Regrets

Our apologies to those readers who tried without success to access Viewpoint this afternoon. We regret the world-wide panic which doubtless ensued when millions found themselves unable to receive their daily dose of wit and wisdom. An electrical storm in North Carolina knocked out our server until Bill was able to administer first aid.

The Power of the Dollar

Those who might be looking for charitable organizations to which they might contribute this Christmas season, or places to do their Christmas shopping, might find this article at Religious News Service helpful. Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, has eliminated the United Way from his gift list and Target stores from his shopping spots. He explains that his decision to stop giving to United Way is due to the charity's refusal to fund the Boy Scouts of America while openly supporting numerous pro-homosexual groups with its money. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"I don't know why people still give to United Way," Knight says. He contends that people are already giving to government bureaucrats by paying taxes, so he asks, "why would you give to a group of private bureaucrats who have decided as a group that the Boy Scouts are worthy of being kicked out of various chapters across the country."

The Scouts had been a long-time beneficiary of United Way funding, until pressure from the homosexual community led to the BSA groups nationwide being cut out because their national organization promotes faith and moral values and prohibits homosexuals from serving as scoutmasters. Since then, at least 50 United Way chapters across the U.S. have excluded the Boy Scouts from a share of their fund-raising drives, claiming the BSA's Christian values are discriminatory.

But it is the apparent discrimination against the Scouts by the United Way that has angered Knight. Although not all the nation's United Way chapters have severed ties with the BSA, he points out that "the national headquarters has done nothing to stop the trend." Meanwhile, a major portion of the money the charity collects is being given to pro-homosexual groups.

[T]he United Way is not the only major U.S. organization that is drawing the pro-family leader's ire. In a recent interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he mentioned the recent announcement by Target that the retailer would not be allowing non-profit groups to solicit outside its stores this year. This means the familiar Salvation Army bell ringers will not be able to set up their kettles and collect donations at Target locations this shopping season.

Knight feels people of faith should be outraged over the retailer's actions. "Millions of Christians give Target millions of dollars," he says, "and what have they gotten from Target in return? A lump of coal. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and I think consumers ought to take this into account when they do their Christmas shopping."

"One Salvation Army officer said to me that the Target money that's raised in his community represents 75 percent of the income that he has in that community," said Major George Hood, a spokesman for Salvation Army. "When you begin to strip budgets of 75 percent of a revenue stream, it means that some very difficult decisions will have to be made in those local communities about what they will be able to do during the holidays with families, and what they will be able to do all year long once the Christmas season is over."

Knight is certainly correct in assuming that if people are going to effect change in our society we have to do more than bemoan the cultural deterioration we are witnessing and actually use what tools we have to bring pressure to bear on those who would hasten the slide. One of those tools, perhaps the most effective, is how we spend our money.

Maybe it would be instructive, not only for United Way and Target, but also for those other charities and businesses which are looking on, to see how much of an impact popular dissatisfaction makes at Target's cash registers and United Way's mailbox. If Target takes a hit this year, you can bet that the Salvation Army will be welcome at their competitor's stores and will probably be back at Target next year. As for the United Way, who needs them? It's as easy, and more efficient, to write a check directly to the recipient as it is to go through the middle man.

Update on the Fight Against Cancer

Here's some good news from the front of the war on cancer, specifically Leukemia. Leukemia occurs as a result of blood cells, usually white blood cells, mutating and reproducing out of control and crowding other cells to the point that they can't function properly. Treatment often consists of using a drug called Gleevec which binds with an enzyme in cancerous cells thereby interfering with their growth and proliferation. Unfortunately, some of the cancerous leukocytes mutate so fast that the Gleevec can't wipe them out.

Now a new drug has been developed which is able to attach to many of the cells that Gleevec misses:

The new drug is being tested in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, which affects about 4,400 Americans a year and 10,000 people around the world. The drug is known by its experimental name BMS-354825. During the trial, also financed by Bristol-Myers, 31 of 36 patients with advanced CML who had not been helped by Gleevec had a complete hematologic response, meaning their bodies stopped producing leukemia cells.

This is a good illustration of why government must not take the profit out of drug R&D by imposing onerous regulations and unreasonable caps. Companies like Bristol-Myers have to have the economic incentive to create these products or else they'll simply stop working on them. It would be nice if we lived in a world where everyone was motivated by love and research had no cost associated with it, but we don't. So perhaps we can live in a world where lawyers can't sue drug manufacturers out of business or cause the manufacturer's insurance premiums to go so high that the average person can't buy the drugs or can't buy their own insurance to pay for the drugs.

Can God Do Anything At All?

Evangelical Outpost points us to a blog called Prosthesis where the question whether God can do the logically impossible is entertained. The answer, apparently, is yes and no.

Dooyeweerdians answer the question "Can God do the illogical?" with "Yes and No." It depends on what is meant by the question. If the question means, "Is it logically possible for God to do the illogical?" then we could just say that that sentence has no meaning. It is like asking if God could create a circle that was so blue that it becomes a square. The Dooyeweerdian says that God created the laws of logic for His creation.

