Letter of Amends

Robin is a self-described "recovering liberal from Berkeley" who writes her family and friends a letter of apology for all the unpleasantness she put them through before the scales fell from her eyes. It's good, especially the second half where she explains what brought about her epiphany.

Here's the nut of it:

In February of 2008, I saw a new client, a bright and sensitive young woman who came in looking like she just escaped a war zone. In some ways she had; she had innocently shared with others at her job that she voted for Hillary rather than Obama. Immediately she was being targeted for abuse that put her in fear for not only her job, but her life.

We both suddenly became aware that something had grown really dark in the Democratic Party. I started hearing about many other incidents where loyal Democrats were being physically and emotionally threatened for supporting Hillary. A woman in Berkeley had her front window broken because it displayed a poster of Hillary. Randi Rhodes, an Air America talk show leftist, called Hillary a f______ witch. (Rhodes was recently promoted to a national talk radio show, illustrating another disturbing trend: the deafening silence about what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed the new "thug-ocracy.)

An acquaintance had her car broken into, and the only item stolen was a NoObama bumper sticker. A South Park episode featured an episode where a nuclear weapon was being aimed at Hillary's genitals. My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary "nutcracker." When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

Things went from bad to worse when Sarah Palin entered the scene. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President, there was no debasement of her character, no sexual threats. But with Palin, a full scale "wilding" ensued that chillingly reminded me of the random sexual attacks on women by gangs of men in New York. She was called every vile name in the book by both male and female liberals.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin's church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama's church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin's voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn't supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.

Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don't PC on me.

Robin concludes with these questions:

But now the problem is: how in the world does one be a conservative these days? How to stay brave and committed when conservatives are being targeted, punished, and shunned on a daily basis? How to sleep at night knowing that the country I have finally come to love may be destroyed from within by a massive Big Brother government?

Maybe one reason the Democratic party has shifted so far toward the hard left is that a lot of intelligent people like Robin, people who sincerely believed that liberalism held the answers to our problems, have been so repulsed by the tactics of the ACORNs and the antics of the Keith Olbermanns that in order to preserve their own sense of self-dignity and integrity they just have to dissociate themselves from it all and leave the party to the leftists. Maybe.

RLC

Agile or Indolent?

Changing one's mind is indicative of one of two things: intellectual nimbleness (i.e. the ability to change course in light of new evidence) or intellectual laziness (a failure to think matters through in the first place). When the change of mind occurs only occasionally we may assume the cause is an agile mind. When it happens frequently it's more likely due to the latter cause. In the president's case I'm not sure yet which it is, but his switches seem to be occurring with uncomfortable frequency, at least in matters bearing on national defense.

We noted earlier Mona Charen's recitation of some of them, and now Jake Tapper of ABC informs us that Obama has had yet another change of heart.

President Obama defended his decision to fight the release of photos showing detainee abuse Wednesday afternoon, saying it would only put American troops in harm's way and create a backlash against Americans.

"The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger," the president said before departing on his trip to Arizona. "Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse."

The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

In other words, the Obama administration is going to fight against releasing the photos even if it means going to court and even if it means opposing the ACLU.

This is a good decision. Indeed, in almost every instance where the president has flipped I think he's come down on the side of doing the right thing, but it's worrisome that he could not see it was the right thing until after he had made so much political hay promising the left he would do the wrong thing. Did he really think through those promises before he made them or was he just iterating the knee-jerk positions of his leftist constituency? Do his tergiversations suggest that the president is intellectually gifted or intellectually lazy?

If it is the first we have cause to be hopeful. If it's the second we have cause to be alarmed.

RLC

SCOTUS Pick

There's been much speculation as to who President Obama will pick to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. There seems to be agreement that the nominee will probably be a woman, an African-American, someone relatively young with legal experience and leftist views of the importance of the Constitution.

Given all this there's one obvious candidate who meets all the criteria and who would have the nomination simply by asking, yet her name has never been mentioned: Mrs. Obama. You heard it here first.

RLC

Saving What's Left

New Scientist comments upon the parlous state in which many species of birds find themselves due primarily to the loss of their habitat:

Darwin would not be amused. A bird native to the Galapagos islands, the medium tree-finch, this year joined 191 other bird species newly added to the critically endangered list, the roster of the world's most threatened species.

But while the medium-tree finch is in jeopardy because of parasitic flies introduced to the islands, most of the species on this year's red list of threatened species are imperiled by inexorable loss of their habitat.

There was some good news, however, with six critically endangered species downgraded to "endangered". Some owed their reclassification to successful conservation programmes. The threat to the Mauritius Fody, for example, was lifted by moving the remaining birds to an island off Mauritius free of predators.

Another success story is Brazil's Lear's macaw, named after the English nonsense poet Edward Lear. The spectacular parrot has increased fourfold in number through a joint programme involving the Brazilian government, local landowners and conservation organisations.

Aside from habitat loss and predation, the other ominous factor is the impact of climate change, says Fowlie. Mountain-living birds, for example, would die out if the climate they rely on shifts north or south to non-mountainous zones.

Lear's Macaw

I confess to being very conflicted every time I drive around my county and see the huge swaths of land being gobbled up for housing, highways and shopping malls. I find myself having to fight the temptation to be inwardly pleased that the economy is slowing down and housing starts are depressed. I keep asking myself if it isn't wrong to view the reduced pace of the loss of natural lands as a silver lining to the economic crisis.

I know the economic slump is costing people jobs, and that's the source of my inner conflict. I don't want anyone to be out of work, but neither do I want to see our beautiful countryside and crucial habitat buried under vast deposits of asphalt and cinder block.

If I had my way I think I'd preserve it all and require that all new building be done in areas that are already developed, like our cities and the empty malls that long ago closed their doors.

Don't bother to write to tell me how impractical that is. I know it is. That's why I'll never have my way.

RLC

Chuck Defarge

Here was Democrat senator Chuck Schumer in 2004 when the sobriety imposed upon our political class by 9/11 still had some residual influence:

"Do what you have to do." Gosh. That sounds like Senator Schumer is saying that if the government has reason to believe that a catastrophe can be averted by squeezing information out of a terrorist then most of his colleagues and he himself would advocate extreme methods of interrogation, methods much more gruesome, one assumes, than waterboarding or sleep deprivation.

But that was then. Now the Madame Defarges of the Democratic party, as Michael Barone aptly refers to them, are cackling with glee at the prospect of Bush officials being carted off to the guillotines. So here is the same Chuck Schumer a month ago:

Let's be charitable and decline to call this hypocrisy. Let's just think of it as moral and logical incoherence. Chuck Schumer like Nancy Pelosi and a host of others in their party were in favor of "enhanced" interrogation before they were against it.

So what's different now from then? The chance to avenge themselves on the Bush administration has presented itself to the Democrats who have gained congressional majorities and control of the White House, so they're seizing the opportunity. They've got their knitting needles working furiously, weaving into the sweater as many names of the people they hate as they can.

Thanks to Hot Air for the videos.

RLC

Thirteen Mysteries

If you're into science you might find this article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist interesting. Brooks lists thirteen mysteries that have (mostly) cosmologists and physicists baffled. To give you a sample here's #9:

It's one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

I have to say that I think cosmologists are much more confident that dark energy is the culprit than what this article suggests. I wrote about this phenomenon last December. After discussing what dark energy is believed to be doing to the universe I mentioned that the most fascinating thing about it is this:

Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

The biggest mystery about dark energy, it seems to me, is not what it is but rather how it came to be so exquisitely calibrated. Or maybe that's only a mystery for materialists.

RLC

Wouldn't You Know

Okay. I knew it would happen. As soon as I made the comment that I hadn't heard of any conservative making a joke about killing those in the political opposition, or words to that effect, along comes the first instance of it in my memory and puts egg on my face.

