Reacting to Race

Evan Coyne Maloney at Big Government.com offers us a heuristic for understanding everything from why criticism of President Obama is seen as racist to the failure of the traditional media to investigate ACORN to the reporting on the Kanye West boorishness at the Country Music Awards. Maloney tells us that there are several rules we need to keep in mind, and once we have mastered them we will understand all else. It's sort of like finding the DaVinci Code. Anyway, here are the rules:

1. If a person is a member of a group guilty of past racial oppression, that person has no moral standing in relation to anyone in any group that's ever been a victim of that oppression.
   
2. A member of an oppressor group is always assumed to be guilty in relation to a member of a victim group.
   
3. An oppressor can only avoid presumed guilt by making a display of his or her sympathy for the oppressed.
   
4. Members of victim groups can lose their moral standing by expressing a preference for individual rights as opposed to group rights.
   
5. Advocating on behalf of a victim makes one almost as unassailable as being that victim.
   
6. Coming to the defense of an oppressor is even more repugnant than being that oppressor.
   

Maloney applies the rules in order to interpret the three stories mentioned above, but he could have cited others. The reaction to the beating given to a white student to the cheers of the black students on a school bus would have almost certainly have been much different had the races been reversed. As it was, the media, leery of violating rule #2, focused their commentary almost entirely on the kindness of the boy who stepped in to stop the assault, and the possibility of racist motivation was scarcely mentioned even though the victim was one of only a few kids on the bus who was white. If the races had been reversed there's little doubt that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been on the scene demanding justice for the victim and the media would have been amplifying their voices. Instead, because it was a white kid that got beaten by black kids, the story, like others of its kind, quietly slipped off the media radar screen.

If we really wanted to move beyond race into the post-racial promised land that we heard so much about during the presidential campaign wouldn't we start applying the same standards of judgment to everyone regardless of their skin color? Let's judge people by what they do. Let's judge them by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Here's my rule, call it rule #7: Regarding any interracial incident, ask whether the reaction to the episode would be different were the races reversed. If the answer is yes, then something is wrong with one of the two reactions.

RLC

Refusing to Face the Emptiness

In a book review at First Things Edward Oakes makes the following observation about atheism:

In Untimely Meditations, Fried�rich Nietzsche spins a tale that goes like this: Once upon a time, on a minuscule planet orbiting a mediocre star, clever little animals emerged from the slime - and not long after began using puffed-up words like truth and goodness. Even worse, they thought they could attain genuine knowledge in this ultimately dead world. But their little C-grade star eventually cooled, and these pathetic little creatures died out, and with them died their proud words and hard-gained knowledge. The universe shed not one tear but merely looked on from its cold, infinite, uncaring skies.

One must at least credit Nietzsche for drawing out the consistent implications of atheism. Recent atheists, in contrast, seem to preach their atheism with an odd fervor, and one looks in vain for these overheated unbelievers to acknowledge that atheism entails a pointless universe. Perhaps, though, we should sympathize with our current crop of evangelizing atheists. Nietzsche's pointless-universe thesis is so difficult to maintain that not even he could manage it. In a later book, The Gay Science, he came to the conclusion: "It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests - that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato: that God is the truth, that truth is divine."

Rare is the contemporary atheist who takes his atheism as radically as did Nietzsche.

Indeed. Rare is the atheist who can bear to live consistently with his atheism. As someone once noted, atheists refute their belief everyday by how they live their lives. They live as if their lives are full of point and purpose when, in fact, in a Godless world, point and purpose are empty concepts.

The irony of this is that the atheist is often at pains to accuse the believer of living by an irrational faith when, in fact, the very essence of irrationality is refusing to accept the logical conclusions of one's presuppositions. The paradigm case of irrationality is the modern atheist who tries to inject meaning into his life by undermining belief in the only thing that could possibly make life meaningful.

Like Nietzsche, the atheist Jean Paul Sartre sees the consequences of his atheism much more clearly than do many modern skeptics:

"I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea)

RLC

William P. Alston (1921-2009)

Bill Alston died last week. That probably means very little to most readers, but if you're among those who have done some reading in the philosophy of religion and/or epistemology you've probably encountered Alston's name and works more than once. He was a giant among contemporary philosophers, and he was also, by all accounts, a wonderful man.

Tom Senor shares some personal memories of Alston at Prosblogion, and what he tells us about him might serve as a model and inspiration for any student who hopes one day to be a teacher. Alston exemplified, in Senor's account, everything that good teachers should be.

Jeremy Pierce also offers some fine reminiscences of Professor Alston here. Anyone interested in being familiar with modern philosophy should be familiar with Bill Alston and reading these two pieces is an excellent step in that direction.

RLC

Hope for Spinal Cord Injury Victims

In a stunning development scientists have been able to restore near-normal mobility to rats whose spinal cords have been severed from their brains. Evidently, tissue in the spinal cord is capable of taking over some of the functions of the brain:

Paralysed rats whose spinal cords had been severed from their brains were made to run again using a technique that scientists say can work for people, according to a study released Sunday.

Consistent electrical stimulation and drugs enabled the rats to walk on their hind legs on a treadmill -- bearing the full weight of the body -- within a week of being paralysed.

With the addition of physical therapy, the rodents were able after several weeks to walk and run without stumbling for up to 30 minutes, reported the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Remarkably, the animals could adjust their movements in response to stimuli despite the lack of signals to and from the brain: when the treadmill was reversed, for example, the rats walked backwards.

"This means that the spinal network is almost capable of cognitive processing," explained Gregoire Courtine, a professor at Zurich University.

"It can understand that the external world is changing, and interpret this information to modify the way it activates muscle," he told AFP by phone.

Earlier studies had shown that nerve networks in the spinal cord can produce limited motion in the muscles independent of the brain or sensory organs. But this is the first time that researchers have been able to restore normal or nearly normal functions.

The article concludes by pointing out that there's no reason why the same procedures couldn't work in human beings. This would be a marvelous gift to the quarter of a million people in the U.S. who have suffered severe spinal cord injury. Nearly half of all spinal cord injuries are caused by automobile accidents, and more than half of these occur among young people between 16 and 30 years old. Perhaps there is hope for these tragic cases.

RLC

Tolstoy Or Dostoyevsky

Lovers of Russian literature will enjoy the essay by David Hart at First Things in which he compares the genius of Dostoyevsky to the genius of Tolstoy. I've read both but studied neither and am in no position to pronounce upon the question of which is superior, as Hart does. I will say, though, that in all my admittedly inadequate reading of the great novelists there are few passages I have come across as powerful and mesmerizing as Dostoyevsky's chapter four and five of Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov. In chapter four, titled Rebellion Dostoyevsky presents the problem of theodicy in perhaps its most powerful form in all of literature. Theodicy is the attempt to explain how one can believe in God in the face of the world's staggering evil.

In chapter five, titled The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky relates his famous parable of Christ's return to Spain at the height of the Spanish Inquisition. In the parable, Christ is actually thrown in prison, not by unbelievers, but by a Cardinal of the Church. What's more surprising, perhaps, is that the rationale the Cardinal gives for this incredible act seems wholly plausible. One can imagine such a thing happening.

Both of these chapters are dialogues between the devout Alyosha and his atheistic brother Ivan. It's Ivan who carries the dialogue, challenging his beloved brother, an orthodox monk, to respond. The two chapters are unequalled, at least in my experience, by anything else in literature. They can be read by themselves without reading the rest of the book, but I commend the entire novel to anyone who has the time. It'll stay with you for the rest of your life and the two chapters I've mentioned will compel you to think about the problem of evil more deeply, perhaps, than you ever did before.

I also recommend Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment for its portrayal of a man named Raskolnikov who tries to live consistently as a Nietzschean moral nihilist. The man who thinks himself "beyond good and evil" (the title of Nietzsche's book on the subject), as does the otherwise likeable Raskolnikov, becomes a moral monster, who can't live even with himself. His amorality, his view of himself as a Nietzschean superman, leads to insanity. Dostoyevsky's treatment of this theme is the best I've ever read.