[B]ecause the laws of logic set the limits for what we can conceive, even if God did do the logically impossible, we would not be able to conceive of it. Because God is accommodating to us and because doing the logically impossible would have absolutely no meaning to us....the answer is "No."

However....the question "Can God do the illogical?" might also [be phrased] "might God have made the laws of possibility other than what they are?" The answer to this is "Yes." Since the laws of logic were created for this creation, there isn't any reason to believe that God "could" not have created differently.

All this is based upon the assumption that God created the laws of logic which are therefore contingent upon Him and which He can therefore transcend. However, were He to do so, we could not discern what was happening since we cannot conceptualize outside the framework provided by those laws and would be unaware of any phenomena occurring extra-logically. So God can transcend logic, but we couldn't know He was doing it.

What if the laws of logic are not discretionary, however, but rather are ingrained, like Love and Goodness, into the very nature of God? What if logical laws, like the moral law, are infused into the created order such that any world God creates would be governed by the same logical principles? If God suffuses the creation with his own nature then the laws of logic could not be other than what they are, nor can God violate them without somehow transcending His own nature. It might, then, be quite impossible for God to create a square circle or to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it.

Theologians who maintain that logic is a contingent set of rules created by God generally wish to hold on to a very high view of omnipotence. They wish to be able to say that there are no limits of any kind constraining what God can do. This may be the case, but if God is the sort of Being who can do anything at all theology would seem to be pointless. After all, how can one talk about whether God exists when one of His attributes would be that He can both be and not be at the same time?

Freedom is on the March

William Kristol writes in The Weekly Standard that American success in Iraq is and will continue to ramify all across the Middle East and the Arab world:

The sounds one hears emanating from the Arab Middle East are the sounds, faint but unmistakable, of the ice cracking. Though long suppressed and successfully repressed, demands for liberal reform and claims of the right to self-government seem to be on the verge of breaking through in that difficult region.

The key to turning these random sounds of discontent into the beginnings of a symphony of self-government is, of course, success in Iraq. Here, the last month's news--the mainstream media to the contrary notwithstanding--is promising. Bush's reelection victory; the successful offensive in Falluja and the failure of the "Sunni street" to rise up in outrage; the inability of both the terrorists and antidemocratic political forces to deter the Iraqi and American governments from moving ahead with the January 30 elections; the president's willingness to increase U.S. troop levels, and his commitment to victory--all of this enables one to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects in Iraq.

And if Iraq goes well, the allegedly "utopian" and "Wilsonian" dreams of fundamental change in the broader Middle East won't look so far-fetched. Failure in Iraq, it's widely recognized, would be an utter disaster. What's less widely recognized is that the rewards of victory could be considerable. The most obvious and tangible benefits would of course be for the Iraqi people, and secondarily for American geopolitical credibility. But the indirect effects in the Middle East should not be underestimated.

If the Iraqi experiment with democracy is successful what will be the consequences in Iran? Iran is a Shi'a nation living under the cruel dictatorship of the Shi'a mullahs. What will the Iranian masses think and do if and when they see their next door Shi'a brethren breathing in the bracing air of freedom? The very prospect gives the mullahs anxiety attacks. This is why we are witnessing the paradox of Iranian Shi'a assisting the Sunni and Baathist insurgents, who were instrumental in killing a million Iranians in the 1980s, fight against Shi'a Iraqis. The Iranian oppressors are already nervous that there is a free Afghanistan on one border. Place a free Iraq on the other and the chances that they would be able to sustain their crushing theocracy would diminish to almost zero.

Moreover, if Iran liberalizes, Syria will be politically and militarily isolated, and the Baathists there would doubtless be overthrown by a people sick of their cruelty and corruption. A more liberal Saudi Arabia and Egypt would then follow almost inevitably. Freedom, as the President likes to say, is on the march. The despots, tyrants, and other losers know this, and that's why they're fighting with all they have to stop it.

It all hinges on American will in Iraq, but if we are successful, and we will be if we stick with it, the world will be transformed.

A Milestone

Today Viewpoint passed the 10,000 hit mark on our traffic counter. This is a very gratifying milestone for us, and Bill and I wish to thank all of our readers for visiting with us and for linking us to your friends. We started this blog last May having no idea how it would fare and have been both surprised and gratified in equal measure with the response.

We know that some of the big blogs get 10,000 hits in a day so we have plenty of room for growth, and we're going to keep working to make our site worth visiting. It's our ambition to post something worth reading every day and we're delighted that so many of you apparently feel that we're succeeding.

Your support means a lot to us and so we extend our sincere thanks to each of you.