A sportscaster told an unfunny and pathetic "joke" and conservative radio talk show host Mark Davis allegedly repeated it with alleged approval. I use the qualifier "alleged" because I didn't hear it myself, but am relying on Camille Paglia's description:

Two days after watching "Seven Days in May," I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two. How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?

Paglia is right to be upset by this. So am I. This sort of talk should have no place in our public discourse. Wishing or even joking about the suffering and/or death of one's opponents is reprehensible and disgusting whether it's Wanda Sykes telling the sick joke or David Feherty (whoever he is). Moreover, those who laugh at these gibes, whether it's Barack Obama and the Washington press corps, or a conservative talk show host, evince a serious and unpleasant character flaw that should invite our disdain for the flaw and our prayers for the offender.

RLC

Hope He Dies

In 1994 a journalist named Julianne Malveaux distinguished herself by admitting that she hoped Clarence Thomas would develop heart disease and die. More recently Bill Maher lamented that an assassination plot against Dick Cheney during a visit to Afghanistan had been foiled. During the Bush years a a novel was written that fantasized his assassination. Now an alleged comedienne named Wanda Sykes not only calls Rush Limbaugh a traitor and a terrorist, which trivializes both, but adds that she wishes he'd suffer kidney failure.

The remark was despicable enough, but did our president and the audience have to laugh at it? What kind of people are these that they find talk of the death of their political opponents so hilarious?

I know I ask this question a lot, but this video clip just demands that I ask it again. Can you imagine the press reaction had a conservative said something this vicious, this stupid, this cruel about a Democrat? Have you ever seen a Republican president laugh when someone says in his presence that he hopes some Democrat suffers a fatal illness? Come to think of it have you ever heard a conservative say anything like this? Me neither. It's not that conservatives have so much class, it's that liberals, are at least too many of them, have so little.

For more on this see Kathryn Lopez at NRO.

RLC

Power of the Happy Man

Jason sent us a link to an essay by Peggy Noonan on the late Jack Kemp. Like much of what Noonan writes it is graceful and touching. Kemp was a political role model, one who is emulated too infrequently but whose example, if followed, could have a powerful impact on an electorate that seems to be wearying of the politics of humorless viciousness.

Kemp was driven by two things: the power of ideas and a genuine concern for the poor. He believed that the way to help the poor was not just by giving them stuff, which never works, but by giving others the incentive to offer opportunities for the poor to work their way out of their poverty.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Kemp was the kind of person politics wants more of, the kind who remind us that it is a great profession, that at its best it is a calling, an actual vocation. We all know politicians who are cynical, and whose interaction with the public leaves them convinced of their superiority. Kemp was the opposite. As his son Jimmy said this week, "My father didn't think people were the problem but the solution." He believed people had talent, dynamism, brilliance and hunger, and a good government was one that did not thwart but helped them, through sound policy, to become what God built them to be.

Jack knew how to lead. He spoke of ideas with affability and authenticity. He wasn't angry and dark and simmering, didn't glower. He had the power of the happy man. "Sometimes now the cost of admission into politics is bitterness, bile and guile," said the pollster Kellyanne Conway. He was old-style, and humane. Ms. Conway got her first job in politics as an intern in Kemp's office. "Who are you?" he once said. "I'm just an intern here," she said. "No one is just an intern here," he replied. He saw politics as a team sport, assigned, delegated and promoted from within. In all the years Ms. Conway knew him, she never heard him ask what the polls were saying. When he ran as Bob Dole's vice presidential nominee in 1996, he flopped as a hatchet man. It wasn't in his DNA.

I hope you'll read the rest of Noonan's column. It paints an image of a man we might wish all our political leaders would pattern themselves after.

RLC

Flip Flops

Mona Charen tells us that the Obama administration is reversing itself on many of the national security positions it took during the campaign. Having soundly and frequently rebuked the Bush administration for warrantless surveillance, Guantanamo, denial of trials to detainees, military tribunals, and other assorted crimes against humanity, it looks like Obama is quietly pursuing the same policies, and may even decide to keep Gitmo open for business:

You won't find it on the front pages, but the Obama administration has been walking back its position on many national-security questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has asserted that the U.S. has the right to hold suspected terrorists without charges. Solicitor General Elena Kagan has reiterated that position. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that military commissions were "still very much on the table," and rumor has it that the Obama administration will soon formally reverse itself on Guant�namo.

The New York Times reported that "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." No kidding? Not only that, but not a single detainee was read his Miranda rights when he was taken into custody.

Additionally, Congress is balking at letting Guantanamo's inmates anywhere near their hometowns. Sen. Dianne Feinstein even put Alcatraz off limits. "It's a national park and tourist attraction," she explained.

Former senator Rick Santorum, now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has been keeping an eye on other national-security flips by the new president. Remember how Obama had lambasted the Bush administration for relying on the "state secrets" privilege? The Obama Justice Department has already invoked the doctrine twice - most recently to defend the National Security Agency's surveillance of communications. The Justice Department explained that "attempting to address the allegations in this case could require the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods that are used in a lawful manner to protect national security. The administration cannot risk the disclosure of information that could cause such exceptional harm . . . " Query to the ACLU: Does that mean the Obama administration is "shredding the Constitution"?

It would be a lot easier to commend the president for bending to reason and choosing to follow the Bush polices were it not for the fact that he has been so contemptuous of those very policies and the people who implemented them. Instead of seeming wise he comes across like a callow teenager who takes shots at his elders on matters he scarcely comprehends and then is startled to learn that the most sensible course is to do the very things he condemned and derided others for doing.

A bigger man would publicly acknowledge his misjudgment and admit that Bush was correct after all.

RLC

Suspicious Minds

Uh oh. There's something fishy about that $328,000 photo of Air Force One over New York. Actually there are several things fishy. The folks here are saying that for some reason the White House's story doesn't add up and that the Obama administration isn't being straight up with us about this fiasco. Imagine that.

I don't know whether there's more to this that we aren't being told - after all this is the most transparent administration in history - but I have to say that there are some puzzling questions being raised, some of which had occurred to me but which I never really thought much about (Like why did the photo have to be done when it was and why is it of such amateurish quality?).

Anyway, check it out. It'll satisfy your minimum daily requirement for suspiciousness.

RLC

Unconditional Love

Dennis Prager is always worth reading and this recent column is no exception. In it he discusses the significance of the fact that English is the only major language that has the concept of "to earn":

One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn." Those of us whose native language is English assume that the phrase "to earn a living" is universal. It isn't. It is almost unique to English. Few languages have the ability to say this.

In the Romance languages, for example - a list that includes such major languages as Spanish, French, and Italian -- the word used when saying someone "earns" money, is "ganar" in Spanish, "gagner" in French. The word literally means "to win." In Hebrew the word "marveach" means "profits." In German, the word "verdient" means "deserves."

Obviously, it is very different to "win" or to "deserve" or to "profit" than to "earn."

Since the 1960s-'70s, a concerted effort has been made to weed the word, and therefore the cultural value, of "earning" from American life. Increasingly little is earned. Instead of earning, we are increasingly owed, or we have more rights, or we are simply given.

Many American kids no longer earn awards or trophies for athletic success. They are given trophies and awards for showing up. These trophies are not earned, just granted -- essentially for breathing.

This is a good insight and I think there's a lot to it. Prager then builds on the idea of "earning something" by launching an interesting disquisition on the concept of unconditional love:

Another increasingly widespread concept that undermines the notion of earning is "unconditional love." The term, which was barely used prior to the 1960s, is now ubiquitous. It is a prominent goal, a human ideal to strive for. The idea of having to earn love is more than unheard of today; it would strike most moderns as morally suspect.

We expect unconditional love not only from parents to babies and toddlers, but to children of any age, no matter how they act. Parental unconditional love means that all people, no matter how disgracefully they act --- even toward a parent -- and no matter how old they are, must be shown infinite love from their parents. Parental love is never to be earned, always to be given.