Nevertheless, Hart thinks Tolstoy is superior and perhaps he is, but I fell in love with Dostoyevsky as a young man and recommend him every chance I get.

RLC

Waggle Dance

Insects are amazing creatures. One of the most mind-rocking discoveries about them was made by Karl von Fritsch back in the 1940s when he worked out the significance of the honeybee waggle dance. This astonishing behavior occurs inside a pitch dark hive when a bee returning from a feeding foray does a dance that signals to other bees - which feel the dancer's moves with their forelegs - which direction and how far they should fly to find food. The dance even factors in such variables as windage. It's truly astonishing and, as an article by Caroline Williams at New Scientist tells us, how and why such a behavior could have evolved is a profound mystery.

Now new research is suggesting that honey bees usually ignore the dance and rely on other methods to find food, but if the dance is irrelevant the mystery just deepens. After all, the dance is still an accurate code for finding food so the question of how and why an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of sand developed such an elaborate behavior is still unanswered. Moreover, if the dance is unnecessary or ignored then we're faced with the question as to how it evolved when it doesn't confer any particular advantage on the bees. We're also confronted with the puzzle of explaining, if the bees don't need it and don't pay much attention to it, how and why it's retained in the genome.

Since we're asking difficult questions about the evolution of insect behaviors that are excruciatingly difficult to explain in terms of purely mechanistic processes, here's another - butterfly metamorphosis. How did it come to pass that a caterpillar could build around itself a chrysalis, completely dissociate the cells and tissues of its body inside the chrysalis, and reorganize those tissues in the form of a butterfly? To think that such a process could have evolved solely by chance is not unlike thinking that a computer programmed to build motorcycles could, by randomly jostling the bits and bytes of software code, reprogram the computer to build fighter jets.

I have no problem with the notion that metamorphosis developed over time and that mutation and natural selection played a role. My problem is with believing that such a process could occur without the guidance of an intelligent mind. It takes more faith than what I can muster to believe that natural processes alone are sufficient to accomplish such miracles.

People sometimes say that Christians must check their reason at the door of the church, but no one must suspend his reason or his skepticism more often than the materialist who believes that metamorphosis evolved solely by the chance concatenation of physical forces.

RLC

Hey, Let's Defend Iran Against Israel

Gerald Posner interviews former Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski for The Daily Beast and gets a real scoop. In the course of the session Brzezinski opined, believe it or not, that we should be prepared, essentially, to go to war with Israel in order to defend Iran:

Posner: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America's worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

Posner: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse. [Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty in international waters, off the Sinai Peninsula, during the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel later claimed the ship was the object of friendly fire.]

This is quite startling advice. Mr. Brzezinski advocates attacking an ally who was trying to do what we should have done ourselves by taking out Iran's nuclear weapons capability. Mr. Brzezinski is suggesting here that we should actually put our airmen at risk in order to defend Iran. He thinks that we should throw our relationship with Israel away - the intelligence cooperation, the alliance with the only country in the Middle East that shares our values - in order to keep Iran safe, even though Iran has threatened numerous times to use its nukes to destroy Israel.

People can differ on exactly what should be done about Iran, but an act of war against ally seems an odd way to treat one's friends. Wouldn't some sort of diplomatic protest after the fact be wiser than going to war with a country with which we share such a close relationship? Apparently, Mr. Brzezinski doesn't think so.

It's no wonder people get the willies when they think of Democrats running our national defense.

RLC

Market Trends

For those of you interested in business and the stock market, David Callaway at Marketwatch.com has good news and bad news. Here's a synopsis:

Wednesday's 108-point run was the best day of the month for the Dow, and it's now up more than 3% for September, 11.6% for the year, and nearly 50% from its bear market closing low on March 9.

But just as stocks couldn't go straight down to zero this spring, a favorite prediction of the bears and the shorts at the time, they can't go straight back up either. We've no better chance of hitting Dow 14,000 again this year as we had of hitting Dow 3,500 in March, when the average got below 6,500.

Earnings aren't good, Washington is in typical gridlock on health care and financial regulation, banks continue to fail at an alarming rate and unemployment is approaching 10%. Yet some economic numbers do show that the worst of the recession is over, a theory which garnered a modicum of credibility this week when Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke said the recession has "likely" ended.

Still, it's hard to see this rally as anything other than a momentum bandwagon right now. Online brokerage trading volumes are surging at Charles Schwab Corp., E-Trade Financial, and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. and small investors are jumping back into funds and especially exchange-traded funds.

At some point, a correction is inevitable. And arguably, it's OK to just ride this out until that day comes. Might be next week; might be next year. When it does come, though, it will come with a loud crack in equities, as all the positive momentum behind the market right now suddenly shifts to an embarrassing, emperor-without-clothes type of feeling, which will precede a rush to sell.

That ultimately will be healthier for the market than the current sprint to Dow 10,000, though it might not feel like it at the time. By the end of the year, I think we'll be higher than we are today, likely above 10,000. December in particular could be a strong scene-setter for a recovery run in 2010.

So what's the take home message? It appears to be that the road ahead for investors (and businessmen and women) is going to be bumpy, but that if you just ride it out you'll be fine. I'm not an economist but I have some doubts about this. It may be that over the relatively short term things will be fairly positive, but what happens when our huge deficits start building in a year or so, and we have to pay on the debt. The only way we'll be able to do that is to impose onerous taxes on businesses or print money which will generate inflation. Either course will kill the markets. It seems inevitable that one or both of those alternatives lies in the not so distant our future, so I wonder why Calloway thinks that 2010 will be a year of recovery.

Perhaps the only thing that's going to be recovered in 2010 is the good sense of the voters who will decide to cashier the people who got us into this mess.

RLC

Why The Arabs Languish

The folks at Strategy Page analyze Islamic terrorism and why Arab civilizations have stagnated while the rest of the world passes them by:

In many parts of the world, especially among young Moslem men, Islamic terrorism has become fashionable. It's a coping mechanism for failure. More than half a century after the Arab world once more became free (first from centuries of Turkish rule in 1918, then a few decades of European supervision), the truth has sunk in. While the rest of the world prospered during the last half century, the Arabs are still uneducated, unproductive, poor and ruled by tyrants and kings. What are young Moslems to make of this?

Blaming the Jews has accomplished nothing, except to provide more opportunities to fail. Supporting al Qaeda (with money and volunteers) produced the September 11, 2001 attacks. That had young men dancing in the streets all over the Arab world (much to the chagrin of their elders, and embarrassment of their governments). But the response has led to an even longer list of failures. Not only was al Qaeda, and similar organizations, revealed to be mindless murderers of innocent Moslems (in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other Islamic nations), but these Holy Warriors proved embarrassingly incompetent when fighting the Crusaders from the West.

American troops suffered far fewer casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan (where the casualty rate was actually a third of what it was in Vietnam) than in earlier wars. While pro-terrorist web sites loved to feature videos of roadside bombs going off and American troops getting shot out, more embarrassing were U.S. videos of Islamic terrorists being caught in the act, and bombed or shot up. Worst of all were those videos, taken by American UAVs or helicopter gunships, that showed terrorists trying to plant roadside bombs, which then blew them up because of improper handling (or construction.)

One of the little discussed tragedies of Islamic terrorism is the fact that most of those it attracts are the least capable. Islamic terrorism is not only an act of extremism, but also of desperation of those who have few other prospects. It's an international organization because Islam, in general, has not been amenable to taking advantage of new technology and economic opportunity, except for cable TV and the Internet. That's why the Moslem world has lagged so far behind the rest of the world in the last century. Religious leaders are reluctant to discuss the possibility of Islam being part of the problem, although many educated Moslems are becoming more aggressive in seeking out cultural problems, and proposing solutions. Terrorism is not seen as a practical way out by most Moslems, but the threat of retribution by Islamic radicals makes it difficult for most Moslems to speak up.

