Understanding ESC

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost explains some things about stem cell research that the average voter is probably not aware of. He writes:

Since the average American voter believes the President controls the economy, it's not a surprise they would believe that he would control federal funding for ESC also. But Bush's executive order didn't really initiate a ban at all. In fact, all it did was clarify what the executive branch is supposed to do - enforce the law. The ban had already been put in place by former Arkansas congressman Jay Dickey.

In 1996, Dickey attached an amendment to the Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill that prohibits the use of federal funds for research that destroys or seriously endangers human embryos. The Dickey Amendment, which has been reimplemented every year since '96, reads:

None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for- (1) the creation of a human embryo or embryos for research purposes; or (2) research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.

While the law is rather straightforward, the Clinton Administration was able to find a way around it. They reasoned that if private funds were used to destroy the embryo then it would clear the way for government funding. They would allow the private sector do the dirty work and then slip them funding for their efforts. Although this violates the clear intent and spirit of the law, it was nevertheless ruled to be a "legally valid interpretation."

The Clinton Administration adopted this stance as their policy but was unable to implement it before Bush took office. Unlike his predecessor, Bush came in with the intent to obey the law as it was written. But by the time he made his decision, a number of embryonic stem cell lines had already been derived and were in various stages of development, growth, and characterization. Since the damage had already been done to the embryos, Bush agreed to a compromise which allowed federal funding to be used for these specific lines. Funding of ESC research would be allowed without having the government be complicit in the destruction of more human embryos.

Kerry's expressed policy is a reversal of this position. By "lifting the ban" he means that he'll take the position of former President Clinton and ignore the law as it is written in order to find a way around its limitations. Since both he and Sen. Clinton were unable to override the Dickey amendment in the legislature, he is attempting to do it by fiat. In essence, Kerry is promising to ignore the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives.

It would be interesting to see how many of the Democrats who criticize the President's position on this issue have themselves voted for the Dickey Amendment and its annual renewals.

Sec. Annan, Please Call Your Office

The Sudan crisis continues and the Sudanese leadership sits in Khartoum pretending it's not happening. This article provides an update. Some excerpts:

In a statement from Geneva on Tuesday, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs accused Sudanese forces of new helicopter attacks, denied by Khartoum, and the Janjaweed of raids on the ground. "Fresh violence today (Tuesday) included helicopter gunship bombings by the Sudanese government and Janjaweed attacks in South Darfur," the U.N. agency said.

The U.N. estimates Darfur violence has killed 50,000 and made two million short of food and medicine.

Sudan has said international pressure over Darfur aims to undermine the country's Islamist government, which Washington lists as a "sponsor of terror."

In a July 30 U.S.-drafted resolution, the Security Council gave Khartoum 30 days to take measures against the Janjaweed, or face unspecified sanctions. Khartoum denies using the Janjaweed as a proxy force and says they are outlaws.

It will be interesting to see what the U.N. does when the August 30 deadline passes. It will also be telling to read the tragic statistics of how many people died in that 30 day period. It is unconscionable that this horror has been allowed to go on this long, as if the Sudanese thugocracy were a legitimate government, and every day it is allowed to continue is another black mark on the legacy of the United Nations.

Lt. Kerry's Magical Mystery Tour

Hugh Hewitt has an interview with a boatmate of Kerry's who categorically denies Kerry's claim to have been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968. The swift boat vet also puts the kibosh on Kerry's claim to have transported CIA agents into Cambodia. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

HH: Now, Steve Gardner, John Kerry has also been discovered to have been telling a story that he took a CIA man at least one CIA man into Cambodia and that he kept his hat. When you were on the boat with John Kerry, for your two months and two weeks of the tour that he served, did you ever have a CIA man on board?

SG: Number one, no.

HH: Did you ever take anyone to Cambodia and drop them off?

SG: Categorically no.

HH: Did you get near Cambodia and drop anybody off?

SG: The closest we can get to Cambodia, and that's a long swim, is 50 miles.

HH: Alright. Let me ask you about other people on the boat. Could John Kerry have just misunderstood someone on the boat was CIA when it wasn't CIA? Did you ever have any strangers on the boat?

SG: Nope. We always would have an interpreter, or something like that with us, or we would take others and take them in to areas in the Mekong Delta where they would be doing surveillance, but never did we have anybody that we would take close or could take close to Cambodia.

What does it matter, some are asking. These were events that took place thirty five years ago. If he lied about them back then, who cares? Many of the people who are going to be voting in November weren't even born in 1968.

It's of course true that the events occured a long time ago, but Senator Kerry has advanced them as his chief qualification for serving as president. He and his party have made them relevant to this campaign because evidently he feels that what he did back then far outshines anything he has done since. He wants us to believe that it is those deeds which define him as a man and as a leader.

It behooves us then to examine those events. When we do we find that either they didn't happen the way he says they did or didn't happen at all. We are thus left with the conclusion that his VietNam service is a net negative, a serious negative since he himself places such importance on it, and that our consideration of his qualifications should move past VietNam to his record in the Senate. We can't, however, because he keeps bringing us back to VietNam, reminding us often that he fought to defend this country as a young man, etc.

This last refrain is particularly disingenuous, by the way, since one of the anti-war shibboleths from the 1970s was that no American interests were at stake in VietNam and that therefore we had no business being there. This was Kerry's position as a leader of the VietNam Veterans Against the War. Perhaps some journalist might ask him if, by insisting that he was defending this country when he served, he is now of the belief that the VietNam war was indeed a war fought in defense of the United States. If so, when did he change his mind? If not, why does he keep saying that it was?

