unless they can get a lot of people voting for them who have no idea what they're voting for, they don't have a chance.

RLC

Superstition

An article on superstition in New Scientist has a quote from Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany.

Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect - often falsely - science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition. "You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," he says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often," he says.

I don't know if Forstmeier had Darwinists in mind, but it sure sounds as if he did.

RLC

On Creation

Having read the latest attack on Sarah Palin regarding what she believes as it pertains to the Creation, I have grown weary of the Liberal, anti-religious, anti-creationist body of individuals who actually have no understanding of what the Bible has to say regarding the Creation of all things yet they behave as scholarly and intellectual elite who feel compelled in the name of all that they think to be right and true to assault and degrade those who believe differently than they.

Bible-believing people are not evil and represent no threat to anyone except, perhaps, to those who are truly lost just as Jesus was a threat to the truly-lost Pharisee of His day. Indeed, He threatened their status quo to such a degree that they crucified Him.

To this end, I have added a page to Viewpoint that can be accessed via the "Creation" link at the left of this page under Hall of Fame. Perhaps Ms. Palin will find something of value here also.

Sex and Commitment

With the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy her mother's advocacy of abstinence education has come under some scrutiny.

Those who oppose abstinence-only education make the argument that kids are going to engage in sexual behavior no matter what they're told so we should give them the means to prevent being "punished with a baby", to use Barack Obama's infelicitous phrase.

This argument seems a little like telling youngsters that they shouldn't shoplift, but since a lot of kids are going to do it anyway, we should give them a coat with deep pockets so they're less likely to get caught. Or they shouldn't speed, but since they're going to do it anyway we should give them a radar detector so they don't get punished with a ticket.

To say that something is wrong, but that as parents and schools we're going to help facilitate the doing of it, is to send our kids a pretty confusing message.

The surest way not to get arrested for shop-lifting is to refrain from shop-lifting. The surest way to not lose your license for speeding is to not speed. The surest way to not get pregnant is to not have sex.

There's a tacit assumption at work among those who say that we should face the reality and acknowledge that kids will have sex anyway and that we should therefore give them the means to protect against pregnancy. That assumption is that there's nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage except that an unwanted pregnancy might result.

I think that assumption is simply wrong. When we decouple sex from commitment, when we make sex a form of recreation, a number of harmful effects follow. Surely, the morally desperate condition of contemporary society is prima facie evidence that somewhere along the line we've gone terribly wrong with regard to our thinking about sexuality.

Mary Eberstadt at First Things writes compellingly that we are reaping the bitter fruit of our divorce of sex from procreation. I don't know about that, but certainly separating sex from commitment, particularly marital commitment, has been a disaster. It has resulted in a long litany of social problems and dysfunctions - everything from rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, a million and a half abortions a year, the objectification of women, marital infidelity, spouse abuse, illegitimacy, child sexual abuse, STDs, broken homes, shattered lives, and the general sleazification of our culture.

Many social problems that seem superficially unrelated to sex are, in fact, the consequence of a sexually permissive culture. Crime and academic failure, for example, are much more common among fatherless young men, but many children are fatherless because men are no longer required to commit themselves to a woman in order to have sexual access to her.

When sex is isolated from profound commitment people tend to lose respect for each other, their relationship changes, they often find themselves quarreling more frequently, trust between them diminishes, and if and when the relationship ends, one person, often the girl, feels used and embittered. I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote that the question, "Will you still respect me in the morning?" has become a cliché because the concern is so real.

We call it "making love", but sex apart from commitment is rarely about love despite what the participants tell themselves and each other. The harmful consequences are far-reaching, both emotionally and physically, and the rewards, such as they are, are ephemeral and uncertain.

To think that the only hazard of a physical relationship with someone to whom there is no commitment is an unintended pregnancy is, in my opinion, terribly naive.

RLC

Al Qaeda Admits Defeat

Captured documents reveal a level of deep despair among members of al Qaeda in Iraq. The report at Long War Journal reveals a lot of internal dissension and many al Qaeda leaders have given up hope of prevailing against the coalition.

Perhaps we should forward this report to Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader of the senate, who famously pronounced at the outset of the surge that we had already lost the war.

By the way - I read in last night's paper that 2008 has been the worst year for our military in terms of casualties in Afghanistan, and I wondered: Can anyone remember reading anything in the papers or seeing anything on television about the war in Afghanistan that was not about our troops being killed or our people killing innocent civilians? One might think, for all the media tells us about that theater, that the only thing that's happening there is that our troops are taking terrible losses and the only casualties we're inflicting are on women and children.

It's not unlike the template the media followed in Iraq. As long as there were a lot of casualties among our forces and Iraqi civilians we heard about Iraq day and night. Then when the country began to be pacified, Iraq just about disappeared from the news altogether. A year ago it bade fair to be the dominant issue in this year's presidential election, but since we're succeeding no one seems to want to talk about it.

Harry Reid certainly isn't saying much.

