Squandering Our National Treasures

Liberals concerned about conserving our scenic and wild lands as well as threats to the health of our wildlife populations and parks should take note. It's their fiscal policies which are today the dominant menace to all of these. Take the plight of California as an illustration of how government profligacy endangers the very resources it wishes to preserve:

Conservation projects in California's state parks face a bleak future, if cuts proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger go through.

To tackle a swelling state deficit that has reached $24.3 billion, the "Governator" wants to slash spending across the board - including funding for 80 per cent of the 270 sites run by the California Department of Parks and Recreation. Those parks earmarked for closure (pdf) include world-famous attractions such as the giant sequoias at Calaveras Big Trees State Park in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Gated access roads to some parks would be closed, but many parks can be easily entered from public highways. With no rangers on hand to keep a watchful eye on visitors, that could be bad news for threatened species such as the desert tortoise.

In a recent survey, researchers led by Kristin Berry of the US Geological Survey in Moreno Valley found a worryingly high death rate among young animals in the Red Rock Canyon State Park, north of Los Angeles - some of which had gunshot wounds.

The proposed funding cuts would also eliminate conservation management activities such as the removal of invasive plants and efforts to prevent catastrophic fires. In Calaveras, this involves the removal of fir trees allowed to grow by earlier fire suppression efforts - and which now threaten a conflagration that could engulf the sequoias.

Out of control spending and deficits have forced the California state government to cut back on its expenditures on "non-essentials," and what is in line to be cut are not the wasteful projects, not the spending on the millions of aliens who are in the state illegally, but our natural heritage.

If we extrapolate this onto a national scale, we might wonder how long it will be before the White House announces that our national parks, forests and seashores are no longer affordable and that in order to pay the interest on the astronomical national debt President Obama has bequeathed us we should sell these off.

If this state of affairs ever does come to pass what an irony it'll be that the "environmental party," the party so distraught over global warming and other ecological cataclysms, will be the party responsible for the loss of our nation's most beautiful jewels. In squandering our nation's treasure the Democrats may well have squandered our national treasures.

RLC

Puzzler

According to Gallup there are almost twice as many self-identified conservatives in the U.S. as there are liberals. This is very hard to believe given the election results the last two cycles. Nevertheless, according to the famous polling agency:

Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

So, if this is true why do we have the most liberal House, Senate and White House in the history of this country?

Could it be that regardless what people themselves believe, they have no idea what the people they vote for believe? Put that down as my guess.

RLC

The Speech We Wish He'd Given

Dennis Prager gives us the speech we wish President Obama would have given in Cairo. Here's an excerpt:

To my great disappointment, many Muslims have come to believe that my country has declared war on Muslims and Islam. Because of this widespread belief, I said in an interview with al-Arabiya a few months ago, that we need to restore "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago."

Let's look a little deeper at that relationship. For the truth is, as noted by the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the American newspaper the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in the last 20-30 years America did not just respect Muslims, it bled for Muslims. We Americans engaged in five military campaigns on behalf of Muslims, each one resulting in the liberation of a Muslim people: Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bosnia and Kosovo, as well as the failed 1992-93 Somalia intervention to feed starving African Muslims -- in which] 43 Americans were killed -- were all humanitarian exercises. In none of them was there a significant U.S. strategic interest at stake. So, in fact, in these 20 years, my country, the United States of America has done more for suffering and oppressed Muslims than any other nation, Muslim or non-Muslim.

While I recognize that gratitude is the rarest positive human quality, I need to say -- because candor is the highest form respect -- that America has not only not received little gratitude from the Muslim world, it has been the object of hatred, mass murder, and economic attack from Muslim individuals, groups, and countries.

There's much more at the link. Would that our president was less inclined toward ingratiation and self-abasement and more inclined toward presenting the Muslim world with the hard facts about the history of American/Islamic interactions.

RLC

Color Specific Justice

As everyone knows by now, President Obama's candidate for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, is under fire for her comment that she thinks a wise Latina woman would come to better conclusions on many court cases than would some old white guy, or something. Be that as it may, the details of her ruling in the Ricci case - which is now before the Supreme Court - leave a lot of doubt whether wisdom is a trait of which this particular Latina can boast.

Stuart Taylor at National Journal reviews the details of the case and shows beyond a reasonable doubt that "the decision to kill the promotions (in the Ricci case) was driven less by purported legal concerns than by raw racial politics."

Taylor adds that:

But the unmistakable logic of Sotomayor's position would encourage employers to discriminate against high-scoring groups based on race -- no matter how valid and lawful the qualifying test -- in any case in which disproportionate numbers of protected minorities have low scores, as is the norm.

Such logic would convert disparate-impact law into an engine of overt discrimination against high-scoring groups across the country and allow racial politics and racial quotas to masquerade as voluntary compliance with the law.

In other words, this "highly intelligent," "highly accomplished," "empathetic" Latina judge likes to lift the blindfold that represents a judge's indifference to who stands before her in her court in order to take a peek at the skin color of the people involved in the case. She then rules accordingly. Her much vaunted empathy appears to be very color specific.

Read the rest of Taylor's essay at the link to gain a good idea of the sort of person President Obama thinks should be dispensing justice in America.

RLC

Iranian Democracy

According to a piece by Amil Imani and Dr. Arash Irandoost at American Thinker, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have actually finished third in the recent Iranian election:

[T]he turnout was massive, a near record high 85 percent of Iran's 49.2 million eligible voters. Based on the information from Mousavi's website, a group of Interior Ministry employees have leaked out the following results which seem to be closer to reality than the one released by the establishment:

• Total eligible voters: 49.2 million
• Participated in the election: 75% to 85%
• Mir Hussein Mousavi: 45%
• Mehdi Karoobi: 33%
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 13%
• Mohsen Rezai: 9%
• Cancelled votes: 3%

It is clear that Mr. Mir Hussein Mousavi won the election by a large margin. Ahmadinejad came out third. But on Friday June 12, 2009, in the Islamic election something happened. Something beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. Something huge. A daylight coup d'�tat by the elements of the establishment, particularly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the U.S. Senate had designated as a terrorist organization (with Senator Obama not voting).

One might be forgiven for wondering whether President Obama's reluctance to vigorously condemn the fraudulent Iranian elections stems from the fact that, having once worked for ACORN, he has a soft spot in his heart for voter fraud.

RLC

Living Within Our Means

My friend Jason weighs in with a "guest post" this morning:

George Will diagnoses here three causes which stifle American economic growth and, consequently, deepen global financial woes further:

• Ecological protectionist legislation enacted by the United States which heavily taxes foreign "carbon-intensive" goods
• Refusal by the Obama Administration to allow for the "creative destruction" of failed corporations such as General Motors and Chrysler (Will argues that such executive intervention doesn't allow the corporations to die naturally which would free up greater amounts of capital over time.)
• Rising long-term interest rates resulting from national governments, most notably Great Britain and the United States, borrowing heavily to pay off their respective national debts.

The financial picture that Will paints in his editorial isn't pretty. The Standard and Poor indices he cited regarding British and U.S. national deficits relative to their total national gross domestic products for this year prove especially disheartening.

But Will shines some much needed light on a solution already in the works courtesy not of the latest Obama Administration czar or Congress, but by an increasing number of individual American consumers. The major credit company, Visa, reported that in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008, and for the first time ever in U.S. financial history, purchases made by debit cards exceeded credit cards.

In other words, individual consumers decided to buy goods and services with only the money immediately available in their checking accounts as opposed to increasing their monthly credit debt.

Spending only what you have. Imagine that.

JRG

Where's the Boundary?

In almost any controversy one can find words being employed whose meaning everyone understands until someone asks for a definition. Then it turns out, sometimes, that the meaning isn't so clear after all.

In the controversy over Intelligent Design (ID) disputants often speak piously about science as a discipline which deals only with the realm of nature and which does not concern itself with supernature, which is the province of religion. Since ID allegedly relies on supernatural causes of biological complexity it's ipso facto religious rather than scientific. Perhaps, though, we should ask exactly what is the distinction between what's natural and what's supernatural. Where's the boundary between them?