It's hard to overstate the importance of the religious worldview of a people in shaping their culture. Everything they value, everything they accomplish, is a consequence of what they believe about God, man, life, and nature. A worldview, for example, that inculcates the idea that our minds are gifts from God that He wants us to use to unlock the secrets of His creation will have a completely different developmental history than cultures which believe that our minds should be used only to study theology. A worldview which sees nature as the creation of a rational, loving God who gives it as a gift for our safe-keeping will imbue the people who hold it with a completely different attitude toward scientific investigation than a worldview which teaches that technological progress is somehow outside the proper concern of the truly pious.

Even many thoughtful atheists recognize that the values we have always held dear in our democracy are derivatives of our Christian heritage and can not be sustained by any other worldview. Atheist philosopher J�rgen Habermas, for example, has observed that:

"Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

Habermas is right, of course. The Enlightenment sought to ground the virtues of Western civilization in the exercise of human reason and wound up giving us the soul-crushing totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Modernity's rejection of God in general and Christianity in particular led to unprecedented horrors in China, Cambodia, Africa, Germany, the Soviet Union and elsewhere around the globe. One hundred million people were murdered in the name of reason, science, and state atheism. In the attempt to deify man the 20th century wound up dehumanizing him and grinding him into the earth everywhere but in those cultures which remained under the sway of a vibrant Christianity.

Jesus taught that truth makes us free. It will liberate us from superstition and the sort of assumptions that enchain men rather than free them. The problem with the Arab world is that they are in thrall to a worldview that locks its adherents in the chains of a mental dungeon rather than freeing them to fluorish.

RLC

Nowhere to Hide

Strategy Page features an interesting report on the silent war against Islamic terrorists around the globe:

Navy SEALS reportedly launched a daring raid Tuesday in southern Somalia that targeted and killed a senior al Qaeda leader wanted for several deadly attacks. This was the latest in a series of covert operations carried out by US and allied special operations. At least four other high-profile raids by ground forces took place in Pakistan, Madagascar, and Syria over the past several years, while others have gone unreported, according to US officials.

The successful Somali raid targeted Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa as well as a senior leader in Shabaab, al Qaeda's surrogate in Somalia. Nabhan is thought to train terrorists in Somalia and has been at the forefront in cementing ties between Shabaab and al Qaeda. He has been wanted for his involvement in the 1998 suicide attacks against US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as leading the cell behind the 2002 terror attacks in Mombasa, Kenya, against a hotel and an airliner.

Reports of the operation are still unclear as the U.S. military has refused to comment. But various press accounts from eyewitnesses and unnamed intelligence sources provide a glimpse of the operation.

The operation, dubbed Celestial Balance, was approved 11 days ago after US intelligence determined that Nabhan was shuttling back and forth between the Shabaab-controlled port cities of Merka and Kismayo. A car transporting Nabhan and five other foreign fighters was escorted by another car carrying three Shabaab escorts; the vehicles were hit as they stopped for breakfast as they traveled to Kismayo.

According to one witness, upwards of six helicopters were involved in the raid. At least two AH-6 Little Bird special operations attack helicopters strafed the two-car convoy. Other helicopters dismounted Navy SEALs, who seized the body of Nabhan and another, and purportedly took two other wounded fighters captive. An unconfirmed report indicated that Sheikh Hussein Ali Fidow, a senior Shabaab leader, was among those killed. All nine al Qaeda and Shabaab leaders and fighters were killed during the operation.

It's good to know that despite the widespread view on the Left that terrorists should be treated as criminals with Miranda rights rather than as mortal enemies President Obama is pressing the fight against al Qaeda wherever they can be found. It's also good to know that we have men capable of executing such dangerous missions with skill and courage.

RLC

This Is Very Sad

I want very much to like and respect former President Jimmy Carter, but it seems that every time he opens his mouth he says something irresponsible. This is no exception:

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

Like so many others who are calling any criticism of President Obama a sign of racism, Mr. Carter offers not a shred of evidence that any of Mr. Obama's critics are motivated by race let alone that the "overwhelming" number are. The charge of racism is an admission that the left has no argument. There's nothing they can say in defense of the current administration's headlong rush to bankrupt the nation and to move us toward an ever-expanding role for government in our lives, so they accuse anyone who doesn't want to go along for the ride of being a racist. They offer no evidence, no support of the accusation, they just state it as an axiomatic truth.

Liberals accept as an article of their faith that America is a deeply racist nation. If you ask them to show you an example of racism in America today they're hard put to come up with one, but that doesn't diminish the strength of their conviction. Their dogmatic certainty is just as rock solid and just as purblind as that of any stereotypical fundamentalist. Given their assumption that America is still living in the 1930s, and given their utter incomprehension that anyone could possibly oppose liberal policies on their merits, it seems obvious to them that opposition to Mr. Obama could not possibly be based on anything but his skin color.

Now, I don't have any doubt that there's racism in this country. After all, one could go here,for example, and see a school bus full of white kids hooting and hollering as a couple of their friends beat up just about the only black kid on the bus (or maybe it was the other way around, I forget), but to accuse the President's political opponents of being racially motivated without adducing even a shred of empirical evidence for the charge beyond, maybe, a couple of ambiguous signs in a protest march is not only vile, it's stupid.

RLC

Why People Don't Believe Him

Newsweek columnist George Will explains why President Obama seems to be the victim of a strange kind of inverse relationship. The more he talks the less people believe what he says. The President has played so fast and loose with so many matters involving the people's money, most lately health care reform, that people respond to his words like they respond to the guy in the bar who's always spinning yarns that everyone knows aren't true.

Here are a few excerpts from Will's incisive column:

On the 233rd day of his presidency, Barack Obama grabbed the country's lapels for the 263rd time-that was, as of last Wednesday, the count of his speeches, press conferences, town halls, interviews, and other public remarks. His speech to Congress was the 122nd time he had publicly discussed health care. Just 14 hours would pass before the 123rd, on Thursday morning. His incessant talking cannot combat what it has caused: An increasing number of Americans do not believe that he believes what he says.

He says America's health-care system is going to wrack and ruin and requires root-and-branch reform-but that if you like your health care (as a large majority of Americans do), nothing will change for you. His slippery new formulation is that nothing in his plan will "require" anyone to change coverage. He used to say, "If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period." He had to stop saying that because various disinterested analysts agree that his plan will give many employers incentives to stop providing coverage for employees.

He deplores "scare tactics" but says that unless he gets his way, people will die. He praises temperate discourse but says many of his opponents are liars. He says Medicare is an exemplary program that validates government's prowess at running health systems. But he also says Medicare is unsustainable and going broke, and that he will pay for much of his reforms by eliminating the hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud in this paragon of a program, and in Medicaid. He says Congress will cut Medicare (it will not) by $500 billion-without affecting benefits.

He says the nation's economic health depends on controlling health-care costs. Yet so important is the trial bar in financing the Democratic Party, he says not a syllable in significant and specific support of tort reforms that could save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing "defensive medicine" intended to protect not patients from illnesses but doctors from lawyers. He has said he will not add a dime to the deficit when bringing 47 million people into government-guaranteed health care. But Wednesday night, 17 million went missing: "There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage." Almost 10 million of the uninsured are not citizens, and most of them are illegal immigrants.

Presumably the other 7 million could get insurance but chose not to. Democrats propose fines to eliminate that choice. He suggests health-insurance companies are making excessive profits. But since 1996, profits of the six such companies in the S&P 500 have been below the 500's average. He says a "public option"-a government insurance program-would not be subsidized to enable it to compete unfairly with private insurers. (The post office and the government's transportation -"public option," Amtrak, devour subsidies.) He says the public option is vital for keeping health insurers "honest"-but that it is only a wee "sliver" of reform.

