What Is Truth?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that Obama told at least three whoppers during last night's debate. He denied having launched his political career with Bill Ayers' help, he denied having given $800,000 to ACORN, and he misrepresented the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act which he voted against.

Morrissey has details at the link if you'd like to check them out.

For my part, I'm a little reluctant to call Obama a liar, as Morrissey does, but I'm beginning to think that his problem (and thus ours) runs even deeper than lying. I'm beginning to think that Obama has a very pragmatic, Rortian view of truth. In this view, if a particular fact is unpleasant or inconvenient or impedes achieving the goals one has set for oneself then it's simply not a fact. It's not true for him. Truth is what works and obviously the sorts of claims that McCain was making about Obama's association with terrorist Bill Ayers, his support for ACORN, an organization which is being investigated all across the country for voter registration fraud, and his vote on the BAIP act, which is essentially a vote to permit infanticide, are not helpful to his candidacy. Thus he's able to persuade himself, and say with a straight face, that such claims are not "true", they're not "facts".

Truth, according to the late philosopher Richard Rorty, is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying. Obviously, Obama's peer group of radical leftists, socialists and media liberals have no problem with what he says and thus tacitly validate his claims. The truth for him as well as for many of those who want to see him attain the presidency is simply not the same as what is true for his critics. Therefore, his denial of the facts McCain cites is probably not technically a lie since he believes he's telling the "truth", or at least what's true for him.

I don't know, then, that it's quite accurate to call Obama a liar, a charge I deem to be very serious in any event, but he certainly does appear to be epistemically challenged.

RLC

Hiding in the Tall Grass

Senator Obama and his allies are fond of laying the blame for the subprime lending fiasco at the feet of Republican fondness for deregulation, but although a supine MSM has largely let him get away with this misrepresentation of the historical truth, Peter Wallison at The Wall Street Journal does not.

In a column that deserves to be read in its entirety because it sets the record straight on several mythical elements of the Democrats' campaign narrative, Wallison says this:

In the summer of 2005, a bill (co-sponsored by Senator McCain) emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.

Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending -- but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama's past: voting present.

Not willing to buck his party's leadership the senator refused to do the right thing. Instead he laid low, hiding in the political tall grass. His behavior in this episode displayed neither leadership nor political courage. Indeed, Senator Obama has never done anything to evince either of these virtues yet somehow he has managed to persuade a majority of American voters that he has both of them in abundance.

Is it that we are gullible, naive, or stupid? Or are we all three?

RLC

Voting for Change

A friend passed along this thought:

George Bush has been in office for just under eight years. For the first of them the economy was pretty good. For example, a little over one year ago:

• Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
• Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
• The unemployment rate was 4.5%
• The DOW hit a record 14,000+
• Americans were buying new cars, taking cruises, overseas vacations overseas, etc.

But we wanted change. So, in 2006 we voted in a Democratic Congress. Since then:

• Consumer confidence has plummeted
• Gasoline rose to over $4 a gallon
• Unemployment rose to 6.1% (a 10% increase)
• Americans have seen their home equity drop by $12 trillion dollars and prices are still dropping
• 1% of American homes are in foreclosure
• The DOW is below 8500. $2.5 trillion dollasrs has evaporated from stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investment portfolios

The president has no control over any of this. Only Congress could have done anything to prevent it but Congress has been preoccupied with trying to find Bush administration officials that they can put in jail.

In 2006 America voted for change and we got it.

Now Barack Obama promises that he is going to deliver real change.

Just how much more change can we stand?

RLC

Without God (I)

Among the indictments of religious believers recently registered by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism is all faith and no evidence, the believer is condescendingly assured, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by "evidence", it often turns out that the word is being employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, of course there's no proof that there is a personal God, as if God's existence were the conclusion of a deductive syllogism, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. We have proof for very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It is actually, in my view, more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I will argue in this series of posts over the next week or two is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion that theism is true is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of evil is the most troubling example. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism. If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

The first of these facts, then, is our intuitive conviction that the universe must have had a cause and that it didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that the universe's existence depends upon something beyond itself, something which transcends space and time. It's possible, perhaps, that the universe somehow created itself, but that seems both counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator itself requires an explanation. As Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium. Most people would think that the cube was produced by aliens and would regard the cube as virtual proof that aliens existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of aliens, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the cube and that until they can offer some account of the aliens the skeptic is under no obligation to believe they exist. Most reasonable people would think that the inability to say anything much about the aliens doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube nor does it mean that the alien theory is on philosophical par with the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube would be a reasonable inference and would seem to be the most plausible explanation even if it could not be proven.

Likewise, given the contingency of the universe, the existence of a transcendent cause responsible for the universe is a reasonable inference. The alternatives, that the universe is eternal or that the universe brought itself into being, are possible but scientifically and philosophically no more compelling, and perhaps much less so, than the view that the universe had a transcendent cause.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Ghost Writer

Jack Cashill at The American Thinker does a literary analysis of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father and draws two interesting conclusions: Obama didn't write it and Bill Ayers probably did. If Cashill's correct, and he seems to have done some homework, the finding is significant. First, Senator Obama's reputation for intellectual brilliance is predicated largely on the grace and style of Dreams, and, secondly, it gives the lie to the senator's claim that he didn't have a very close relationship with Ayers.

The circumstantial evidence that Cashill amasses is, by his own admission, not dispositive, but it's much more than merely suggestive. Read his case for yourself and make your own judgment.

RLC

Only Eight

How many times will we have to hear that Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed his crimes before someone asks what that has to do with anything? No one thinks that Obama participated in Ayers bombings so why does his age at the time they happened matter? Would it be exculpatory if someone friendly with German nazi war criminals during the 1960s was only eight when the crimes were committed? Would we be saying that it doesn't matter that the man associated with nazis decades later since he was only eight when the nazis were perpetrating their evil?

It's an indication of the weakness of the case that is made in Obama's defense that he and his supporters have to grasp at such an inane and irrelevant excuse.

Meanwhile, the candidate pretty much admits he's a Marxist socialist:

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

RLC

Prelude to <i>Without God</i>

Recently, I wrote a trio of posts titled Hurtling Toward the Cliff in response to an article by physicist Stephen Weinberg titled Without God. Over the course of the next two weeks or so I'd like to elaborate on this theme in a series of posts which will examine a number of facts about the world and human existence and consider these facts in the light of both atheism and theism. The series will borrow for its title Weinberg's Without God.

It'll be my contention in the series that theism offers a far superior account of these facts, that it makes better sense of them, than does atheism and that the theistic view of the world is therefore more intellectually satisfying and more rational than is it's opposite. Seventeen facts or phenomena about the world and human life will be considered:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact of biological information
   
4. The fact of human consciousness
   
5. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
6. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
7. Our sense that we have free will
   
8. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
9. Our sense of moral obligation
   
10. Our sense of guilt
    
11. Our belief in human dignity
    
12. Our belief in human worth
    
13. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
14. Our desire for justice
    
15. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
16. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
17. Our desire to survive our own death
    

In what follows it will be argued that theism provides an easier, more comfortable explanation for each of the above than does atheism. When taken together they add up to a powerful case for the proposition that it's eminently reasonable to believe that a personal mind, a mind similar to that imputed to the God of Christian theism, undergirds the world.