RLC

Jason Bourne Needs to Know

Anika Smith at Evolution News and Views has a little fun with actor Matt Damon over Damon's semi-coherent criticism of Sarah Palin's views on how long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth:

You may have seen the video of Matt Damon attacking Sarah Palin because he doesn't know anything about her (his words, not mine). It's like he read a bad Maureen Dowd column and regurgitated the unfunny parts - that is, the whole thing.

The best comment, and the most relevant to our readers, Damon makes at the end:

"I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago. That's an important - I want to know that, I really do, because she's going to have the nuclear codes. You know, I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago... we can't, we can't have that."

Whatever Damon's command of English might be, he's clearly completely ignorant of the issue at hand. Of course, I don't know much about Matt Damon, which frightens me, actually. I need to know if Matt really thinks random mutation acting on natural selection is capable of accounting for the complexity of life and the universe. That's an important - I want to know that, I really do, because he's going to be making million dollar block buster films I'm probably going to be watching. You know, I want to know if he thinks Darwinian evolution can explain that. Because, you know, we can't have such dogmatic, blind adherence to outdated modes of thinking in such a vocal world leader, we can't have that.

For my part I wonder what the age of dinosaurs has to do with having access to nuclear weapons. I'm sure there's a connection or else someone of Mr. Damon's stature would not think it so important, but I'll be darned if I can figure out what it is.

RLC

With Friends Like These ...

Some on the left seem determined to remind people every chance they get that nothing is beneath them. Here's Randi Rhodes from Air America, the liberal talk radio network, on yesterday's show:

Why do they say these things? How does Randi Rhodes know what Sarah Palin is like? Why does she have to imply that she's a child molester, for heaven's sake?

One reason is that they know they can't fight on the battlefield of issues because they don't have any. Obama has moved so close to McCain that there's really not much difference between them on most of the issues that catapulted him to the nomination. Nor can they keep up the pretense of "change" because Obama has pretty much abandoned that rhetoric and symbolized his apostasy by naming a veteran Washingtonian as his running mate. Whatever Biden represents it's not change.

So instead we get remarks like that made by Sue Fowler, chair of the South Carolina Democrat party and wife of Don Fowler who rejoiced that Hurricane Gustav was coming and would interrupt the GOP convention. Mr. Fowler's better half opined that Sarah Palin's "only qualification for the vice-presidency is that she hasn't had an abortion".

Or we get the inane line, repeated by a gaggle of Democrats, that Barack Obama is like Jesus because Jesus was a community organizer and that Sarah Palin is like Pontius Pilate because Pilate was a governor. Third graders would find this sort of thing too stupid to employ on the playground, but desperation will evidently lead some people to throw away their dignity and say things like this.

Earlier it was smears against her family and gross distortions of her religious beliefs, her prayer about Iraq, and her views on creationism. It just makes you shake your head in dismay at the depths to which some people will sink.

Ed Morrissey reminds us that:

Rhodes recently offered the novel claim that John McCain got treated like a "prince" by his captors in North Vietnam. Apparently her separation from reality has accelerated with this piece of character assassination. There's really no other term for it; she accuses Palin of being at least a latent child molester.

Even apart from that despicable accusation, the rest of Rhodes' argument sounds strangely like projection. What does Rhodes herself do for a living? She "opines about everything from politics to lawn care". Rhodes also acts as though she "knows it all", including Palin's sexual proclivities. If Rhodes finds opinion from strong women so offensive, maybe she should find another line of work. After this bit of lunacy, perhaps her employer should expedite that change.

Barack Obama seems to me to be a fine and decent, if woefully misguided, man, but some of his supporters on the left make one wonder what's happened to their decency. I'm sure he's embarrassed by them.

RLC

Will He Stay or Will He Go?

There's lots of talk around the web about Senator Obama probably regretting his decision to put fellow senator Joe Biden on the ticket rather than Hillary Clinton. I think Obama did the right thing in not picking Senator Clinton, but like most others, I didn't foresee either McCain's selection of Governor Palin or the wildly popular pick she would prove to be. Obama was in a tough spot. Naming Hillary as his VP probably would have guaranteed him the election, but it would have, I think, destroyed his presidency. In the event, he passed on her, McCain picked Sarah Palin, and Obama hasn't been the same since.

Nevertheless, what's done is not necessarily what has to remain done. Biden dropped a bit of a hint this week that he might not be long for the race when he said that Senator Clinton would have probably been a better pick than he was. If Barack Obama really wants to neutralize the Palin factor he could arrange for Biden to drop off the ticket and ask Senator Clinton to join him as his VP. I'm sure he doesn't want to do that, but if the poll numbers continue to drop and, perhaps worse, if Congressional polls also show the Dems at risk of losing the House of Representatives, which they now are, I would not be surprised to see Biden go and Hillary graciously assent to serving as Obama's loyal right hand.