Bill and Dick

'Tis the Season

" 'Tis the season," Richard Neuhaus writes in First Things (subscription required), "to once again complain about the season," and so it is. Neuhaus has in mind specifically complaints about the consumerization and secularization of Christmas which are indeed at once both tedious and moronic. But there's another aspect of the Christmas season which has become as wearisome as it is dependable - the debunking of the Christmas story. It is fashionable in certain quarters to point out this or that difficulty with the Biblical record in order to justify the sneers of urban sophisticates and to discredit the celebrations of those dopey Christians. Rather than focus on the significance of the incarnation of a transcendent God, why He did it and what it means for us today, we're treated instead every Christmas to the semi-scholarly pontifications of journalists and academics who are convinced that it didn't really happen.

Sometimes efforts to cast a shadow over a particular Christian tradition like Christmas are more subtle than others. John Meacham of Newsweek authors an account of the debate over the historicity of the events surrounding Christ's birth which is more respectful of the tradition than some others, but he still seems to make assumptions that irritate.

He seems to assume, for example, that if an event, like the virgin birth, is an article of faith then that excludes it from being historical fact. Meacham states that:

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the virginal conception is not a fact but an article of faith, there are other explanations for Matthew's and Luke's Nativity accounts.

This sounds as if Meacham believes that the virgin birth can only be one or the other, fact or article of faith, but there's no obvious reason why Christians cannot believe something occurred which did, in fact, occur. Faith which is not a belief in facts is delusion.

He also writes throughout the piece as if what Matthew and Luke were doing in writing their accounts of Jesus' life was composing a good story rather than compiling accurate history. They were concerned, he implies, with presenting a narrative that would make Jesus appear divine in order to persuade people to embrace the new religion begun by his followers. Here are a few examples:

By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish writer had before.

Matthew portrays Mary and Joseph as residents of Bethlehem who were later forced to move north to Nazareth. With a keen dramatic sense, he also adds two stories evoking the memory of God's deliverance ....

Luke's conundrum is just the opposite of Matthew's: how to get Mary and Joseph, who in his Gospel were living in Nazareth in the north, down to Bethlehem in the south.

Setting Jesus' birth at a moment when the princes of this world are exerting temporal power over the people is a deft device....

This is a dangerous way to look at the Gospels for if it is true that the writers were more concerned with salesmanship than historical accuracy then nothing in the Gospels is reliable, and if that's the case Christianity is worthless. There is, however, no reason to accept the view that the Evangelists weren't trying to faithfully record history except the a priori assumption by some scholars that the events they chronicle never really happened.

Meacham also offers arguments from some scholars which are embarrassingly fallacious. An example is this:

Where did the details-of miraculous conception, of birth in Bethlehem, of stars in the sky, shepherds in the night and wise men on a journey-come from? Apparently not from Jesus. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, the author of a monumental series, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus," points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke of his birth, and neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source.

Meier's dismissal of Jesus as a source is a fallacy logicians call an argument from silence. Because the Gospels don't mention Jesus talking about the circumstances surrounding his birth, the reasoning goes, it's therefore safe to assume that he's not the source of this information. This is silly.

Moreover, how Meier can conclude that Mary is unlikely to have been a direct source is not explained, but one would certainly like to know why she should be ruled out. She was probably in her late teens when Jesus was born and thus in her late forties when he died. She may well have lived another thirty years or more after his death and would have had ample opportunity to discuss with others her memories of Jesus' conception, birth, and childhood. Why discount her?

Meacham finds it strange that there's not more made of the virgin birth in the New Testament:

If the virginal conception were a historical fact...it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament.

Yet it's mentioned by both Matthew and Luke and the latter is the author of the book of Acts. Luke doesn't mention Mary's virginity there, perhaps, because that book was a history of the early church, not a biography of Christ. Why the Gospel writers should have emphasized the unique circumstances of Jesus' conception more than they did is left unexplained. How often does Meacham think it should have been mentioned, anyway? How many mentions would have been sufficient to satisfy him? He goes on to say that:

It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny....If Mary had received Gabriel's message, then she should have known her son was not mad, but the Messiah. And even if she were not around in this story in Mark, had Jesus been born in such extraordinary circumstances, it is logical to assume that those closest to him would have known at least something of it....

Contrary to the interpretation Meacham puts on the apparent surprise Mary and the disciples continually experienced at Jesus' words and deeds, these stories strike our ear as profoundly true to human nature and experience. It's often the case that even though we know something is true we're surprised when we encounter evidence of it, and the evidence is often not even recognized as such until well after the event.

It may be that when the angel announced to Mary that she had been chosen by God to bear a son that she neither recognized this being as an angel at the time nor understood at the time the full significance of what she was being told. She may have thought in her youthful naivete that she'd been visited by a prophet and never really grasped the astonishing import of his words until much later, if at all. Even when she found herself inexplicably pregnant she might have never realized that the child she was carrying was the Son of God. It would've been easy to push all these things to the back of her mind as the years went by and the daily issues of life pressed upon her, especially if subsequent events never gave her any reason to recall them.