Cornelius Hunter puts his finger on the problem in a post on anti-ID philosopher Barbara Forrest. Hunter says:

In her recent paper, The Non-epistemology of Intelligent Design: Its Implications for Public Policy, evolutionary philosopher Barbara Forrest states that science must be restricted to natural phenomena. In its investigations, science must restrict itself to a naturalistic methodology, where explanations must be strictly naturalistic, dealing with phenomena that are strictly natural. Aside from rare exceptions this is the consensus position of evolutionists. And in typical fashion, Forrest uses this criteria to exclude origins explanations that allow for the supernatural.

The question for Forrest and the evolutionists then is: What is the boundary between natural phenomena and supernatural phenomena?

Forrest tells us science must never violate this boundary, so it is important that we discern it. We need to distinguish between natural and supernatural phenomena? How can science know when it is investigating a supernatural phenomena rather than a natural one?

We've actually discussed this problem at Viewpoint several times over the years. Here's some thoughts from three years ago on this very question:

One of the fundamental problems in the debate over design is the vagueness of the terms "natural" and "supernatural." What exactly are natural or supernatural entities? Is a natural entity simply something which is part of the space-time universe and a supernatural entity something which transcends this universe?

If so, then those cosmologists wrestling with theories about "other worlds" are really doing theology, not science. If, however, we wish to consider the theorizing of cosmologists to be legitimate science then we have to say that excluding theorizing about an extra-cosmic designer from science is an arbitrary and unwarranted step.

For all we know, the designer of our universe could be a denizen of one of those other universes or it could be the "generator" which manufactures those universes.

In other words, the concept of other worlds effectively erases the natural/supernatural distinction and greatly expands the purview of science.

The question then becomes not whether talk of a designer is scientific or not, but whether there is reason to think that our universe and the living things in it show evidence of intention and intelligent engineering.

The next time someone tells you that Intelligent Design is not science because it invokes the supernatural and science only deals with what is natural ask them what they mean by those terms. Chances are they won't be able to give a coherent, non-arbitrary reply.

Indeed, the only way to meaningfully distinguish between natural and supernatural is to say that the word natural encompasses everything that exists or may exist, including angels and demons, except the creator God of theism. That is, nature is comprised of all ontological contingent entities and supernature is comprised of the ultimately necessary being. This distinction is fine with me, but then there's surely no warrant for saying that ID is religious, or non-science, since the designer of our little corner of reality could theoretically be any intelligent entity which transcends our world but which is not God.

I think that those, like Forrest, who insist on excluding ID from science, should be clear that what they're really doing is not striving for some methodological purity but rather trying, perhaps for their own religious purposes, to incorporate an explicitly anti-theistic epistemological bias into the very definition of science.

RLC

Tough Going for Terrorists

According to Strategy Page the war in Pakistan and Afghnaistan is not going well for the terrorists. In Pakistan al Qaeda has had enough of our predator drones and is absconding to Somalia while the Taliban are finding themselves relentlessly hunted down by Pakistani troops and American missiles.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan the troop surge is paying dividends:

The influx of American troops is showing up throughout southern Afghanistan. Areas that had long been dominated by the Taliban, or pro-Taliban tribes, are now being raided by American troops. U.S. intelligence forces arrived before the combat troops, and the increased reconnaissance and electronic monitoring effort produced a more detailed picture of who the Taliban were, where they lived and what they were up to. All that was needed was more troops to work the target list. The Taliban tactics appear to consist of avoiding foreign troops (except for greater use of roadside bombs), and trying to concentrate forces to drive Afghan police and government officials out of the countryside. This would have some chance of success were it not for the foreign troops.

There's more about the conflict in both of these theaters at the links.

Oddly enough, even though the increased American presence and combat activity has caused an increase in American casualties, very little is being said about this in the media. This time last year 40 U.S. troops had died in Afghanistan. So far this year American deaths number 70 - a 40 percent increase. If these deaths were occuring in Iraq, the casualty figures would be a prominent feature of the evening news, but maybe that's because Iraq was Bush's war and people had to be reminded daily what an awful failure it was. Afghanistan is now Obama's war and we must not weaken our resolve or lose sight of our goal by focusing on negatives.

Makes sense to me.

RLC

The Silence

President Obama is getting some flak for not speaking out more forcefully on behalf of the Iranian dissidents protesting the results of what was, from all appearances, a fraudulent election. I don't think the criticism is quite fair. There may, for all we know at this point, be good reasons for keeping quiet. The President may have intelligence, for example, that suggests that Ahmadinejad is waiting to use the excuse of American meddling as a pretext for cracking down even harder on the demonstrators. Obama may know that strong words at this juncture will cost innocent lives. If so, he's probably doing the right thing, but, in any event, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. For now.

If, however, the demonstrations persist and the government continues to kill innocent people then Mr. Obama will not be able to postpone stinging denunciations of the tyrants in Tehran. After all, as Steven Hayward at No Left Turns notes, were these protests occurring in apartheid South Africa, and it was blacks being shot in the streets, it's doubtful that Mr. Obama would show such restraint.

As things continue to escalate in Iran Mr. Obama will have to take a stand for democracy. He'll have to show by his response that he's willing to confront fascist tyranny or that he prefers to accommodate it. And tyranny it is:

RLC

Atheists Are IDers, Too

One of the claims made by the detractors of Intelligent Design is that it's really a religious position held by a bunch of Christian fundamentalists eager to use it as a Trojan Horse to sneak creationism into public schools. One would think that the fact that there are so many atheists and agnostics sympathetic to ID might give pause to those who subscribe to this allegation, but the critics seem undeterred by the evidence which, nevertheless, continues to mount. Alfred Russel at Uncommon Descent writes, for instance, about the atheistic scientist Fred Hoyle who was an opponent of Darwinism and who believed that an intelligence of some sort was driving the universe. Here's part of Russel's post:

[T]he truth is that Hoyle absolutely disbelieved in Darwinism. He thought that there is intelligence "out there" in the cosmos, and perhaps in past time, that is directing the progress of life on Earth. In The Intelligent Universe, Hoyle meticulously demolishes Darwinism in great detail and with scientific precision. He even goes after Darwin himself, suggesting that Darwin only understood how evolution might work after he received Wallace's letter detailing the role of natural selection. Hoyle returns time and time again to quote Wallace, whom he evidently admired.

What Russel's post on Hoyle shows is that skepticism about Darwinism, atheism, and sympathy for ID are all compatible with each other.

The claim, made by Richard Dawkins and others, that ID logically entails belief in God is simply false. ID is certainly compatible with belief in God, and it may make belief in God easier to accept - the real reason, in my view, why there's so much opposition to it - but it does not require belief in God.

But, skeptics demand, who else could be the designer if not the God of religious belief? Well, there are lots of atheists who, in order to escape the conclusion that this amazingly fine-tuned universe is the product of a Creator, are suggesting that our universe is just one of a near infinite number of worlds and that, given so many worlds, it's not so implausible to believe that one like ours would exist by chance.

If you buy into this "multiverse" argument (I don't) then you have to admit that in one of those worlds there could well be a civilization so advanced that it has the technology to design and create other worlds. Perhaps our world is the product of such a civilization. If so, it would have been intelligently designed but there would be no necessary religious dimension to belief in the designers.

The point is that ID should not be excluded from classrooms or anywhere else on religious grounds. It's no more religious than is the Darwinian view that all of life and the cosmos can be explained in purely natural terms. To exclude intelligence as a legitimate causal explanation while allowing alternative naturalistic explanations demonstrates a materialist bias against any view which makes the existence of a transcendent intelligence more likely.

RLC

Slumdog

I just got around to watching Slumdog Millionaire over the weekend. What a great movie. The glimpse of Indian life, the music, the story, the acting, the cinematography - everything was superb. Or am I just too uncritical and too easy to please? What did you think about the film?

RLC

Lots More Land

Don't lose any sleep over this, but the ice sheet covering Greenland is melting faster than expected:

Study results indicate that the ice sheet may be responsible for nearly 25 percent of global sea rise in the past 13 years. The study also shows that seas now are rising by more than 3 millimeters a year--more than 50 percent faster than the average for the 20th century.

UAF researcher Sebastian H. Mernild and colleagues from the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark discovered that from 1995 to 2007, overall precipitation on the ice sheet decreased while surface ablation--the combination of evaporation, melting and calving of the ice sheet--increased. According to Mernild's new data, since 1995 the ice sheet lost an average of 265 cubic kilometers per year, which has contributed to about 0.7 millimeters per year in global sea level rise. These figures do not include thermal expansion--the expansion of the ice volume in response to heat--so the contribution could be up to twice that.

Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither? It certainly has consequences. The sea level is apparently rising due to melting ice around the globe, and that has implications for coastal cities and agriculture. The oceans will get somewhat less salty which will have implications for marine ecology, but no one really knows how these things are going to play out. One thing that we do know, though, is that if the ice covering Greenland continues to recede, far more land is going to become available for use not only by humans but also by plants and animals. Vast tracts of land in Greenland could within a century or so become habitat for all sorts of creatures which are currently confined to more restricted ranges.

More land will also be available for agriculture, mining, and who knows what all else. This is true not just of Greenland but also North America and Russia. The idea that a changing climate is a global disaster is rather short-sighted. It's more likely to be, like most things, a mixed bag. The point is we just don't know yet.

RLC

Hearts vs Minds

This is bound to upset a lot of liberal stereotypes: Yahoo News reports on a pair of studies which conclude that conservatives are more open-minded to opposing views than are liberals. Here's a quick summary:

People with stronger party affiliation, conservative political views, and greater interest in politics proved more likely to click on articles with opposing views, according to the Ohio State study. "It appears that people with these characteristics are more confident in their views and so they're more inclined to at least take a quick look at the counterarguments," Knobloch-Westerwick noted.

Among the political blog readers, a similar trend emerged in which "liberals read almost exclusively liberal blogs, but conservatives tend to read both," Davis said.

The article offers several possible explanations for this finding, including genetic disposition, the success of talk radio, etc., but I suspect that the biology-based explanation is closest to the truth. I think, but couldn't possibly prove, that conservatives are generally more left-brained, logical and analytical. They want to find the best arguments to support their views. In other words, for most conservatives a position or idea has to make sense.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be more right-brained, subjective and intuitive. If a particular view makes them feel good, if it's compatible with the way they'd like the world to be, then they have no need of argument. In fact, they often find contrary opinions to be unsettling and often think that someone who questions liberal dogma must be lacking in compassion or have some other pernicious character flaw.

Or maybe this theory and the studies cited above are all a bunch of horse-puckey.

RLC

That Seventies Show

Economist Arthur Laffer has some gloomy tidings for us in the Wall Street Journal:

With the [economic] crisis, the ill-conceived government reactions, and the ensuing economic downturn, the unfunded liabilities of federal programs -- such as Social Security, civil-service and military pensions, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, Medicare and Medicaid -- are over the $100 trillion mark. With U.S. GDP and federal tax receipts at about $14 trillion and $2.4 trillion respectively, such a debt all but guarantees higher interest rates, massive tax increases, and partial default on government promises.

But as bad as the fiscal picture is, panic-driven monetary policies portend to have even more dire consequences. We can expect rapidly rising prices and much, much higher interest rates over the next four or five years, and a concomitant deleterious impact on output and employment not unlike the late 1970s.

What monetary policy is he talking about? The picture below is worth a thousand words. It shows the massive increase in the money supply undertaken by the Federal Reserve to pay on the enormous debt the current administration has buried us under.

The more you have of something the cheaper is its value. It's as true of money as it is of anything else, and the unprecedented infusion of cash into the economy means that the value of the dollar will inevitably sink which means we're headed for double digit inflation just like, or worse than, we had in the seventies.

Russian blogger Stanislav Mishin writing in the newspaper Pravda, of all places, offers(courtesy of the Washington Times)the following commentary on our current precarious economic condition:

It must be said that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple. Excuse me dear reader, I meant people.

True, the situation has been well-prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past 20 years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia, and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.

Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls to the whims of their elites and betters.

The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more than another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.

In other words, President Obama's policies could well turn the U.S. into a third world country, but, hey, didn't he and Michelle look so cool together on their New York date night.

RLC

Moral Purity and the U.N.

Americans, concerned about their image as a human rights violator, last November elected Barack Obama to lead us back to righteousness. One of the first things the new President did in order to fulfill his mandate to restore moral purity to American foreign policy was to order the closing of the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba because it's important to avoid the very appearance of evil.

Very well, but the case is even stronger for dissociating ourselves not just from the figment of evil, but from the real thing. In this instance the real thing resides at the United Nations.

Here, courtesy of Ed Lasky, are four reasons why the United States should pull out of the U.N.

In elections last Wednesday:

1. Libya was elected President of the U.N. General Assembly. The Libyan minister for African affairs has been designated for the post.
   
2. Sudan has been elected vice president of the General Assembly.
   
3. Algeria has been elected chair of the Assembly's Legal Committee, known in the U.N.'s streamlined bureaucracy as the Sixth Committee.
   
4. Iran has been elected vice-chair of the Sixth Committee.
   

Closing Gitmo is a precipitous and foolish idea. The detainees held there were treated better than we treat convicts in many of our prisons in the United States and certainly better than they would be treated were they imprisoned in the countries in which they were captured. The only reason for closing it is symbolic, and it's not even clear what the symbol is.

Pulling out of the U.N., on the other hand, would be an act of genuine moral substance since it has become a haven for thugs and tyrants who are handsomely recompensed for blustering and threatening the free people of the world and accomplishing next to nothing on behalf of those who suffer.

RLC

Gravitational Mysteries

There are four fundamental physical forces that operate throughout the universe - the strong nuclear, which holds the atomic nucleus together against the force of repulsion of positively charged protons; the weak nuclear, which mediates radioactive decay; the electromagnetic, which is the force between charged particles and/or magnetic poles; and gravity. Of these four, gravity is by far the weakest being 10 to the 40th power times weaker than the electromagnetic force, which is in turn 100 times weaker than the strong nuclear force (which is why the SNF can hold protons together against the force of their mutual repulsion, at least over very short distances).

Gravity is the force with which we are perhaps most familiar, and yet no one really understands much about it. We can measure it and predict its effects, but when it comes to understanding it scientists are at a loss. It is indeed strange, when we think about it, that an object like the earth can somehow pull another object, like your body, without there being any discernable physical connection between them.

This is, however, just one of the mysterious aspects of gravity. New Scientist has a piece in which they briefly outline current thinking on each of the following questions about gravity:

1. What is gravity?
   
2. Why does gravity only pull?
   
3. Why is gravity so weak?
   
4. Why is gravity fine-tuned?
   
5. Does life need gravity?
   
6. Can we counter gravity?
   
7. Will we ever have a quantum theory of gravity?
   

The most interesting to me is #4 but check them all. It's a very interesting article.

RLC

Double Standard

As a minority who overcame a difficult childhood to rise to the top of her profession, Sonia Sotomayor has a compelling story, and Republicans who would block her nomination must be animated by the worst sort of motivations. At least that's the narrative we've been hearing, but those who are telling it have very short memories. Colleen Carroll Campbell reminds us of another compelling story:

Eight years before Sonia Sotomayor burst onto the national scene with her hardscrabble life story and bid to become America's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, another judicial nominee almost made history. Honduran immigrant Miguel Estrada was nominated in 2001 to become the first Hispanic on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a post seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.

Estrada's rags-to-riches story and sterling resumé had the same star quality as Sotomayor's. Estrada barely spoke English when he arrived in America at age 17, but he wound up graduating with high honors from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, editing the Harvard Law Review and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. After a stint at a prestigious New York law firm, Estrada served as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York and an assistant solicitor general in the Clinton administration. His bid for the federal bench was backed by the left-leaning American Bar Association, which awarded him its highest rating of "well-qualified."

Unlike Sotomayor, however, Estrada never enjoyed fawning press coverage or effusive praise from the liberal activists and politicians who have spent the past week pontificating about the need for ethnic diversity on our nation's highest courts. In fact, many of the same voices gushing about the "empathy" that Sotomayor's Hispanic heritage allows her to bring to bench once raged against Estrada.

The key difference between Sotomayor and Estrada: Estrada is a conservative. Senate Democrats, wary of seeing a Latino Republican nominee advance toward the Supreme Court, spent more than two years blocking his nomination. Although he had the votes to be confirmed, Estrada withdrew his name in 2003 after it became clear that he would not be granted the courtesy of a simple up-or-down vote on the Senate floor.