There is precedent. George McGovern's choice of VP, Thomas Eagleton, dropped out of the race in 1972 when it became public that he had been treated for depression, and he was replaced by Sargent Shriver. More recently, Robert Torricelli withdrew from the New Jersey senate race of 2002 when it became apparent that he would lose, and he was replaced by popular retired senator Frank Lautenberg who won and who's still in the senate today.

There will be more twists to this fascinating election before it's over, I think.

RLC

The Palin Interview

Tim e-mails me from Penn State with a couple of questions about the ABC news interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson and asks for my thoughts. He writes:

It's difficult to blame her for looking uncomfortable in the face of Gibson's questioning, but I felt the interview highlighted her utter lack of foreign policy experience. She said she's never met a foreign leader and that she's traveled very little outside of the United States. She said Alaska's proximity to Russia gives her insight into the current situation in Georgia. More troubling was the fact that she'd never heard of the Bush Doctrine, which could very well become a central part of our next president's foreign policy, given our current relationship with the Islamic world.

Just a few weeks ago Republicans were saying a lack of experience is a fatal flaw. Why the sudden turnaround?

Three times Palin refused to answer whether our troops should cross the Pakistani border without approval from their government. She talked her way around the question and never gave a straight answer. Her lack of decisiveness was disturbing. Is this what we want from a woman who could soon become our next leader in the war on terror?

A vice presidential pick is not simply a political weapon used to "energize" a voting bloc. A vice president should be able to step in at a moment's notice as leader of the United States. Do you believe she's ready?

Here's the crux of my reply edited somewhat:

Good to hear from you and to read your thoughts on the Palin interview. You asked at the end if I thought Palin had enough foreign policy experience to be ready. I think the best way to answer that is to say that I think she's at least as ready as Senator Obama. Until he won his party's nomination he had no foreign policy (FP) experience either, and all that he's gotten since then came on his recent trip during which he met with several foreign leaders. I think that to the extent that a lack of FP experience is problematic it's much more problematic for the head of the ticket than for the veep.

Having said that, though, I'm not real impressed by the FP qualification. Unless they have first served as a vice-president most people who become president have very little FP experience until they get to the White House. They have usually been governors, and governors don't deal with FP. Nor do most senators. Probably the only two presidents since the 1930s who had any real prior FP experience before becoming Commander-in-Chief were Eisenhower, who was our commander in Europe during WWII, perhaps Nixon who was Ike's VP, and the first Bush who was head of the CIA for a while and a vice-president. Truman and LBJ were vice-presidents but neither had much FP responsibility in that role. FDR, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the current Bush were all governors. JFK was a senator.

So I don't hold a lack of that particular kind of experience against either Obama or Palin.

Nor am I troubled that Palin didn't know what Gibson meant by the Bush doctrine (BD). It was a "gotcha" question that her opponents will make a lot of hay over but which is really kind of silly. For one reason, the BD is not a formal doctrine but a name given by the media to a set of policies. As such it has gone through a number of revisions in the last eight years, and what Gibson said the doctrine is is not the whole story. In its current incarnation, the "doctrine" is the policy of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. Gibson said that it was the policy of preemptive war, but actually it's both of those, and Palin should be given some slack for not knowing exactly what he meant or how to respond to his question.

As for the Pakistan question, she was wise not to give a definite answer. That was another rhetorical trap that Gibson had laid for her. If she said we should not go into Pakistan then her answer would be used to discredit both Bush and McCain since we are, in fact, sending troops surreptitiously across the border, and McCain, I think, supports that (So does Obama, btw). If she had said that we should go in then she would be criticized for embarrassing our "allies" in Islamabad who must keep up the pretense, for domestic reasons, of being outraged that their territorial sovereignty is being violated by American incursions. By answering Gibson's question she would have either embarrassed the administration and her patron, Senator McCain, or she would have committed a diplomatic blunder.

Either way the question was a "no-win" and she was smart not to answer it.

At any rate, now we can look forward to Gibson's interview with Joe Biden and the snares he has set for him. Or maybe not.

RLC

Let's Mock McCain's Disability

From the same campaign that gave us Senator Joe Biden urging a wheel-chair bound state legislator to stand up and take a bow, we have this ad mocking John McCain because he doesn't use e-mail.

What the ad doesn't tell us is the reason Senator McCain doesn't use the computer. The torture he suffered as a POW has disabled his arms such that he can not comfortably use a keyboard. So, if he doesn't have to, why should he?

Nice ad, fellas. Next time get someone older than fourteen to write your script.

Jonah Goldberg wonders what's next. It's a good thing New York governor David Patterson isn't a Republican or else we'd be getting ads about the outrage of having a blind man who doesn't know how to drive a car serving as governor. After all, Goldberg says, transportation issues are pretty important. How dare he serve as governor while being ignorant of what it's like to navigate New York's highways.