We expect God to show unconditional love to all people, again no matter how they act. According to the doctrine of divine unconditional love, God loves sadists as much as He loves the kindest individuals. No one earns God's love; we receive it, like sports trophies, for breathing. Many fine people believe this about God, but I think it is religio-cultural-specific, and non-biblical. In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd. It depicts God as a love machine who, like an air-conditioner that emits the same amount of cold air no matter how the inhabitants of a house act, emits the same amount of love no matter we act. It means that we in no way influence God's love for us. I don't find that comforting. And it is certainly no more likely to induce decent behavior in human beings than a God who does show conditional love based on human decency.

Here I think Prager slips. The Christian doctrine of the atonement is, I think, a paradigmatic example of unconditional love. It's predicated upon nothing that man deserves. God suffers and dies in Christ as a profound demonstration of his love for us and to pay the price for man's betrayal and infidelity. As a consequence each person is offered the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation to God. That seems to me to be an act of pure agape, or unconditional love. Of course, whether we accept that gift is up to us, and many people choose to reject it. God doesn't force it on them, but that He nevertheless makes it available to them is an act, I think, of pure unconditional love.

Prager has more to say about this, which you can read at the link, but the matter of forgiveness leads into the next part of his essay.

We also expect forgiveness to be given without being earned. Many people believe in what I call automatic forgiveness -- the obligation to forgive anyone any crime, committed against anyone, no matter how many victims and no matter how removed from my life. Thus the pastor of a church attended by then-President Bill Clinton told the president and all others at a Sunday service that all Christians were obligated to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist murderer of 168 people. Did McVeigh earn this forgiveness? Of course not. So where did the notion of unearned forgiveness come from, especially unearned forgiveness from people who were not the victims of the evil being forgiven? It is one thing for me to forgive those who have hurt me; it is quite another for others to forgive those who have hurt me. God Himself demands that we earn forgiveness. The term for that is repentance. No repentance, no forgiveness.

Here I think Prager is exactly right. Few things sound sillier to me than someone who lost nothing and no one in the 9/11 terror proclaiming that they forgive the terrorists. Who do such people think they are?

What does it mean to forgive someone who has done you no harm, anyway? To forgive a person does not mean to forget what they did, it means to not hold what they did against them - to not demand retribution. If someone murders another person's loved one it's simply absurd for a third individual, who had no connection to any of the people involved, to say that he forgives the murderer.

Finally, the increasingly powerful culture of entitlement and rights further undermines the value of earning anything. The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state -- you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax -- but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned, them.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

I think Prager is right about this, as well. We should be compassionate with those less fortunate, but it should be made clear to everyone involved that our largesse is the fruit of compassion and is not an entitlement. When people think they're entitled to the contents of your wallet the desire to help them dwindles as rapidly as resentment toward them rises.

It's a major difference between conservatives and liberals that conservatives see a sense of entitlement as a serious flaw in social welfare programs and liberals seem to be relatively unconcerned about it. Most liberals would be indifferent to your right to decide whether to keep and how to dispose of what you earned and they're much more inclined to think that those who have earned little are somehow entitled to have a share of what you have worked hard for.

RLC

About Time

An article at Foreign Policy by Christian Brose notes that Australia has gazed at the tea leaves and concluded that the United States, especially under the current administration, is no longer much inclined to use military force to protect its allies and that it's time for Australia to start building up its defenses.

After listing the upgrades Australia is undertaking (and under a very leftist prime minister, no less) Brose goes on to write:

But why is it a bad thing for our allies to strengthen their defenses? .... I see the Australian white paper as a reason to be optimistic that America's relative decline can be managed in a smart way that leaves us in a good strategic position. Westhawk puts his finger on one reason why:

"If the Australian defense ministry can reach these conclusions [that the U.S. is a declining power], why shouldn't the Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Indian, and Russian defense ministries also formulate these same planning assumptions?.... The greatest loser from such a chain reaction would be China."

I'd go even further. The United States should want the Indians, and the Japanese, and the South Koreans, and the Indonesians to reach the same conclusions. We should actively encourage them to reach the same conclusions. And that goes for our NATO allies as well. (The Russians, not so much.) We should work to get more and more of America's like-minded allies investing in the capabilities to shoulder a greater share of our collective defense. And to that end, the perception that the "unipolar moment" is passing can actually play in our favor, as will the fact that China's "peaceful rise" remains an open question at best.

Brose is right, I think. It is time our allies started carrying more of the burden of our common defense. Europe, for example, has evolved into a continent-wide welfare state largely because they've had the luxury of not having to spend large sums of money on their militaries as long as the U.S. was guaranteeing their safety. It's time, though, that Europe stopped acting like the guy who mooches off his parents well into his thirties and never moves out on his own. Let the Europeans follow Australia's example and provide for their own security. Except for Britain and Poland they haven't been much help to us when we needed them anyway.

HT: PostModern Conservative

RLC

Post-Christian?

Stephen Prothero, chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, argues that claims that the United States is a "post-Christian" nation are simply false.

He points out that the vast majority of people in this country self-identify as Christian:

What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming "post-Christian." If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic. And even if we accept the ARIS survey as gospel, the United States today has more Christians than any other country in human history. The current U.S. population is more Christian than Israel is Jewish and Utah is Mormon. Meanwhile, Christianity remains, for good or for ill, a vital political force, not just on the right but also on the left, and the Christian Bible remains the scripture of American politics, invoked thousands of times a year on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

[B]orn-again Christians,... now constitute 34% of the U.S. population. The "non-denominational Christian" category that populates U.S. megachurches has exploded from under 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to in excess of 8 million today.

The problem, though, is that whether this nation is Christian or post-Christian should not be measured by the religious sentiments of the masses. The religious status of this country is actually a function of the attitudes of its cultural elite. The university professors, artists, scientists, media personalities, the people who make our movies, our music, and write our books, politicians, professionals (doctors, lawyers, journalists, clergy) and wealthy businessmen.

The elite shape the culture and put their stamp upon it. It's their religious sentiments that matter and any attempt to determine the extent of religious influence in this country that focuses on the beliefs of the common folk is pretty much beside the point. As far as I know the cultural elite have never been subjected to the kind of analysis that would tell us definitively what their views are. Nevertheless, I think that if we look even cursorily at the products our culture is turning out it would be pretty hard to think that the U.S. is still a Christian nation.

Consider the hostility of the pop culture to anyone who on religious principle takes a stand that conflicts with progressive orthodoxies. Look at how the culture has savaged Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin. Consider how people who embrace "traditional" values, who are pro-life, opposed to gay marriage, sympathetic to intelligent design, and who actually go to church on Sunday are depicted by the entertainment media.

There is, furthermore, reason to believe that the ground is being prepared in much of the Western world, and even here in America, to make Christian conviction an automatic disqualification for engagement in the public square.

But beyond all that, I wonder how many, even among the masses, are serious about their religious affiliation. Being a Christian is more than just being a CHINO (Christian In Name Only). Most people when asked about their affiliation will name the church they had their children baptized into, but that identity makes no real difference to them in the decisions of their everyday life. For many people, God is like a parent who lives on the other side of the country and who one gets to see maybe at Christmas and Easter but who has little input into how they manage their daily affairs.

At any rate, a survey of American religious convictions that fails to go beyond a simple affiliation question is neither informative nor useful.

RLC

Which Party Is More Ideologically Diverse?

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he challenges the media meme that the GOP is too narrow and intolerant of diverse views to be a national party. Santorum points out some inconvenient truths:

According to the American Conservative Union, in 2008, only two of the 51 Senate Democrats had conservative ratings above 25 percent. But 21 of the 49 Republican senators had conservative ratings of 75 percent or less.

This means that the senate Republicans are much closer to the ideological center than are the Democrats. Here's further confirmation that the most ideologically rigid party is the Democrat party:

Furthermore, 12 Democrats had a conservative rating of zero, while an additional 25 scored under 10 percent. By contrast, only one Republican scored a perfect 100, and a scant seven others scored above 90 percent. (Note that Pennsylvania's other "moderate" senator has a conservative rating of 8 percent.)