Character Counts

Mark Steyn has a great piece in the U.K.Telegraph on Kerry's weird story about Christmas in Cambodia. He writes:

I'm Vietnammed out. But it's the centrepiece of Kerry's campaign: the other day, asked a straightforward question about 9/11, he stuck to the current millennium for a good 20 seconds and then veered off into "the war that I fought in was a war where we saw America lose its support for the war, where the soldiers came back having had to do what our soldiers are doing today, carry an M-16 in another country, try to tell the difference between friend and foe. I know what it's like to go out at night on patrol", etc, etc. So, since Vietnam seems to be the only subject on which he has anything to say, it would be reassuring to know that at least he's got that right.

Unfortunately, perhaps tragically, he doesn't have it right. He has insisted for three decades that he spent Christmas eve on an illegal mission in Cambodia, but he appears to have made the story up, and now, like a tar baby, he's stuck with it. Steyn continues:

For decades, John Kerry has told anyone who'd listen that at Christmas 1968 he was on an illegal mission inside Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1986, while attacking President Reagan for turning Central America into another Vietnam quagmire (wrong as usual), Kerry said: "I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me."

The illegal Yuletide foray was so seared into him that he brought it up at every opportunity.

As he told the Boston Herald in 1979, "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

LBJ was President on Christmas Eve 1968, but let that pass. Here's an Associated Press story from 1992: "Navy Lt John Kerry knew he had no business steering his Mekong River patrol boat across the border into Cambodia, but orders were orders... By Christmas 1968, part of Kerry's patrol extended across the border of South Vietnam into Cambodia."

Just one problem. It never happened. Every living officer up his chain of command says Kerry was never ordered to Cambodia. At least three of his five crewmen say their boat was never in Cambodia. And if you don't believe any of his fellow veterans, read the excerpt from Kerry's own journal published in Tour Of Duty, the recent hagiography by Douglas Brinkley.

On December 24 1968, Kerry was at Sa Dec - that's well inside Vietnam, 55 miles from the Cambodian border.

For most of his adult life John Kerry has peddled as his central Vietnam anecdote - the one that drove him to turn on his nation's leaders - what appears to be a complete fantasy. Why would he do such a thing? If there's a good answer to that question, maybe someone in his doting press pack would like to ask it.

In the absence of a plausible explanation for Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story, we are left to conclude that the Senator is either delusional or mendacious. If the latter, we have to ask what kind of man would slander his fellow veterans, officers, and indeed his country just to make himself look tall and to advance his own political ambitions.

An interesting question to pose to a Kerry supporter is, Why? Just because John Kerry is not George Bush is not good enough. Indeed, it's incredibly irreponsible. If Kerry supporters cannot give a convincing reason for their support beyond the fact that he's not Bush, they're tacitly admitting that it doesn't matter to them what the man is like. They're acknowledging their willingness to entrust the reins of power to a mediocrity who is either a chronic liar or a sad, deluded man living in a fantasy world if that's what's necessary to get Bush out. How long can a democracy survive in a political climate that spawns such recklessness in its citizens?

Why Bush Will Win

In the first of a pair of outstanding columns for National Review Online Michael Novak offers six reasons why he thinks the Democrats will not win in November. He writes:

1. No one - neither his colleagues nor his wife nor his supporters nor he himself - has anything good to say about John Kerry except that he served bravely in Vietnam. The nearly 30 years since then have generated few boasts on his part, few commendations from others, few successes anyone can seem to remember.

2. The Democratic elite sitting in convention cannot present themselves as they are to the American people, but must stifle their deepest feelings, be silent about their most passionate aims, and hide their turbulent loathing of George Bush Republicans (lest it frighten independents with its ferocity). The Democratic elite is saying as little as possible about same-sex marriage. And guns. And very little about abortion. And not a word about total withdrawal of American troops from Iraq - quite the opposite. Democratic elites do not want the people to know what they really think. On that ground, they fear they will lose.

3. Democrats must hide from the public what they truly think about evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Catholics. They express these thoughts mostly among themselves.

4. John Kerry looks sillier in the pale blue NASA rabbit suit than Michael Dukakis did in a tank.

5. The months of April, May, and June were so heavy with bad news for George Bush - the huge Sorosian expenditures on anti-Bush ads came at him in torrents - and still he held even with Kerry in the polls. It is hard not to believe that there will be at least a slight change in the roaring winds. When it comes (and the change is already underway), it is bound to push Bush's sails steadily ahead as the weeks roll on.

6. The worst lies told by the Democrats about Bush - those of Joe Wilson, Michael Moore, and others, saying that Bush lied about Iraq - have already been proven wrong by the 9/11 Commission (which was supposed to blow Bush out of the water just before the election, but ended up destroying his worst calumniators). These lies were also proven wrong by the British inquiry. Even the Kerry Convention in Boston ended up taking the Bush strategic line in Iraq, except for one thing: Kerry is wistful about the probability of persuading France and Germany to bear some burden on behalf of liberty in Iraq. Good luck! God knows, Bush and Colin Powell tried.

In response to this argument, the persuasiveness of which we'll leave to the reader to decide, he received several hundred e-mails roughly half of which were filled with such hate-filled invective that he was stunned by their viciousness. In a subsequent rejoinder he tells us about them:

Their sentiment was far more animus against Bush than support for Kerry. One said my word 'hatred' was inexact: 'Total disgust' is more accurate. That's what a good many people expressed - an almost inarticulate disgust beyond their powers of speech. Quite a number compared Bush to Hitler, and the present to the early Third Reich.