RLC

Large Hadron Collider

No doubt you've heard that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went on line this week in Switzerland. Scientists are hoping that the giant particle accelerator will allow them to smash protons into each other at such high energies that they will gain deeper insight into the composition and origin of the universe. You may not understand exactly what it's all about, but Kate McAlpine is here to help you with the physics of the LHC with this smash tutorial:

Actually you may not understand any more after watching the video than you did before, but you probably enjoyed the experience of not really learning anything. There's some background on McAlpine and the video here.

RLC

Fear and Trembling at the DNC

Jason sends along an essay from the Politico which reveals a growing discontent in the Democratic party. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party's most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall.

A former top strategist for past Democratic presidential campaigns ... said that: "Obama is struggling with working-class whites just like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis did, and Walter Mondale. He's struggling with voters in the border-state South. And he's struggling with an enormous wind at his back, a hatred for George Bush and a mainstream media that is little short of a chorus for his campaign."

If McCain wins in November the police may have to close every bridge in the country to prevent Democrats from jumping from them.

RLC

Stain on the Presidency

I have occasionally argued on Viewpoint that George Bush might well be regarded by history as an outstanding president. I still believe this, but I do not think Bush's presidency has been uniformly praiseworthy. His temporizing on illegal immigration, for example, has been a major disappointment, as has his fiscal profligacy.

There is, in addition, an ugly stain on both his presidency and his personal character represented by the case of border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

Ramos and Compean encountered a Mexican drug smuggler named Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, trying to move over 700 pounds of narcotics into Texas. The agents tried to apprehend Aldrete-Davila who ran. When they ordered him to stop, he turned as if to fire a weapon. The officers shot, and one bullet hit the smuggler in the buttock. He managed to flee across the border, and the federal prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, went to Mexico and offered him immunity for his testimony against the agents. On this man's word, the border agents were convicted by a federal jury on charges that included assault with a dangerous weapon, lying about the incident and violating the alleged smuggler's Fourth Amendment right to be protected against illegal search and seizure.

Ramos and Compean were offered a plea bargain which would have put them in jail for six months, but they would have had to admit guilt and lose their jobs. They didn't believe they were guilty of anything serious so they declined the offer. The vindictive, narrow-minded, mean-spirited Sutton came down on them hard. He invoked a law that makes using a firearm during the commission of a crime punishable by a mandatory ten year sentence, so, since the two agents were convicted of violating the smuggler's fourth amendment rights and fired at him when they thought he was going to shoot, the two agents are now serving 10-12 years in solitary confinement.

While under immunity this thug tried several more times to bring drugs into the U.S., was caught, and given ten years in prison. He has a briefer sentence than do the two agents. Indeed, if Ramos and Compean serve their full term they'll do more time than some convicted murderers.

President Bush, who had no qualms about pardoning "Scooter" Libby who was convicted of committing perjury, has not been able to see his way clear to pardon these two men who were trying to do their job and prevent criminals from exploiting our porous border. Their reward is to be persecuted by a man, Johnny Sutton, who appears to be a cross between Michael Nifong and Inspector Javert.

John McCain is casting about for ways to distance himself from George Bush. In my opinion, he could do himself a lot of good, especially with Hispanic Americans, if he promised that if elected he would immediately pardon Ramos and Compean. Their sentence is one aspect of Bush and his presidency that everyone should distance themselves from.

RLC

Contretemps Over Sex-Ed

The Obama campaign is upset by a McCain ad that takes the senator to task for favoring sex education for kindergartners. Jim Geraghty at NRO claims that the language a bill Obama voted for as an Illinois state senator certainly makes it look like the controversial ad is basically correct. Geraghty quotes from the bill these words:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.

It's one thing to teach children the difference between good touch and bad touch, it's something else to teach them how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. To be sure the bill required that the instruction be "age appropriate" but any discussion of avoiding STDs must perforce address matters of sexual intimacy and prophylaxis if it's to be at all meaningful, so the question is what need has a kindergartner for such information? Are five year olds at an appropriate age to talk about these matters at all?

RLC

The God Gene

"Professor" John Cleese presents a lecture on the God gene. The lecture, of course, is a spoof of Dawkinsian sociobiology that holds that all of our behavior is a product of genetic influences which have evolved over vast stretches of time:

Those scientists searching for a "God gene" are trying to show that if belief in God is genetic then there's no objective reason to think God really exists. The claim "God exists" is rendered trivial, it's thought, if our belief in God is genetically caused.

Unfortunately for these scientists, the attempt to discredit belief in God by showing that the belief has a genetic provenience is too clever by half. It winds up defeating itself.

If our belief in God is a product of our genes then it would seem that all of our beliefs must be similarly caused or influenced, but this means that the very belief that our genes cause our beliefs is itself caused by our genes. If that's so, then there's no reason why we should believe it. The belief that beliefs are genetically caused has no objective truth value. The claim is absurd, and Cleese's skit does a nice job of illustrating the absurdity.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Barack's Life as an Organizer

Since Senator Obama cites his three years as a community organizer as an important element among his qualifications to be President, Byron York wanted to learn what a community organizer does and what Barack Obama accomplished in his tenure as an organizer in Chicago. So York went to the Windy City to find out, and writes about what he learned in an article at National Review Online.