Estrada's case marked the first time a filibuster was used to defeat an appeals court nominee. Yet the hard partisan line taken against Estrada by Senate Democrats was hardly unprecedented.

But Democrats' amnesia on judicial appointees doesn't end with Estrada:

Many of the same Democrats now extolling Sotomayor's underprivileged childhood showed no appreciation for the humble beginnings of conservative judges Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers Brown, two African-Americans raised by sharecroppers who faced fierce confirmation battles on their way to the bench. And the same liberal activists who warned of a Catholic cabal on the Supreme Court during the confirmation hearings of Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito have made nary a peep about Sotomayor's Catholicism, perhaps because they regard her as the "right" kind of Catholic -- one who does not actively practice her faith.

And this doesn't include all of George Bush's other appointees whose nominations languished and died in the Senate because the Democrats didn't want Bush's selections making judicial decisions.

Then there is the total memory loss suffered by the President himself:

President Barack Obama recently called on senators to judge Sotomayor "on the merits" and eschew the "political silliness that has come to surround the Supreme Court." That challenge would carry more weight had Obama himself met it during his Senate tenure. When evaluating Roberts' nomination in 2005, Obama acknowledged that "there is absolutely no doubt in my mind Judge Roberts is qualified" but said he was more concerned about "what is in the judge's heart" than his resume. Citing what he perceived as Roberts' lack of enthusiasm for affirmative action and abortion rights, Obama rejected him.

The President's calls to eschew petty partisan fights over judicial nominees are risible, given his and his party's history of doing exactly that, but, even so, Republicans shouldn't follow the Democrat example. They should consider Ms Sotomayor on her merits, not on the basis of who nominated her. If she's qualified they should confirm her, but if it turns out that she's not the shining star the administration is making her out to be, Republicans should firmly oppose her.

That's how grown up statesmen behave.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

RLC

If Israel Strikes

It seems almost a foregone conclusion now that President Obama has switched his position on Iranian nuclear weapons from "unacceptable" to "acceptable" - having learned that the "unacceptable" position entails the use of force - that Israel will strike Iran to take them out. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton writing for the Wall Street Journal outlines Iran's most likely responses to such an attack:

1. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz.
   
2. Iran cuts its own oil exports to raise world prices.
   
3. Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   
4. Iran increases support for global terrorism.
   
5. Iran launches missile attacks on Israel.
   
6. Iran unleashes Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.
   

For one reason or another Mr. Bolton thinks most of these to be unlikely assuming there's a scintilla of sanity still left in Tehran. He's of the opinion that 6), another proxy war waged through Hamas and Hezbollah, is the likeliest outcome.

His discussion of these options is fascinating.

RLC

Presto!

The President has shown a fondness for talking about the number of jobs that he has "saved or created" with his stimulus spending, but as William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal observes this construction is at best meaningless and at worst dishonest:

His latest invocation came yesterday, when the president declared that the stimulus had already saved or created at least 150,000 American jobs -- and announced he was ramping up some of the stimulus spending so he could "save or create" an additional 600,000 jobs this summer. These numbers come in the context of an earlier Obama promise that his recovery plan will "save or create three to four million jobs over the next two years."

The reason this is either meaningless or dishonest is that the President surely knows that "the number is pure fiction -- the administration has no way to measure how many jobs are actually being 'saved.' "

Of course, the inability to measure Mr. Obama's jobs formula is part of its attraction. Never mind that no one -- not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- actually measures "jobs saved." As the New York Times delicately reports, Mr. Obama's jobs claims are "based on macroeconomic estimates, not an actual counting of jobs." Nice work if you can get away with it.

And get away with it he has. However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula "save or create" allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion of precision. Harvard economist and former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw calls it a "non-measurable metric." And on his blog, he acknowledges the political attraction.

"The expression 'create or save,' which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius," writes Mr. Mankiw. "You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus."

Mr. Obama's comments yesterday are a perfect illustration of just such a claim. In the months since Congress approved the stimulus, our economy has lost nearly 1.6 million jobs and unemployment has hit 9.4%. Invoke the magic words, however, and -- presto! -- you have the president claiming he has "saved or created" 150,000 jobs. It all makes for a much nicer spin, and helps you forget this is the same team that only a few months ago promised us that passing the stimulus would prevent unemployment from rising over 8%.

During a March hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus challenged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the formula.

"You created a situation where you cannot be wrong," said the Montana Democrat. "If the economy loses two million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Now, something's wrong when the president invokes a formula that makes it impossible for him to be wrong and it goes largely unchallenged. It's true that almost any government spending will create some jobs and save others. But as Milton Friedman once pointed out, that doesn't tell you much: The government, after all, can create jobs by hiring people to dig holes and fill them in.

If the "saved or created" formula looks brilliant, it's only because Mr. Obama and his team are not being called on their claims. And don't expect much to change. So long as the news continues to repeat the administration's line that the stimulus has already "saved or created" 150,000 jobs over a time period when the U.S. economy suffered an overall job loss 10 times that number, the White House would be insane to give up a formula that allows them to spin job losses into jobs saved.

So the President manages to escape media accountability for the loss of 1.6 million jobs since he took office by claiming to have saved or created 150,000 jobs with more on the way, and the fawning media is too busy ogling his abs to ask him how in the world he arrives at that number. As Ed Morrissey has noted, he could as easily boast of having saved all 140 million jobs in this country. How could anyone gainsay the claim?

Are you still working? Thank President Obama.

RLC

Silent Sisters

Melissa Clouthier wonders why the sisterhood has been so strangely silent about the egregious Playboy rape list compiled by Neanderthal misogynist Guy Cimbalo targeting conservative women. Oops, did I just inadvertently give the reason?

It is odd - well, maybe not - that hardly any liberal males have condemned this putrid piece of hate speech, and it's even odder that feminists have had so little to say about it.

Clouthier compares their silence to the person who sees an assault on a woman but does nothing to help, the very type of person feminists generally profess to loathe. Here's Clouthier's close:

Meanwhile, besides the women on the list and other conservative women media members (Megyn Kelly, Michelle Malkin, Elizabeth Blakney, the Smart Girls ladies, etc.), who presented the most vociferous defense?

Conservative men. That's right. Conservative men wrote ardently [in defense of] the attacked women. Ed Driscoll, John Hawkins, Ed Morrissey, Caleb Howe, Allahpundit, Jim Treacher. One liberal man likely lost his job for decrying Playboy's misogynistic actions.

The feminist women remain silent. I don't expect them to find their voices anytime soon. These are the same women who defended Bill Clinton's sexual harassment and blamed the victims. These are the same women who savaged Sarah Palin based on her hair, her clothes, and her choice to have a special needs child. And now, these are the women who stand by and watch other women get attacked because they are beautiful and believe differently. The feminists say nothing.

If you haven't been following this sordid tale, click on the link. The original Cimbalo article has been taken down, but Clouthier provides enough details to give you an idea of what's been going on.

UPDATE: Just as I prepared to post this I learned that the National Organization of Women has chastised David Letterman for his klunky "jokes" about Sarah Palin and her daughter. That's good news.

RLC

Tasteless and Cowardly

So, David Letterman calls Sarah Palin "slutty-looking" and cracks a humorless joke about her daughter being raped at a baseball game, and his audience, comprised mostly of New York, liberal-minded, compassionate people roars at the hilarity of it all.

Now imagine that it was not David Letterman, but rather some conservative radio talker like Rush Limbaugh who made these remarks to a conservative audience. Imagine, though, that it wasn't Sarah Palin that he called "slutty" but rather Michelle Obama, and suppose it wasn't Willow Palin who was the object of the humiliating and completely stupid comment but one of the Obamas' daughters. Suppose further that the conservative audience howled with laughter. What do you suppose would be the response? What was the response when Don Imus said something similar about the Rutger's girls basketball team?

Liberals would go ballistic, and properly so, at the sheer tastelessness and cruelty of it. They would excoriate Limbaugh and hound him from the airwaves. Conservatives would never live down the embarrassment of having one of their premier spokespersons say such a disgusting thing and having their brethren caught on tape laughing and applauding.

But David Letterman says it about the Palin family, liberals laugh themselves to tears, and no one on the left seems to think that anything unusual has happened. Few on the left seem to worry about what such behavior says about the kind of people they are. Some on the left are so blinded by their own hatreds and self-righteousness that they can't even see that what they would find despicable if done by conservatives is completely acceptable when done by one of their own.