About half (or maybe only a third) of the 207 letters went into painful riffs, long or short, about the vices of George W. Bush. Several of these are based on untruths - things Democratic speakers such as Howard Dean and Michael Moore say all the time that simply are not true. The revulsion against Bush expressed in these emails does not seem to depend on truth. Even those who actually believe these things could with a little effort find out that they are false. Let me just mention a few of these untruths:

1. The intelligence, academic achievement, and IQ of George Bush are too low for the job. Bush's IQ, measured by his SAT scores and academic achievements, is higher than that of John F. Kennedy and many other successful presidents. Much was published on this in 2000.

2. Bush "lied" when he said Iraq was an "imminent" danger to the U.S. Bush expressly denied that the danger was then imminent, and said when it was actually "imminent" it would be too late to counter.

3. Bush "lied" when he said Iraq had the "potential" to develop weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam must be assumed to possess weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's potential to develop weapons of mass destruction has been demonstrated from what was found after May 2003. And any reasonable leader, hearing the best estimates of all major intelligence services and observing Saddam's behavior, had to assume that he possessed them. Even the anti-war movement employed the same assumption. It used as one of its arguments the claim that war would occasion Saddam's use of WMDs.

4. Bush "lied" when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address that the British had information about the attempt of Iraq to purchase "yellow cake" in Nigeria, as charged by Joseph Wilson. (The famous 16 words.) The British Butler Inquiry said Bush's words were "well-founded." The Senate Intelligence Committee discovered that it was Wilson who had lied.

5. Bush "lied" when he landed on the aircraft carrier under a banner that said "mission accomplished." General Tommy Franks has said he suggested the symbol as a strategic move, to dramatize to reluctant allies that the offensive operations were now over. A new (but still difficult) phase of ending disorder and bringing stable political and economic institutions had begun. On this task, some Europeans had hinted they would help. Franks wanted a dramatic signal sent to them. It was also meant as a "closure" for the main Coalition offensive.

6. A big reason for the deficits are the Bush tax cuts. As even the New York Times has noted, the main cause by far was the great drop of income for the wealthy in the two-year stock-market drop, with a consequent dramatic drop in tax revenues. This was before the Bush tax cuts came into effect. Since then, tax revenues have dramatically increased, especially from the rich. The top 10 percent pay 65 percent of all income taxes.

Both of these essays have much more in them worth reading. I don't know if Bush is going to win in November, but if he loses it will be because of some of the most repugnant political tactics I've ever witnessed. The depth of hatred that justifies any means of unseating George Bush is as frightening as it is repulsive. Heed the words of one of Novak's correspondents: "First we will vote, then if we lose, we will fight." In other words if lies don't work then violence will? This is the language of fascist tyrants and Stalinist totalitarians.

Robocop

The soldier of the future is going to look like Robocop and be just as formidable according to this article. Some excerpts:

"What we hope to gain from this program is body armor that wears like a traditional textile impregnated with nanomachines connected to an onboard computer, DeGay explained. "So when you shoot a round into the uniform system, it's normally pliable until it senses the strike of a round -- it becomes rigid, defeats the strike of the round and becomes soft again."

A shortcoming of traditional body armor is that it can only absorb so many strikes from machine-gun rounds. "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," DeGay pointed out.

Another potential development is inserting "nanomuscle fibers" that can actually simulate muscles, giving soldiers more strength. Fabric is impregnated with nanomachines that create the same weight, lift and feel as a muscle. "So I coat the outside of the armor with a nanomuscle fiber that gives me 25 to 35 percent better lifting capability," DeGay explained.

The uniform from the waist down will have a robotic-powered system that is connected directly to the soldier. This system could use pistons to actually replicate the lower body, giving the soldier "upwards of about 300 percent greater lifting and load-carriage capability," DeGay said. "We are looking at potentially mounting a weapon directly to the uniform system and now the soldier becomes a walking gun platform."

I guess this is a good thing. See the article for pictures.

The Terror of Living in Saddam's Iraq

This is such a sad story and it's even sadder when one realizes that it's only one of perhaps thousands of such stories coming out of the horrifying nightmare that was Iraq under Saddam.

Read the story at Iraq The Model and then ask whether Iraq and the world are not better off now than if the United States and Britain had, like France, Germany, and Russia, done nothing.

In Their Own Words

Here's a series of quotes from Democrat leaders about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction that's making the rounds on the internet. I don't vouch for the accuracy of all of them, but interested readers should be able to verify them easily enough:

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." "The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons...." - Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years .. We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do." - Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapon stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." - Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002

"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation .. And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

Now these very same people are insisting that President Bush lied about WMD. They are scoffing at any suggestion that there ever were any such weapons, and that Bush took us to war unnecessarily. The Democrats are either inveterately dishonest or they are disconnected from reality. Either way they do not deserve to wield political power nor can the American people afford to give it to them.

The 2002, 2003 quotes are interesting, in that they support a theory of mine, which, though I can't prove it, nevertheless makes sense out of the last couple of years' politics. The Democrats seem to have been trying to turn up the heat on Bush to do something about Iraq, being fully convinced that he would do nothing significant. They doubtless thought that they would then be able to use his dithering against him politically.

When Bush called for congressional approval to use force they still thought he would do nothing decisive, despite his success in Afghanistan, so they voted for it, thinking that they'd be able to portray themselves to the public as tough and Bush as wimpish, afraid to tackle the world's fourth largest army.