He says:

[I]f you ask Obama's fellow organizers what his most significant accomplishments were, they point to two ventures: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area's oldest housing projects. Those, they say, were his biggest victories.

Neither of these achievements amounted to much, and Obama sensed that he really wasn't going to get a lot done in his role as an organizer, which is why he decided to go to law school. He believed that he needed more power and being a lawyer would confer that power. York's piece gives us the details and offers us an interesting and important glimpse of these formative years in the life of the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

RLC

The Price of Freedom

An Iraq war vet shares his thoughts on what the war means and why he thinks Senator Obama is wrong on the war. Watch to the end:

RLC

Biden on Abortion

Senator Biden, appearing Sunday on Meet the Press, stated his position on abortion. The New York Times reports that:

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for vice president, departed Sunday from party doctrine on abortion rights, declaring that as a Catholic, he believes life begins at conception. But the Delaware senator added that he would not impose his personal views on others, and had indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion.

So let's unpack this. He believes that "life begins at conception". This is a biologically awkward phrase since life is a continuum and does not "begin" in the sense that people mean it when they employ constructions like the one Biden used. I leave open the possibility that Senator Biden was uttering an inanity, but I assume he was not. I assume that what he meant was that an individual acquires the rights of a person at conception.

He then said that as a senator and potential vice-president he would not presume to impose that belief upon others. This assertion entails, one can only conclude, that if Americans thought that Jews or blacks were not full persons, the senator, entrusted with the power of legislating the laws of the land and confirming its judges, would not interfere with this opinion even were he convinced otherwise. Well, it wasn't too long ago that Jews and blacks were not considered full persons. Would Biden have refused to vote against legislation that would have criminalized the holocaust or curtailed slavery?

The child in the womb is a person, according to Joe Biden, but if the mother wants to kill it, for whatever reason, that should be her right. This is pretty stunning. It's either of a piece with the thinking of many Germans during the thirties and many Americans in the ante-bellum south or it's simply the muddled cogitation of a man who never really took his responsibilities as a senator seriously enough to think through the logic of his position.

RLC

Extremism

Over the past week some in the media have tried to place Sarah Palin out on the fringe of American life. This has been a difficult task since her opinions are pretty much the same as those of the vast number of Americans who live outside the university campus and the Washington beltway. She is pro-life, favors small government, opposes corruption, is a committed Christian, hunts, fishes, and supports the effort to defeat the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. For some this makes her an extremist, for most it makes her a very attractive candidate.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, whose personal associations include unreconstructed terrorists and terrorist supporters, is considered a moderate. Obama has the most extreme voting record in the Senate. He opposed the bill that banned partial-birth abortion and later criticized the Supreme Court for upholding the law. As an Illinois state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act which made it illegal to allow children born alive after an unsuccessful abortion to be left to die. He has promised that as president his first act would be to sign the Freedom of Choice act which would eliminate all existing restrictions on abortion, including the ban on the use of federal funds for abortions.

Never mind the fact that only a small percentage of Americans stand where Obama stands on these issues. In the minds of her media opponents it's Sara Palin who's the extremist and who must be discredited.

I really don't think the elite media understands the worldview of most Americans and certainly not that of most conservative Christians. They seem to have assumed, for example, that once Bristol Palin's pregnancy was exposed religious conservatives would abandon the mother's candidacy as if she were a moral leper. They seem to have been surprised that, on the contrary, most Christians identified with the fact that the Palins have challenges just like the rest of us and that just because our children don't always listen to the advice and counsel we offer them it doesn't mean that they, or we, are failures.

I don't know why else the media would have thought that Bristol's pregnancy was newsworthy unless they believed it somehow demonstrated hypocrisy or irresponsibility on the part of the mother and that it would erode her support among Evangelical Christians. If that's what they thought they certainly don't understand Evangelical Christians.

RLC

Unintended Consequences

Andrew writes with some interesting comments on Saturday's post titled Dumb but Funny. In the post, I quoted the editor of our local paper who made the remark that Palin's skepticism about human activity being the cause of global warming is bad for polar bears. Andrew writes:

Just a note on the polar bear comment. My dad is a hunter, and when I say hunter I don't mean taking a day or two off in late November to shoot a white tail deer. My dad hunts all over the world; Africa, New Zealand, Alaska, Tajikistan, and Canada. We were actually talking about polar bears the other day, and this is what he told me. The number of bears in Alaska right now is the highest it has ever been. However, environmentalists are afraid that global warming could hurt the population in the next 45-50 years, so polar bears were put on the endangered species list already to try to protect them in the future.

Here's the problem. Big game animals bring in big game hunters and big game hunters bring big money to these small Alaskan communities. No hunters means no money and no incentive for the locals and natives to protect the local polar bear population.

In Kenya you can't find wildlife anywhere. Years ago the Kenyan government outlawed hunting. Since the hunters were not coming to Kenya anymore there was no longer any reason for the local populations to protect the animals native to Kenya. Poaching became rampant and today there is almost no wild game in that country.