The first installment of the argument will be posted tomorrow.

RLC

More on the Right to Health Care

A few days ago I made the comment that Senator Obama's view that people have a fundamental right to health care/insurance strikes me as ill-considered. A couple of readers thought this sounded a bit callous and uncompassionate, but I think it's Obama's view, though no doubt well intentioned, that is the less compassionate. Here are a few reasons why:

1) A right held by one person entails an obligation owed by another. By conferring a right to health care on one person we obligate everyone else, including others who may be struggling to make ends meet, to fork over even more of their income to the person with the right. In other words, we give people who may or may not be in genuine need a claim on your wallet. That may seem compassionate to the recipient, but it's decidedly uncompassionate to the person who must hand over his purse rather than be allowed to use his resources to help his own family.

2) When someone feels they have a right to receive a benefit from the state it stifles gratitude. They expect the taxpayer to pay up, indeed they come to believe they're owed the benefit and are aggrieved if the taxpayer resists. Rather than fostering gratitude for the sacrifice others make on their behalf the right cultivates instead a sense of entitlement in the recipient.

3) Since a right to health care puts the taxpayer in relation to the recipient like a debtor stands in relation to the person he owes, the taxpayer tends quite naturally to feel resentful at the transfer of his resources to people who demand that he do so. This not only serves to foster bitterness between classes but, to the extent that the classes break along racial lines, it nurtures a seething racial animosity.

4) When people feel the government owes them a benefit it stifles their initiative. People who know that others will provide for their needs are much less motivated to work to provide them for themselves. If we didn't learn anything else from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs we should have at least learned that dependency destroys the work ethic.

5) When charity becomes a government function it harms the church. Churches which have robust charitable ministries are often strong and vibrant, but churches which have had their outreach to their communities co-opted by the state often grow flaccid, weak, and cold. Charity should be the role of the church and people should turn first to churches when they're in need of help. Churches are then in a position to help these people not only with financial assistance but also to teach them how to manage money, how to parent, and instruct them in many other of the virtues necessary to rise out of poverty. When the government takes over this role, however, recipients have no expectations placed upon them and thus often fail to rise above the station in life to which they were born.

Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion should be required reading for anyone who thinks that government "compassion" is the only way, or even the best way, to help people.

RLC

Losing Faith

Edward Heathcote Amory of The Mail Online summarizes David Freddoso's book, The Case Against Barack Obama, and declares that it has disabused him of his infatuation with the Illinois senator. Somewhat amazingly, in light of what Amory reveals about Obama, he still hopes Obama wins. Oh well.

Read the column at the link. You'll learn some things about Obama you probably didn't know and they're not pretty.

RLC

Insane Rage

I don't know if you've been watching any of the talking-head shows lately, but there's been a lot of handwringing about how McCain and Palin are inciting mobs and stirring up hate and whatnot at their rallies. Yet, despite the terrible climate of "insane rage" that the Republicans have allegedly been fostering, no one who has made such allegations on any of these shows has been able to give a single example of anything either candidate has said that was inflammatory. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there was only one incident involving one person at one campaign event who shouted a single ugly remark, but this single episode has been amplified by the media to the point that a casual observer might think that Republican rallies are typically Nazi-like hate-fests.

Meanwhile, the media turns a completely blind eye to the "discourse" on the left which is frequently as vile and hateful, and far more common, than anything you would find coming out of a GOP rally. No Republican sounds anything remotely like Barack Obama's pastor, the racist hate-monger Jeremiah Wright. Nothing any Republican has said or done is remotely similar to the movies made about assassinating Bush or the ugly things said about Todd and Sarah Palin. The media ignores the threats, for instance, by Sandra Bernhard who describes the grisly fate that awaits Governor Palin if she shows up in Bernhard's city.

Michelle Malkin lays out many of the disgusting details of what has become an almost typically despicable discourse emanating from the American secular left.

The Democrats and their supporters in the blogosphere, of course, are trying to intimidate the Republicans into so softening their criticism of Obama that it does no damage. They want McCain to lob marshmallows at their candidate. By failing to give any balance or perspective to the reports of howling mobs of frenzied, spittle-spitting Republicans, the media is doing their part to help the cause.

The irony in this is that, if anything, McCain has been far too timid in his willingness to cast a probing eye on Obama's associations with Ayers, Rezko, Wright, Pfleger, et al. He seems willing to allow his opponents to dictate what is acceptable criticism and what isn't.

It reminds me of the time I watched a hawk swoop down and seize a chipmunk. Once the chipmunk was caught it didn't even struggle, it just acquiesced in its fate. McCain has been acting like the chipmunk caught in Obama's talons. If he's not going to fight he ought never to have run for the nomination.

RLC

Oomph

Ramirez captures the plight of the American taxpayer:

If taxpayers feel squashed by free-falling corporate CEOs just wait until Obama gets into the White House. His promise that no one making under $250,000 will see a tax increase is very hard to believe.

If the Obama plan is implemented taxes will go up on almost every business in the country which means that employees will be laid off and prices will rise. Being unemployed and having to pay more for goods is just as much a tax increase as is having to pay the tax directly to the government.

RLC

Tackling a Taboo

ESPN's Jemele Hill dares to rush in where more timorous observers fear to tread. In a column at ESPN's Page 2 she wonders about something that everyone knows, but few are willing to talk about - the dearth of white running backs in major college and pro football.

Hill considers both the possibility that the disparity between white and black at some positions is due to a kind of discrimination as well as the possibility that it's due to genetic advantage, but, though she doesn't seem persuaded of the former possibility, she seems shy about drawing the full conclusions from her speculations about the latter explanation.

The idea that white football players are excluded from playing running back (or corner back) because of discrimination is silly. If whites had the talent to play these positions they'd be in them. It seems obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in sports that the ratio of whites to blacks at positions requiring speed is due to a difference in physical endowment that is racially linked. Blacks of West African ancestry are simply better suited, by virtue of their genetic gifts, for sports that require running and jumping.

Hill's article quotes a researcher who draws the right conclusion but then moonwalks away from it by asserting that genetic endowment is not a matter of race but a matter of one's ancestral environment. For example, people who come from high altitude regions, this researcher opines, are better suited for sports involving endurance. This, however, is flummery. It's like arguing that the lack of melanin in whites is not due to their race but due to having descended from people living in northern Europe. Regardless of how a race of people came to have the genetic characteristics they do it's simply nonsense to think those traits are not linked to their race.

Indeed, we've become so fearful of talking about race in this country that we are loath, like the people called out to gaze upon the emperor's new clothes, to note obvious truths even when no one doubts them. This seems absurd, perhaps, but there's a reason for it, maybe even a good reason.

Hill doesn't push her speculations this far, but it seems likely that we shrink from talking about the physical advantages that blacks have in sports like football and basketball because there's a very distasteful inference lying just down the road. If the success of blacks in certain sports is due to physical superiority then the inability of whites to compete with them is due to physical (i.e. genetic) inferiority. If we're intrepid enough to follow this inquiry further we find ourselves forced by consistency to acknowledge that the paucity of blacks in other areas of endeavor, like the technical fields and sciences, suggests a general inability to compete intellectually that must also be genetic. If the physical inferiority of whites is genetic then there's no reason to think that intellectual inferiority is not also genetic.