--------------

Meanwhile, on show after show last night liberals tried to tie the Holocaust Museum shooter to conservatism in order to discredit "the right," but they failed to notice that conservatives were among the man's primary targets. He hated Fox News, The Weekly Standard, and neo-cons in general. His anti-semitism is much more agreeable with the sort of thing that emerges in left-wing discourse than anything that is heard on the right.

Unable to actually trace this man's derangements to conservativism, they simply assert that he was a "right-winger" because, well, he just has to be. It fits their stereotype.

Unlike the play the Holocaust Memorial murder is getting, when a few weeks back a black muslim terrorist shot and killed a young white soldier in Arkansas the story simply evaporated like morning fog. There was no public investigation into this man's background, his hatreds, and mental disorders. There was no soul-searching about the nature of Islam, black racism, and the anti-military mindset which infects the American left and which may well have incited this attack. Why not?

Anyway, Letterman says that making jokes about people in the news is what he does. Very well. Let's see how long it takes him to say something as tasteless and coarse about Michelle Obama and her daughters as he was "courageous" enough to say about Palin and her's.

RLC

Go South Old Man

Mark Steyn sends a shiver down our spines with a little anecdote about how nationalized health care works in Canada:

In the Province of Quebec, patients suffering from serious incontinence - i.e., they have to aller aux toilettes jusqu'� 12 fois par nuit (that's 12 times a night) - have to wait three years for a half-hour operation. That's 3 years times 365 nights times 12 trips to the bathroom.

There are only two urologists in the province who perform the operation, in part because hospital budgets are so tight they decline to buy the necessary "neurostimulator".

The central point about socialized medicine is that restricting access is the only means of controlling costs. And, when comparisons of health "costs" between nations are made, the time you spend in the bathroom each night and the subsequent impact on your work performance the following day are not factored in.

Of course, if you get sick of the three-year wait, you can always drive a couple of hours south, with frequent rest stops, to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Vermont or Dartmouth-Hitchcock in New Hampshire, and write a check. For the moment. Once the U.S. system has been "reformed" so that its wait lists are up to Euro-Canadian standards, poor incontinent Quebeckers will have to drive to Costa Rica. And that's a lot more rest stops.

Two urologists in the entire province? When the government is paying the bill for health care the government decides what equipment to invest in and what procedures are urgent, and the government cares not a tittle how many times you have to go to the bathroom every night.

If President Obama continues on the road to Euro-Canadian socialism, including a nationalized health care structure, I suspect a lot of people, both Canadians and Americans, will start moving to Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a beautiful country and folks there don't have to spend the entire night in the bathroom.

RLC

California Dreamin'

It may be hard for young people to believe, but it wasn't long ago that California was seen as the land of milk and honey. People flocked to the state to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. California was perhaps the most prosperous state in the country and it was a great place to live and raise a family. Today, however, California is a different place, an economic basket case on the brink of bankruptcy. What happened? Representative Tom McClintock tells the story:

A generation ago, California exemplified its nickname, the Golden State. State spending was less than half per capita, inflation-adjusted, what it is today. Its debt-service ratio was less than a third.

Californians enjoyed one of the finest highway systems in the world and one of the finest public education systems in the country. Water and electricity were so cheap many communities didn't meter consumption.

Only a few decades have passed, yet California is a dramatically altered place. The tax burden is one of the heaviest in the nation. State government consumes the largest portion of personal earnings of any time in its history and yet can no longer maintain its basic infrastructure. The once legendary California quality of life has declined precipitously and produced a historic first: More people are moving out of California than are moving in.

One thing - and one thing only - has changed in those years: public policy. The political left gradually gained dominance over California's government and imposed a disastrous agenda of policy changes that now are being replicated at the federal level.

There's much more to this sad tale at the link. McClintock explains how deficit spending, high taxes, onerous regulations on business, unions, and centralized, bureaucratic government have combined to destroy the west coast nirvana that was once one of the best places to live in the world. He closes by reminding us that the policies which have reduced California to its current low estate are precisely the policies that a Democratic congress and administration are now foisting on the rest of the nation. Just as California's best days may well be behind it, so, too, are those of the rest of us unless in 2010 and 2012 we vote to reverse the folly.

UPDATE: As if to add an exclamation point to McClintock's eulogy for his state McClatchy has a piece that says that California is considering ending its welfare program because it can no longer afford it. I doubt this will happen, but the fact that it's even being talked about is indicative of the gravity of California's crisis.

RLC

A Pair of Bigots

Two anti-semitic bigots are in the news today. The first is the deranged elderly white supremicist named James Von Brunn who shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum yesterday. The left is playing this tragedy as a crime of "the right" even though there's nothing about Brunn that suggests he was a "right-winger." The tragedy is also getting round the clock coverage on the news outlets even though there are dozens of similar shootings in Washington everyday, shootings motivated by hatred, that no one seems to care much about.

The second bigot is Jeremiah Wright who was asked recently if he had spoken to the president, Wright replied that: "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."

It's not comforting to know that the President's spiritual mentor is an anti-semite. Can you imagine what the media reaction would be had a pastor of former President Bush said such a thing? The media would be, rightly, drawing all sorts of conclusions about the character of the president from the fact that he was willing to subject himself and his family to such a man's teaching for twenty years.

Reverend Wright and Mr. Von Brunn are two peas in a pod. They're both haters - one incites hatred and the other acted on it. One, we'll probably be told over the days and weeks ahead, reveals something dark and ugly in the soul of white, conservative America. The other, who may reveal something dark and ugly in the soul of our president, we won't be hearing much about at all.

RLC

Feedback

There are a number of interesting emails on our Feedback page, including a bit of a pro/con debate over John Calvin's theology. Check them out and feel free to add your own thoughts.

RLC

More on the Canaanites

In my post on the Canaanite genocide I posited as one possible reply to the problem of how to reconcile God's Old Testament command to extirpate everything that breathes with the Christian belief in His goodness, mercy, and love that perhaps we simply don't know enough about the details of the matter. According to this reply, if we knew more about the situation prevailing in Canaan during the time the command was given maybe the whole passage would be less puzzling.

Bill writes to link us to a site that offers an intriguing possibility along these lines. Those of you with a theological bent should check it out.

RLC

Don't Jump Yet

Here's news that might coax those Republicans about to jump off window ledges to hold off a little longer. It comes in the form of a recent Rasmussen poll that may be a portent that the tide is turning against the current platitudinous hope and change policies of the current administration. I don't want to assign too much significance to polls, especially polls this far out from the next national election, but this one may indicate that the nation is beginning to come out of the collective hypnotic trance it's been under since last summer and starting to listen to people who actually know what they're talking about. Here's a summary of Rasmussen's findings:

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of 10 key issues, including the top issue of the economy.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues, while 39% trust Democrats more.

This is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue. Voters not affiliated with either party now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues by a two-to-one margin.

Republicans also now hold a six-point lead on the issue of government ethics and corruption, the second most important issue to all voters and the top issue among unaffiliated voters. That shows a large shift from May, when Democrats held an 11-point lead on the issue.

For the eighth straight month, Republicans lead on national security. The GOP now holds a 51% to 36% lead on the issue, up from a seven-point lead in May. They also lead on the war in Iraq 45% to 37%, after leading by just two points in May and trailing the Democrats in April.

[C]onfidence that the United States and its allies are winning the War on Terror is at its highest level since February.

Republicans lead the Democrats on immigration for the third straight month, pulling ahead to a 35% to 29% advantage on the issue.

On taxes, the GOP leads the Democrats for the fifth straight month, 44% to 39%. In May and April, Republicans held six-point leads on the issue.

Democrats continue to hold the lead on the issues of health care, Social Security and education. While Democrats have a 10-point advantage on health care, that's down from the 18-point lead the party had a month ago.

Democrats lead by six points on Social Security, down from nine points in May. The parties were tied on the issue in April.

Polls are volatile and could change literally overnight, but still, there's hope. It's not that I think the Republicans are so great. After all, they're the ones whose profligate spending was the pin hole in the dam that lead to the Obama deluge. It's just that it's clear that the Democrats are on a spending bender and that Obama is trying his hardest to bring as much of the country as possible under government control as soon as possible, so if this headlong sprint toward Euro-socialism is going to be stopped it'll have to be Republicans (Lord help us) who'll have to do it. This poll gives us reason to think it may still be possible.