This same thing could very well happen to the polar bear in Alaska. Are they really going to be able to stop the locals from poaching the bears for food or even shooting them when they get too close to the towns and settlements? The environmentalists may well have doomed the polar bear in their attempt to save it [from] a threat that many believe doesn't even exist.

Andrew's e-mail offers us a good illustration of something called the Law of Unintended Consequences. So often the actions of government have consequences that are completely unforeseen, unintended, and counterproductive. It's a good reason to be skeptical of those who promise us that government can solve our problems.

One of the best examples of how the Law of Unintended Consequences works that I can recall occurred back in the 1980s. Congress decided that wealthy people could afford to pay more taxes on their luxury boats so they imposed a steep tax on boat purchases. This caused buyers to shop abroad for their pleasure craft which caused several New England boat builders to go out of business, thrusting hundreds of middle class workers and craftsmen out of jobs. The government didn't get their revenue, the wealthy weren't "punished" and the only thing that happened was lots of average folk wound up unemployed. That's our Congress working for you.

RLC

Authenticity

Breaking news from the Onion News Network: Jacksonville Jaguars Experience Existential Epiphany:

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

We have it on good authority (almost as reliable as The Onion) that after the game was called the Jaguars players repaired to the locker room where they listened to their coaching staff read excerpts from Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Back in the US of KKK A

I was perusing the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal on Friday and was struck by a couple of the articles. One was an AP account of how community organizers are miffed at the merriment some GOP speakers enjoyed at their expense at the recent convention. The article pointed out that community organizers do good work, help poor people cope with a variety of stresses, and should not be belittled.

Well, of course they shouldn't, but that's not what was happening at the convention. What Republican speakers did was not deride people who are community organizers or the work they do, but rather deride the notion that that work is a qualification for the presidency of the United States. A community organizer is something like a secular missionary. Missionaries do wonderful work, and few would demean it, but three years in an inner city mission field is not the sort of experience that, by itself, prepares one for the Oval Office.

A second column, by an Intelligencer staffer named Jeff Hawkes, who apparently couldn't think of anything else to write about, fretted over Obama's safety during a campaign swing through Amish country last Thursday. I certainly don't wish to scoff at concern for anyone's safety, but the unspoken implication of Hawkes' overwrought essay, it seemed, was that Lancaster County is McCain territory and is therefore filled with, you know, lots of those right-wing, racist, extremist nuts. Hawkes cited a number of other fans of Barack at the Lancaster rally who harbored similar fears. One of them worried that "Every time there's somebody of promise, it's extinguished." He concluded his column by noting that "nothing bad happened" and breathed a sigh of relief as if we just missed tragedy by mere inches here in the US of KKK A.

Mr. Hawkes is perhaps unaware of the much more tangible threats against George Bush from both the rabid left and Islamic terrorists. If he is aware of them, I wonder how many anguished columns this worrywart has written about the very real risk George Bush takes every time he sets foot outside the White House, or if this is something Mr. Hawkes even thinks or cares about.

In any case, it seemed curious that Hawkes uniquely singled out senator Obama as the object of his concern. It makes one wonder if Mr. Hawkes, being a good liberal white man, may not have been exorcising the burden of his racial guilt. By going on about his profound concern for Mr. Obama's well-being, perhaps, he was assuring his minority readers and fellow liberals and perhaps himself, that, unlike so many other whites in Lancaster county, he is no racist.

That explanation may make him sound a bit pathetic, but it's a lot better than concluding that he just doesn't care about the safety of Republicans.

RLC

Bounce

The USA Today/Gallup poll, taken Friday through Sunday, shows McCain leading Obama by 54% to 44% among those seen as most likely to vote. This doesn't mean much at this point, but it is a sweeping turn-around for McCain who was down 7 points going into the convention.

Picking Sarah Palin may well have resuscitated his candidacy, and the selection is rich in irony. The party which has been portrayed by the media for years as a collection of chauvinists, misogynists and miscellaneous neanderthals has a woman on the ticket, only the second time in history a national party has done this, and all those redneck wife-beaters are wild about her. Meanwhile, organizations like the National Organization for Women which demonstrated the depth of its concern for women by remaining almost completely silent during the sexual depredations of Bill Clinton, including allegations of assault, don't even try to conceal their dismay with Sarah Palin. Oprah Winfrey, who has championed the advance of women throughout her career, refuses to allow Palin on her show.

Women who despaired that Hillary's defeat in the primaries robbed them of any hope that a woman would be president in their lifetime, now have a surprising second chance. The question is, how many Hillary supporters are there for whom abortion rights are not dispositive and who would be willing to vote for a strong successful woman who exemplifies what they think a woman should be in most other respects? How many Hillary supporters are there who are so smitten by the idea that they, or their daughters, might well see a woman in the White House after all that they will subordinate their preference on abortion to helping to make history happen?