I spent 12 years in the Senate. It has one doctrinaire, narrow, intolerant caucus, and Specter just joined it.

In fact, Specter's ACU rating of 44% makes him the most conservative Democrat in the senate. It's amazing that despite the obvious ideological imbalance in the Democratic party the media and others are insisting that it's the Republicans who need to become more diverse. It'd be nice if they'd check the relevant facts and figures once in a while before they write their stories.

RLC

Those Anti-Intellectual Republicans

This video shows why people have so little respect for both politicians and media talking heads. Republican Congressman Mike Pence, an otherwise admirable man, simply doesn't know how to answer a question that probably 99% of people in Congress wouldn't know how to answer, but instead of admitting that he hasn't really given the matter much thought he bobs and weaves and temporizes hoping that the clock will run out and rescue him from Chris Matthews' hectoring. It's not his finest hour.

Matthews, on the other hand, doesn't know any more than Pence, and probably wouldn't understand a reasonable answer to his question if Pence had given him one. The host of Hardball claims that there are people in the GOP who oppose stem cell research, but I challenge him to name one. His assertion is completely uninformed. There are people who oppose embryonic stem cell research, to be sure, but that's hardly the same thing as opposing stem cell research. He later avers that some Republicans believe that liberal scientists have "planted" fossils in order to provide confirmation of evolutionary theory, a notion that is certainly a revelation to me. I have never heard of anyone who believes such a ridiculous hypothesis except, of course, for those scholars who freely acknowledge that exactly this was done in the case of the Piltdown hoax (c.1912).

Anyway, I was hoping Pence would ask Matthews to define "evolution." That would have ended the matter right then, I suspect, because I doubt that Matthews could have given a non-trivial response to the request. Anyone who believes that the debate today over evolution is between science and religion, as Matthews apparently does, simply doesn't understand the issues. If Matthews was able to give an adequate definition of what he meant by evolution he would have had to define it in such a way as to make Pence's objections to it seem perfectly reasonable to the majority of his viewers. But, alas, Mr. Pence didn't ask for the definition. Too bad. It would've been fun to watch.

It would've been even more fun if Pence had thought to ask Matthews, who is a Catholic, if he believed in transubstantiation, the immaculate conception, the assumption of the virgin Mary, or papal infallibility. If Matthews affirmed these doctrines of his Church Pence might have then asked his audience to judge whether such beliefs are more scientifically plausible than the belief that the universe and life show evidence of intentional engineering.

RLC

Man Without Conviction

Remember the old Boy George tune, Karma Chameleon? It could've been written about Arlen Specter.

It must be plain by now even to someone who has been on a space voyage for the last twenty years that the senator is a man without principles. He announced Tuesday that he wanted the courts to declare Minnesota senator Norm Coleman the winner in his prolonged contest with Democrat Al Franken and then realized that this wouldn't set well with his new brethren in the Democratic party, so before you could say "so long seniority" he started backpedalling.

It didn't matter, though. His new friends in the Democratic party stripped him of his seniority anyway, and now poor Arlen is about as consequential as a midget in the NBA.

Senator Specter's explanation for his moonwalk away from Coleman is precious:

"In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates," Specter said. "I'm ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I've made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke."

In other words, he's made a career of knowing what to say and what to do in order to get himself elected, but somehow in this instance he lost his focus. We can be assured it won't happen again.

RLC

Gay Marriage and Black Outrage

African-American ministers are incensed at the decision of the District of Columbia City Council to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere - Marion Barry, succumbing to the temptation to hyperbole, predicts a "civil war" - but I don't know why these gentlemen are blaming the Council. They should be incensed at their own parishioners. Blacks vote Democratic at rates in excess of 9 to 1. If African-Americans are going to vote for liberals they can hardly fault them for doing what liberals do. Until socially conservative blacks realize that the Democratic party is the very last organization that will defend socially conservative policies black ministers are going to find themselves with lots to keep their outrage occupied.

RLC

Momentous Day

Israel's prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with administration officials on May 18th and it's expected that there will be fireworks. According to DEBKAFile President Obama intends to radically restructure our relationship with Israel in ways that the Israelis are almost certain to find objectionable.

There's cause for concern in this. If Israel refuses to accept American terms for accommodating Arab demands President Obama may well set the Israelis off on their own, leaving them vulnerable to an Iranian attack through their Hezbollah and Syrian proxies.

His glowing press notwithstanding, the president has yet to accomplish anything of substance abroad, so a lot rides on the upcoming talks, both for the U.S. and for Israel. Indeed, the paramount concern is that the sixty year friendship we've had with each other is suddenly, with the advent of the new administration, on the rocks.

May 18th could be a momentous day in the history of that relationship.

RLC

Barack Soprano

According to this report by John Carney Barack Obama is a smooth-talking version of a crime boss. I don't know if these allegations are true, but they're very serious and they come from several sources, all of whom voted for Obama:

Creditors to Chrysler describe negotiations with the company and the Obama administration as "a farce," saying the administration was bent on forcing their hands using hardball tactics and threats. Conversations with administration officials left them expecting that they would be politically targeted, two participants in the negotiations said.

Although the focus has so far been on allegations that the White House threatened [the firm] Perella Weinberg, sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.

The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler, say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person described the administration as the most shocking "end justifies the means" group they have ever encountered. Another characterized Obama as "the most dangerous smooth talker on the planet- and I knew Kissinger." Both were voters for Obama in the last election.

One participant in negotiations said that the administration's tactic was to present what one described as a "madman theory of the presidency" in which the President is someone to be feared because he was willing to do anything to get his way. The person said this threat was taken very seriously by his firm.

The White House has denied the allegation that it threatened Perella Weinberg.

Last week Obama singled out the firms that continue to oppose his plan for Chrysler, saying he would not stand with them. Perella Weinberg says it was convinced to support the plan by this stark drawing of a line between firms that have the president's backing and those that did not. They didn't want to be on the wrong side of Obama. Privately, administration officials have expressed confidence that other firms will switch sides for this reason.

These allegations add to the picture of an administration willing to use intimidation to win over support for its Chrysler plans--and then categorically deny it.

As I understand this these firms are holding debt that Chrysler owes and the Obama administration is strong-arming them to eat the debt so that Chrysler can survive and its union employees can keep their the pension and health care benefits that are largely responsible for driving Chrysler to the brink of insolvency in the first place. In other words, the lending institutions have to shaft their stockholders so that Obama's supporters in the UAW don't get hurt. If they don't then Obama can't guarantee their safety, so to speak.

Isn't anyone in the major media concerned that a president of the United States would abuse his power to coerce private citizens by threatening them with public embarrassment if they don't go along with his policies? Can you imagine the outcry had Bush done something like this?

I repeat that I don't know whether these allegations are correct, but if they are it should cause us to be deeply concerned about the kind of man we've elected to the Oval Office. Recall during the campaign when candidate Obama called for the creation of a civilian security force that would be, in effect, his own private army. The media almost completely ignored this bizarre suggestion, but in light of the tactics he's allegedly using to gain control of the private sector there certainly seems to be reason to wonder whether this man is what most of those who voted for him thought he was.

RLC

Two Philosophies

The back-and-forth over Senator Arlen Specter's party switch has stirred a couple of thoughts on the matter of how we should look at politics and what our philosophy of governance should be.

Basically, there are two ways to view politics: We can look at it as a game in which two sides compete for the prize of wielding power and garnering benefits for their team, or we can look at it as a moral calling to do what's in the best interests of the people of the United States. Much of the media commentary in the wake of Specter's jump to the Democrat party gives the impression that most people think of politics in the first way rather than the second. This, I think, is unfortuante.

People are saying the GOP needs to be broader in order to attract more young people, more pro-choicers, more blacks, etc. A party that has no room for an Arlen Specter, we're told, doesn't have a very big tent and is on the road to irrelevance and eventual extinction.