This is such an unwelcome conclusion, fraught as it is with so many unpleasant sociological implications and so vulnerable to abuse, that most people think it's safer to just not bring the matter up, which is why so few people ever remark out loud on the complete absence of white running backs in the NFL.

Hill's article makes a couple of bows to political correctitude but is overall an interesting read. It's certainly unusual that someone would be willing to take on this topic. I wonder what the reaction to her article would be had it not been written by an African-American woman.

RLC

Five Million Illegal Mortgages

Here's encouraging news:

Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It's not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.

The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.

One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.

So, let me see if I have this right. Millions of people are losing their life savings in part because many illegal aliens, whose presence in this country, we were told, will boost our economy, were not required to have any credit standing or social security number.

Unlike the financial debacle, which can largely be laid at the feet of Democrats, the illegal alien mess is truly non-partisan. Few in Washington, including the president and both of his would-be successors, have any inclination to do much about it. Like Nero, our political leadership is content to fiddle while Rome burns.

And it is burning. Illegals are placing an enormous burden on our police, hospitals, schools and other tax-payer funded facilities, especially in the southwest. Illegals kill thousands of Americans every year either by murder or by automobile accidents. Now it seems they're also partly responsible for the mortgage mess for which the tax-payers also have to pay.

No presidential candidate who shrugs his shoulders when confronted by this onslaught deserves to president. Unfortunately, one of them will be. At least McCain is willing to build the fence along the border. Obama isn't even interested in doing that.

RLC

Idiots?

A while ago we noted that Democrats were dependent upon the least educated members of our society for their electoral success and thus shouldn't asperse the intelligence of Republicans. We received a bit of criticism after this post for suggesting that idealistic young community organizers would be so cynical as to deliberately seek to exploit the poor and uneducated for political purposes. Well, read this:

In a confidential internal memorandum obtained by Face The State, the Colorado Democracy Alliance outlines a roster of "operatives" who worked for Democratic victory in the 2006 general election. The document outlines specific tasks for various members of the state's liberal infrastructure, including a campaign to "educate the idiots," assigned to the state's AFL-CIO union. Among the operation's intended targets: "minorities, GED's, drop-outs."

Individuals named in the document, marked "CONFIDENTIAL," "for internal use only," and "DO NOT DISTRIBUTE," are high-level elected Democrats including House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, former Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, as well as Gov. Bill Ritter's press aide and former campaign chief Evan Dreyer. All are specially marked as "off-the-record or covert."

It's interesting that these "progressives" regard their electoral base as "idiots". That's the same language that Lenin used to describe the people who swallowed communist propaganda and wrote favorably of the communist revolution in newspapers and magazines. Lenin reportedly referred to them as "useful idiots".

Read the whole report and you find nuggets like this which indicate that the agenda of the Colorado Democracy Alliance is not dissimilar from Lenin's:

Laurie Hirschfeld Zeller, the newly installed executive director of CoDA, explains her organization's mission. "Our job is to build a long-term progressive infrastructure in Colorado while we're conceding nothing in the short term in terms of progressive goals at the ballot box."

The Bell Policy Center, a liberal think tank involved with CoDA, was praised for its work fighting to dismantle Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights. She characterized Colorado's constitutional requirement for voter approval of tax increases as "arcane."

In the opinion of this left-wing progressive woman it's "arcane" to allow taxpayers to decide through the ballot whether they will be taxed and by how much. In other words, for her and others who share her ideological outlook representative, democratic government and political freedom is outdated and obsolete.

Liberals and Progressives, like the old Soviets, use words like "democracy" as code. What they mean by it is what the rest of us mean by "tyranny".

RLC

How to Steal an Election

CNN's Drew Griffin is doing some of the best investigative journalism of this election cycle. He's looked into the allegations of voter registration fraud against ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and shares his findings with Campbell Brown:

The "good" news is that ACORN is active in all of the battleground states. Good luck Senator McCain.

RLC

Klunky Comparison

Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were gleeful the other evening over a video (see below) which shows an Obama spokesperson named Robert Gibbs making an inept comparison between Obama's association with uncontrite terrorist Bill Ayers and Hannity's association with some unsavory guests on his show.

Apparently, Olbermann and Maddow think that somehow Gibbs' attempt to show that Hannity's asociation with his guests is no different than Obama's association with Ayers is successful, but it seems to me that a child could distinguish between the cases. Obama was allegedly friends, or at least friendly, with Ayers, they were exchanging e-mails and phone calls up to 2005. They are ideologically sympatico. Hannity is not connected to his more odious guests in any way except as an interviewer. How the two cases could justify the sort of snide contempt at which Olbermann is so adept is beyond me.

Take a look for yourself (first four minutes):

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Lieberman Dishes and Disses

Every conservative's favorite liberal senator, Joe Lieberman, has some thoughts on Barack Obama, the Democratic party, and his future in it:

Sen. Barack Obama's "na�ve" world view could embolden America's enemies during one of the most dangerous periods for America since the 1930s, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman told Newsmax in an exclusive television sit-down interview Tuesday.

Lieberman, visiting Fort Lauderdale, Fla., also told Newsmax that he is so disappointed with the Democratic Party, he will consider whether to bolt the Democratic Senate caucus next session.

"I believe he's na�ve to think that people like [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and Tehran will somehow become America's friends by talking to them - a warm embrace and a cup of tea. It's not going to work that way," said Lieberman.

In a wide-ranging interview, Lieberman also said:

� It's important for the political process to question Obama's ties to former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers: "I think these are very fair questions and it's now up to Senator Obama to answer them."

� Barack Obama is clearly 'not ready' yet to be commander in chief, and the country's adversaries, including Iran "will not fear him" if he were to become president.

� McCain should tout his economic plan that will emphasize tax cuts and job creation - exactly what a troubled economy needs. He said it would be foolhardy to raise taxes in a recession, as Obama has promised.

� The Republicans must emphasize that his plan for energy independence will create "hundreds of thousands, I think millions of new jobs."

"The Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party that I joined in the '60s under my hero President Kennedy, and it's not the Democratic Party of my dear friend Bill Clinton," Lieberman said.

You can read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

Day Labor

It might soon come to this:

RLC

The One

Alpha and Omega? Are these young men in their camouflage pants and military style drill arrogating to Obama the title by which God describes himself in Revelation 21:6?

Fascism often begins with paramilitary groups indoctrinating their members in a cult of personality. But fascism is not just paramilitaries investing a leader with a reverence usually reserved for the deity. It also involves propagandizing the young to regard the leader as a savior, the repository of all their hopes for a grand future. Watch this:

We are actually witnessing in the parents of these children an apotheosis, the promotion of a man with no record of achievement to Mt. Olympus. Maybe Obama himself is embarrassed by all this, maybe not, but it certainly says something important about many of the leftists who support him. Like the ancient Roman emperors, Obama has become more than a cult figure to them, even more than a savior. In the minds of the people who choreograph these performances he's sung and talked about in the same tones employed by religious people to sing and talk about God. It'd be funny if it weren't so serious. As it is it's truly scary.

Do rank and file Democrats not feel uneasy about this?

RLC

A Right to Health Care

In Tuesday night's debate Barack Obama surprised many viewers who had not yet fallen asleep by declaring that Americans have a right to health care. I wonder what he meant by that. Surely it's not a constitutional right, since nowhere in that document can we find such a right enumerated (of course, neither is it stated in the constitution that a woman has a right to kill her unborn child, but that omission doesn't mean much to liberals who reason that since it should be there we can safely act as if it is there).