When it became clear that Bush actually intended to undertake something historic they were aghast. This wasn't the way it was supposed to work out. They were then forced to resort to their fallback plan which was to do everything they could to find fault with how he did it, and hope that the voters would forget their earlier hawkishness. If this is indeed what happened it's pretty hypocritical, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

Let The Character Assassinations Begin

The assault on the character and personal lives of the swift boat veterans who have contradicted Kerry's account of his Viet Nam experience has begun. See here for details.

These men are apparently going to be vilified, drawn, and quartered by the press. This is ugly, disgusting,and contemptible behavior on the part of the Democrats and their media allies, but you knew it was coming. The Democratic party is the undisputed master of the politics of personal destruction.

The crucial question - whether these men are, in fact, telling the truth - is going to be lost in an avalanche of personal, irrelevant invective. This alone should be enough to move people to wonder whether this is the sort of sleazy behavior they want to vote into power, but, sadly, it probably won't.

Sen. Landrieu Meet Noah Webster

A Democrat switches parties and the senator from his state, Mary Landrieu, calls him a coward and adds that his word is now meaningless.

A coward? Switching parties may be many things but how is it cowardly? Maybe somebody in Louisianna could donate a copy of a dictionary to Senator Landrieu's office.

By the way, how many Democrats called Senator Jim Jeffords a coward when he switched from Republican to Independent so that he could caucus with the Democrats? Perhaps that's different since Republicans who jump parties are acting on principle. When Democrats become Republicans they're cowards. I get it.

God and Evil, Pt. II

In a recent post entitled God and Evil Viewpoint discussed one classical response of theists to the problem of evil based upon the assumed existence of human free will. We pointed out that although human volition may account for some kinds of evil, what we called moral evil, the question remains as to why an all-powerful, benevolent God would tolerate evil that resulted not from human free will but from natural causes like storms, accidents, famine, and disease.

Before we try to address this question, we should be reminded that in God and Evil we stipulated that the understanding of God's power that we are working with is that God can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it.

So, the question before us now is, wouldn't a perfectly good and omnipotent creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil. One way to answer this question, perhaps, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there's no potential for harm. For example, any world governed by gravity and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury. Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

At this point, it might be objected that theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't he, if he was perfectly good, create this world like that?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Perhaps the reason that there is no evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there. The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven could serve as an override to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do that here in this world as well, and, since he doesn't, he must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death. At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way apparently, that God had forbidden. It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy. If, as was suggested in God and Evil, God did not foresee this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his creator, and God would not force him to do otherwise. Grief-stricken at the rejection he suffered at the hands of his beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

God did not abandon man entirely, but he has given man his autonomy, he has set man free in the world. All subsequent history is the story of God's attempt to woo mankind back to himself, to win back the heart of his unfaithful lover. God's love for us still burns, and he wants us back despite our disloyalty. Indeed, he desires our love so much that he redeems us himself. Man's infidelity deserves eternal divorce, eternal separation, from God, but God atones for our sin himself on the cross in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The story of God's redemption is a beautiful, tragic story, a romance, a story of faithfulness, goodness and perseverance, and it's the only story that makes sense of human history.

If God does not exist, if death is the end, then all of life, all of history, is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no purpose, there is no significance. It's all absurd. The evil which besets us, the suffering, pain, and grief we experience, are all meaningless. They are all for nothing. Atheism, carried to its logical conclusion, ends in nihilism, the belief that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters.

In the face of this despair Christianity infuses life with hope, meaning, and dignity. Christianity redeems the absurdity of the world by insisting that nothing in our world is for nothing. There is a reason for our existence and a reason why there is evil. We may not know what it is, but if we were created by God we may assume that God had a purpose for doing so, and that that purpose is our purpose. If our world is beset by evil we have grounds for hoping that there is a reason why God endures it, and that in some future existence justice will be done and suffering will be no more.

Atheism offers none of this. In a world without God people are born out of nothingness, they suffer, and they return back to the void from which they came and there's no significance or meaning to it at all. Atheism offers no basis for hope that there is any ultimate meaning to life or any ultimate justice in the world. It offers no basis for believing that right and wrong are grounded in anything other than subjective feeling. It offers no basis for granting human beings dignity and significance. In a world without God there is no point or purpose to life beyond whatever short-term goals we set for ourselves to keep us from reflecting on the fact that everything we do ultimately goes for naught.

Christianity may not be true, but each of us, including the atheist, should certainly hope that it is. Inexplicably, most atheists hope for the very opposite. They hope that they are right that there is no God. The atheist, in fact, finds himself in the awkward position of holding firmly to a view which, one might think, he should hope with all his being is completely wrong.

The Journalistic Pursuit Of Truth

The "politics of personal destruction" is shifting into high gear. The Swift Boat veterans who appeared in the anti-Kerry ad and in the forth-coming book Unfit For Command were branded "liars" and "sleazy" characters by an angry Al Hunt on Saturday evening's edition of Capitol Gang.

Hunt specifically called John O'Neill, the author of Unfit For Command, a liar but offered no support for the allegation. It's hard to say how he could support it, actually, since he hasn't seen the book yet, but then evidence doesn't matter in the world of post-modern liberalism. All that's necessary for a man to be a liar in our current cultural environment is for him to say something you don't like or that you wish weren't true.