Meacham also seems to accept the unfortunate opinion of skeptics that:

[A]lmost nothing in Luke's story stands up to close historical scrutiny; Brown finds it "dubious on almost every score." Augustus conducted no global census, and no more local one makes sense in Luke's time frame.

We don't profess to be Biblical archeologists, but we have to wonder how Meacham and Brown handle the scholarship which suggests that there was indeed a census about 6 or 7 B.C., the time period when most conservative scholars place Jesus' birth. To say, moreover, that Augustine conducted no global census is a bit of a red herring. The wording in the gospels would have referred to the Roman empire, not the globe, and it is known from Josephus, the ancient Jewish/Roman historian, that such a census was indeed conducted around 6 or 7 A.D. and that these counts occurred about every fourteen years. That would have placed an earlier enumeration at around 6 or 7 B.C. or just about the time that Luke suggests.

As Viewpoint has discussed in earlier posts (see here for example), the problem that scholars have with the virgin birth is really a problem that they have with miracles in general. They just can't bring themselves to believe either that God works that way or that there even is a God to perform a miracle in the first place.

If the latter belief is true, of course, then there is no point in talking about Christmas at all, and if the former position is true, that God doesn't intervene in human history, then not only was there no virgin birth, but there was also no Resurrection. If neither of these events actually occurred then the Bible is completely untrustworthy, and we have no particular reason to think that God cares how we live nor any reason to think that there is life after death.

The significance of Christmas, and of the Virgin birth, is that if these momentous events really did happen then there is a basis for a wonderful hope that life has meaning and that we are not all alone in the cosmos. There is reason to believe that love is better than hate, that altruism is better than egoism, that might does not make right, and that each of us is cherished beyond measure. Christmas means that God cared enough to join us in our existential predicament so that we may ultimately enjoy Him forever. This means that we are not just dust in the wind but rather that we are truly important, that we have dignity and value in the eyes of God.

We don't wish to sound as though we're critical of the entire Newsweek article. There are sections where Meacham is to be applauded. His conclusion, for instance, is excellent:

A man with no human father, a king who died a criminal's death, a God who assures us of everlasting life in a world to come while the world he made is consumed by war and strife: Christianity is a religion of perplexing contradictions. To live an examined faith believers have to acknowledge those complexities and engage them, however frustrating it may be. "We are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties," wrote John Henry Newman, the great Victorian cleric whose intellectual journey led him from the Anglican priesthood to the Roman Curia. "Take away this Light and we are utterly wretched-we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us, and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being." The Christmas star is just one such light; there are others. Whatever our backgrounds, whatever our creeds, many of us are in search of the kind of faith that will lead us through the darkness, toward home. In Luke, the angelic host hails the Lord and then says: "on earth peace, good will toward men"-a promise whose fulfillment is worth our prayers not only in this season, but always.

Just so, but the only faith which will lead us through the darkness is one based upon truth and upon something beyond ourselves and our world. Take away the truth of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' birth and death and all that is left is darkness...forever.

Diversoids

Much has been written about the intellectual and ideological monoculture of today's universities. Academia is eager to celebrate diversity in all things save political opinion. University faculties are overwhelmingly liberal and the professoriat sees it as their professional responsibility to do all they can to proselytize their students.

A recent article in The Economist has some interesting things to say about this state of affairs.

Tom Wolfe's new novel about a young student, I am Charlotte Simmons, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland - about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to "Animal House".

In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students "hook up" (i.e. sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.

Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at "diversoids" - students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of "diversity officers". Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.

It's worth reading the entire piece.

Manipulating the Election With Oil?

PowerLine casts a suspicious eye at the recent fluctuation of oil prices and asks cui bono. Their suspicions are understandable. Prior to the election the price of oil rose steadily from $35 a barrel last spring to over $55 a barrel at just around the time of the election. Since the election the price rise has reversed course and is now at about $43. What's causing this fluctuation which seems to be timed so closely to our election? Power Line considers two suspects:

There have been rumors that speculators, including George Soros, tried to drive up the price of oil in hopes of helping John Kerry. I know of no evidence to support that suspicion. But apart from Mr. Soros, what about the Arab states? Is there any doubt that the Saudi royal family would have preferred to see Kerry in the White House, and an end to President Bush's campaign to bring democracy to the Middle East? The bare minimum one can say is that the Saudis failed to follow through on their pledge to keep oil prices down.

How much of a conspiracy theorist does one have to be to wonder whether some combination of forces, inside or outside of the Arab world, tried to influence our Presidential election by allowing or forcing prices to rise during the fall? And has anyone in the mainstream media, with its alleged investigatory resources, shown any interest in finding out why oil prices seem to have risen and fallen in synchrony with the American campaign season?

It's not likely. If the otherwise supine MSM is going to put their nose to the trail they'll have to first suspect that somehow George Bush is implicated in some hanky-panky here. Otherwise, they're not interested. If there were even a whiff of suspicion of Bush, however, the media would be thrown into a frenzy, elbowing each other in the ribs in their rush to "get to the bottom of the story". Even old Dan Rather would be mustered back into the lists and soon be hot on the scent. That is, just as soon as he could get back from Texas where he's been busy proving that those National Guard memos were true in what they allege even if they were complete fabrications.