Maybe Senator Obama meant that health care, or health insurance, is a human right, but, if so, where does he get that idea? It can only be a right of any kind if the rest of us are somehow obligated to provide it, but what could possibly obligate you to pay for my health insurance? Perhaps Obama derives the obligation from his Christian faith, but if so he's importing into the public square religious reasons for public policy, and that's illegitimate, as we've all come to learn from the good people at the ACLU.

Moreover, why would there be a human right to health insurance or care but not, say, to food or transportation or shelter? These are more basic needs than health insurance which many people can do without for years. Once we agree with Senator Obama that each of us has a right to be insured do we not also have to agree that the government, i.e. you and I, has a deeper obligation to provide everyone with a house, a car, and a full refrigerator?

Senator Obama has inadvertantly given us an object lesson in the injustice inherent in liberalism. Liberals, in order to win votes, persuade the masses that they will open up to them the public purse. This sort of demagoguery appeals to the great bulk of the population, but it's totally irresponsible and only encourages the masses to believe that they must also have a right to every other amenity in life. Of course, liberals encourage this thinking and believe it a grand act of compassion to take from those who work and give it to those who don't, or can't.

No one has a problem with helping those who are physically or mentally unable to help themselves, but the idea of helping those who choose not to help themselves, who make consistently bad choices in life and then expect the taxpayer to shield them from the consequences of those choices, rankles. The liberal solution, Obama's solution, is to tell us that the people who have worked hard and played by the rules have an obligation to support those who don't. A lot of folks see this as grossly unjust.

RLC

Civic Duty

Say Anything blog has an interesting statistic that reflects well on the civic virtue of the good people of Indianapolis. It turns out that 105% of eligible persons in that patriotic town and the surrounding county are actually registered to vote. The region has 644,197 people and 677,401 of them are registered to exercise the franchise in November. This is a very impressive feat.

We're sure it's a mere coincidence that the group ACORN, which is currently being investigated all across the country for voter fraud, has an office in Indianapolis, and that the Obama campaign's contribution of $800,000 to ACORN to help them get out the vote is an innocent misjudgment. Just saying.

RLC

No Life for Young Men

Back during the heyday of the debate over capital punishment opponents of the practice argued strenuously that offenders should be given life in prison without parole rather than be put to death. Advocates of the death penalty, on the other hand, argued just as fervently that once we end executions of murderers in favor of life in prison the "reformers" will next argue for imposing less draconian sentences so that ultimately no one will even get life in prison.

Jeff Hawkes, staff writer for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal offers an excellent illustration of how the debate over how to punish killers will evolve. He argues that juvenile murderers should not be sentenced to life in prison, but all of his reasons apply just as much to killers as old as thirty five. Hawkes writes that:

Pennsylvania has 444 juvenile lifers, according to a May report by Human Rights Watch. That's not only more - far more - than any other state, it represents nearly one-fifth of all juvenile lifers in the United States.

Considering that no other country sentences children to life without the chance for parole, Pennsylvania's Senate Judiciary Committee is appropriately taking a second look at whether life without parole for juveniles is just.

Family members of murder victims implored the senators at a hearing last week to keep teenage killers locked up forever. But juvenile law advocates and researchers argued that the right thing to do is give an adult who committed a horrible crime as a teenager a chance to show he or she is no longer a danger.

Hawkes thinks that as long as a killer is no longer a danger to others he should be let loose, but if we accept this logic why impose a sentence at all? As soon the inmate convinces a panel of "experts" that he's rehabilitated why not release him forthwith? Indeed, those who have killed others in crimes of passion or revenge are probably not a threat to the general population in the first place so why incarcerate them at all?

He goes on to write that:

Beatriz Luna, associate professor of psychiatry at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said research suggests that teens should not be held as accountable as adults for their actions because the juvenile brain, particularly the region for impulse control, is not fully developed.

Research further suggests, Luna said, that the brains of people in their 20s and 30s continue to develop new pathways, indicating "great possibility for rehabilitation."

"...the fact is the adolescent brain is at the peak of risk-taking behavior, and it can be rehabilitated. My opinion as a scientist and as a member of society is that life without parole is quite uninformed (and) seems vindictive."

Well, if this is a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on juveniles then it's equally a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on anyone under thirty-five. Is that where Hawkes is headed with his argument?

Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of "Rethinking Juvenile Justice," said brain processes responding to pleasure and reward are especially active in early adolescence, explaining why teens see the rewards of risky behavior and ignore the costs.

"The engines are running at full throttle," Steinberg said, "but there's not a skilled driver behind the wheel yet."

Hawkes concludes that "science and compassion are on the side of giving a lifer hope of showing a parole board he's not who he was at 13".

Of course the killer's not who he was when he was thirteen. No one is. No one at thirty is who they were when they were twenty. Everybody changes. Hawkes' argument is really a brief for doing away with life sentences altogether. First we stop executions, then we end life terms. What's next on this particular slippery slope? Doing away with prison?

RLC

ZZZZZZZZ

In what was otherwise a snoozer of a debate last night the most startling revelation to emerge was Senator Obama's statement that he would go to war with Iran to keep them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the clear implication of his assertion that we cannot let Iran have nuclear weapons and that, though we should try sanctions, etc., etc., he would not take the use of military force off the table.

Add this to his stated policy of surging troops in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban/al Qaeda who threaten to undo all that has been accomplished there, and his claim that we should invade Pakistan to get bin Laden, and those who saw Obama has the great anti-war hope must be seething with disappointment and frustration. Obama presented himself early on in the primaries as an anti-war progressive and garnered a lot of support from the constituency to which that position appeals. Now he turns out to be something quite other than what he originally appeared. In fact, with his threat to attack Iran, he seems to be a proponent of the "Bush doctrine" of striking an enemy who is preparing to strike us.

I have a word of encouragement, though, for those who may be feeling betrayed by Obama's willingness to bomb a nation that has not attacked us: Don't worry. I doubt very much if the senator really means what he's saying. He may think he does, but I believe the real Obama is the Obama of the early primaries, not the Obama of the campaign's homestretch.

As for the rest of the debate, the candidates were simply treading water. No one did badly, but not doing badly does not help McCain. McCain simply lacks the instincts necessary to wage a come from behind race. To be sure, he was hindered by the blandness of the questions selected by the moderator, Tom Brokaw who apparently turned aside any questions about illegal immigration, abortion, Obama's unsavory associations, or judicial appointments.

Even so, McCain needs to show the country what Barack Obama and the Democratic party will do to the nation should they get the power, and he doesn't seem to have the stomach for that. He didn't seem interested, for example, in explaining to viewers that the worst financial crisis this nation has experienced since the depression of the 1930s is due almost entirely to Democrat malfeasance. Maybe he should have Sarah Palin pinch hit for him at the last debate as a sort of designated debater. At least she won't go gently into that dark night of political defeat and oblivion.

RLC

SNL

Saturday Night Live did a funny skit on the financial crisis which pretty much puts the blame on everyone, but especially congressional Democrats, bad credit risks, greedy yuppies and liberal moneybags. The skit was pulled from the SNL website, evidently because of pressure from somewhere, but it was caught by patdollard and can be viewed there. It's pretty good.