Hunt claimed that since Kerry's accusers didn't actually serve on Kerry's vessel they're not qualified to say whether Kerry actually did the things he is credited for doing. This is like saying that because some kid in your high school was a year behind you, you can't really know anything about him.

Hunt followed this bizarre claim with one even weirder. Veins almost popping in his neck, he vigorously insisted that John McCain has more authority on the matter than anyone at the table, and John Mccain has called these men "dishonest and dishonorable". Never mind that these men knew Kerry and served with him whereas McCain never did until both men were in the Senate together. As long as truth is whatever you want it to be this sort of logic will make perfect sense to you, I suppose.

Some critics have argued that these Viet Nam veterans are reprehensible because they're making an issue out of something that happened thirty-five years ago and should not be relevant today.

There are several things to be said about this objection, however. First, those who make it were themselves mute while Terry McAuliffe and other Democrats were raking through George Bush's National Guard service. I don't recall any liberal reporters, least of all Al Hunt, telling the Democrats to stop acting like political dumpster divers. According to the Democrats and the pundits the people should know whether Bush did what he claimed to do when he was in the National Guard. It was okay to call him a draft dodger and a deserter because, heck, for all any of them knew maybe he was. But it's not okay to subject John Kerry to the same kind of scrutiny. That's sleazy politics.

Second, the allegations against Bush were made by high representatives of the Democrat party. McAuliffe is the party chairman. The Republicans have nothing to do with the ad or the book, at least not that we know. These have been produced by men who are private citizens, and if they're telling the truth what they're doing is far more noble than what Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11.

Third, John Kerry and the Democrats are the ones responsible for making his war time service an issue. In his acceptance speech he spent more time talking about his four month tour of duty in Viet Nam than he did his nineteen years in the Senate. John Edwards says "if you want to know what kind of man John Kerry is, ask the men who served with him," but when we take Edwards up on his suggestion the men who served with him are slandered and vilified by the liberals because they refuse to follow the script.

Al Hunt and his Democrat allies allege that these men, upwards of two hundred of them, are simply lying or are the manipulated pawns of rich backers who are putting up the money for these ads. It is somehow sordid for rich Republicans to finance ads critical of Kerry, but when George Soros says he would spend his entire fortune to defeat George Bush the liberals revel in the prospect.

They snickered at the obvious mendacity of rich film- maker Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and rejoiced that so many people were going to see it, but when it's their guy being subject to charges which, for all they know, may be true they're outraged at such "dishonest and dishonorable" tactics.

On Capitol Gang Margaret Carlson shrugged off the claims of these war veterans, many of them decorated heroes themselves, by making the astonishing assertion that they will all soon be discredited. This is journalism? Without having read their allegations, without having seen their evidence she knows that Kerry is innocent and these men are simply fabricating this whole thing? Where is journalistic objectivity? Where's the noble journalistic pursuit of the truth wherever it may be found? In the world of the contemporary liberal, evidently, there's no need to look at evidence when you already know the truth.

Viewpoint is looking forward to the Sunday morning talk shows. They should be feisty.

Keyes is In!

No Left Turns tells us that Alan Keyes has decided to run against Barack Obama for the Illinois senate seat:

Alan Keyes has accepted the GOP nomination to run for the Senate in Illinois and Barack Obama has already agreed to a series of Lincoln/Douglas style debates. Whatever the outcome of this race, you can't miss these debates!

Indeed!

Loose Lips Sink Ships

A lot of people have wondered why our intelligence agencies announce the captures of various terrorists. It would seem that the wiser course would be to keep their Islamist comrades in the dark while we extract as much information from the captured individuals as possible. As soon as the terrorists read in the papers that someone who knows about them has been caught they are certain to change their methods, procedures, plans, addresses, and anything else they can in order to avoid capture.

Yet there is the hope that our intelligence personnel know what they're doing. We trust that their decisions, policies, and methods are well-thought out so we give them the benefit of the doubt. That benefit, however, is going to be much harder to concede after this MSNBC account of the leak of the name of the Pakistani who was the source of information for all the terrorist arrests in Europe that have occured in the last couple of days. Some excerpts:

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al-Qaida operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers. Monday evening, after Khan's name appeared, Pakistani officials moved him to a secret location.

"After his capture [in July], he admitted being an al-Qaida member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker, and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz."

The Times published a story Monday saying U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested in Pakistan was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security alerts. The Times identified him as Khan, although it did not say how it had learned his name.

U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the name to other news organizations Monday morning. None of the reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time, helping to catch al-Qaida suspects.

Intelligence and security experts said they were surprised that Washington would reveal information that could expose the name of a source during an ongoing law enforcement operation.

"If it's true that the Americans have unintentionally revealed the identity of another nation's intelligence agent, who appears to be working in the good of all of us, that is not only a fundamental intelligence flaw. It's also a monumental foreign relations blunder," security expert Paul Beaver, a former publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, told Reuters.

The key word here is "unintentionally". It may be that the name was released deliberately to sow confusion or deception. Nevertheless, if whoever revealed the identity of this man did it recklessly, he/she should be fired. Naming Khan may have unnecessarily alerted dozens of terrorists who might survive to murder in the future. If so, whoever made the decision to expose Khan's arrest will be partly responsible for the deaths of the victims.

Christmas in Cambodia

Jim Geraghty who writes KerrySpot at National Review Online cites what Hugh Hewitt believes is perhaps the most devastating revelations in the forthcoming book on Kerry's Viet Nam service titled Unfit For Command. Kerry appears to have deliberately lied on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986 when he said that he was ordered into Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 (Hewitt's permalinks are down so once at his site you'll have to scroll to the piece on Kerry's Christmas Eve in Cambodia).