Now climb down from that ledge.

RLC

Te Adoramus

Evan Thomas is an editor at Newsweek which, we hear, now holds solemn daily devotionals for its editorial staff given to the worship of our president, about whom Thomas speaks here like the Romans once spoke about their emperors:

It's great fun to giggle at how these journalists have abandoned all personal pride and professional objectivity in their headlong rush to ingratiate themselves with this administration, but we shouldn't. It's really quite pathetic to watch grown adults prostrating themselves at the feet of another human being to seek his blessing and favor. One gets the feeling that if President Obama told either Evan Thomas or Chris Matthews, who is himself quick to assent to Thomas' apotheosis of the community organizer from Chicago, to commit hari kiri, they'd trip over each other in their scurry to be the first to obey the great man's wishes.

Thanks to Hot Air for the clip.

RLC

Capitulating to Tyranny

The North Koreans, like the Iranians, appear determined to possess nuclear weapons, and the Obama administration appears determined to let them. President Obama has declared his resolve to work toward a world free of such weapons and has committed the U.S. to gradual disarmament, but nothing could be more counterproductive to his plan than to stand by while these two terrorist states develop their own weapons of mass destruction.

The refusal to take more than mere diplomatic measures almost guarantees that the neighbors of these two countries will feel the need to arm themselves to counter the existential threat they'll be facing.

Look for Japan to soon begin rebuilding its military and to seek its own nuclear capacity and the Arab Gulf states, Turkey, and eventually Iraq and South Korea will surely do likewise. Obama's acquiesence to the nuclear ambitions of rogue states all but guarantees that the entire Middle East and Pacific rim will become volatile nuclear tinder boxes.

We might expect, too, that as nuclear weapons proliferate they'll eventually find their way into the hands of Islamic terrorists and start going off in places like Tel Aviv, Seoul, and New York City. Over time they'll spread to South America via Venezuela and Cuba. The president has made it clear that his policy with regard to tyrannies is to speak softly and carry a nerf bat, and the world's thugs have taken gleeful notice.

RLC

Stockholm Syndrome

Andy McCarthy at National Review Online links us to a piece that you just have to laugh at even at the risk of being labelled "insensitive." McCarthy calls our attention to an article in The Brussels Journal about a lefty Dutch journalist, Joanie de Rijke, who "went to Afghanistan to conduct a sympathetic interview with Taliban jihadists who had just killed 10 French troops. Naturally, she was abducted and serially raped for six days. And now she is angry ... not at the chief Taliban thug - who showed her "respect," though, regrettably, "he could not control his testosterone" - but at the Dutch and Belgian governments who refused to pay the $2 million ransom the jihadists demanded."

Not only are the governments of Belgium and Netherlands getting heat over their refusal to play along with the Taliban extortion, but minister of Parliament Geert Wilders is the object of European opprobrium for a speech he gave on this incident to the Dutch Parliament. In the speech Wilders said:

"She was raped, but she was not angry. The journalist who went looking for the Taliban in Afghanistan saw her curiosity end in a cruel ordeal of multiple rape. While this would make others angry or sad, this journalist shows understanding. She says: 'They also respected me.' And she was given tea and biscuits."

"This story" Wilders went on to say, "is a perfect illustration of the moral decline of our elites. They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth. Rape? Well, I would put this into perspective, says the leftist journalist: the Taliban are not monsters. Our elites prefer to deny reality rather than face it. One would expect: a woman is being raped and finds this unbearable. But this journalist is not angry because the Muslim involved also showed respect. Our elites, whether they are politicians, journalists, judges, subsidy gobblers or civil servants, are totally clueless. Plain common sense has been dumped in order to deny reality. It is not just this raped journalist who is suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but the entire Dutch elite. The only moral reference they have is: do not irritate the Muslims - that is the one thing they will condemn."

The Brussels Journal then notes that:

Rather than trying to refute Wilders, the Dutch establishment attacked him, accusing him of "immorally abusing de Rijke's ordeal for his own political goals."

Her reaction confirms precisely what Wilders was trying to say. In reality the Taliban are not monsters because they call themselves Taliban, but because they behave like monsters. People like de Rijke, however, no longer judge people by their behavior and their actions, but condone them for the noble motives which they imagine have driven them to commit their acts. As Wilders said, "They are so blinded by their own ideology that they turn a blind eye to the truth."

Those who have been abducted and suffer from Stockholm syndrome usually have not placed themselves in danger willingly. They had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The phenomenon illustrated by the case of Joanie de Rijke is that of people who for ideological reasons deny the existence of danger and subsequently put themselves in danger. Unlike ordinary Stockholm syndrome sufferers they do not begin to shown signs of loyalty to the criminal while in captivity, but have already surrendered to the criminal before their captivity, and, indeed, have ended up in captivity as a consequence of their ideological blindness.

And so, in a way Joanie de Rijke is right. She did not develop Stockholm syndrome while in captivity. She had the syndrome even before she left for Afghanistan. It is natural that she should resent her state of mind being described as Stockholm syndrome, because she considers it to be the state of mind of a righteous and intelligent modern intellectual. It is the state of mind which she shares with almost the entire political and intellectual class of Europe today, that of the hostage to political correctness.

The Brussels Journal article is worth reading in its entirety. It contains further details about Ms de Rijke and her experience, some of them funny and none of them flattering.

RLC

The Canaanite Genocide

A reader writes to ask my thoughts on the stories in the Biblical Old Testament that recount God's commands to the Israelites to slay every man, woman, child, and animal of the Canaanites (e.g. see Deut. 20:16: "[I]n the cities of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave anything alive that breathes."). Nothing could be more unChristian, more contrary to the God that Jesus reveals in the Gospels, than the behavior God commands in this passage. How, a lot of people wonder, can we reconcile this savagery with the Christian view of God?

This is the toughest question, in my opinion, with which a skeptic can challenge a Christian. I don't know that there's any satisfactory reply, and every answer of which I'm aware has serious shortcomings and/or implications. Consequently, the tendency is to simply push the problem out of one's mind. Few preachers discuss it in their sermons, and, I suppose, many laypersons simply ignore those parts of the Bible which describe the horrific killing that God ostensibly commanded of His people as they prepared to occupy the Promised Land.

I don't have an answer, at least not a good one, to the question of how to reconcile the Old Testament Yahweh with the God revealed in Jesus, but for those who are interested here are some of the explanations on offer from theologians. Perhaps one of them is correct:

1) The Old Testament record is, in this respect at least, inaccurate. The Israelites claimed to be acting on the command of God as a way of rationalizing their atrocities, but they were either mistaken about God's will in this matter or they were deceitful. God did not, in fact, ordain this behavior.

The problem with this approach is that it entails that the Old Testament, or at least parts of it, are not inspired and inerrant in the sense that Christians have traditionally believed.

2) God is sovereign and can do whatever He wants.

This is certainly true, but it doesn't address the problem. The question that cries out for an answer is why a good God, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, would want to do something so cruel and why He would have human beings participate in the brutality.

3) The Canaanites were so wicked that they deserved death and the Israelites, God's chosen people, were simply the agents of His judgment.

But what could be just about slaughtering terrified women, children, the aged, and the infirm? Did they "deserve" death? John Wesley declared that to attribute such atrocities to God is an outrage against His character and makes Him "more false, more cruel, and more unjust than the devil."

And why would God use human beings to execute such cruelties? What effect did it have on Israelite soldiers to put children to the sword? Why did He not simply handle the chore Himself or send plagues as He did against the Egyptians just a few decades earlier?

Moreover, if anything is absolutely wrong, i.e. wrong regardless of circumstances, it's genocide, but if God authorized the complete elimination of a race of people then all moral and ethical absolutes are relativized and all distinctions between good and evil become meaningless.

4) We only know part of the story. If we knew all of the details God's reasons would be more comprehensible.

This is an attractive option and it may be the truth, but it carries at least the scent of a cop-out about it. We are given no reason to think that there's more to the story than what we're told, at least no more that would change the moral complexion of it.

Moreover, its hard to imagine what additional facts there could be that would make God's command more comprehensible and more compatible with the God of justice, love and mercy that the New Testament portrays.