RLC

Obama and Ayers

This story by Dinitia Smith on William Ayers appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks on New York and Washington. It gives us good look at who Ayers is, and although both he and his wife try in the article to soften the ugliness of some of their earlier pronouncements, one wonders if this is out of genuine regret or if it's simply a public relations move. Here are a couple of the most salient paragraphs:

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article also gives us insight into Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn:

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

Other reports recount how Ms Dohrn flashed a three finger salute to the crowd to symbolize the fork.

Ayers and his wife are past associates of Barack Obama. Among other things, they hosted him in their living room when he launched his campaign for the Illinois senate and served on several boards with him. Obama's campaign is trying to minimize the connection, while admitting that they were friendly, but the relationship seems to have been closer than they're letting on.

This is important, not because it suggests that Obama is sympathetic to terrorism, but because it reflects on his judgment, the sort of people he is drawn to, and the sort of people who might find their way into his administration.

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were learned that John McCain was supported by, and worked closely with, an unrepentant abortion clinic bomber. I feel quite certain that the media would go ballistic and insist that this association alone would disqualify him from being president of the U.S. Yet much of the media seems completely unconcerned that Obama was involved with Ayers and Dohrn who bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

UPDATE: CNN, of all people, has done a piece which pretty much shows that Obama and Ayers were pretty tight back in Chicago. I'm sure that this kind of reporting is not going to be popular with CNN's viewership, but Drew Griffen is to be commended for doing real investigative journalism. He'll probably be looking for a new job next week:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Religulous

Christianity Today reviews Bill Maher's polemic against religion and finds it amusing but ultimately frivolous.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

Honestly, it's not the hardest thing in the world to make a religion look silly when you only focus on the kitschiest, most grimace-inducing practitioners of it. Sure, we have to own up to these unfortunate (but fortunately fringe) elements within our ranks, but Maher shores up little credibility for his cause by refusing to talk with any opponent with an ounce of nuance of theological rigor.

Like schoolyard bullies who always pick on the kids least able to defend themselves, people like Maher always seem to mock those who are least able to articulate their beliefs or whose beliefs are the most outlandish. They never seem to have much appetite for engaging those who are their intellectual betters because they doubtless realize at some level the damage that would do to their project of embarrassing religious belief. Indeed, the Bill Mahers of the world probably realize that were they to pick on those who've actually thought about their religious convictions they themselves would be the ones who'd wind up looking silly.

RLC

Racism!

Did you know that any criticism of Senator Obama's former associations is a form of racism? It's true, at least if Douglass Daniel of the AP is an authority on such matters. Writing of Sarah Palin's reference to Obama as having palled around with terrorists the racially sensitive Daniel espies racism lurking in the weeds:

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain's purpose so well. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

This is absurd, of course, but what better way is there to discredit someone than to accuse them of racism? Whites, especially white liberals, generally cower in fear at the charge, but though it may have McCain's advisors trembling, I don't think it'll deter SarahCuda.

The fact is that Obama has mingled with an unsavory cast of characters (a Weatherman terrorist, an Islamic terrorist financier, a felon, a bigoted preacher), and these are facts of which the electorate should be made aware. If we're known by the company we keep the American public should be informed of what kind of people Obama has gravitated toward. If calling these associations to attention be racism then the word no longer has any meaning.

Patterico has more examples of the promiscuous use of the incendiary term against critics of the man who is the leftmost candidate for president since 1946.

RLC

Any Questions?

Why we are where we are:

Now let's all turn out in November and reward the people who caused this mess by putting their party in the White House. That makes sense, doesn't it?

RLC

With Friends Like This...

Barney Frank deserves to be pilloried for his role in the financial crisis we're now facing, but people like Bill O'Reilly are obviously not the ones to do it. This video is an embarrassment to those who agree with O'Reilly's point but think that a much more effective case could be made against Frank and the Democrats by calmly and rationally explaining it rather than acting like a three year-old having a tantrum in the sandbox:

The lesson here is that we need to carry on our discourse in ways that are polite, courteous, and calm. We persuade no one by yelling at them and calling them cowards. Nor do we impress our listeners if they're repelled by our belligerence and name-calling, which any decent person would be. It's disgusting when the left does it, and it's no less so when it comes from the right.

This is not to say that there's no place for anger. There is, but if we want to persuade others to our point of view our anger should be controlled. Anyone who doesn't understand the issue in this video, and who doesn't know the players, is going to find Barney Frank a much more sympathetic character than Bill O'Reilly, and that would be unfortunate, at least it would be if you believe that conservative ideas must prevail if our nation is going to survive.

People like O'Reilly (and Michael Savage) succeed only in making the task of conservatism's opponents that much easier.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff (Pt. III)

In his essay titled Without God physicist Stephen Weinberg says this:

[I] do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications-it's still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.

Set aside the pomposity and self-righteousness implied by his claim to be a moral exemplar. He's being hopelessly naive when he says that belief in a transcendent creator has no moral implications. Unless there is a transcendent moral authority there simply is nothing that obligates or binds us to act in any way beyond how we feel like acting. There's nothing that makes kindness better than cruelty. Both kindness and cruelty are simply things some people prefer, like they prefer a particular flavor of ice cream. We may like or dislike the behaviors we label kind and cruel, just as we like or dislike a particular flavor of ice cream, but as with the ice cream, there's nothing wrong with them.

Weinberg then adds this:

As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing....Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation-that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking-with good humor, but without God.

So atheism amounts to this: We are like a lone man lost in a wilderness and facing certain death. We can face our predicament bravely or not, but which we choose isn't going to change anything and doesn't much matter. And why worry about bravery? What makes bravery a virtue? The fact that other people admire it? People admire a lot of things in others that are not virtuous, what makes bravery different?

Atheists like Weinberg adjure us to face the absurdity of life with a smile on our face, but it's the smile of a clown. It's there but there's an incongruity between the smile and the emptiness and despair that lurks behind it. The smile is a mask that tries to send the message that one's life means something when in fact anyone who thinks about it knows that it doesn't.

Thanks to Logan Gage at EN&N for calling Weinberg's essay to our attention. See here and here for additional posts on Weinberg's Without God.

RLC

Hezbollah?

Senator Biden is often praised for his extensive foreign policy experience but that experience is of little moment if he doesn't know what's going on in the world's hot spots. In his debate with Governor Palin the senator took some swipes at the Bush policy in Palestine and along the way delivered himself of the asseveration that we and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon and that he and Senator Obama urged that NATO fill the void.

I haven't a clue as to what he's talking about, and neither, I suspect, did he. Lots of other folks are wondering about it, too. It's as if Biden just made this up on the spur of the moment.

He made a number of other erroneous statements during the debate, but this one is perhaps the most bizarre. Check out the link.

Maybe he was thinking of something else and got confused in the spotlights, but the point is that after this debate there should be no more gibes at Sarah Palin's relative lack of knowledge about the world.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff (Pt. II)

In his article Without God which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Physicist Stephen Weinberg paints a bleak and depressing picture of a life without God, but seeks to redeem that portrait by urging us to enjoy a drop or two of honey before we dissolve into the void of nothingness. Weinberg urges us to be brave, but his prescription is really a form of denial. He tells us that human life is pointless and absurd so we should embrace...poetry. He adds that poetry doesn't need God for its inspiration:

We see already that little English-language poetry written in the past few decades owes anything to belief in God, and in some cases where religion does enter, as with poets like Stevie Smith or Philip Larkin, it is the rejection of religion that provides their inspiration.