This strikes me as exactly wrong. In the first place there's no call from the media for Democrats to cast a wider net to attract conservatives into their party. How much diversity of opinion is there among congressional Democrats? How many social and/or fiscal conservatives are among that party's leadership?

But set that aside. The claim that needs to be addressed is that Specter's defection shows the Republican party must, if it is to save itself, become more like the Democrat party. In other words, what matters to those who are calling for the GOP to broaden their base of support is not principles but electoral success. When we unpack the arguments what we find is an appeal to Republicans not to let their convictions stand in the way of political expediency.

Not just liberals in the media but even many Republicans are saying that the party must get over it's infatuation with the policies of Ronald Reagan and get rid of Sarah Palin and other social conservatives. The party needs to drop its opposition, it is insisted, to abortion on demand and gay marriage, and it has to stop trying to mollify Christians. As long as these people have a say in deciding what the party stands for the party will never attract young people, blacks, or gays.

I think this is all shamefully wrong-headed. Political parties should stand for distinct philosophies of governance, and their differences should be clear to the voters. The electorate should be able to choose between clear alternatives which set of principles they wish to be governed by. If the people decide that they prefer liberal social, economic, and foreign policies to those advanced by conservatives, or vice-versa, they should know which party's candidates are most likely to stand for those policies.

That's how a republic works. We should be disgusted by politicians who say one thing to get elected and then govern differently. We should be disgusted by politicians who masquerade as people who hold one set of principles but really hold another. Some say that the people will always vote for those who promise to ease their way through life by showering benefits upon them rather than those who tell them the truth and insist they "take their medicine." They argue that if the GOP does the latter it will go the way of the Whig party. Maybe so, but if our electorate has degenerated to the point where all it wants is a government that usurps the freedoms that have been our birthright in exchange for pampering us from cradle to the grave, if the American people are that uneducated and self-centered that they will vote for whoever promises them the most goodies, then our democracy is on life support in any event.

Arlen Specter has always been moderate to liberal. As such he belongs in the Democratic party. If his switch hurts the GOP, and it does, so be it. Let's be principled and let's be honest. Deceiving the voters cannot be good for the health of our system of government. Let's have parties that clearly stand for something and let's not blur the distinctions. Least of all let's not yield to those who tell us that winning elections is more important than what we believe in.

RLC

Notre Dame and the Value of Life

Notre Dame alum Lacy Dodd offers a poignant autobiographical account of a young woman's anguish over an unwanted pregnancy. It's the kind of story that doesn't receive much publicity in the Big Media, but it should. It's also a story, though it hardly mentions it until the end, about Notre Dame's decision to invite Barack Obama to give the commencement address this year and confer upon him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Here's her opening:

For many members of the Notre Dame Class of 2009, the uproar surrounding the university's decision to honor Barack Obama with this year's commencement address, and to bestow on him a doctorate of laws, has provoked strong feelings about what the ensuing conflict will mean for their graduation.

I know how they feel. Ten years ago, my heart was filled with similar conflicts as we came closer to the day of my own Notre Dame commencement and my commissioning as an officer in the United States Army.

You see, I was three months pregnant.

Dodd's last paragraph is like a stilleto to the heart of the rationale for extending an invitation to President Obama to be honored by the university. Give it a read.

RLC

Imposing Morality

Former CIA agent Michael Scheuer spares neither Bush nor Obama in this hard-to-argue-with assessment of President Obama's decision to remove "harsh interrogations" from that diminishing set of tools we use to protect our children from the grisly deaths that Islamic terrorists have in store for them:

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards."

Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs?

Before enthroning Obama's personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama's hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters -- should that be a concern in any event? -- but they do not even make the Islamists' hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. That list is headed by Washington's support for Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, its presence on the Arabian Peninsula and its unqualified support for Israel.

Still, Emanuel's statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy's true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush.

True enough. It's ironic that among the favorite complaints of the Left about the religious Right is that they seek to impose their morality upon the rest of us and have no business doing such a thing. Yet Obama ratchets up the danger to all Americans by imposing his moral beliefs concerning the proper treatment of terrorists, and that's evidently just fine with the Left. I guess whether shoving one's beliefs down the throats of others is acceptable or not depends on the belief and who's doing the shoving.

Read the rest of Scheuer's blistering column at the link.

RLC

Why Women Should Marry Young

I read once that the divorce rate for teen-age marriages is asymptotically close to 100%. I don't know if this is true, but I'm sure the rate is high nonetheless. Even so, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas, argues compellingly that we should marry young (though not that young) and that the trend toward waiting until the late twenties or thirties has several liabilities:

The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That's up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren't pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn't be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well. The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years.

One obvious reason for not postponing marriage is that it gets harder for women as they get older to attract men whereas it actually gets easier for older men to attract younger women.

[A]ccording to social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, women's "market value" declines steadily as they age, while men's tends to rise in step with their growing resources (that is, money and maturation). Countless studies -- and endless anecdotes -- reinforce their conclusion. Meanwhile, women's fertility is more or less fixed, yet they largely suppress it during their 20s -- their most fertile years -- only to have to beg, pray, borrow and pay to reclaim it in their 30s and 40s.

These are just two of the reasons Regnerus offers in support of his thesis that it's in a woman's interest to marry young. You'll have to read his essay to learn the others.

Meanwhile, I should mention that one of the best books I've read on this topic is George Gilder's Men and Marriage, a work published back in the 80s and one I can't recommend highly enough to anyone interested in the sociology of marriage. Gilder argues convincingly that the revolution in sexual mores of the last fifty years has actually devastated many young women and ruined their chances of a happy marriage. It's good stuff, as is the Regnerus article.

RLC

Pigs Fly

A student sent along this pun: Fifty years ago skeptics said that a black man would be elected president when pigs fly. Well, Barack Obama got elected president and three months later.......swine flu.

Okay. I apologize.

RLC

Jack Kemp, 1935-2009

Former professional quarterback, Congressman, cabinet secretary, vice-presidential candidate, and conservative theoretician Jack kemp died today after a long illness. He was 73.

Ed Morrissey says this: "Kemp had the courage to move beyond the usual issues for conservatives, choosing to work on poverty and housing issues, and challenging his fellow conservatives to make conservatism work across the board. It's one of the reasons why Kemp will be missed."

Kemp was the original "compassionate conservative" and many of his ideas for lifting the poor out of poverty are just as appealing today as ever.

RLC

Carrie Prejean Meets the New Fascists

There is a type of human being who delights in tearing down others, especially those who can't really fight back. These people are bullies, to be sure, but worse than that, they're people with rancid, hate-filled souls who make themselves feel good by smearing anyone better than themselves. The following video offers us two such specimens mocking a young woman who is not a politician, who didn't lie to the American people, who didn't cheat on her taxes, who didn't cause the economic crisis, who didn't thrust this nation into levels of debt it will never be able to pay. She's just a girl who was asked a bone-headed question in a beauty contest and attempted to give a polite, honest answer.

For this she was insulted, not only by the questioner, an epicene creature who fancies to call himself Perez Hilton, but also by two individuals on MSNBC whose emotional maturation seems to have come to a halt back when they were prepubescent 7th graders.

Imagine that this was your daughter these two exemplars of the modern Left were trashing and dragging through the slime on national television. If your daughter were asked her opinion of gay marriage and gave an answer like Miss Prejean's it very well could be.

We're beginning to see a pattern here from the Left. Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party-goers, Carrie Prejean, anyone, for that matter, who seems to be either a regular guy or have convictions based in Christian belief, can expect to be savaged by giggling, leering losers in the most vile and vicious manner on the Left-wing cable outlet, MSNBC. It really is contemptible, but that's more and more how the Left chooses to treat those with whom they disagree, especially on this station. All their enemies must be utterly destroyed. No one merits any respect who deviates from their progressive orthodoxy:

This is evidently how Leftist homosexuals like Musto and Hilton treat those who don't share their view of what marriage should be. Watching the video, a simple question popped into my mind: Would the world be a better place with more people like Carrie Prejean or more people like Michael Musto, Keith Olbermann, and Perez Hilton?