The President is either confused about his proposals or he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people into thinking that those proposals are something that they're not. In either case, he has just about exhausted the confidence the electorate placed in him last November. If he turns out to be a one-term President it won't be because of racism, or because people misrepresented his policies, or because of congressional Democrats (although they're trying hard to ensure that the voters get fed up with the President's party). If Barack Obama fails to win the support of the electorate in 2012 it will be largely because voters simply don't believe that he knows what he's talking about or that he's telling them the truth.

RLC

Norman Borlaug - Hero

Contrary to the faux heroes offered up by our celebrity culture most real heroes are people we've never heard of. Such, perhaps, was Norman Borlaug who died recently at the age of 95. Borlaug was an agronomist who won a Nobel prize in 1970 for having saved from hunger hundreds of millions of starving peasants around the world.

Guy Sorman tells his story in a piece at City Journal. The account of how Borlaug's work on developing strains of wheat and rice to relieve famine conditions in Mexico and India is fascinating in itself, and I hope you'll read it, but there's also an ideological moral to the story.

Sorman writes:

Borlaug was no innocent scientist: he knew that science could feed the world only when political conditions were right. In the case of India and Mexico, the semi-dwarf wheat and rice worked marvels because the farmers owned their own land. As private owners, they had a vested interest in using more expensive seeds that would produce a higher yield. Local authorities provided the water for irrigation: both the Mexican and Indian governments did it right, later followed by Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. But without private entrepreneurs, the Green Revolution would not have taken place. While touring the world, Borlaug always stressed that seeds by themselves could not eradicate hunger. Private property, entrepreneurship, and reliable governments were essential prerequisites.

Borlaug's pro-market advocacy did not please everyone in the Third World. The Indian Left always saw the Green Revolution as an engine of injustice, and it attacked Borlaug for generating a social divide. It's true that the most dynamic farmers in India did become wealthy, but the poor became poorer only relative to the new bourgeoisie.

As it was with the Left in India so it is with the Left everywhere. They seem to prefer that everyone be hungry rather than see a few get wealthy. They think that collectivism and socialism can solve food shortages despite the fact that the history of the twentieth century has consistently been one of capitalist countries sending food to hungry people in socialist countries. One reason why third world nations remain mired in poverty and hunger is because they've adopted an unworkable socialist model which removes all incentives for farmers to work hard to produce a surplus. Yet we keep hearing, even from many in our country, that private property and private enterprise are great evils even as American agriculture continues to help feed the world.

Those who believe that socialism would do better might offer some indication of how many hungry children socialism fed in the 20th century.

RLC

Is America Breaking Up?

Pat Buchanan wonders, with good reason, I think, if America is breaking up. Here's the heart of his essay:

[T]he episode [the President's speech to school students] reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health-care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

Buchanan has a point. As we become more and more diverse, as we focus on the things which make us different rather than the things which we share in common, as fewer and fewer Americans revere our nation's history, traditions and founding documents, as fewer Americans speak a common language, we will become increasingly Balkanized. Every nation is subject to certain centrifugal forces that tend to rip it apart. What holds a people together against those forces is a dominant culture in which everyone shares. We no longer have such a culture, or it is rapidly disappearing, and what we do have diminishes its hold on the hearts and minds of Americans with every new generation.

America may well be breaking up, and that fact raises an interesting academic question: Can a democracy long endure when none of its sub-cultures is any longer dominant? In other words, can a democracy survive multiculturalism and its attendant relativism? My fear is that the answer is "no." At least it's hard to think of an historical precedent.

RLC

Re: The 9/12 Photo

Several readers have written to inform me that the photo I used to accompany my post titled 9/12 Tea Party was actually taken at a different rally.

I thought when I first saw it that the scene looked too sunny to have been taken last Saturday when the northeast was pretty much soaked in a steady drizzle, but then I thought that maybe in D.C. the sun might have come out more than it did where I live.

Anyway, the pic is not of the 9/12 protest and should not be used as a guage of how many people were in D.C. last Saturday. TCS kindly sent along a link that has some info on the photo. It appears that the shot may have been taken of a Promise-Keepers rally that took place in October of 1997, an event that, coincidentally, I happened to have attended.

I was going to take the photo off the website, but since I'm in it I decided out of vanity to leave it up.

RLC

No-Brainer

Last year Congress and President Bush agreed to suspend the ban on oil drilling on the continental shelf. Things were set to resume tapping into the oil reserves on the shelf this year, but unfortunately the Obama administration suspended the suspension by imposing a six month delay on the granting of leases needed to begin drilling.

That delay is set to expire on September 21st and the administration and Congress have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how serious they are about creating jobs, stimulating the economy, balancing the budget, and making us energy independent of the Middle East.

According to a report by the American Energy Alliance (AEA) drilling would add $8 trillion to our GDP and generate $2.2 trillion in new tax revenues. This would go a long way toward reducing the deficit that Congress and the President have burdened us with.

Allowing drilling would also, according to the AEA report, create 1.2 million jobs each year and generate $70 billion in wages. The new jobs would not be limited to just the oil industry but would be realized in a wide spectrum of industries upon which oil drilling depends. It would be a substantial boost to the economies of coastal states like California which are teetering on the brink of insolvency.

The continental shelf holds at least 80 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Since we import about 4 billion barrels a year we could cut our imports in half and have enough oil to last for at least another forty years.

More oil and lower dependency upon foreign suppliers means cheaper gas. Cheaper fuel means lower prices for everything manufactured and/or shipped in the United States. This would be a boon not only to the middle class but especially to the poor.

Democrats in Congress, however, are very reluctant to go along with offshore drilling. They prefer a cap and trade system to reduce fuel consumption that would help reduce global warming. Cap and trade would raise the cost of fuel, kill job growth, make everyone poorer and reduce global temperatures a measly two tenths of a degree Celsius by 2100. It's hard to see why this is a more desirable policy than exploiting the resources we already have, and given the alternatives it's astonishing that there's any debate about which course of action we should follow.

Instead of just reiterating their refusal to allow drilling it would be helpful if the Democrats would share with us the reasons for that refusal.

[Some of the above information was gleaned from an article by Rep. Doc Hastings in the Washington Times.]

RLC

Seeking God in Science (Pt. II)

In chapter two of Seeking God in Science (See here for the first part of our discussion of the book) Brad Monton considers the question of whether ID is legitimate science and here, as in chapter one, he slays a number of hostile polemical dragons. He argues that attempts to define science have a dismal history and that, Judge Jones' decree in Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District notwithstanding, there's no good reason to think that intelligent design is not science. Monton takes on one contender after another and tosses each in turn out of the ring. His analysis of his opponents' arguments is incisive, sometimes brilliant, and the upshot is that, though he thinks ID wrong, there's no good reason for excluding it from the community of scientific theories.

The next chapter was perhaps the most interesting. He begins by saying that the important question is not whether ID is science but whether it's true, and he's exactly right about this. He thinks the arguments in its favor have some plausibility but not enough to persuade him to abandon his atheism or to accept that there is a non-theistic designer.

The problem, I think, with Monton's argument in this chapter is that he seems to make the term "somewhat plausible" synonomous with "not very likely." I don't know if this is intentional, but I do think it's misleading. For example, in considering the argument for a designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe he notes that most people simply lack the expertise to evaluate the claims that the relevant parameters must be set at precisely the values they are for life to exist and thus shouldn't make too much of the extraordinary coincidence that so many values are indeed calibrated to such fine tolerances.

That's true enough, but it's an objection one could make to any theory in science. Most philosophers and even many scientists know very little about relativity theory or quantum mechanics or string theory or even evolution. They rely on people who do know about these things, and they assume that the people who do have expertise are largely correct in their conclusions.

The fine-tuning argument has as an implied premise that the physicists who argue that the dozen or more values must be almost exactly what they are or else the universe wouldn't exist and/or life wouldn't exist, are most likely correct. If they are then an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the cosmic structure.

The argument isn't a proof in the deductive sense, but it's much more than "somewhat plausible" since the claim that the cosmos is fine-tuned for life seems to be admitted by even opponents of ID and is much more likely to be true than false.