Eurabia

The collapse of European multiculturalism is proceeding apace. This article from Times Online in the United Kingdom makes it clear that all the old verities of liberal tolerance and the need to celebrate ethnic and religious diversity are crumbling like dry mud under the pressures of an unassimilated Islamic population which bids fair to transform once Christian Europe into Eurabia within a generation.

Richard John Neuhaus in the current edition of First Things (subscription required) quotes Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis as saying that by the end of this century, if not before, Europe will be part of the Arab West. Former European Union commissioner Frits Bolkstein of the Netherlands states that if Lewis is right "the liberation of Vienna in 1683 (from invading Turks) will have been in vain". Within a decade several major European cities will be majority Muslim, and if they are still democratic they will doubtless be governed by Muslims. What Islam couldn't accomplish in 1683 by the sword it will succeed in accomplishing through immigration and fecundity.

One might be a little less distressed by the prospect of an Islamic Europe if one could find some evidence somewhere in history that Islamic rule would be good for Europeans, and that an Islamic Europe would be good for America. Unfortunately, Muslims have a run up a pretty dismal record of governance over the centuries, and one is inclined to think that the future under a Muslim caliphate in Europe would be an unmitigated disaster for the world.

There are perhaps several ironies in all of this, but surely one is that in its eagerness to repudiate the fervent Christianity of an earlier age and to embrace the sophisticated secularism of modernity, Europeans are falling like overripe fruit into the hands of the most fanatical religionists on the face of earth. The world, it appears, abhors a religious vacuum. Sweep one set of dogmas out of the house and another will immediately rush in to fill the void. The last one hundred years have seen this process repeated several times. First, Christianity died of spiritual inanition and was replaced by communism and fascism. These were defeated in WW II and were replaced by an already effete secular materialism which lacks the moral will to withstand the contemporary onslaughts of a vigorous Islamism that believes itself to be in the ascendent.

Perhaps the entire future of Europe will be determined by how it reacts to this challenge in the next few years.

Whither the Democrats

Peter Beinart, writing for The New Republic Online, offers us what may be one of the most important post-election analyses of the Democrat Party's future. His essay is a rich pastiche of history, prescription, and prognostication. Distilled to its essence, Beinart's argument is that Michael Moore and MoveOn.org not only do not represent the Democratic Party but have exerted a powerfully dysgenic influence upon it and need to be marginalized. Following are just a few excerpts from part I of a two-part article:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... it is the right--the very extreme right--which is most likely to gain victory."

American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions--most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn--that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naively consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either.

After the defeats of 1994, 2000, 2002, and 2004 it may be appropriate to wonder whether the Democratic Party is headed the way of the passenger pigeon. A lot of people are asking what the party has to do to recover. Beinart's article is a good place to begin coming up with an answer. He closes with this:

[D]espite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star....If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn.

The problem for the Democrats is that much of their energy and funding flow from their anti-war base. If the Democrats follow Beinart's advice they'll alienate a large segment of the people who give the party its distinctiveness. It would be as if Republicans suddenly became a pro-choice party.

Moreover, if the Democrats dress up like Republicans what incentive would there be for voters to elect them rather than Republicans? This is the root of the debate that's beginning in the Democratic party in the wake of November 2nd. Should they move further to the left and emphasize their differences with Republicans so that the voters have a clear choice, or should they move toward the right and blurr their differences so that elections become little more than popularity or beauty contests, like campaigns for student council president or Homecoming Queen?

The Democrats are in a tough spot, but so are conservative voters. If the Democrats move leftward that would be good for the Republican party since it would marginalize the Democrats with the American electorate, but it would be bad for conservatives because a Democrat shift to the nether regions of the left would create a vacuum in the center that Republicans would rush to fill in order to seize the political territory being abandoned by their opponents. Republicans would not only secure their hold on power for the next two generations, much like the Democrats did from FDR to LBJ, but the party would inevitably become more liberal.

Indeed, a pro-military, pro-choice, big government Republican party would be pretty much indistinguishable from the Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson, John Kennedy Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s. If the Democrats continue to make love with Michael Moore, George Soros, and MoveOn.org look for Rudy Giuliani, or someone like him, to be the Republican nominee in 2008.

World War III

Deroy Murdock at NRO has an excellent column that captures in a brief space the essence of the nature of the struggle we are in against the Islamist menace. Murdock amasses the evidence for viewing this conflict as a world war (although he himself doesn't use the term) and closes with this:

As Andrew Higgins chillingly related in the November 22 Wall Street Journal, two days after Van Gogh's death, Islamists aimed their knives at Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, a critic of open immigration. They posted his picture on line beside this message: "The punishment is beheading, and the reward for doing it is paradise."

Moderation against such fanaticism is inconceivable. Fundamentalist Islam must be transcended from within while militant Islam must be vanquished from without. Victory cannot come too soon.