Perhaps, but whether the poet loves God or hates him he is still fascinated by him and this fascination is what inspires his art. If it weren't for God what would these poets write about? Weinberg seems to think that a culture can produce great art without God and perhaps it can produce some, but if the art and literature which has been inspired by God, either positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, were removed from our museums and libraries, there would be precious little of value left.

Moreover, we are justified in wondering, where are the great artists from those countries which are officially atheistic? Who are the men and women of genius in those countries whose work is completely indifferent to God and yet rises to the level of greatness? Most of the great writers who emerged behind the iron curtain, for example, were religious dissidents. The record of official state atheism does little to inspire optimism that Weinberg's assessment of atheist art is correct. If history is a guide, it seems more likely that atheism stifles and impedes creativity and artistic genius.

I'll have a little more to say about Weinberg's essay tomorrow.

RLC

Sarahcuda

Last night's debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin was remarkable. Biden seemed the more knowledgeable and yet, according to some analysts, he made at least ten misstatements of fact. Palin may also have made some errors but, despite having to rely frequently on her notes, she turned in a stunning performance. She was up against a man who has been involved in such debates in three different presidential campaigns, including the recent Democratic primary. Palin has been on the national stage for about five weeks, yet she not only held her own against the 35 year veteran of Congress, but she came across as a very appealing candidate.

Biden had only to avoid embarrassing himself in order to pass muster (though he certainly exceeded that minimal requirement,) but Palin had to show the country that she was smart, knowledgeable, charming and competent. She had to show that she belonged on the stage with Senator Biden. She did all of that, and by so doing she probably pulled McCain's bacon out of the fire for a second time within a month.

His campaign was beginning to falter going into the convention and Palin's speech at that event turned it around. Then, after McCain moved into a slight lead, the financial crisis hit and the attacks on Palin piled atop her distressing appearances with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, began to sap the original excitement she generated. McCain could not overcome these problems in his debate with Obama, which was considered an approximate draw, and it looked as if his campaign was about to fade into oblivion. Indeed, NBC analyst Chuck Todd just yesterday declared the race essentially over.

But after last night I'm not so sure. It's not that Biden lost, rather it's that Palin seemed to reassure a lot of people that the calumnies leveled against her abilities were unwarranted, and her disappointing performances in her interviews with Gibson and Couric were correctable stumbles. She re-energized a lot of Republicans last night and probably wooed more than a few independents and undecideds to her side.

We'll have to wait to see what the polls show to be sure, but I'll be surprised if McCain doesn't get a bit of a bump from Palin's performance last night.

A final thought: It occured to me as I watched the debate that the country would be better served if the two debaters, Biden and Palin, headed their respective tickets. Isn't it ironic, for instance, that we may elect in November a man to be commander-in-chief who, because of his past associations with terrorists, would probably otherwise be denied a top security clearance by the CIA or FBI?

RLC

What If

In a fun parody, Victor Davis Hanson at NRO puts all of Joe Biden's howlers and other goofy utterances in the mouth of Sarah Palin and tacitly invites the reader to wonder what her treatment from the media would be like if she had said half the dumb things that Biden has said.

Tonight Sarah Palin will debate Joe Biden (in an event moderated by Gwen Ifil who has a big financial stake in a Biden win). I was thinking about this debate today and the treatment that Palin has gotten from the media and the left-wing blogs, and the thought occurred to me that it's a wonder that any good person runs for elective office in this country. Fine people like Palin are ridiculed and treated with contempt by the Charles Gibsons of the world while crooks, scam artists, buffoons and perverts like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, William Jefferson, Nancy Pelosi and many others get a complete pass from the media. Why do good people subject themselves to the abuse and humiliation they must endure to serve the people when others who have no business being seated in Congress are never examined, never questioned, never exposed because they happen to be members of the correct party?

I suppose it's true that when the people in a democracy don't take the time to find out what their political leadership is doing, and who they are, they wind up with the politicians they deserve.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff

I have on many previous occasions argued here at Viewpoint that an atheistic worldview leads to nihilism, or it would if the atheist were consistent with his fundamental assumption that there is no God. Our worldview is like a train which, once we climb aboard, heads off toward a particular destination. The terminus toward which the atheistic train is bound is a yawning abyss of despair and nihilism. If one stays on the train all the way one inevitably plunges into the chasm. Few are willing to go all the way, however, so, once they see the abyss looming ahead, they jump off the train.

Atheistic physicist Stephen Weinberg, in an article in The New York Times Review of Books titled Without God, looks down the track and espies clearly the cliff over which his atheism will plunge him:

[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. What, then, can we do?

Weinberg is about to jump off the train. He won't give up his atheism, but he can't bear to follow it to its logical endpoint either.

So he urges his readers to embrace humor, beauty, pleasure, and moral virtue despite the fact that there's no non-arbitrary reason why anyone should do so and no reason to think that these could inject any real meaning into the otherwise dreary ordeal of life. Weinberg's answer reminds me of a parable that Leo Tolstoy tells in his Confessions:

"There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself the traveler gets into a waterless well; but at the bottom of it he sees a dragon with its jaws wide open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon, so he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on; and he sees two mice, one black and one white, gradually making their way round the stem of the wild plant on which he is hanging, nibbling it through. The plant will soon give way and break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish; but, while still hanging, he looks around him, and, finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches his tongue and licks them.

"Thus do I cling to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why such tortures have fallen to my lot. I also strive to suck the honey which once comforted me, but this honey no longer rejoices me, while the white mouse and the black, day and night, gnaw through the branch to which I cling. I see the dragon plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet. I see the dragon, from which there is no escape, and the mice, and I cannot turn my eyes away from them. It is no fable, but a living, undeniable truth, to be understood of all men...."

Weinberg, like many atheists, is like the man in the well about to die but somehow persuading himself that licking the honey has some point to it.

RLC

Sowell on the Bailout

Thomas Sowell explains why the collapse of Freddie and Fannie is not a failure of free market economics but rather a predictable consequence of government involving itself in the marketplace. He says, for example, that:

[V]oters [don't] deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Sowell also explains briefly why it's wrongheaded to try to blame this crisis on the Bush administration. It's a good op-ed but the page on which it's found seems to take a while to load. Nevertheless, it's worth the wait.

RLC

Dissing the Classics

Eleanor Bourg Donlon laments what she sees as a growing disinterest among the young for reading the classics, particularly Dickens and Shakespeare, and she places the blame squarely on classroom teachers, both secondary and college:

The true stage for the anti-Dickens crusade is the classroom. The uninspired pessimism of high-school teachers blights the young receptacle, already numbed into thinking that the Harry Potter series is "quality literature." Jack thinks Sydney Carton is a sap, and Jill doesn't have the foggiest idea what is wrong with Miss Havisham. They agree, however, that the assignment is boring, and they wait longingly for the day when they can escape the class altogether. And so the teachers say, "No one really likes Dickens but we have to read him." Or "Dickens is depressing, but that was because all the Victorians were repressed." Or "Dickens was paid by the word, that's why he wrote such long books." (The last is not only an appalling misunderstanding of Dickensian prose, it is apocryphal. Dickens was paid by the installment, not by the word-a fact that does illuminate much of the structure of the novels.)