Similarly, Monton asserts that we are not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning because we can't know what happened prior to about 10 ^ -12 seconds after the initial event. Because we can't penetrate that time horizon we're not warranted in believing that the universe began to exist. I think this is not quite correct. We may well be warranted in believing that the universe began to exist in a big bang but we're not warranted in saying that it certainly did. And if we are warranted in believing that the universe began to exist then we may well be justified in believing that it had a cause of its existence.

His most problematic objection to ID has to do with the ID argument that life itself is astronomically improbable as a product of blind, impersonal forces. He doesn't dispute this, but he does argue that the universe is spatially infinite and rather homogenous throughout. Therefore there would be an infinite number of planets like our own and no matter how small the chances of life arising naturalistically, if the probability is at all greater than zero it must have happened. Indeed, it must have happened infinite times.

I find this argument implausible. It's based on the assumption that given infinite opportunities anything that is possible to be the case will be the case. Given an infinite number of planets there would be an infinity of planets like earth and in an infinite number of planets anything which is at all possible will be actual. One problem with this argument is that its based on the assumption that the universe is infinite and that it has a fairly uniform composition throughout, but we have no more reason to think this second assumption true than we did to think that the universe had a beginning. If Monton is not warranted in believing that the universe had a beginning then I don't see how he's warranted in believing that the universe is both infinite and uniform.

But even if we grant Monton these assumptions it seems to me that they actually confirm the existence of a designer. Let's stipulate that there is a non-zero probability that some part of our spatially infinite universe was designed. In other words, we're stipulating that it's possible that a designer exists. If so, then given an infinite number of parts to the universe, at least one of them (actually an infinity of them) must be designed. Thus a designer exists. This doesn't prove that the designer has designed every part of the universe but its a very short psychological step from the existence of a designer of an infinite number of parts of the universe to the existence of the entire universe.

At any rate, an argument that demonstrates the existence of a designer of even just a part of the universe seems to be a defeater of Monton's belief that no such designer exists.

The fourth chapter addresses the question whether ID should be taught in public school science classrooms. Here again Monton relentlessly punctures many of the arguments raised by those who oppose doing so.

The book is a delight to read, as much for Monton's relentless devotion to the truth and the clarity of his argumentation as it is for the interesting perspectives brought to the topic by an atheist defending intelligent design. I recommend it to anyone interested in the controversy surrounding the debate between IDers and those who oppose them.

RLC

The ACORN Saga Continues

Perhaps you've heard that ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), President Obama's former associates, are once again in the news and the news isn't good. A pair of intrepid young indy filmmakers surreptitiously filmed the proceedings as they visited two ACORN offices, one in Baltimore and one in Washington, posing as a pimp and a prostitute. The pair claimed that they wished to run a prostitution business using teenage El Salvadoran girls and they needed advice on housing options. They were counseled by ACORN representatives as to how they could get away with running their business in Baltimore and how they could mislead the IRS and avoid paying taxes.

The conselors were fired when the video broke, but there's a much deeper, more systemic problem with ACORN than just a few ethically challenged housing advisors. ACORN representatives have over the years been convicted in numerous states of voter registration fraud and a host of other legal violations. The odor of corruption and/or mismanagement has clung to them for at least a decade.

Yet ACORN has been given access to millions of dollars in stimulus money and were contracted to help carry out the 2010 census (although in the wake of this latest scandal the census bureau has severed its connection with ACORN).

If you'd like to be brought up to speed on this latest episode in the ACORN saga go here and scroll down. There's plenty of information and video shot by the young undercover investigators in the ACORN offices.

By the way, the young man who did the filming, who did the kind of investigating reporting the traditional media seem loath to do, James O'Keefe, may be prosecuted by Baltimore City for secretly taping the exchange with the ACORN people. Law enforcement authorities had been questioned as to whether the city was going to do anything about what some thought to be ACORN's obvious breach of the law so the State's Attorney's office looked at the tape and decided, astonishingly, that the malefactor was the filmmaker.

Meanwhile, the traditional media slumbers while this travesty plays out.

Margaret Williams, an ACORN board member, predictably blames the whole contretemps on .... racism. Sigh.

RLC

Update on 9/12 Numbers

Jason writes to inform me that ABC is denying having ever claimed that there were 2 million people marching in Washington yesterday.

I have no way of knowing what the actual number was, but when taken together with the fact that there were other such gatherings around the country, it does seem that there's a lot of dissatisfaction out there with the direction the Democrats are taking this country.

It's also noteworthy, perhaps, that so many of the people who traveled across the country to attend this event say that they've never done anything like it before. They never protested anything more than an underdone steak in a restaurant, but they've finally decided that they can be silent no longer. Their children's futures are being placed at risk by this Congress and administration.

Let's just set the number in D.C. yesterday at "lots."

RLC

9/12 Tea Party

According to ABC as many as two million people showed up in Washington, D.C. today to protest out-of-control government spending and an unprecedented arrogation of centralized power. My local news was reporting "tens of thousands" but this appears to be a gross underestimation:

That's an awful lot of racists.

Go here for more pics of the party and enjoy the Doobie Brothers a while:

UPDATE: The photo above showing the crowd in the Capitol mall tuurns out to have been taken at a different rally which took place in 1997 and should not be used to guage the number of people at the 9/12 protest.

RLC

Re: Wednesday's Speech

Caleb, a young law student and friend, writes to share some thoughts on our post about the President's speech last Wednesday.

He has a lot of interesting things to say and closes with this:

I, like many, took umbrage with Rep. Wilson's comments. My issue, however, was not with what he said, but the manner and place in which he said them. While I deplore the current partisanship of politics, where names are flung around with increasing frequency, I realize that it would be hypocritical for one to slam Rep. Wilson for calling Obama a liar when Sen. Reid called President Bush a liar. However, yelling this during a joint address to Congress seems highly disrespectful. So did the various Republicans who were clearly Blackberrying, held signs that said "What bill?", etc. I'm not saying that the Democrats were never guilty of rude behavior towards the President. However, I feel that it is up to both sides, Republican and Democrat, to show more respect for the office. I do not agree with everything that Obama said during his speech, but to call him a liar during it is extremely rude and cheapens the political debate.

Caleb's right. The Democrats were just as rude to Mr. Bush when he tried to pitch social security reform to them in 2004, Mr. Obama was not being forthright about coverage of illegal aliens, and Senator Reid has never been forced to apologize for calling Mr. Bush a liar on national television. Nevertheless, it was unseemly and inexcusable for congressman Wilson to blurt out "You lie!" in that forum, and he apologized for it. We're still waiting for Senator Reid's apology.

Read the rest of Caleb's thoughts on the Feedback page.

RLC

Seeking God in Science (Pt. I)

Bradley Monton is an atheist philosopher of science who has written one of the best books on the controversy surrounding intelligent design I've come across. Monton's book is exceptionally fair to the point of being in places almost sympathetic to ID, though he's at pains to stress that he's not a proponent. Even so, I suspect that the book will have a lot of opponents of ID wondering exactly whose side Monton is on.

The book is titled Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (157 pages) and is divided into four chapters plus a preface. It opens with the claim that "This book is not providing a full-fledged endorsement of intelligent design. But intelligent design needs to be taken more seriously than a lot of its opponents are willing to."

His goal in writing the book is:

"not to serve one side [in the debate] or the other side, and in fact my goal isn't even to be useful. My goal is simply to evaluate the arguments on both sides as carefully and objectively as I can. If this ends up serving one side more than the other, I don't care; my goal is to do the best I can to get at the truth."

This is certainly a welcome approach, one rarely found among opponents of ID (Michael Ruse and Ronald Numbers are the only other anti-ID writers I can think of who might share Monton's desire to be fair to the arguments of their opponents), and Monton's treatment of the topics in his book is as fascinating as it is refreshing.