Geraghty quotes from Unfit for Command:

Kerry also described, for example, for the Boston Herald his vivid memories of his Christmas Eve spent in Cambodia: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

Problem One: Nixon hadn't taken office yet.

Problem Two: "During Christmas 1968, he was more than fifty miles away from Cambodia. Kerry was never ordered into Cambodia by anyone and would have been court-martialed had he gone there. During Christmas 1968, Kerry was stationed at Coastal Division 13 in Cat Lo. Coastal Division 13's patrol areas extended to Sa Dec, about fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border...

All the living commanders in Kerry's chain of command-Joe Streuhli (Commander of CosDiv 13), George Elliott (Commander of CosDiv 11), Adrian Lonsdale (Captain, USCG and Commander, Coastal Surveillance Center at An Thoi), Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann (Commander, Coastal Surveillance Force Vietnam, CTF 115), and Rear Admiral Art Price (Commander of River Patrol Force, CTF 116)-deny that Kerry was ever ordered to Cambodia...

At least three of the five crewmen on Kerry's PCF 44 boat-Bill Zaldonis, Steven Hatch, and Steve Gardner-deny that they or their boat were ever in Cambodia. The remaining two crewmen declined to be interviewed for this book.

The Cambodia incursion story is not included in Tour of Duty [the book on Kerry's war years by Douglas Brinkley]. Instead, Kerry replaces the story with a report about a mortar attack that occurred on Christmas Eve 1968 "near the Cambodia border" in a town called Sa Dec, some fifty-five miles from the Cambodian border.

Somehow, Kerry's secret illegal mission to Cambodia, which he recounted on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986, is now a firefight at Sa Dec and a Christmas day spent back at the base writing entries in his journal.

Unless O'Neill and Corsi have made some major error in their reporting, this is pretty stunning. Either Kerry is a pathological liar, or every man in his chain of command is.

Hewitt fills in some details of Kerry's recollections and adds that:

[I]f he lied about being sent to Cambodia, Kerry's narrative is in trouble. It will remain true that he saved a man's life, but that day's undeiable courage does not validate or protect Kerry's record then or since. A powerful demonstration of obvious falsehood on a key claim is a major blow to Kerry.

Which is why the focus ought to be on the Cambodia story, over and over again. Did Kerry make that claim? Did he do so in the Senate as part of a political argument about Nicaragua? If so, what's that tell us about his willingness to invent personal history to serve his political ambition?

Viewpoint wonders how long it will take the major media to start reporting on these revelations. By sitting on them they are doing a serious disservice to the American people who have a right to know the truth about the men they are being asked to elect as president. One thing we can be sure of, if new questions about George Bush's integrity had emerged they would be splashed across every headline and news broadcast all weekend and every day until November 2nd.

Unfit For Command has the potential to dampen a lot of enthusiasm for Kerry, an enthusiasm which, like Lake Okachobee, is miles wide and only inches deep to begin with. The danger to the Democrats is not just that undecideds will be persuaded to move toward Bush by the indictments of Kerry's character that the book contains, but that the millions who are moderately disposed toward Kerry and who are not driven by any particular animus toward Bush will simply stay home on election day.

The Wretched of the Earth

In the Sudan the holocaust continues while Khartoum plays dumb.

Sudanese Interior Minister Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein says: "It is true that the situation is out of control, but we will make an effort."

"Making an effort" is not good enough. These guys have had years to "make an effort" and have done nothing to stop the militias that are murdering, terrorizing, and dispossessing millions of people in their country. Indeed, the evidence is that they have abetted it. The effort they need to make is to pack their bags and get out.

Kofi Annan announced that the Sudanese government has about three weeks left to show the U.N. Security Council that it is serious about disarming the Janjaweed [the Sudanese militia] or face possible sanctions.

That must be a real rib-tickler in Khartoum. U.N. sanctions do not have a very reassuring record of concentrating tyrannical minds on the necessity of caring for their people. Meanwhile, in three weeks hundreds more children will starve to death.

On Thursday, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum: "Our policy is that anything that the AU wants we will cooperate (with). Before that we need to sit down, study it carefully and reach agreement on how we are going to implement it."

Yes, of course. Examine the problem carefully, anything to prolong the genocide and to evade having to do anything to stop it. What's needed in the Sudan is for someone to say that the games are over in Khartoum and to send in several thousand well-equipped troops to wipe out the Janjaweed, restore the people of Dharfur to their homes and farms, and to bring them relief from their suffering.

These wretched people can't count on U.N. sanctions. How would sanctions help them anyway? Sanctions invariably hurt rather than help the poor and dispossessed. The U.N. is as useless as a space heater in hell and the African Union is worse.

Perhaps the French and Germans are available for a humanitarian mission. They should have plenty of cash on hand for such an undertaking after having profited handsomely from their deals with Saddam at the expense of the Iraqi people. Maybe someone should give Chirac and Schroeder a call on behalf of the suffering Sudanese.

Why Do So Many Home School?

An article here points out that 1.1 million kids are home-schooled by parents who feel that public schools are just not safe or morally healthy environments for their kids:

The estimated figure of students taught at home has grown 29 percent since 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department. In surveys, parents offered two main reasons for choosing home schooling: 31 percent cited concerns about the environment of regular schools, and 30 percent wanted the flexibility to teach religious or moral lessons. Third, at 16 percent, was dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.