Personally, I think voting for Palin just because she's a strong and charming woman is as irresponsible as voting for Obama just because he's black or for McCain just because he was a POW. Even so, it'll be interesting to see how many Democrats who wanted to see Mrs. Clinton at the head of their ticket, or at least on it, will pull the lever for Palin just because she's a version, albeit a mirror-image, of Hillary.

RLC

Dumb But Funny

Almost as if to highlight a post on Viewpoint the other day, one of our local papers, The York Dispatch, ran an editorial Wednesday which serves as a fine illustration of why so many are growing so disappointed with so much of the media. Here's what they said:

[Sarah Palin's] candidacy plays directly to the evangelical and far-right conservative wings of the Republican Party -- a home run for anti-abortion crusaders, the National Rifle Association, heterosexual marriage-only supporters and abstinence-only sex education.

Apparently, The editor's idea of being "far-right" is to hold views that have been mainstream in this country for two hundred years. But that aside, I wonder at the choice of "anti-abortion crusaders" as a designation for those who call themselves pro-life. It's unlikely that the editor thinks it appropriate to call pro-choicers "anti-life crusaders", so why use the pejorative for pro-lifers? Why not call people what they want to be called?

It's a GOP melange designed to float undisturbed over conservative waters -- until it strikes the reefs of sheer ignorance that comprise the ridiculous tenets of creationism, also known so well to us as intelligent design.

Well, the "reefs of sheer ignorance" must extend all the way to the editorial offices of the Dispatch. Intelligent design is not creationism. Only those who are foundering on that reef of sheer ignorance, or those whose scruples don't prohibit dishonesty, continue to conflate the two.

The good governor, it seems, favors teaching it in school as a "science."

As we mentioned in our earlier post this is simply false. Either the editorialist's ignorance encompasses not only the nature of ID but also current events, or the editorialist is simply being deliberately untruthful.

What Palin said was: "...teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools."

Later, Palin clarified her remark: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

In other words, if the topic comes up it should be discussed, just like string theory should be discussed in physics classes if students show interest in it.

I will bet that if we were to survey the entire country and ask whether people agreed in principle with Palin's statement those who reply "yes" would comprise over 95% of the respondents. The other 5% would be mostly newspaper journalists.

The editorialist then embarrasses himself with this piece of incoherent pomposity:

A word to the unschooled: Science it's not. And to those who honestly believe the world was created around 6,000 years ago, another word: Fossil.

Well, shut my mouth. There's an argument for you. ID is not science because a newspaper editor says so, and if any of you yokels out there believe the earth is only 6000 years old you must have never heard of fossils. This is almost as compelling as the argument that ID isn't science because Judge Jones said it wasn't in the Dover case.

There's more:

On global warming, Ms. Palin, it seems, has yet to be convinced it's the result of human meddling. Certainly not good for polar bears in her home state and not healthy for the rest of us.

Aside from the fact that it's distressing that an editor of a newspaper seems to have difficulty writing in complete sentences, the juxtaposition of these two thoughts is difficult to decipher. If the Dispatch means that Mrs. Palin's skepticism about the cause of global warming bodes ill for polar bears and humans then it must be privy to proof that humans are causing global warming. If the editor does have such proof in hand then he's in possession of something that many in the scientific community are still looking for, and it would be helpful of him to share that proof with those of us less enlightened than he.

Gov. Palin's political merits and disabilities aside, former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, a Democrat, had this observation on Palin's nomination:

"Are we comfortable in having a VP who represents the extreme right wing, including the advocacy of creationism and a denial of any human responsibility in climate change?"

"No, we're not", cheers our editor, as though he were freshly back from a political rally.

Tom Daschle, and presumably our editor, are uncomfortable with an extremist in the vice-president's chair. So am I, but I'm not exactly clear on how it is that beliefs shared by more than half the country are "extremist". And if the Dispatch is so concerned about extremists in the White House why is it not editorializing against Barack Obama whose political views make him the most liberal member in the senate and place him clearly out of the American mainstream?

Evidently, for those like Daschle and the good folks at our newspaper there are just two kinds of people: There are those who agree with them and there is everyone else. Those who agree with them are enlightened moderates. Everyone else is a far right-wing extremist.

It's pretty funny. Dumb, but funny.

RLC

Update on Bob Novak

Some readers may be familiar with columnist and pundit Bob Novak, but whether you are or not you'll find his recent column interesting. Novak discovered after a minor traffic accident last July that he had a life-threatening brain tumor, in fact he was told he had only a few months left to live. He resigned from his career as a syndicated columnist, but has reemerged with this column that tells the story of his disease and the outpouring of graciousness from people he never guessed would be kind to him. It's a lovely account and reflects well on a lot of people in Washington and not so well on a few others.

You can read it here.

RLC

Keep Digging

It would be worth a couple of hearty guffaws were it not so disheartening. Some in the media, specifically CBS, CNN, and the New York Times, are spreading a story they evidently gleaned from Daily Kos that, contrary to what Sarah Palin said in her acceptance speech about being an advocate for special needs children, she actually cut the Alaska state budget for such programs by 62%.