Here are a couple more questions: Has anyone heard any outrage from feminists over the treatment of this girl? No? Gee, wonder why. Can you imagine the sheer magnitude of the outrage had, say, Rush Limbaugh said something even a tenth this vile about some innocent young woman?

Lastly, if what Don Imus said about the Rutgers girls basketball team was bad enough to get him fired from his job what's Keith Olbermann doing still working for MSNBC? At MSNBC, apparently, no degree of vulgar effrontery is deemed inappropriate as long as it's directed at someone who holds opinions unacceptable to progressive sensibilities.

RLC

Irreconcilable Differences

There are some among the Darwinists who wish to affect a rapprochement between Darwinism and "Religion." They believe that religious people must be persuaded that they have nothing to fear from Darwinism so that they'll stop opposing it.

Now remember that "Darwinism" is not a synonym for "evolution," rather it's a synonym for materialistic or naturalistic evolution. It's the view that all of life can be completely explained in terms of unguided, unintelligent natural processes and forces.

The more militantly atheistic Darwinians are having none of what they see as an unnecessary appeasement of religious believers. I actually agree with the atheists and with Logan Gage at Evolution News and Views on this point. Darwinism, properly understood is simply incompatible with any notion that a supernatural mind played any role whatsoever in the emergence of life and its subsequent radiation, and the attempt to somehow reconcile naturalism with some version of theism is doomed to disappoint members of both camps.

If religious people wish to accommodate themselves to Darwinism they pretty much have to give up theism in favor of some sort of vague deism, and if atheists wish to suggest that Darwinism allows for a role for God, no matter how restricted, they have to change their definition of Darwinism. No theory that renders God irrelevant to the universe can be reconciled with theism and no theory that allows purpose and intelligence a role in the creation can be reconciled with naturalism or materialism.

I understand the desire to find a middle ground, but really there doesn't seem to be one. Either the universe is a contingent entity ultimately dependent upon a necessary being outside of itself, or it's not. That seems to exhaust all the possibilities.

RLC

Biden Brigade

You have to feel sorry for the White House staff. They must cringe every time Vice-President Biden speaks out in public, knowing that they're going to have to go out and twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels trying to "clarify" his remarks. It must be a painful task, but it certainly affords much mirth and merriment to those paying attention. Here's Biden's original interview the other day with Matt Lauer:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

At a time when people are being urged to use public transportation to conserve fuel, it's hardly helpful to have the vice-president warning that traveling in subways and busses may expose them to a disease that the media has already gotten everyone jittery about. It makes me wonder if it was Joe's idea to fly Air Force One at low altitude over Manhattan the other day, sending office workers scrambling into the streets in panic.

Anyway, here's White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' lame attempt to clean up the mess:

Like the people who walk behind the horses in a parade to scoop up the leavings, there must be an entire brigade of vice-presidential staffers assigned shovels and buckets with instructions to follow Biden around.

To borrow a quip making the rounds: They told me if I voted Republican in the last election I'd get a ditz for a vice-president, and doggone if they weren't right.

HT: Hot Air for the links.

RLC

Changes at SCOTUS

One of the reasons many voters feared Democrat control of our government, perhaps the main reason for some, was that Democrats would be virtually certain to nominate and appoint judges and Supreme Court justices whose view of jurisprudence blurred the difference between judging and legislating. Those on the left side of the spectrum, which is the ideological home for all of the leading Democrats in Washington, tend to see the courts as vehicles for implementing social policy rather than as institutions for determining whether particular cases violate or conform to the law and the Constitution.

What the law actually says is, for the Left, only of secondary importance to what those who adjudicate would like it to say. The Left uses this power to circumvent the legislature, which represents the will of the people, and prefers the expedient of imposing its will on the rest of us through judicial fiat. This is a usurpation of democracy, as the late Richard John Neuhaus famously put it, and it deprives citizens of their right to make law through their elected representatives.

Comes word now that Justice David Souter is retiring from the court and that President Obama will have the opportunity to display the sort of judicial philosophy he will lay upon the nation by his nomination for a replacement. There's little reason to think that his nominee will be someone who seeks to interpret the Constitution in light of what it actually says and every reason to believe he will pick a candidate who is guided more by ideological fashion than Constitutional rigor.

The good news is that such a selection will not change the complexion of the Court since Souter was just such a justice himself. Indeed, the most likely candidates for the next round of retirements (Justices Stevens (89) and Ginsberg (76 and recovering from cancer)) are also very liberal, so unless there's a surprise and Scalia, Thomas, Roberts or Alito choose to leave the bench, none of Obama's appointments to the Supreme Court are likely to change things much.

The bad news, though, is that Souter will doubtless be replaced by a younger version of himself which means that Souter's judicial philosophy will be with us for many years to come.

Beyond that, real damage (or benefit, depending on your point of view) is most likely to occur on the federal bench where a slew of appointments of very liberal judges could have ramifications that ripple through our society for decades. This is the sort of change that candidate Obama promised and the sort of change most of his supporters voted for, but I don't think it's the sort of cvhange we need.

RLC

Specter's Switch

I suppose I should have some thoughts on Senator Specter's switch to the Democrat party, so here are a couple:

It's not a surprise. He's been a very liberal senator most of his career. The Democrat party, by gaining Specter, has not changed its ideological complexion, but the Republican party, by losing Specter, has just grown more conservative. If he was going to do it, though, I wish he hadn't promised just a month or so ago that he wouldn't jump parties.

I do respect him for the courage with which he has battled his cancer and for his stalwart defense of some good Supreme Court nominees. He was an ardent defender of Clarence Thomas against the calumnies of the Left and Anita Hill and was a key player in getting Roberts and Alito through Senate confirmation. Other than that he's been a millstone around the neck of the GOP.

I've never voted for him in the primary and never voted against him in the general election. Now I can.

His move was pure self-interest. He would've lost to Pat Toomey in the GOP primary. I can't imagine aspiring Democrat office-holders not being a little miffed at his horning in on their political ambitions. It'll be interesting to see what kind of a primary challenge he'll face. It'll also be interesting to see what Harry Reid offered him in return for making the switch.

Now that the Democrats have the 60 votes they need for cloture there's no reason not to encourage Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to follow Specter into the Democrat party.

RLC

Repealing the Right to an Attorney

You may recall the efforts of the Bush administration to set aside a law established in the wake of the Supreme Court's Michigan vs. Jackson decision in 1986. This ruling required police to allow a defendant to have a lawyer present for any questioning to which he is compelled by the police to submit.

The Bush Justice Department, arguing that the law was unnecessary and outdated, sought to have it repealed. The sixth amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the right of criminal suspects to be "represented by counsel", but the administration argued that this merely means the right to have a lawyer present in a criminal trial.

The Justice Department, in a brief signed by the solicitor general, said the 1986 decision "serves no real purpose" and offers only "meager benefits".

The government said that suspects have the right to remain silent, and that officers must respect that decision. But it argued that there is no reason a defendant who wants to speak without a lawyer present should not be able to respond to officers' questions.

No wonder people thought the Bush administration was hostile toward civil rights. Any administration that would attempt to deny prisoners the right to an attorney before being questioned by the police is just one step away from bright lights and rubber truncheons. We can thank the media for their vigilance in calling this surreptitious attempt to roll back civil rights protections to our attention.

What's that you say? You never heard of this case? You don't recall the media outrage over the fascist Bush administration's attempt to turn the U.S. into a police state?

Well, perhaps that's because the case is in fact just now moving through the courts, and the administration that is pushing it is not the Bush bunch but the Obama brigades, and that's doubtless why you haven't heard anything about it from the media. People who would be outraged if Bush had tried something like this, people who would be conjuring up images of jackboots and swastikas if a Republican president sought to overturn Michigan, are perfectly content to let Obama do it.