The first chapter consists of an attempt to refine the definition of intelligent design so that the arguments both pro and con can be evaluated more effectively and to dispose of a number of weak or misleading arguments with which opponents of ID have cluttered the landscape. It should be noted that this is not a book about the science involved in evolution. In fact, there's very little science in the book at all. It's a book of public philosophy and can be read with profit by any educated person who is aware of the controversies swirling around ID.

In chapter one Monton makes an interesting claim. He observes that if we're trying to find an explanation for certain features of the universe - like its existence and the fine-tuning of the cosmic constants and parameters - then an intelligent cause is clearly our best option. ID offers the best explanation for cosmic fine-tuning and the existence of the world, but he doesn't accept ID because, as an atheist he doesn't think there's any explanation for these phenomena at all. ID is the best explanation, but he believes all explanations are false. The universe just is and there's no explanation for it.

This is an interesting approach but it strikes me as a science-stopper, an accusation which is often leveled at ID. Scientists should always be looking for the explanations of physical phenomena. To say of some contingent state of affairs that it has no explanation seems to me, at least, to be rather ad hoc. Monton says our choice is between an intelligent cause of the world and believing that it just is and has no explanation or cause. If those are our choices, and I think Monton is right about that, it seems that the "no explanation" position is a very high price to pay in order to be able to hold on to one's atheism.

One of the weak anti-ID arguments Monton addresses is the claim by opponents that ID is a religious idea. Monton offers an interesting counter. He points out that, for all we know, our world could be a computer simulation designed by an inhabitant of some other world. Everything about the visible universe could in fact be the product of a very sophisticated software program. If that's a possibility, no matter how bizarre it may sound (and Monton cites some reasons for thinking it may be the case), then ID could be true and there would be nothing necessarily "religious" about it.

In other words, just because many IDers are religious people does not entail that ID must be a religious theory any more than the fact that many Darwinians are atheists entails that evolution is inherently atheistic.

I'll talk more about Brad Monton's book on Monday. Meanwhile, if you're interested in the issues involved in this debate, no matter which side of it you're on, you really should think about ordering a copy.

RLC

Wednesday's Speech

President Obama's speech on health care Wednesday night was disappointing. Once he got past making the case for why we need reform, a need most people agree we have, almost nothing he said about how that reform would look was credible.

We were led to believe that the President would be offering his own plan, but although he referred often to "his plan" the details were virtually the same as those in the proposals currently hibernating in congressional committees.

The president several times averred that his critics are lying about the plan when they claim it will cover illegal aliens, abortions, and will provide for the practical equivalent of "death panels." Yet even some Democrats are saying that the plan will in fact either do these things or permit them to be done. After the speech Democratic senators closed a loophole in their bill that would have given coverage to illegal immigrants and House Democrats twice defeated attempts to tighten the language in their bill that would insure that illegals weren't covered. Such measures are very strange if the bills did not allow for coverage of illegals in the first place.

The President insists he wants competition between insurance companies but neither of the two measures that would put competition into the market, allowing people to buy across state lines and reducing mandates in coverage, were in the President's plan. Either of these or both together would increase competition, lower insurance cost, and not cost a single dime, but the President is disinclined to adopt them. No one knows why.

He insisted that he will be able to save billions of dollars by cutting fraud and waste in the medicare system, but he never explained how he would do this or why he hasn't just gone ahead and done it already. He simply alluded to lots of details that need to be worked out.

AP ran a fact check on several other of the President's assertions and found them less than persuasive. The claim that he will be able to increase coverage on 30 million people (the original target was 47 million) without adding to the deficit or reducing or rationing care of the elderly is quite literally incredible.

His attacks on his critics seemed petulant and beneath his office. It seems that the speech did little to help salvage health care reform and even less to salvage the perception of Mr. Obama as quite the opposite of the "post-partisan" president he campaigned as.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Wilson is getting a drubbing in the media for his impolite and intemperate outburst during the speech, when he shouted "You lie" at Mr. Obama, but were these critics of Mr. Wilson not listening to Mr. Obama? Several times throughout the evening Mr. Obama accused critics of the Democrat health care reform proposals of lying. Why castigate Mr. Wilson, but not Mr. Obama? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once called Mr. Bush a liar on Meet the Press and refused to apologize. There was no outrage on the left at Mr. Reid's remark. Indeed, the left pretty much agreed. Mr. Wilson has learned an interesting lesson. If you act like a Democrat, you better vote like one or else you can expect to get pummeled by the media.

RLC

What We Should Remember

With due respect to the President, I think he's trivializing 9/11 by designating it a national day of service. When I heard that that was his intent I tried to imagine what the WWII generation would have thought had December 7th been designated by FDR or Harry Truman a day for people to clean beaches and volunteer for Welcome Wagon. I think they would have treated the suggestion with condign derision.

What we should reflect upon on this day, in my opinion, are three things:

First, we need to keep it firmly in mind that we are in a war to the death with radical Islam. They will not stop trying to kill us, our children and our grandchildren until either we have converted to Islam, or either we or they are all dead. This is a generational conflict. It will not end when we withdraw from Iraq or Afghanistan. It has been going on at varying levels of intensity for 800 years and will not cease just because we'd like it to.

Second, we need to remember, and continue to hold up to our young, the character of the people who acted so bravely and unselfishly on that horrible morning. From the firefighters who climbed the tower stairways to try to help the people trapped therein, to the people on board flight 93 who refused to be passive in the face of evil, to the workers in the buildings who, despite danger to themselves, struggled heroically to help their friends and co-workers escape.

There are many others, men and women in the armed forces and intelligence agencies, who subsequently exhibited great valor in fighting those who were allied with the terrorists who launched the attacks, but on September 11 we should remember the men and women who were directly involved in the attack and praise their heroism. Somehow, picking up trash and raking leaves in the community park seem pretty anemic and inappropriate gestures given the import and magnitude of what this infamous day calls for.

Third, we should reflect seriously on the fact that God blesses the nation that seeks to live justly and morally and may remove His hand from the efforts of those nations which have decided to estrange themselves from Him. We need to affirm our trust in God and keep in mind that our dependence for our survival rests ultimately in Him. Military might alone is insufficient and inadequate to keep us secure. If we forget about God and the path He desires us to follow, He very well may forget about us. In that case we might expect that many more 9/11s lie in our future.

Community service is fine, but it's perhaps more suited to Labor Day. Let's not do to 9/11 what we've done to so many other holidays, the real meaning of which has been obscured by the manner in which we celebrate or observe the days.

RLC

Scorning Both Sides

Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting commentators on the contemporary socio-politico landscape. She's a lesbian leftist (maybe more libertarian-left) who writes very clear-sighted criticism of politicians both liberal and conservative. She's an Obama supporter, but she's very tough on both him and the Democrats in general in this piece at Salon. I highly recommend her essay. She's equally hard, as is her wont, on the GOP and certainly doesn't soften her fire when she directs it toward the Bushies and other GOP targets. Here she is on Republicans:

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload.

This is only a slight exaggeration. Her point is well-taken that a party that professes to defend traditional values has little credibility when so many of its major office holders have been caught in flagrante, as it were. It's true that GOP malefactors are not in the same league as the Democrats, but the Democrats don't claim to be concerned about "family values," so no one is particularly surprised when a Democrat is caught siring children with his paramour (John Edwards) or engaging in rough sex with prostitutes (Eliot Spitzer).

They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies.

This raises a very interesting question for conservative Republicans, one that really needs to be addressed more than it is. What exactly is the role of government in regulating personal morality? Most conservatives say they want government out of our lives, but then they want the government to enforce obscenity laws and to limit or ban abortions. I think there is a defensible principle involved here (the government has the obligation to protect our rights, especially the right to life, and therefore the government is acting within its proper sphere if it regulates abortion), but the principle needs to be articulated and argued for more than most Republicans seem inclined to do.

Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

Here again, Paglia is voicing some difficult truths (I'll let her characterization of Newt pass). George Bush ruined his presidential legacy, in my opinion, by increasing the deficit (although compared to what Obama has done, Bush's irresponsible contribution to the deficit was like the weight of a fly on the back of an elephant) and by his desultory approach to stemming the tide of illegal immigrants flowing into this country. Nevertheless, Bush kept this country safe for eight years from a determined terrorist enemy and liberated (for how long remains to be seen) fifty million people from oppression. No President in American history can say the same.

It is regarding Dick Cheney, however, that I think Paglia detours off the highway of truth she's been cruising. I think Cheney will go down in history as one of the most unjustifiably maligned men ever to serve in high office. Paglia's accusation that he spooked Bush into a pointless war is neither supportable by the facts nor fair to either Cheney or Bush. Nor is it by any means clear that the war was pointless. I think Cheney, whether he was right or wrong, has shown exceptional courage, calm, and clarity. Few men in elective office have demonstrated the ability to think as clearly about the nature of the conflict with radical Islam in which we are immersed, and will be immersed, for the next several decades, as Cheney has, and, yes, I wish he had been the Republican nominee in 2008 instead of John McCain. At the risk of suffering Paglia's derision I would have voted for him.

Anyway, now that you've read what Ms. Paglia has to say about the GOP, read what she has to say about her own party at the link.

Thanks to Byron for passing it along.

RLC

Hillary in 2012?

The Weekly Standard reports that Hillary Clinton is planning to step down as Secretary of State in order to run for the office of Governor of New York. This makes sense on several levels. First she seems to have been marginalized, perhaps deliberately, by the White House which has appointed "czars" to manage most of the world's trouble spots. While Hillary was sweating in Africa entertaining school children her husband was sent to North Korea to get much of the credit for the release of two young journalists that the North Koreans had accused of spying. Whatever her portfolio she seems to be much less prominent in foreign policy than any of her most recent predecessors.

Then there's 2012. Ms Clinton may well smell blood in the political water. If the President is limping toward 2012 Ms Clinton may want to challenge him in the primaries just as a weakened Jimmy Carter was challenged in 1979. It would be very awkward to do this as a cabinet secretary, but a governorship would be the ideal vehicle from which to launch a bid for the presidency, an office she doubtless still covets. If Obama is strong going into the primary season the governor's office will still serve her even better as a launch pad in 2016.

If the Weekly Standard report is borne out her resignation will surely be stage-setting for a 2012 run at the White House, and a challenge from within the party to a sitting president. That should produce a lot of fireworks.

RLC

Hard to Argue with Her

These people are a chuckle a minute. Lefty blogger Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake offers a fascinating defense of Van Jones by inadvertently admitting that what conservatives have long suspected about Progressives is in fact true:

Now he's [Van Jones] been thrown under the bus by the White House for signing his name to a petition expressing something that 35% of all Democrats believed as of 2007 -- that George Bush knew in advance about the attacks of 9/11. Well, that and calling Republicans "a..holes." I'm pretty sure that if you search through the histories of every single liberal leader at the CAF dinner that night, they have publicly said that and worse.

So where are all the statements defending Van Jones by those who were willing to exploit him when it served their purpose? Why aren't they standing up and defending one of their own, who has done nothing that probably the majority of people in the Democratic party haven't done at one time or another? Is he no longer "one of their own?"

What's she saying? That Jones is no worse or no kookier than a lot of other Democrats? Is she saying that most Democrats have either been communists or have communist sympathies? It sure seems that way.

Her phone must be ringing off the hook with calls from her fellow Dems demanding that she get that post off her blog.

HT: JustOneMinute

RLC

The New Scarlet Pimpernel

If I were a member of the Sierra Club (my environmental contributions go to The Nature Conservancy) I would withdraw my membership forthwith after having read this essay by Sierra Club president Carl Pope. Pope, like so many others on the left, seems unable to imagine why anyone would object to a man who was, and may still be, a radical Leninist revolutionary serving in a high level position in our government. Nor does he see any reason, evidently, to object to someone on the public payroll who believes that the Bush administration was in some sense complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Why else would people like Pope draw the conclusion that any criticism of someone like Van Jones must be motivated by racism? Are they so cynical that they can't imagine anyone objecting to the appointment of a man of Jones' philosophy of governance and political judgment to a position of responsibility in the Obama administration?

Here are some excerpts from Pope's column:

Well, that [the administration's failure to defend Jones] was a mistake. So was the decision by the White House to treat the initial attacks not as part of an assault on the president but, instead, to allow them to be viewed as being about Van Jones. What we underestimated was the power of the fact that both Jones and Barack Obama are black. Yes, the hysteria was about politics -- I don't think Fox News really cares about Jones's ethnicity -- but it was enabled by race. Calling Bush a "crack-head" is seen by a large part of America as worse than calling him "addict-in-chief" because crack is not just a drug -- it is a drug used largely by black people. It reminds those Americans who are still uncomfortable with Barack Obama that we have a black president.

[A]t the end of the day, [that] was his crime. He spoke to and was of a part of an America that Fox and the reactionary right would like to put back on the plantation or pretend is not part of our nation.

But we shouldn't forgive either ourselves or the Administration if the next time we sense this happening we don't fight back harder, faster, and in a way that calls a mob a mob, racism racism, and an attack on the president an attack on America.

Barack Obama campaigned as one who would put racial divisions behind us, but his votaries are determined to make any criticism of this administration all about race. To criticize the President or any of his African American appointees has become for many prima facie evidence of racism. What these race hustlers fail to realize, however, is that the charge of racism is losing its punch. If everyone's a racist, if every opinion one holds is rooted in racism, then the word "racism" loses its power to intimidate. People are beginning to realize that no matter how respectful they try to be to the racial sensibilities of others they're going to be branded as a racist as soon as they express any opposition to any black in American politics, so why bother worrying about it?

Arguments like Pope's are as silly as they are sad. After three decades of trying to get past skin color we find out that, for the left, skin color is often the explanation of first resort for anyone who disagrees with them. So strong is this heuristic that even the lack of empirical evidence of racism is itself considered evidence for how diabolically subtle modern racists are. I'm reminded of the line from the novel/movie/play The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orzy about the Englishman who masqueraded as a fop risking his life to rescue French nobles from the Jacobin terror:

"They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel ..."

Substitute "liberals" for "Frenchies" and "white racist" for "Pimpernel" and the lines could have been written for today's politics.

If Pope wants to find genuine racism perhaps he should look at Jones' comments about "white" polluters, or Jeremiah Wright's sermons, or Professor Gates' stereotyping of officer Crowley. Pope wouldn't see the racial bias in these men, though, because if he did, if he faulted any of them for the race-based sentiments they express, that would, by his own standard, make him a racist for criticizing a black man.

You can watch this video for yet another example of how the left seems unwilling to entertain any explanation, other than racism, for opposition to this administration or any African American who is a part of it:

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

RLC

Vicious Smear Campaigns

This is bizarre. Van Jones, President Obama's recently-resigned Green Jobs czar, claims that health care reform opponents are responsible for his resignation:

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones wrote. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

Lies and distortions? All anyone did was show his signature on a 9/11 "truther" petition, quote his own words about being a Leninist revolutionary and black nationalist, and play the audio tapes of him insulting whites and Republicans. Apparently, for lefties like Jones telling people what he actually believes is a "vicious smear campaign," and quoting him is to "lie and distort." Pretty funny.

Now it would be nice to engage in a similar "vicious smear campaign" to get rid of a couple of other "czars" starting with John Holdren and Hugo Chavez booster Mark Lloyd. All that needs to be done is to show the American people, honestly, fairly, and without rancor, what these guys stand for and let the people give voice to whether they want such individuals working at taxpayers' expense, accountable to no one, in the White House.

RLC

The Evolution of Morality

Robert Wright is an atheist who argues that there is a moral law that somehow pervades the universe and which obligates us to do "right." P.Z. Myers is an atheist who sees things, at least this thing, much differently. Here's Myers:

Nope, says I. First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn't mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing 'out there' that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you've inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions.