This will doubtless disappoint those suffering the fevers of what Michelle Malkin calls Palin Derangement Syndrome (PDS), but the charge is false. In fact, the Special Education Services budget actually rose by 12% last year under governor Palin.

What happened was that one of the programs that had formerly been folded into Special Education Services, the Alaska Youth Challenge Program, was taken out of special needs and put elsewhere in the budget. This made it look at first glance as though the special needs budget had been slashed by 62% when in fact the Youth Challenge Program actually experienced a 12% increase in funding.

It took one stay-at-home mom about 30 minutes of googling on the internet to discover the explanation that eluded the vast resources of the media organs who are spreading the false information. It makes one wonder why everyone doesn't just get their news from the internet.

RLC

Finally

Climate change seems to have come to Pakistan, at least the security climate seems to have changed. President Musharaff, an unsteady ally at best in the war on terror, is gone, and the new regime seems much more committed to rooting out the Taliban and ending their ability to function as a fighting force. Stephen Brown at FrontPageMag writes that:

Finally, it's all-out war against the Taliban in Pakistan.

While the world's attention was focused on the conflict in Georgia, Pakistan's military launched a full-scale assault against the Pakistani Taliban. With former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf now out of the way, Pakistan's new military chief, General Ashfaq Kiyani, wasted little time in sending the army in force against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban's proper name).

For the Bush administration, the offensive fulfills a long-desired American objective to eradicate the Taliban and al Qaeda bases in Pakistan's tribal regions. These rear areas provide major support for the enemy in the Afghan war, and it is hoped their destruction will substantially reduce that conflict's intensity, if not end it.

The severity of the fighting and the government's success can be judged by the fact the Pakistani Taliban has been "routed" in the Bajaur tribal agency, a Taliban-al Qaeda stronghold. The Pakistan army reported killing more than five hundred Taliban combatants while another 3,000 have fled into Afghanistan and 300,000 civilians have become refugees. Government forces almost nearly captured Ayman al Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's second-in-command. On the army side, 20 soldiers are dead with another 50 missing.

Suffering setbacks, the Taliban had asked for a ceasefire, which the government, to its credit, rejected. Reflecting the new attitude in a post-Musharraf Pakistan towards Islamist militancy, the Pakistani government says it will not negotiate with the Tehrik-i-Taliban until it lays down its weapons.

The rest of the article explains the reasons for Musharaff's reluctance to go after the Taliban. Check it out if doings in the Middle East interest you.

RLC

Knocking Palin

As the campaign moves forward one of the knocks against Sarah Palin will almost certainly be that she is a "creationist". This accusation, intended to lump her in the public mind with snake handlers and other religious fanatics, will be based on her 2006 statement, given in response to a question, that we should:

"...teach both. You know, don't be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it's so valuable in our schools."

Later, Palin clarified her remark: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."

So, the evidence is clear. She's a zealot.

What we will probably not be told, however, is that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards all actually voted in 2001 to make teaching the controversy over evolution virtually mandatory.

Edward Sisson has the details at Evolution News and Views.

If Palin's suggestion that students at least be exposed to the debate places her out of the political mainstream in the U.S., where must we place senators who voted for this language in the Santorum amendment to No Child Left Behind:

It is the sense of the Senate that-

(1) good science education should prepare students to distinguish the data or testable theories of science from philosophical or religious claims that are made in the name of science; and

(2) where biological evolution is taught, the curriculum should help students to understand why this subject generates so much continuing controversy, and should prepare the students to be informed participants in public discussions regarding the subject.

As sensible as this amendment is it's actually much more "radical" than Palin's position which was simply to allow the controversy to be discussed if it comes up in class. It'll be interesting to see to what extent Palin is attacked for her view and whether the attackers will trouble themselves with observing that her view is mild relative to that of the aforementioned liberal senators.

RLC

Sexism

Everybody's talking about Sarah Palin's outstanding speech last night, and the talking heads can't help but remind us every third minute that she, of course, didn't write it. It was written by Matthew Scully, a speech writer for George Bush, among others. Well, so what? No politician has written his or her own speech in its entirety since Abe Lincoln scrawled the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope en route to Gettysburg.

So, we're led to wonder: How often were we told last week that Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn't write their speeches? The answer, I suspect is pretty close to zero, which, if true, raises yet another question: Why does the MSM feel compelled to tell us that Palin didn't write this one? Is it because they just don't think that a woman could have done such a fine job unless a man helped her?

Or is it because they realize that her speech is a real threat to the Obama candidacy, and they feel constrained to deflect its power by suggesting that she herself is not really capable of such rhetorical excellence?

Either way, wouldn't the repeated reminders that Governor Palin didn't write the speech, were they made by Republicans about a Hillary speech, for instance, be seen as examples of sexism?

Just asking.

RLC