Meanwhile, in the universities, Dickens and his characters are accused of homoeroticism, incest, misogyny, and so on: an infamous parade of unseemly sins. Beyond these torrid projections, Dickens is condemned as too sentimental for cynical modernity, too preachy for tolerant modernity, and too prosy for innocent undergraduate eyes. Young students are distracted with Woolf and Joyce and oversexed interpretations of Shakespeare.

I suspect Donlon exaggerates her case at least a little. The teachers of literature that I know best love the classics and teach them with a contagious verve and affection. Even so, those closer to the literature class, whether teacher or student, would be in a better position than I to assess the accuracy of Donlon's indictment.

Her essay is worth reading in its entirety.

RLC

Conflict of Interest

Suppose you were running for high office and were to debate your opponent in front of the entire nation. Would you think it fair that the moderator of the debate stands to make a great deal of money if your opponent wins the election but earn nothing if your opponent loses? Probably not, but this is the situation Sarah Palin will find herself in during tomorrow night's debate with Joe Biden.

The moderator, Gwen Ifil, has written a book about Barack Obama which is due to be released in January right around inauguration day. If Obama is the man being inaugurated, Ifil will probably sell a lot of copies. If Obama has lost the election no one is likely to be interested in her book. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which invited her to moderate, committed a gross error in judgment and, for her part, she should have declined their offer.

The fact that she will be asking the questions means that she is in a position to influence the outcome of the proceedings. Her tone, her inflection, the kind of questions she asks, can all work to the advantage or disadvantage of one or the other debater. A moderator is supposed to be disinterested, but Gwen Ifil is surely not disinterested.

No one who has a financial stake in the outcome should be permitted to be in this position any more than a basketball official who has bet on the game should be allowed to officiate it.

For more on this go here.

RLC

Thoughts on a "Crisis"

Yesterday's events provoke a few desultory thoughts:

How long will it be before the rest of the media starts informing viewers of the facts surrounding our financial crisis (see video below)? And why, if it truly is such a crisis, did Congress take the next two days off for Rosh Hashana? If the situation is as dire as we've been told that it is wouldn't we expect Congress to work on Christmas day, if need be, to get it resolved? Why are Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank blaming Republicans for not getting the bailout passed when 40% (95) of House Democrats voted against it? If only 11 of those Democrats had voted for the measure instead of against it it would have passed. I'm not saying that that would have been a good thing, understand, but it's hard to blame the other party when so many of one's own party didn't vote the way one thinks they should have voted.

The fact that neither Pelosi (nor Obama) seemed to work very hard to get her caucus to support the bailout plan and the fact that the Democrats adjourned for a two day holiday suggests to me that this "crisis" is more a political ploy than a serious immediate threat to our economy. Either that or the Democratic leadership is even more irresponsible than I thought they were.

Here's an interview you can expect never to see on MSNBC:

RLC

Obama's Gestapo

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned Senator Obama's attempt to intimidate and squelch free speech by prosecuting those who produce ads that the Obama campaign doesn't like. Now comes an organized attempt in Missouri to use police and prosecutors to respond to ads the campaign deems to be unfair.

This is unconscionable, and, as we said in the earlier post, it reveals something truly frightening about the Obama mindset and what an Obama presidency would be like. No politician has any business recruiting law enforcement personnel to serve as truth squads. The only purpose this could have would be to frighten people away from voicing their opinion. By threatening people with litigation or police scrutiny for speaking their mind, Obama is bringing gestapo tactics into the political arena. This is precisely what totalitarian governments do, it's a first step on the road to tyranny, and it has no place in our politics. It's amazing to me, or would be if I hadn't come to expect it, that the liberal media is letting him get away with this. Where are the media guardians of free speech?

Watch the news clip about this here, and go to Hot Air for more.

It seems to me that Obama has handed John McCain's people a tremendous gift. This news clip should be turned into an ad and played around the clock in every battle ground state in the nation so that voters see that, as Jonah Goldberg says, liberalism really is fascism with a smiley face.

RLC

Diplomatic Genius

In the midst of trying to arrive at a bipartisan plan to save our economy Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi decided to go to the well of the House and blame the Republicans for the entire mess. By choosing at this delicate moment to resort to partisan attacks against them, and accusing Republicans of being the cause of the crisis, she so angered GOP congressmen that a number of them recanted on their agreement to hold their nose and vote for the bailout. Consequently, it failed to pass 207-226.

I don't know what she was thinking, but it appears that she wasn't thinking at all. It should also be noted that, as the following post makes clear, any attempt to blame this crisis on Republicans reflects either ignorance, stupidity or dishonesty. No one who occupies the Speaker's chair could possibly be ignorant of the facts so we're left with some rather unfortunate alternatives regarding Nancy Pelosi.

RLC

Where the Blame Lies

Anyone following the news this past week will probably have heard Democrats and other liberals repeatedly blaming the Republicans for the current financial crisis. The historical fact is, however, that Republicans have tried on several occasions to rein in these institutions and have been forcefully resisted by Democrats who wanted banks to be forced to give mortgages to people who couldn't afford them and for taxpayers to essentially guarantee those loans.

This video is from a 2004 congressional hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets. It leaves no doubt that the Democratic members chose to attack the credibility of the regulator rather than take any action against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or their CEO's whom they chose to defend.

Watch the whole thing and the next time you hear someone try to blame the current mess on the Bush administration dare them to watch it as well:

Here's a rich irony. The very same people who preferred to beat up on the regulating agency at this hearing, Barney Frank and his fellow Democrats, now run the committee and are the same people to whom is entrusted the task of designing legislation to solve the problem.

Here's another irony. More people trust Barack Obama to fix this crisis than trust John McCain despite the fact that Obama has accepted more money in the last two and a half years from Freddie and Fannie than any other politician except Democrat senator Chris Dodd and despite the fact that he numbers among his economic advisers the two men most responsible for the corruption at these two institutions, Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. It's hard not to be cynical about the intelligence of the American voter.

For more background on this video go here.

RLC

Palin's Qualifications

There's lots of concern that Sarah Palin's inexperience and lack of intellectual polish disqualify her from being just a heartbeat away from the presidency. A common rejoinder to this is to point out that Obama has even less relevant experience than does Palin, but there's another comparison I've never seen called to our attention that should be. Nancy Pelosi is only two heartbeats away from the presidency and there are probably few people in government less qualified for the Oval Office than she. Those who complain that it's painful to listen to Palin stumble through her interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson ought to be made to sit and listen to Nancy Pelosi's brutal assaults on both logic and veracity.

If the woman who appears in this video is qualified to be Speaker of the House then Sarah Palin is eminently qualified to be vice-president:

What Pelosi said about Republicans being opposed to contraception is nonsense, of course, but her statements about the teaching of the Catholic Church are even worse. See here for the Church's response:

This video also has some interesting discussion of Obama's claim that pro-lifers are lying about him having voted against a bill that would have protected children from infanticide. It's old news, I know, but it's good to be reminded of this stuff now and then.