Is it any wonder that Americans' respect for Big Media is flagging? Is it any wonder that a lot of people are very worried about which of our rights the Obama Justice Department will try to repeal next?

Thanks to Hot Air for the link.

RLC

Not Much Hope for Peace

Strategy Page runs a dispiriting analysis of the state of efforts to gain peace between Israel and the Palestinians:

International efforts to get peace talks between Palestinians and Israel going, are failing because of disunity among Palestinians. Not only are Hamas and Fatah not willing to work together (as rival political parties, not rival governments), but many Palestinians are opposed to both Hamas (for its radicalism) and Fatah (for its corruption). The Arab nations are finding it impossible to even get Hamas and Fatah to pretend to unite to negotiate a peace deal with Israel (that would create a Palestinian state.) Hamas is still running its propaganda about eventually destroying Israel and driving all Jews from the Middle East. Hamas appears to be practicing what it is preaching, with preparations continuing for a major attack on Israel.

Violence continues inside Gaza and the West Bank, but a different kind of violence. In Gaza, Hamas is well on its way to establishing a functioning police state. Opponents are being terrorized into inactivity. In the West Bank, Fatah only controls about half the territory. There are many more factions there that have maintained their local power. Some of these groups are terrorists, more interested in carrying out attacks on Israel than in establishing a Palestinian state.

The Israelis cope by continuing their counter-terror operations, seeking out and arresting or killing the more active terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank. This war is largely unreported, because both the terrorists and the counter-terror forces keep their secrets. Since the Israelis figured out how to defeat Palestinian terrorists five years ago, you have few suicide bombs going off in Israel, and any attacks that are carried out are low level and crude. The Israeli operations continue to detect and disrupt terrorist operations, which is how they keep the terrorism out of Israel.

Hamas would like to subvert Fatah control of the West Bank, but appears to see another battle with Israel happening first. Hamas fighters can be seen training, with new weapons smuggled in from Iran, to use new tactics. Hamas hopes the new weapons and tactics will defeat the new Israeli tactics that [allowed them to] so quickly [tear] through Hamas defenses earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the world criticizes Israel for not doing more to bring peace to the region. On one recent Sunday morning talk show a commentator remarked that Obama has to pressure both sides, but especially the Israelis, to negotiate. This is worse than absurd. Israel is in an existential crisis and the American pundit class thinks they should negotiate their right to exist.

What, one wonders, do these people think a compromise would look like with an enemy determined to destroy you? How do you negotiate with people whose whole raison d'etre is your obliteration and that of your children? What, other than an auto de fe, can Israel give the Palestinians that would mollify them and bring peace? At what point do the Israelis realize that there will never be peace with Hamas and simply say, "Let's get this over with?"

RLC

Torture and Love

In my philosophy class we talk about love, distinguishing the sort of love we have for our fellow man from eros or romantic love. We define the former as treating people with dignity, respect, and kindness.

With that background I was asked the other day by a student how I reconcile the notion that we owe that kind of love to others with my belief that torture is not absolutely wrong.

This is a fair question and deserved an answer. Here's how, had I had the time, I would have replied:

Our obligation to love is a prima facie obligation. By that I mean that we owe respect and kindness to every individual until such time as the obligation to treat one person with love comes in conflict with our obligation to others who also have a claim, perhaps a greater claim, on our love.

When a man threatens the lives of others, particularly those I have a special obligation to protect and for whom I have a special bond of love, then it would be unloving to fail to do everything in my power to stop him. He has nullified my obligation to treat him with respect and kindness and forced me to choose between loving him and loving those he threatens. The moral course in such a circumstance, the course that I believe is demanded by the obligation to love, is to protect the innocent and to stop those who would harm them.

If stopping the guilty entails doing him harm then so be it, but the harm done should, whenever possible, be never greater than what's necessary to remove the threat. Nor should it ever be something one feels good about inflicting. A government which feels compelled to use "torture" (I use quotes because the definition of torture is so broad as to include almost any kind of incivility - a fact which really renders the word almost meaningless) to save the lives of its people is justified in doing so as long as that's the only reason it's used and so long as it's never continued beyond the point where it accomplishes its purpose.

Love is not a warm feeling toward other people, nor is it sentimentality. Sometimes, as in the case of a surgeon operating in a Civil War field hospital without anesthetics, doing the right thing means causing great pain. Sometimes, as in dealing with modern terrorism, doing the right thing for one person entails causing pain to another.

Perhaps you disagree and would argue that "torture" is absolutely wrong, that there's never any justification for it. Before you commit to such a view ask yourself whether you would condemn a man who saved the life of your child by causing her abductor pain in order to coax him to reveal where his accomplices were holding her. Before you say that the man was wrong to do this, imagine looking your child in the eyes after she has been rescued from people who were abusing her and preparing to murder her or sell her into child slavery or the sex trade, and telling her that you would rather she not have been rescued than for her to be rescued by causing pain to the man who kidnapped, molested and planned to kill her.

Perhaps you could say that to your child, but if not, then you agree that torture is not absolutely wrong. If that's your position then the question that needs to be answered is not "should we torture?" but rather, "how should we define torture?" and "under what circumstances is torture justified?" The sooner we have that debate the better off we'll be as a nation.

RLC

Ideas Have Consequences

If you wish to defend the notion of free will how might you do it? Well, Logan Gage tells us, there are some ways not to do it, and these were on display at a recent symposium featuring a number of sociologists, philosophers, and journalists (what were they doing on the panel?).

Gage opens with this summary of the discussion:

Essentially, they all argued that we have an innate sense of free will and that findings in genetics and neuroscience have not undermined it because: (1) sure, genes determine behavior, but not 100%; often the environment contributes to our behavior also, and (2) the number of factors determining our behavior are so many, and the human brain so complex, that we will never be able to pinpoint the genetic and other material causes of our behaviors.

To all this Hoff Sommers asked the obvious question: Sure, genes might not determine all our behavior, for the environment may contribute too, but is that really enough to escape determinism? After all, both my genes and my environment are outside of me and my will?

To this, the two giants of modern social science research-Wilson and Murray-had little to say. I don't believe they understood the full weight of the objection. After all, they seemed to think, we are mere material machines and we know we have free will, so this must all work out just fine.

In other words the problem is this: If God doesn't exist then there's no reason to think that we are anything but an unusual collocation of atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules obey strict physical determinism so if there's no God then it's very hard to see how we can have the kind of liberty of choice required for moral responsibility.

If we don't have such liberty then it's hard to see how there can be any moral obligation, any deserved praise or blame, or any human dignity. No society that realizes that their materialism leads ineluctably to these consequences can for very long keep itself from unraveling without resorting to tyranny.

This is part of the dilemma the materialist has placed himself in. He wants to hold onto these fundamental elements of a healthy society while at the same time denying the existence of God which is the only ground for them. He also wants to say, strangely enough, that despite the incoherence of his position, it's really theists who're epistemically irrational because they believe in a God they can't see.

This is not to say that free will is an easy concept to explicate - it's not - but it is to say that whatever free will is we have it only if we're something more than mere matter. If there is no God then we're only matter and the idea of libertarian free will is an illusion fobbed off on us by some genetic mutation deep in our evolutionary past. This has been so well explained by atheistic thinkers over the past 120 years that it's hard to understand why so many contemporary atheists seem unaware of this dreary consequence of their conviction.

Perhaps they're too busy chuckling at those silly theists to think through the logic of their own position thoroughly enough to bring the abyss to which it leads into full view.

RLC

Hey, Let's Ration Health Care

Charles Krauthammer lays out what he sees as Barack Obama's economic strategy. In order to accommodate the enormous spending to which he has committed the country he needs to solve two problems: How to pay for Social Security and how to pay for Medicare/Medicaid.