Other than changing the word "compelled" to "obligated" I agree with what Myers writes. Given his atheism he's absolutely correct to conclude that there is no moral law. There's no right or wrong, there's no moral obligation, there are just things that people do. An atheist, as Myers implies, has absolutely no grounds for believing in moral obligation or for making moral judgments.

Wright thinks otherwise:

[E]volutionary psychologists have developed a plausible account of the moral sense. They say it is in large part natural selection's way of equipping people to play non-zero-sum games - games that can be win-win if the players cooperate or lose-lose if they don't.

So, for example, feelings of guilt over betraying a friend are with us because during evolution sustaining friendships brought benefits through the non-zero-sum logic of one hand washing the other ("reciprocal altruism"). Friendless people tend not to thrive.

Be this as it may, it does nothing to explain why we're doing something wrong if we choose not to cooperate with others. Even if evolution has given us a moral sense, so what? That's hardly a reason why we should adhere to it. Evolution has given us wisdom teeth, too, but that doesn't mean that we need them.

Wright continues:

Well, a moral sense seems to emerge when you take a smart, articulate species and throw in reciprocal altruism. And evolution has proved creative enough to harness the logic of reciprocal altruism again and again.

Vampire bats share blood with one another, and dolphins swap favors, and so do monkeys. Is it all that unlikely that, even if humans had been wiped out a few million years ago, eventually a species with reciprocal altruism would reach an intellectual and linguistic level at which reciprocal altruism fostered moral intuitions and moral discourse?

This is all pretty interesting, but, even so, it's not at all clear to me that people are naturally altruistic. They seem much more obviously to be naturally egoistic. If we are what we are through evolution then evolution has shaped us to be self-centered and selfish.

But even if we grant Wright's argument that we've evolved to be altruistic how is this an argument for moral obligation? If people don't cooperate with others all that we can conclude is that they don't carry the genes for it. We can't conclude that they're doing anything wrong. Nor can we say that because blind, impersonal forces have caused us to tend toward mutual cooperation that therefore we're obligated to cooperate with others. That's as ridiculous as saying that because nature has given us facial hair we're obligated not to shave it off.

Evolution (maybe) can explain why humans behave the way they do, but it cannot "demand" that we ought or ought not to behave that way. It cannot provide a ground for saying that some choices are right and others wrong. Nor can it provide a ground for saying that people are morally obligated to do what helps others. Only God can impose moral obligation, and if there is no God then P.Z. Myers is right.

RLC

Why People Think There'll Be Death Panels

On FOX News Sunday DNC Chairman Howard Dean repeated the charge that opponents of Democratic health care reform proposals are fabricating the idea of "death panels," and that there are no such entities in the Democrats' proposals.

The problem with this is that it's certain that if those proposals pass there will be rationing of care and that the rationing will impact medicare recipients especially hard. In other words, the government agency given the authority to decide who gets care and who doesn't and on what basis will function pretty much as a panel which will make life or deazth decisions for people. Just because the words "death panel" don't appear in any of the bills doesn't mean that, for all practical purposes, such entities will exist if the bills become law.

Jennifer Rubin at PajamasMedia explains that despite the outrage of liberal pundits over Sarah Palin's reference to "death panels" a lot of President Obama's supporters are letting the cat out of the bag as the discussion on health care has proceeded through the month of August. She writes:

As for Obama, a candid Mickey Kaus observes: "I can't help but feel that the reason the president doesn't effectively rebut the 'rationing' argument is that he kind of believes we have to move toward rationing. But couldn't he fake it?" Well, Obama would have to fake it and muzzle a great number of his own advisors who seem to think there's nothing wrong with limiting care for all of us and, specifically, pulling the plug on the grandmas and grandpas who account for a disproportionate amount of health care spending.

It's interesting that Kaus, an Obama supporter, seems to think that Obama should essentially lie about his intentions, but never mind that. Rubin continues:

Obama, for example, would have to hush up Rahm Emanuel's brother Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the president's health care advisors. He too is all in favor of cutting off care to those whose days are limited and whose medical expenses are high. The Wall Street Journal reported on Dr. Emanuel:

True reform, he argues, must include redefining doctors' ethical obligations. In the June 18, 2008, issue of JAMA, Dr. Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the "overuse" of medical care: "Medical school education and post-graduate education emphasize thoroughness," he writes. "This culture is further reinforced by a unique understanding of professional obligations, specifically the Hippocratic Oath's admonition to 'use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgment' as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others."

Dr. Emanuel thinks we need to stop all this chatter about the worth of the individual. Instead we should focus on communal needs. And he has just the scheme for allocating scare resources. Dr. Emanuel describes his ghoulishly named "complete lives" system:

"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated." ... Dr. Emanuel concedes that his plan appears to discriminate against older people, but he explains: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. ... Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not."

If Mr. Obama wants to end concerns about "death panels" he should stop surrounding himself with people who favor doing exactly what "death panels" would do - ration care to the elderly based on actuarial tables.

My own octogenarian mother needed to have a heart valve replaced and medicare picked up the tab. Given that she was in her eighties it's doubtful that people who share Ezekiel Emanuel's views would have approved such a procedure, at least if medicare would be paying for it. My mother's operation was five years ago, and she's still going strong, walking several miles each day. If she hadn't had it she'd be dead. Any bureaucrats who make the decision as to whether medicare will pay for an operation that makes the difference between life and death would indeed constitute a "death panel," and for Howard Dean, or anyone else, to obfuscate this is simply deceitful.

RLC

Rifqa Bary

You may have heard of Rifqa Bary. She's the young woman who converted from Islam to Christianity and then fled her home in Ohio to find shelter with a Christian family in Florida because her father threatened to kill her for her apostasy. She has petitioned the state of Florida to allow her to remain there.

Now some may have a difficult time believing that a loyal member of the religion of peace, such as her father must be, would want to kill his daughter simply because she became a Christian. After all, it's not as if Muslims actually did this sort of thing, or at least it's not as if they did it very often, or at least did it very often here in the U.S., but the girl's fear is nevertheless palpable (see the opening 20 seconds or so of this video):

Pam Geller has been doing great work advocating on behalf of this girl and bringing her plight to the public's attention (though it's been largely ignored by the traditional media). Go here and scroll down to read about her ordeal.

So far the Florida courts have ruled that Rifqa can remain in Florida while her family is investigated to see if her terror is justified. If you wonder why she's in fear of her life go here and scroll down. Or you can ask Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Wafa Sultan, if you can get past their round-the-clock guard. I would've also mentioned Theo Van Gogh, but it's too late to ask him.

RLC

School Address

What lesson is there for the President in the massive public outcry over his plans to address the nations school children on Tuesday? Well, first, it should teach the Democrats about sauce and geese. President George H.W. Bush made a similar address to schools in 1991 and was hammered by Democrats who accused the Republican president of making the event into a campaign commercial.

The second lesson is that the President has used up much of the trust and confidence that the American people placed in him last November. There is growing fear among Americans that either Mr. Obama is not who they thought he was when they voted for him or that he is who they thought he was when they didn't vote for him.

For myself, I have no problem in principle with the President addressing school students. My difficulty is with taking students out of class yet again to hear a talk that will have very little impact on their lives. Students miss so much class time as it is for mandated tests, field trips, sports, student council activities and a multitude of other dubious reasons that to take them out of class once more to hear a lecture that is highly unlikely to make any lasting impression on more than a few of them is really a bad idea. Students thinking seriously about quitting school are not going to change their minds because some guy in Washington says they shouldn't do it.

I also had a concern about the lesson plans designed for the event. There was some reason to think that President Obama was going to use this event as an opportunity to solicit support for his political agenda. The lesson plans prepared for the event originally recommended having students "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president," and how the president "inspired them," but because the public objected these questionable assignments have been deleted.

So, the public's protestations were a good thing. The event, as it now seems to be unfolding, is fairly innocuous, but given my druthers I'd prefer that the kids be in class learning the things they won't be learning sitting in an auditorium sleeping through the President's speech.

RLC