5) There's no answer. It's an inscrutable mystery. Just trust God and don't worry about it.

This is an appeal to fideism, or blind faith. No matter what the difficulties might be we're urged to ignore them and refuse to allow them to crowd into our noetic structure. I find this suggestion difficult to heed. I don't think God gave us minds merely to have us disengage them whenever we encounter tough questions.

Perhaps there are other possible explanations that readers could come up with for Deuteronomy 20 and passages like it. If so, please feel free to send them along via our Feedback page.

RLC

The Cairo Speech

A worshipful media, or at least large segments of it, have been cooing over the Obama trip to the Middle East in general and his "historic" Cairo speech in particular. Not all journalists, however, are bending the knee. Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post has an excellent analysis of what the President said and some fascinating thoughts on what she fears his intentions are vis a vis Israel and Iran.

Ms Glick sounds a little bit too angry in the column for my taste, but then, if she's correct, perhaps she has reason to be. Here's an excerpt from her essay:

[President Obama] spoke of the need to grant equality to women without making mention of common Islamic practices like so-called honor killings, and female genital mutilation. He ignored the fact that throughout the lands of Islam women are denied basic legal and human rights. And then he qualified his statement by mendaciously claiming that women in the US similarly suffer from an equality deficit. In so discussing this issue, Obama sent the message that he couldn't care less about the plight of women in the Islamic world.

So, too, Obama spoke about the need for religious freedom but ignored Saudi Arabian religious apartheid. He talked about the blessings of democracy but ignored the problems of tyranny.

In short, Obama's "straight talk" to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.

In a like manner, Obama's tough "truths" about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.

On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America's ties to Israel are "unbreakable."

Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign - and therefore unjustifiable - intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.

The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to soothe the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.

This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the "reconstitution" - not the creation - of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.

But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history."

He then explicitly tied Israel's establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.

Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel's rebirth, was Obama's characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners' treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, "resistance."

Be sure to read the rest. It's very insightful.

My biggest problem with the President's approach to the Arab world is that he seems to be all too eager to apologize for America's conduct vis a vis Muslims when in fact the United States has been the best friend Muslims have ever had.

It's only America's restraining hand on Israel's shoulder that has kept Israel from utterly destroying its Muslim enemies in Gaza and Lebanon. In the early 90s we rescued Kuwait from the rape and pillage of Sadaam Hussein's troops and intervened to save Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia from what would have surely been a genocidal holocaust. In the current decade we sent hundreds of millions of dollars to help Muslims devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami. We've spent millions more to bring relief to African Muslims suffering the ravages of incompetent and corrupt government. More recently we liberated 50 million Muslims from oppression and tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All of this has cost Americans in blood and treasure. No nation in the world, certainly no Muslim nation, has done as much for other Muslims as has the United States and yet President Obama mentions none of this. Like most on the left, Mr. Obama can see only American missteps and faults and seems blind to the many facts which contradict his worldview. No wonder Glick sounds angry.

RLC

Contemporary Child Abuse

Mona Charen discusses some disturbing statistics about marriage and child-bearing in America:

The number of babies born to unmarried women in 2007 (over 1.7 million) was 26% higher than it was in 2002.

Forty percent of all births in America are to unwed mothers.

Unwed motherhood is primarily a phenomenon of those who can least afford it. In 2000 less than one mother in ten who had 16 or more years of education was unmarried, but 36% of mothers with between 9 and 14 years of schooling were living without husbands.

By the age of 12, 78% of children living with no live-at-home father have experienced one or more years of poverty. For children living in intact families it's only 18%.

Babies born to unwed mothers are more likely to be premature, suffer low birth weight, and other pathologies. They will have poorer school performance, be in more trouble with the law, suffer more emotional and mental disturbances, more physical and sexual abuse, and more likely to become unwed parents themselves.

I remember reading somewhere that the one thing most men have in common in our prisons is not race, socio-economic background, or level of education. It's that almost uniformly they grew up without a father at home.

A lot of people seem to think that having two biological parents at home with their children is optional, but unwed motherhood is, according to the statistics, a form of child abuse and should be stigmatized. Our cultural elites, however, are so heavily invested in the idea that a diversity of family structures is a proper goal of a progressive society that it'll be a long time before unwed motherhood is treated with the same degree of opprobrium as is, say, exposing a child to second-hand smoke.

RLC

Climate Fascists

Our friends on the left sometimes affix bumper stickers to their autos which say things like "Dissent is Patriotic," or "Resist Authority," or they recite (or used to recite) Voltaire's famous maxim about how "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it." Noble sentiments, these, and typically American. The problem is that too many on the left don't mean a word of it.

Marc Marano at Climate Depot catalogues the many threats and other forms of intimidation that have been leveled against those who've expressed doubt about one aspect or another of the current global warming enthusiasm. Public figures who harbor reservations about the severity or the cause of climate change have been threatened with death, loss of their jobs, and imprisonment. It's astonishing that anyone, even on the left from whence we've come to expect demands for ideological conformity, can hold free speech and dissent in such low esteem.

Of course these forms of intimidation are exactly the tactics typically employed by Nazi brownshirts and other fascists, past and present. It's yet another example of why the new left are really the new fascisti. This modest proposal, for example, recently appeared on Talking Points Memo, a mainstream left-wing blog:

At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers

What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don't want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it's a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.

So when the right wing f***tards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events - how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn't we start punishing them now?

This post has since been taken down, but Morano offers lots of other examples from the last couple of years, including calls for Nuremburg-style trials for those heretics and other deviants who fail to conform to the current orthodoxy. It's frightening to think that in the United States, the home of freedom of speech and the right to dissent, there are people who believe that if you don't go along with the program, if you're skeptical of authority, you should be executed or otherwise punished.

The sound you often hear when you visit these lefty neighborhoods in the blogosphere is the sound of glass breaking.

RLC

Moral Consistency

So, comes word that harsh interrogations do work after all. I wonder if all those media talkers and others who insisted that torture doesn't provide useful information and that Bush is evil for using it, even if it was applied to only a few selected terrorists, will now humbly recant and apologize. I'm not holding my breath.

It's one of the ironies of our times that some of the same people who are so appalled that we would waterboard a terrorist in order to save thousands of lives had no problem at all with withholding food and water from a completely helpless and innocent young woman for nearly two weeks until she died of thirst.

The first is seen as an unconscionable cruelty and the second as an act of mercy. Amazing.

RLC

Byron on the Tiller Case

My friend Byron brought to my attention the article to which I linked yesterday concerning George Tiller's murder. Concerned that readers may get the misimpression that he agreed with the writer of the piece, he sent me an email unambiguously stating his position. It's a very good summary of what has been the overwhelming pro-life response to this episode, and I want to post it here so that everyone will see it.

Byron writes:

As always, you have a knack for getting at important things in ways to make us think. The philosophy teacher in you helps us think through arguments and claims and consequences. Thanks.

Since my name was mentioned as the one who sent you the piece about the ethics of the murder of Tiller, I thought I should say--for the record, since it is such a controversial and weighty matter--that I do not believe that those who follow Jesus should ever take up violence since he plainly taught his followers to be non-violent. Of course I realize that this is in the minority view in church history and although I am not anabaptist, I think the Mennonites and others of that sort get it right on this one. Christians must "overcome evil with good" and so therefore I think this author is dead wrong.

I wouldn't want anyone to think that I sent it to you because I agreed with it, although it is witty and thoughtful. And, if one thinks that killing is a legitimate thing to do to try to stop killing, then this is the quandary you are in. (The author does not advocate vigilante violence,but not because violence is wrong, but because it seems to be declaring war upon the state, violates the just war doctrine, and because it would only create more persecution.) I admire your honesty to face it, although I pray that this author, you and your readers don't take your ponderings too seriously. This is no time for more violence or armchair speculations in favor of violence. This is a time to be consistently pro-life.

Let us speak with one clear voice. Let us, as the Bible instructs, avoid even the appearance of evil. The murder of Mr. Tiller, no matter how horrendous the deeds of the doctor were, was wrong. Period.

I want to say this so clearly because it needs said, and I am glad that most pro-life organizations have been unqualified and clear in condemning this brutal assassination. Yet, the pro-choice community and some in the media have suggested otherwise. Let's not give them anything to wonder about: those who oppose abortion intend to turn around our culture through the long hard work of persuasion, cultural reformation, religious revival, innovative legislation and any other peaceful and legitimate means, but never, ever, by murder.