How many more parents are disillusioned with their child's school but lack the resources to take them out? How many children would be home schooled if parents had the time, energy, and expertise to do it. How many children in our public schools would be in private schools if parents could afford the tuition? I suspect the number is substantial and that confidence in public schools is low and declining. Our schools are in trouble and the first person to come along with an affordable way of privatizing education is going to find a receptive public. Why is this?

The problems began to incubate in the sixties, but they emerged in the seventies when legislation and court decisions made it increasingly more difficult to maintain effective discipline in the halls and classrooms. At the same time, schools became more than just educational institutions, today they are full-service day care, offering all manner of social services, therapeutic programs, extra-curricular activities, etc. These burgeoning programs have become the tail that wags the dog in public schools almost everywhere. Many private schools feel that in order to compete with their tax-subsidized neighbors they have to add to their own menu of offerings.

Add to this the fact that many schools are not run by educators but rather by managers. They may have advanced degrees in education, but many of them are in administration because they really didn't love what they were doing in the classroom. Thus to them what happens in the classroom is secondary to everything else the school does. They would not admit this, of course, but it's clear where most administrators' priorities lie to anyone who has worked in the education field for any length of time. All one needs do is to observe how easy it is for students to be excused from class in order to engage in other activities.

There is much that needs to be done if public education is going to be rescued from irrelevance and obsolescence. One thing that must change before anything else will be of any effect is that schools need to be granted the authority to discipline their students, to permanently expel them when expulsion is appropriate without having to employ phalanxes of lawyers to justify the measure, and to use that authority once they have it.

A second step needs to be that people put in positions of leadership in schools need to be themselves men and women who love learning, leaders who will subordinate everything else that takes place in the school day to classroom excellence. School administrators all pay lip service to learning, they all say that the education their students receive is their highest concern, but in too many of our schools, class is simply where students go when they have no other claim on their time.

Many of the problems public schools face are problems they can do nothing about. Viewpoint, for example, has discussed the correlation between the quality of families in a community and the quality of schools in that community (See here, for instance).

Nevertheless, there are things that educators and legislators can do to make them better, and it is an indictment of our schools that so many parents are willing to go to such lengths to find an alternative. Public school educators can no longer afford to shrug these people off as malcontents and cranks. Public schools need to do better, but they won't as long as they keep telling themselves and us that the problems they face can all be fixed by giving them more money.

The Ad

They're accusing him of having betrayed his country, of lying to the American people about the circumstances of the war, of being unfit to serve as president of the United States. Sound familiar? These are the same claims made by hysterics like Al Gore and Howard Dean about George Bush, but this time the claims are being made by calm, apolitical men who have no partisan or ideological ax to grind. This time the claims are made by men who are actually familiar with the service of the man they criticize. In a thirty second television ad they can offer no evidence to support their allegations, but presumably that will be presented in the book due out next week titled Unfit for Command by John O'Neill. The book, if these men are indeed telling the truth, should flesh out the indictment presented in the advertisement.

Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily hypocritical of the left to call this ad "dirty politics", "gutter politics", and to say that it is "as low as you can go". John Kerry has made his service in Viet Nam a major qualification for serving as president, and the Democrats spent weeks seeking to make George Bush's service in the Air National Guard a proof of his fecklessness and unworthiness to hold the presidency. The Democrats want voters to believe that Kerry is a hero and that George Bush evaded war-time service. Now contrary testimony is emerging and the Democrats are acting like this is some sort of dirty trick.

They complain that the ad is funded by some rich guy in Texas, but many of the most virulent anti-Bush ads and websites out there are funded by George Soros and other wealthy donors.

John McCain calls the ad dishonest and dishonorable, but how does he know it's either? It's only dishonorable if it's dishonest. Does Senator McCain know that the men in the ad are lying? If these men are indeed telling the truth then the American people should know it. If it's true that Kerry didn't deserve his Purple Hearts, if it's true that he was awarded a Silver Star for actions in violation of the military code of conduct and Geneva conventions, if it's true that he accepted praise for actions unworthy of praise, then the American people should know that. If it's true that he lied under oath in his Senate testimony in 1971 then the American people should also know that.

Viewpoint takes the position that a lot of men do things, especially in war, which they regret later in life and that it is better to just put all those demons behind us. Senator Kerry and his party, however, thought they could capitalize on deeds that may turn out to be something the Senator should have been content to bury in the past. Senator Kerry and the Democrats, not the Republicans, made the decision to shine the spotlight on his military record, to contrast it with Bush's, and to urge us to vote for him on the basis of it. They cannot now complain if Americans insist on having the record clarified.

Kerry's Viet Nam Exploits

John Kerry and his allies at the Democratic National Convention have made his war exploits the centerpiece of his campaign, contrasting his meritorious service in combat with George Bush's service in the National Guard. However, a book is coming out next week which will cast serious doubts on the claims of heroism and gallantry that suffused the convention speeches. The book is co-authored by John O'Neill who took over Kerry's command after Kerry was sent home from Viet Nam and is called Unfit For Command.

Matt Drudge has some excerpts:

George Bates, an officer in Coastal Division 11, participated in numerous operations with Kerry. In Unfit For Command, Bates recalls a particular patrol with Kerry on the Song Bo De River. He is still "haunted" by the incident:

With Kerry in the lead, the boats approached a small hamlet with three or four grass huts. Pigs and chickens were milling around peacefully. As the boats drew closer, the villagers fled. There were no political symbols or flags in evidence in the tiny village. It was obvious to Bates that existing policies, decency, and good sense required the boats to simply move on.