Until then, Geert Wilders [A Dutch politician whose life has been threatened by Islamists] grasps the stakes. "Bush was totally correct," he phoned Higgins while dashing between safe houses on the advice of police. "This is war, a world-wide war."

We are indeed engaged in World War III and the sooner our European and Democratic brethren rouse themselves from their liberal slumbers the sooner we may turn the corner in the battle.

Maybe They Don't Know Any Better

Eruptions of the pathological hatred endemic to North America's left-wing continue to suppurate on our body politic. Several of the signs touted recently by Canadian protestors in Ottawa sicken the stomach. Go here and click on the photos to enlarge.

By the way, is the sign that shows Bush in the cross-hairs being carried by a Muslim? Just asking.

Mosul

Strategy Page gives us this take on the fighting in Mosul:

November 29, 2004: Military and police operations south of Baghdad and up north in Mosul continue. The government is convinced that many Sunni Arab religious leaders have joined with anti-government forces and allowed their mosques to be used as bases for gunmen and terrorists, and is raiding mosques suspected of supporting violence. In Fallujah, 60 of 100 mosques in the city were found to be used for supporting anti-government forces. Since many mosques are large, walled, complexes, they lend themselves to being military bases. Technically, this sort of use is forbidden under Islam, but in times of unrest in Iraq, mosques frequently become centers of military activity. So the government has dropped any pretense of mosques being off-limits. As a result, mosques are now regularly being raided. In southern Baghdad, a mosque was found to house a suicide car bomb workshop, which had seven cars rigged and ready to go. That's a weeks worth of car bomb attacks in Baghdad.

In Mosul, the battle is between the Iraqi security forces and the Sunni Arab terrorists. In the last ten days, about fifty Iraqi soldiers and policemen have been killed, often executed, by Sunni Arab terrorists. Unlike Fallujah, the Sunni Arab gunmen are not doing a "stand and fight," but rather a "hit and run." But they need places to sleep and store their weapons. American and Iraqi intelligence efforts are closing down on these. More and more Kurds, and other non-Arab minorities, are being recruited into the police and army in Mosul. While this angers the Sunni Arabs up there, the non-Arab troops are more persistent, and speak Arabic. As more gunmen are arrested, interrogations provide more information on the anti-government groups. There was also a lot of information, on Mosul rebel groups, obtained from gunmen and documents captured in Fallujah.

Meanwhile the defeatist MSM concentrates on the downside as though that were the only side there was to report. Even when they do report a success they invariably follow it with a "but...". No one wants to be so optimistic as to be blinded to reality, but neither do most people want the media to behave as if the dark side is all there is, especially when there is so much good occurring in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pessimism is the mindset of losers and failures and it is particularly common in the American media. Negativism is a corrosive acid that eats away at a group or a nation demoralizing them and sapping their confidence. No athletic coach, no businessman, no general, no president, and no nation ever accomplished anything great by constantly reminding themselves of the reasons why something couldn't be done. Lots of people, however, have failed because they were fixated on the obstacles, because they couldn't, or wouldn't, envison success.

Three Cheers for the <i>New York Times</i>

Last Sunday's Meet the Press featured a panel of prominent Christian spokesmen discussing religion in America. It was a bit surprising that the panel included Al Sharpton, and it was a bit disappointing that Jerry Falwell was more overbearing and combative than he needed to be. The others on Tim Russert's panel, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, comported themselves well, but Falwell and Sharpton were, each in his own way, less than what one would have hoped. I wondered why, given all of the outstanding evangelical thinkers out there, the networks always seem to draw on the same cast of characters when they want someone to speak on behalf of Christianity.

Apparently, David Brooks of the New York Times thought the same thing. He has a remarkable piece on the evangelical he would most like to see on television instead of the usual lineup of Falwellians and Robertsonians, and various clergy who are in one way or another controversial or disaffected. You'll probably think his column (free subscription required) is the more remarkable because Brooks himself is Jewish.

Since our readers may not have the time to fill out the subscription form we offer the Brooks column to you here:

Tim Russert is a great journalist, but he made a mistake last weekend. He included Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton in a discussion on religion and public life.

Inviting these two bozos onto "Meet the Press" to discuss that issue is like inviting Britney Spears and Larry Flynt to discuss D. H. Lawrence. Naturally, they got into a demeaning food fight that would have lowered the intellectual discourse of your average nursery school.

This is why so many people are so misinformed about evangelical Christians. There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don't blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott's name hasn't appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it's never appeared in many other important publications.

Yet, as Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center notes, if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching.

When you read Stott, you encounter first a tone of voice. Tom Wolfe once noticed that at a certain moment all airline pilots came to speak like Chuck Yeager. The parallel is inexact, but over the years I've heard hundreds of evangelicals who sound like Stott.