Surely Byron is correct if the resort to violence is always and absolutely wrong, as those in the pacifist tradition maintain it to be.

My difficulty is in understanding claims such as By makes in the last sentence of his penultimate paragraph when they're made by non-pacifists. If one does not believe that violence is always wrong then what are the justifications for its use? It seems to me that those in the pro-life camp (in which I place myself) are very vague about this. I think Byron would argue that this is one reason we should all be pacifists, but many if not most pro-lifers are not pacifists and would probably reject the suggestion that they should be. In any event, pacifism leads to conundrums of its own which are equally as perplexing and intractable.

If the pro-lifer, then, declines to embrace an absolute abjuration of violence, under what circumstances does he/she think it proper? If it's wrong to employ it to defend the lives of children about to be born then when would it ever be right?

It seems to me that pro-lifers who decline the pacifist option are on the horns of a dilemma: Either killing late-term fetuses, contrary to what many pro-lifers insist, is not really tantamount to murder, or it is tantamount to murdering innocent children, and those who are willing to risk all to prevent this atrocity are justified in their resort to violence.

I really don't like any of these alternatives myself and would welcome insight from our readers, particularly those who consider themselves pro-life. What do you think? Should all pro-lifers embrace an absolute pacifism? Should they back off from their claim that a late-term fetus is ontologically and morally indistinguishable from a new-born? Or should pro-lifers acknowledge that though violence may not be a prudent tactic in the struggle to end the abortion regime in this country, it is nevertheless neither an immoral nor evil one?

Blaise Pascal advised us that our first moral obligation is to think clearly. There are no issues concerning which it is more important that we fulfill that obligation than those issues dealing with human life.

RLC

Re: John Calvin's Theological Legacy

Almost three years ago I did a post on Calvinist theology and invited comments. A reader recently came across the post and chose to respond. His thoughtful email can be found on our Feedback page.

RLC

Pick the Right Fight

In the last couple of days several conservative talk show personalities have been engaging in much hand-wringing over President Obama's recent statement that:

"... if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."

It's time for those who are outraged by this to calm down. It's clear, to me at least, that what Obama was saying is that the United States has a Muslim population greater than that of most Muslim nations, just as our Jewish population is roughly equal to that of Israel. This should not be regarded as an incendiary claim. As it happens, like a lot of what the President says, this assertion is factually inaccurate (We have a Muslim population that ranks about 35th in the world), but it's not nefarious. He wasn't, as critics like Sean Hannity are alleging, proclaiming that we're a "Muslim nation," and for them to make an issue of this makes them look silly.

Conservatives only erode their credibility when they insist on trying to put the worst possible construction on their opponents' words. It makes them look petty and partisan and costs us a fair hearing when larger matters are at stake.

One such larger matter is raised by the words of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor:

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Here criticism is completely warranted. This is a claim she has made on more than one occasion, and it clearly reveals a mindset that's simply unacceptable in a Supreme Court justice. As many have pointed out, if these words had been uttered by a white male nominee he would have been forced to withdraw within hours of the words having come to light.

To suggest that because I am of a particular gender and ethnic heritage I will do a better job of interpreting the Constitution and dispensing justice than someone who is of a different gender and ethnicity is as clear an example of sexist, racist bigotry as one can expect to find outside the meeting halls of, say, the Aryan Nation.

No one who thinks she's better qualified than others to judge the law because she's an Hispanic female should be seated on the Supreme Court, and her appointment tells us much, not only about her, but also about the man who nominated her.

RLC

Senator DeMint and GOP Corporatism

Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina heads the Senate Steering Committee, made up of the Senate's most conservative Republicans, and is a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. In a fine essay in the Washington Times he has some excellent advice for his party. The short version: Get out of bed with the corporate elites.

DeMint puts his finger on a festering problem in the GOP - they've abandoned their conservative principles in order to appease the corporate power-brokers. Here's part of what he writes:

Earlier this month, the United States Chamber of Commerce handed out its annual "Spirit of Enterprise" awards to those members of Congress who voted with the Chamber 70 percent of the time on its most important legislative initiatives of 2008. The only four Republican senators who did not receive the award were Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions, Jim Inhofe and me - four of the most conservative members of the Senate.

What were the conservative offenses? We opposed the failed bailouts and stimulus. Which explains why many liberal Democrats scored higher, including Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Republican who scored lowest of all - that is, the Republican lawmaker supposedly least aligned with the nation's business community - was Ron Paul, a strong constitutionalist famous for his strict adherence to a free-enterprise libertarian philosophy.

There is, in these facts, an important insight into the current unpopularity of the Republican Party. In an era of corporate welfare - which is lately taking on the characteristics of 1930s-style corporatism itself - the interests of big business are veering away from the interests of economic freedom and toward the interests of big government. Many Republicans in the past decade have followed a similar course, and the party - and our country - have paid dearly for the wrong turn.

Republicans were not a party of economic elites as much as they were a party of economic freedom. They represented a clear, philosophical contrast to the watered-down socialism of the Democrats. Even when Republicans fell short on their promises of limited government, Americans believed the promises to be sincere nonetheless.

Where Mr. Reagan fought to deregulate in the interests of industry competition, many recent Republican leaders have sought to regulate in the interests of industry leaders. That is why the lobbying industry has grown so successful in recent years: For the first time, both parties have become receptive to special interest pleadings.

Republicans shouldn't be the party of business any more than they should be the party of labor - we're supposed to be the party of freedom. We should get out of the business of picking winners and losers in the marketplace. We should not care who wins in fair fights between Microsoft and Apple, between CitiGroup and community banks, or between Home Depot and mom-and-pop hardware stores. All we should demand is a fair fight.

It is none of the government's business - let alone the Republican Party's - whether banks make or deny risky loans, but only that we ensure lenders and borrowers bear the consequences of their own decisions.

Republicans will succeed again when we realize our true allegiance is not to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but to free markets, free people and freedom itself.

There's more good stuff from DeMint at the link, and his point is well taken. Too many corporate CEOs masquerade as economic free-marketeers, but they're really not. They're corporatists who welcome all sorts of government intervention into the marketplace because, among other reasons, those interventions make it harder for pesky smaller companies to compete, leaving the market as the exclusive grazing grounds of the wealthy giants. So far from being appalled at the idea of a marriage between business and government, the very relationship that Mussolini contrived in Italy and the Nazis duplicated in Germany, too many Republican politicians think that such an illicit union can only make the engines of commerce thrum with greater resonance, and they're only too happy to facilitate it.

It's, in fact, a symptom of what's wrong with the Republican party and why they're losing elections. They're simply indistinguishable from liberal Democrats.

RLC

So Long, Ben

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke told congress yesterday that large U.S. budget deficits threaten financial stability and the government can't continue indefinitely to borrow at the current rate to finance the shortfall. He added that:

"Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth. Maintaining the confidence of the financial markets requires that we, as a nation, begin planning now for the restoration of fiscal balance."

The Bloomberg report goes on to say that:

Bernanke's comments signal that the central bank sees risks of a relapse into financial turmoil even as credit markets show signs of stability. He said the Fed won't finance government spending over the long term, while warning that the financial industry remains under stress and the credit crunch continues to limit spending.

We have to wonder why congress and the White House are insisting on driving this financial train over the precipice. Surely, they all know what Bernanke and anyone else who has a bank account knows - you can't keep spending money you don't have, running up debts you have no way of paying off.

The article went on to offer some insight into how we're going to pay off Obama's shopping spree:

The budget deficit this year is projected to reach $1.85 trillion, equivalent to 13 percent of the nation's economy, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

"Either cuts in spending or increases in taxes will be necessary to stabilize the fiscal situation," Bernanke said in response to a question. "The Federal Reserve will not monetize the debt."

If Bernanke's telling the truth then the Fed will refuse to just print money to pay off Obama's debts. The bad news, however, is that the only other way to pay them off will be to raise taxes. A lot. In other words, if you think your paycheck is too fat now, just wait. It's about to go on a very severe diet.

Look, too, for the administration to answer Bernanke's impertinence by replacing him at the Fed with someone more compliant and less responsible.

RLC