Instead, Kerry beached his boat directly in the small settlement. Upon his command, the numerous small animals were slaughtered by heavy-caliber machine guns. Acting more like a pirate than a naval officer, Kerry disembarked and ran around with a Zippo lighter, burning up the entire hamlet.

Bates has never forgotten Kerry's actions.

John O'Neill, co-author of Unfit For Command, believes that "Kerry's Star would never have been awarded had his actions been reviewed through normal channels. In his case, he was awarded the medal two days after the incident with no review. The medal was arranged to boost the morale of Coastal Division 11, but it was based on false and incomplete information provided by Kerry himself."

According to Kerry's Silver Star citation, Kerry was in command of a three-boat mission on the Dong Cung River. As the boats approached the target area, they came under intense enemy fire. Kerry ordered his boat to attack and all boats opened fire. He then beached directly in front of the enemy ambushers. In the battle that followed, the crews captured enemy weapons. His boat then moved further up the river to suppress more enemy fire. A rocket exploded near Kerry's boat, and he ordered to charge the enemy. Kerry beached his boat 10 feet from the rocket position and led a landing party ashore to pursue the enemy.

Kerry' citation reads: "The extraordinary daring and personal courage of Lt. Kerry in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire were responsible for the highly successful mission."

Here's what O'Neill and the Swiftees say: "According to Kerry's crewman Michael Madeiros, Kerry had an agreement with him to turn the boat in and onto the beach if fired upon. Each of the three boats involved in the operation was involved in the agreement." O'Neill writes that one crewman even recalls a discussion of probable medals.

Doug Reese, a pro Kerry Army veteran, recounted what happened that day to O'Neill, "Far from being alone, the boats were loaded with many soldiers commanded by Reese and two other advisors. When fired at, Reese's boat--not Kerry's--was the first to beach in the ambush zone. Then Reese and other troops and advisors (not Kerry) disembarked, killing a number of Viet Cong and capturing a number of weapons. None of the participants from Reese's boat received Silver Stars.

O'Neill continues: "Kerry's boat moved slightly downstream and was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade. . . .A young Viet Cong in a loincloth popped out of a hole, clutching a grenade launcher, which may or may not have been loaded. . . Tom Belodeau, a forward gunner, shot the Viet Cong with an M-60 machine gun in the leg as he fled. . . . Kerry and Medeiros (who had many troops in their boat) took off, perhaps with others, and followed the young Viet Cong and shot him in the back, behind a lean to."

O'Neill concludes "Whether Kerry's dispatching of a fleeing, wounded, armed or unarmed teenage enemy was in accordance with the customs of war, it is very clear that many Vietnam veterans and most Swiftees do not consider this action to be the stuff of which medals of any kind are awarded; nor would it even be a good story if told in the cold details of reality. There is no indication that Kerry ever reported that the Viet Cong was wounded and fleeing when dispatched. Likewise, the citation simply ignores the presence of the soldiers and advisors who actually 'captured the enemy weapons' and routed the Viet Cong. . . . [and] that Kerry attacked a 'numerically superior force in the face of intense fire' is simply false. There was little or no fire after Kerry followed the plan. . . . The lone, wounded, fleeing young Viet Cong in a loincloth was hardly a force superior to the heavily armed Swift Boat and its crew and the soldiers carried aboard."

"Admiral Roy Hoffmann, who sent a Bravo Zulu (meaning "good work"), to Kerry upon learning of the incident, was very surprised to discover in 2004 what had actually occurred. Hoffmann had been told that Kerry had spontaneously beached next to the bunker and almost single-handedly routed a bunkered force in Viet Cong. He was shocked to find out that Kerry had beached his boat second in a preplanned operation, and that he had killed a single, wounded teenage foe as he fled."

"Commander Geoge Elliott, who wrote up the initial draft of Kerry's Silver Star citation, confirms that neither he, nor anyone else in the Silver Star process that he knows, realized before 1996 that Kerry was facing a single, wounded young Viet Cong fleeing in a loincloth. While Commander Elliott and many other Swiftees believe that Kerry committed no crime in killing the fleeing, wounded enemy (with a loaded or empty launcher), others feel differently. Commander Elliott indicates that a Silver Star recommendation would not have been made by him had he been aware of the actual facts."

Look for the Democrats to do everything they can to discredit this book. If past experience is any guide, they'll attack its timing, its source of funding, and they'll even seek to destroy the reputations of the men who are quoted in it, but it'll be interesting to see if they actually challenge what the book claims to be the facts.

It will also be interesting to see whether the Bush-haters in the media even care about the facts.

Keyes For U.S. Senate

This article reveals that Alan Keyes is mulling over an invitation from Illinois Republicans to run for the Senate in their state against Barack Obama. It would seem to be a difficult slog against a popular opponent for a man who has never even lived in the state, but Viewpoint hopes that Keyes accepts the challenge.

A campaign between Keyes and Obama would be fascinating for several reasons, not the least of which is that it would afford Keyes a forum for getting his conservative message out to an African-American audience that doesn't often hear such themes from able black advocates.

In addition, it would be interesting to see a campaign between two powerful, charismatic proponents of conservatism and liberalism, and especially one in which the race issue has been effectively neutralized.

As for the fact that Keyes has never lived in Illinois, state law apparently allows a candidate to be eligible as long as he is a resident on election day, and, besides, not having lived in the state didn't prevent New York voters from electing Hillary Clinton.

Go for it Alan!