It is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also confident, joyful and optimistic. Stott's mission is to pierce through all the encrustations and share direct contact with Jesus. Stott says that the central message of the gospel is not the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus himself, the human/divine figure. He is always bringing people back to the concrete reality of Jesus' life and sacrifice.

There's been a lot of twaddle written recently about the supposed opposition between faith and reason. To read Stott is to see someone practicing "thoughtful allegiance" to scripture. For him, Christianity means probing the mysteries of Christ. He is always exploring paradoxes. Jesus teaches humility, so why does he talk about himself so much? What does it mean to gain power through weakness, or freedom through obedience? In many cases the truth is not found in the middle of apparent opposites, but on both extremes simultaneously.

Stott is so embracing it's always a bit of a shock - especially if you're a Jew like me - when you come across something on which he will not compromise. It's like being in "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," except he has a backbone of steel. He does not accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, and of course he believes in evangelizing among nonbelievers. He is pro-life and pro-death penalty, even though he is not a political conservative on most issues.

Most important, he does not believe truth is plural. He does not believe in relativizing good and evil or that all faiths are independently valid, or that truth is something humans are working toward. Instead, Truth has been revealed. As he writes:

"It is not because we are ultra-conservative, or obscurantist, or reactionary or the other horrid things which we are sometimes said to be. It is rather because we love Jesus Christ, and because we are determined, God helping us, to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ."

Politicians, especially Democrats, are now trying harder to appeal to people of faith. But people of faith are not just another interest group, like gun owners. You have to begin by understanding the faith. And you can't understand this rising global movement if you don't meet its authentic representatives.

Not Falwell, but Stott.

It may be years before we again get to see such a positive piece about an evangelical Christian theologian in the pages of the New York Times. Indeed, we wonder how many Times readers will be canceling their subscriptions because such an overtly sympathetic essay about such a manifestly fine Christian was allowed to grace its op/ed page.

The Ohio Vote

Interested in the status of the Ohio vote count? Rich Lowery has a good article at National Review Online. Here's part of it:

The conspiracy theorists focus on Franklin County, home of the heavily Democratic city of Columbus. They allege, among other things, that long lines there on Election Day were a cagey tactic to keep blacks from voting. It just happens that Anthony is chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and also chairman of the Franklin County Democratic party. "I am a black man," he told the Columbus Dispatch. "Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?" Good question.

[Jesse] Jackson and others complain that not enough of the roughly 155,000 provisional ballots - ballots cast by voters who might or might not be legitimate registered voters - are being counted. So far, an ample 76 percent of the provisional ballots have been ruled valid, roughly the same rate as in 2000. A provisional ballot isn't counted when the person casting it wasn't really registered to vote, voted in the wrong precinct or - more rarely - voted twice. Ohio's standards for counting provisional ballots are entirely reasonable. Indeed, they are the same as in such liberal strongholds as New York, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts.

The die-hards also focus on punch-card ballots, which featured prominently in the Florida 2000 controversy and aren't counted if there's an over-vote (i.e., both Bush and Kerry are punched) or an under-vote (i.e., neither is clearly punched). In any election, there is a small percentage of both. Here, Ohio's performance has improved over 2000. Four years ago, out of 4.9 million votes cast, 98,000 were invalid because of over-votes or under-votes. This year, there were more total votes, 5.5 million, but only 93,000 over-votes or under-votes.

It's still possible, believe it or not, that John Kerry could win the election. We'll know by next week. I can't imagine anything, short of another 9/11, that would rock this country more than Ohio finding that John Kerry actually garnered more votes than George Bush. For one thing, all those Hollywood types who moved abroad in the wake of November 2nd would all be coming back again. That prospect alone should be enough to stop the count.

Philosophical Confusion

The normally lucid philosopher John Searle gets himself turned all cattywumpus when it comes to God:

"For us", he writes in Mind, Language and Society, "if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact of nature like any other. To the four basic forces in the universe--gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces--we would add a fifth, the divine force. Or more likely, we would see the other forces as forms of the divine force. But it would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural."

Among the attributes which comprise our concept of God is transcendence. God is the creator of physics, not a part of it. Searle is saying, in effect, that if a transcendent being exists then that being is not transcendent. This is what both philosophers and laymen call nonsense.

Searle is in a tough spot. He cannot bring himself to admit the possibility that the universe is the created product of an intelligent being which exists apart from that which He created, but neither can he deny the possibility that God exists. So he's reduced to announcing that should God exist, He wouldn't really be God. This is the sort of claim that gives philosophy a bad reputation.

Thanks to The Philosophers' Magazine Online's Daily Philosophical Quotation for the tip.

The Triangle of Death

There's a good overview of the ongoing battle in the "Triangle of Death" by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. at National Review Online. Smith updates us on what's happening in this region south of Baghdad and how this assault differs from the battle for Fallujah.