RLC

Above His Pay Grade

The science journal Nature worries that a creationist may inveigle her way into the White House and then all will be lost:

The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin. Sarah Palin, Alaska's governor and McCain's running mate, opposes all research into human embryonic stem cells. She is a creationist....

But there's still hope. Barack Obama may ride to our aid and rescue us from the calamity of having a vice-president who thinks that students should be able to discuss the issues involved in the debate and decide for themselves what to believe rather than being told what to believe. Nature interviewed Barack Obama on this issue. Here's what they said about his response:

Contrast that with Obama's statement on page 448, in which Nature asked him about the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. It is not easy to address students' questions about evolution without falling prey to the false notion of 'teaching the controversy', as the Royal Society's director of education discovered last week in a public-relations meltdown (see 'Creation and classrooms'). But Obama could not be more clear: "I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny," he wrote.

Isn't it odd that Barack Obama didn't think questions about the philosophy of science to be above his pay grade? Anyway, maybe someone will ask our science educator-in-chief whether he thinks ideas like string theory and the multiverse should be excluded from physics classes.

RLC

Trivial Pursuit

Well, most of the commentary I consulted last night had John McCain winning his debate with Barack Obama. Given my political leanings I guess I should be pleased about this, but I'm not, particularly. I want to ask these people how they define a win. The experts I heard and read mentioned fine points of delivery, factual errors by Obama, a little testiness showing around the Illinois senator's mouth, a level of disrespect manifested by his calling McCain by his first name, and on and on. I find all this very annoying. I personally feel presidential debates, as they're usually conducted, are a waste of time and especially so if the winner is decided on the sort of scoring that would be more appropriate to a high school speech and debate tournament or a beauty contest.

We're electing neither a debater-in-chief nor a beauty queen. An error or two, a stumble or stammer, mean nothing in terms of the kind of president a candidate would make. The media treats these events as if they were dancing competitions and whoever scores the most style points in the dance wins the prize.

Much of the post-debate television commentary centered around whether either man committed a blunder or got off a zinger, as if McCain and Obama were auditioning for a comedy club rather than the White House. Undecided voters watch the debates looking for the slightest reason not to vote for one candidate or the other, and the criteria they use are often totally irrelevant to a man's qualifications to be president. Richard Nixon fared poorly in the first ever television debate with John Kennedy in 1960 because he had a "5 o'clock shadow" and visibly sweated from the hot studio lights. JFK, on the other hand, seemed cool, calm, and vigorous even though he was debilitated by back pain that his handlers managed to conceal from the public. Viewers later reported that they voted for Kennedy because he "looked more attractive".

The media, by the way they stage and analyze these dog and pony shows, implicitly encourage us to evaluate our candidates in terms of their personality, eloquence, charm, grace and appearance, none of which are particularly indicative of the kind of president a man would be. We're manipulated by the media into electing a celebrity rather than a leader. It's as shallow as it is depressing.

Last March I wrote the following post. I repeat it today, slightly edited, because I think it's even more timely now than it was then:

The media continue to trivialize our politics by treating the presidential campaign as though it were a board game in which gaffes, scandals, missteps and debate zingers all get tallied up to delight the talking heads and newspaper columnists. Meanwhile, the voting public wishes they'd grow up and start doing their job. They can begin by pressing the candidates to answer some urgent questions and holding their feet to the fire until they do. Here are five questions with which each candidate should be confronted at the earliest opportunity, and they should be badgered for answers every time they make a public appearance until they finally produce them:

1) The National Intelligence Estimate notwithstanding, the consensus seems to be that Iran is still engaged in the production of a nuclear device. The Iranians have threatened to use such a weapon against Israel once they have it. What will you do if Iran (or North Korea, for that matter) persists in pursuing a nuclear weapon? Please do not answer that you will sit down and talk with their leaders. The question presupposes that all such diplomatic efforts have failed. How far are you prepared to go to stop Iran or North Korea from obtaining a nuclear weapon?

2) The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the falling dollar have placed us on the verge of a global economic recession. What, precisely, will you do about the crisis we are facing? Please don't answer with platitudes about "hope" and "change", "yes, we can", and "mavericks". What measures will you take, that the Bush administration has not taken, to fix the problem?

3) Illegal immigrants are flooding into this country and placing enormous burdens upon our schools, hospitals, justice system, and welfare system. What, if anything, do you propose to do to stop the flow of illegal immigration? Please be specific. Telling us that we must secure our border is vague and unhelpful. Please state exactly what you propose to do, if anything, to secure the border.

4) Please name a Supreme Court justice, current or former, who would be most similar to a nominee that you would select for the court or federal bench should the opportunity arise during your presidency.

5) Exactly how do you propose that we achieve energy independence from the Middle East? Do you believe such independence is possible without exploiting the petroleum resources we have within our own borders and without building more nuclear power plants?

If the media neglect to ask these questions and to demand answers they will have failed to meet their responsibility to the public. If the questions are asked, but the candidates refuse to give clear answers then the candidates will have failed the voters, who will be given little upon which to base a responsible vote.

RLC

Genesis of a Crisis

Here's a quick course on how the financial crisis came about and why the Democrats in Congress dare not blame Republicans for it. Even so, if more Republicans had been doing their job when they controlled both chambers of Congress Democratic efforts to block reform would not have been successful.

It's worth the time to watch this, but when I say it's a quick course I mean that it helps to be a speed reader:

RLC

Irrational Belief

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate, and more civilized society. This article in the Wall Street Journal, however, throws a bucket of ice water on that piece of mythology. Here's an excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

It has been clear to most evangelicals for a long time that the people likeliest to believe the craziest things were not Christians but those who had forsaken belief in the Judeo-Christian God. As G.K. Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

RLC

The Obama Test

A friend passes along the Obama Test. It's a survey to see how closely one's views hew to those of Barack Obama. Some of the questions are poorly framed, and some lead too obviously toward a desired answer, but even so it gives a good idea of where Senator Obama stands on a wide range of issues. You can take the survey here.

I found that the senator and I agreed about 4% of the time.

RLC

More on the Bailout

Donald Luskin at NRO writes on the administration's $700 billion bailout of the financial markets that, "To arrive at a principled view on this intervention, we must answer three critical questions: Is it necessary? Will it work? And even then, is it morally justifiable?"

Good questions, these. Go here for Luskin's thoughts on them.

I do not profess to know the ins and outs of the mess we're evidently in, but I do have a thought on any package put together to get us out of it. In my view any such proposal must have four elements: It must ensure that the taxpayers reap whatever profit is made from the investment of the $700,000,000. It must ensure that people working for the financial institutions that receive our largesse are fired and given no severance compensation. It must not help those who defaulted on speculative mortgages nor assist illegal aliens whose mortgages, apparently a significant number, are in default. The taxpayer should not be compelled to underwrite speculators nor buy houses for illegals. Thirdly, there needs to be a provision set up to establish a grand jury to investigate the relationships between the failed firms and Washington politicians, particularly Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd.

Our economy is on the brink of total collapse in large part because politicians and bureaucrats pressured banks to give loans to high risk buyers, congress and the SEC refused to impose any constraints on the practice, and CEOs of major lending institutions were only too happy to go along because they were making a fortune.

None of these guilty parties should be absolved of their culpability for their derelictions, irresponsibility, and greed.

RLC