Krauthammer writes:

Social Security is relatively easy. A bipartisan commission (like the 1983 Alan Greenspan commission) recommends some combination of means testing for richer people, increasing the retirement age, and a technical change in the inflation measure (indexing benefits to prices instead of wages). The proposal is brought to Congress for a no-amendment up-or-down vote. Done.

The hard part is Medicare and Medicaid. In an aging population, how do you keep them from blowing up the budget? There is only one answer: rationing.

Why do you think the stimulus package pours $1.1 billion into medical "comparative effectiveness research"? It is the perfect setup for rationing. Once you establish what is "best practice" for expensive operations, medical tests and aggressive therapies, you've laid the premise for funding some and denying others.

It is estimated that a third to a half of one's lifetime health costs are consumed in the last six months of life. Accordingly, Britain's National Health Service can deny treatments it deems not cost-effective -- and if you're old and infirm, the cost-effectiveness of treating you plummets. In Canada, they ration by queuing. You can wait forever for so-called elective procedures like hip replacements.

Rationing is not quite as alien to America as we think. We already ration kidneys and hearts for transplant according to survivability criteria as well as by queuing. A nationalized health insurance system would ration everything from MRIs to intensive care by a myriad of similar criteria.

The more acute thinkers on the left can see rationing coming, provoking Slate blogger Mickey Kaus to warn of the political danger. "Isn't it an epic mistake to try to sell Democratic health care reform on this basis? Possible sales pitch: 'Our plan will deny you unnecessary treatments!' ... Is that really why the middle class will sign on to a revolutionary multitrillion-dollar shift in spending -- so the government can decide their life or health 'is not worth the price'?"

President Obama may well be intent on taking us down this road, but let's hope not. It's hard to see how anyone, much less the poor, will be helped by making health care harder to obtain. It's also hard to see how any party that supports rationing care could survive the electoral revolt that would occur among the largest voting block in the country - the boomers.

RLC

Swine Flu and You

Much of the news reportage on the swine flu has focussed on numbers of infected people and where those people live. It hasn't been very helpful in explaining what exactly this flu is and how serious is the threat that it poses. This Q and A at New Scientist is more useful in that it answers a lot of questions people are starting to ask about this virus. Check it out.

RLC

The Fascist Temptation

The other day I commented that everyone should read George Orwell's 1984. The crushing thought control that oppresses the citizens of Oceana in Orwell's depressing vision of a future dystopia is not just a boogeyman of paranoid conservatives, it's a real and present danger, especially in a world in which technology is so far advanced and liberal assumptions are so blithely accepted.

Lest you think I exaggerate please take fifteen minutes to watch this video that appeared at Hot Air, and ask yourself how many universities across the country have similar indoctrination programs for incoming freshmen and how discordant such programs are with the traditional concept of free speech and free minds:

Liberalism in the 19th century was a noble pursuit of individual freedom. Classical liberals prized freedom of thought, speech, and religion. They would have been horrified to see the transmogrification of their views that has taken place in the latter part of the 20th century and into the 21st. Contemporary liberalism stands almost diametrically opposite its predecessor. Today, so far from valuing the rights of the individual, liberalism values the collective and lists toward the totalitarian and tyrannical. It employs coercion, particularly in academia, to enjoin conformity of thought and speech. It resorts to public humiliation of ordinary students and other citizens to ensure they don't stray from the approved point of view. It punishes "thought crime" and seeks to homogenize thinking until everyone holds the same opinions, i.e. those acceptable to the liberal elite. In short, liberalism is gradually morphing into fascism.

This disturbing "orientation" program would still be in place at Delaware were it not for organizations like FIRE, but not even the vigilance of these organizations will be enough to stanch the totalitarian impulse unless more people recognize the oppressive tendencies of contemporary liberalism/progressivism and wean themselves from it.

RLC

Pants on Fire

For those of you who may not be aware of who Porter Goss is, he was at one time the Chairman of the House intelligence committee and later served as Director of the CIA under President George W. Bush. He has an article in yesterday's Washington Post in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that she knew nothing about detainees being waterboarded:

Goss writes to challenge Pelosi's claim:

A disturbing epidemic of amnesia seems to be plaguing my former colleagues on Capitol Hill. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, members of the committees charged with overseeing our nation's intelligence services had no higher priority than stopping al-Qaeda. In the fall of 2002, while I was chairman of the House intelligence committee, senior members of Congress were briefed on the CIA's "High Value Terrorist Program," including the development of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and what those techniques were. This was not a one-time briefing but an ongoing subject with lots of back and forth between those members and the briefers.

Today, I am slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as "waterboarding" were never mentioned. It must be hard for most Americans of common sense to imagine how a member of Congress can forget being told about the interrogations of Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. In that case, though, perhaps it is not amnesia but political expedience.

Let me be clear. It is my recollection that:

• The chairs and the ranking minority members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, known as the Gang of Four, were briefed that the CIA was holding and interrogating high-value terrorists.
• We understood what the CIA was doing.
• We gave the CIA our bipartisan support.
• We gave the CIA funding to carry out its activities.
• On a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda.

I do not recall a single objection from my colleagues. They did not vote to stop authorizing CIA funding. And for those who now reveal filed "memorandums for the record" suggesting concern, real concern should have been expressed immediately -- to the committee chairs, the briefers, the House speaker or minority leader, the CIA director or the president's national security adviser -- and not quietly filed away in case the day came when the political winds shifted. And shifted they have.

The rest of Goss' editorial is worth reading as well. It certainly makes you wonder about the integrity of our political leadership.

On the other hand, it may surprise you to learn that I'm quite prepared to accept the possibility that both Goss and Pelosi are telling the truth in this matter. Having listened to Ms Pelosi speak on numerous occasions on various topics I have to say that I really have no difficulty believing that she sat through every one of those briefings and understood not a word of what was being said.

RLC

Re: Freedom Is Slavery

Sarah responded to the post Freedom is Slavery with the following clever takeoff from George Orwell's 1984. Those who've read 1984 - and everyone should - will appreciate Sarah's parody of the Janet Napolitano Department of Homeland Security:

This is ungood thoughtcrime. It has many oldthink thinks. This is ungood because it is unnice to the government. The government needs to crimestop itself against the doubleplusungood right wing extremists who unbellyfeel the government's think. So the government needs to tell everyone that these people are doubleplusungood so that everyone will goodthink. Blackwhite. Minitrue needs to use the right words when telling this to the people so the people will goodthink. By using "extremist" the people goodthink.

They see facism or communism or people with guns who are doubleplusungood and unnice and unhappy. These people are scary and make everyone want the government to crimestop them. These people unagree with the government. They must be crimestopped. If we all unagreed with the government there would be no government. And if these people were allowed to speak more people might unagree and unbelly with the government and less people would blackwhite. It is better if the government says what to think instead of extremists so everyone thinks what to think and upsubs.

The extremists want to hurt us and the government. The government is doubleplusgood for letting everyone think what to think about these ungood people.

On a different note, Newspeak is supposed to be the only language whose vocabulary gets smaller every year. Though I don't think that is true. I don't exactly have any facts, but it certainly seems like the English language is taking a similar downward spiral. I read books written a hundred years ago and the vocabulary is rich and diverse. Then I use some of those words and no one knows what the heck I am talking about. They ask what shelf it's on, I say the penultimate. No clue what I'm talking about. I say my mother is parsimonious and get blank stares. I throw up my hands and say this is egregious. No idea. There is a dearth of words being circulated throughtout the English language.

I was learning how to write articles for newspapers or magazines a few years ago, and the lecturer said to write like I was writing for a fourth grade audience. I thought this was intolerable. Fourth graders weren't going to be reading this, adults were! If the newspapers and magazines dumb everything down, what hope is there for anyone? Maybe if the newspapers and magazines started employing a plethora of vocabulary things would change. Until then, THIS IS EGREGIOUS!!!!!!

Very well put, Sarah.

RLC