Rebuilding Fallujah

Here's anInteresting article on who, exactly, is getting the contracts for rebuilding Fallujah and the rest of Iraq. Two clues. The answer will disappoint the left, and it's not Halliburton:

Iraqi reconstruction is hitting a decisive phase as the Baghdad-based Project and Contracting Office drives for 1,000 project starts by year's end. The PCO wants to establish a tone of success before elections Jan. 31 by giving local Iraqi contractors fast-start projects, especially in hot spots like Fallujah.

The surge in starts-873 as of Nov. 1 and up 24% from Oct. 7-is being achieved in part because months of preparations are hitting the construction phase. But it also is happening because the PCO has rejiggered the schedule to push small, fast projects up the calendar and award local firms the work.

"It's mostly Iraqis," said Charles Hess, director of the PCO, in a telephone interview Nov. 18 from Baghdad. "We had to do that in response to the security situation to avoid having a large expatriate presence on the ground. We use U.S. design-build contractors to shape the more complicated issues we brought them here to help us with....They don't need to be worrying about a $50,000 school when they should be working on a $500-million gas combustion generator in an undeveloped oilfield."

The strategy has been evolving since last summer when negotiations ended major fighting in Najaf, Samarra and Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. Fastpaced reconstruction drives there have become the model for the effort going forward.

In Najaf, 25 projects were completed in two months, including rehabilitation of the main market, sewer and waterline repair, health clinic upgrades, as well as local clean-ups and road repairs.

Similar efforts, the article goes on to say, are beginning now in Fallujah. Iraq is being rebuilt largely by Iraqis who are getting the jobs and receiving the paychecks.

Our question, however, is how did the evil Dick Cheney allow these contracts to slip from the grasping fingers of his cronies at Halliburton? Maybe this story is just another Karl Rove-inspired sham to cover-up the real plot to enrich friends of the administration at the expense of the American taxpayers and the poor Iraqis. We hear MoveOn.org will be on the case as soon as they're finished exposing how Bush stole the election in Ohio.

Implacable Hatred

Andrew Sullivan mentions, in somewhat disapproving tones, articles by Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan who address two different aspects of the war Islam is waging upon the West. Colson believes that our decadent culture with its obsessions with sex, both hetero and homo, does nothing so much as inspire the Islamists to redouble their efforts to slaughter us and to convince them that they are pleasing Allah by doing so. Colson states that:

We must be careful not to blame innocent Americans for murderous attacks against them. At the same time, let's acknowledge that America's increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When we tolerate trash on television, permit pornography to invade our homes via the internet, and allow babies to be killed at the point of birth, we are inflaming radical Islam.

Radical Islamists were surely watching in July when the Senate voted on procedural grounds to do away with the Federal Marriage Amendment. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America's decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.

One vital goal of the war in Iraq, and the war against terrorism, is to bring democracy to the heart of the Islamic world. Our hope is to make freedom so attractive that other Muslim countries will follow suit. But when radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being "married" in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent-the kind they see as a blot on Allah's creation.

Like Colson's, the column by Pat Buchanan should be read in its entirety. It includes some interesting information about Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and his murder and concludes with this:

Undeniably, Islam is rising. And, like all rising faiths, it is intolerant. Disbelieving that all religions are equal - "There is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet" - Islam does not believe all faiths should be treated equally. Why should they be? If one has God's revealed truth, why should one tolerate lies that lead to the damnation of the faithful?

In its new constitution, the European Union has declared Christianity a dead relic. What Islam is saying - with its militancy, its soaring birth rate, it steady replacement of dying Europeans with young Muslim immigrants - is: "Christianity may be your past, but we are your future." My money's on the true believers.

There's one crucial thing Americans and Europeans must understand about the Islamists but evidently not all of us do. They are not going to be mollified by tossing a little foreign aid their way or even by a revival of traditional sexual morality. There is a deep, chronic hatred for the West ingrained in the Muslim psyche and in Arab culture. The hatred grows firstly out of their conviction that God Himself despises us for our cultural depravity and that He is eager for us to be expunged from the face of the earth. They detest us secondly because of our support for the Israeli people whom they hate with more ferocity than they can summon even for us. Thirdly, they loathe us because of their jealousy. When they reflect that they, a once great and proud people who adhere fervently to the one true religion, are living in abject misery and impotence while the wicked infidels skip happily from one success to the next, disdaining God and his prophet, it drives them to acts of horrific violence and madness.

Their spokesmen have been boldly declaring for decades that they will never stop hating or killing us until they have succeeded in destroying both Israel and Western culture and have subjected all non-Muslims either to the sword or to dhimmitude (second class subservience to Islamic law).

We have three alternatives which might mitigate this intolerable state of affairs. We can commit national suicide by every one of us taking a draught of cyanide-laced kool-aid. Or we can commit genocide by bombing the Muslim world forward into the stone age. Or we can do what President Bush is attempting to do and drag the Muslim world kicking and screaming into the modern era. The first option is rather unattractive, the second is morally repugnant, and the third is not guaranteed success. Indeed, the left in this country is working hard to insure that it doesn't succeed. Yet, it is our only viable hope for avoiding endless war and endless terror.