Religious Conflict at Baylor

Baylor president Robert Sloan is under the gun because he's trying to make his school into an academically top-notch Christian university. Apparently, he is encountering resistance from those who are perfectly satisfied with Baylor being a Baptist university. There's no need, as they see it, to convert the school to Christianity.

Junk Science

This week a scary report was issued linking colon cancer to the consumption of red meat. According to Steven Milloy , however, the study this report was based on wouldn't even win first prize in a junior high school science fair:

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society concluded in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association (Jan. 12) that "prolonged high consumption of red and processed meat may increase the risk of cancer in the distal portion of the large intestine."

Their "conclusion" is based on a study of 148,610 adults aged 50 to 74 years who provided information on meat consumption in 1982 and again in 1992/1993 as part of their enrollment in the Cancer Prevention Study II . Through Aug. 31, 2001, a total of 1,667 cases of colorectal cancers were reported among the study subjects.

I suspect that the researchers actually had no conclusion worth reporting after they did an initial analysis of their data. They reported, in fact, no association between red meat consumption and overall colon cancer risk after considering the study subjects' exposures to other colon cancer risk factors.

They parsed the results as follows, "High intake of red meat reported in 1992/1993 was associated with higher risk of colon cancer after adjusting for age and energy intake but not after further adjustment for body mass index, cigarette smoking and other [risk factors]," they stated in the study. Facing the prospect of no result, I think the researchers then engaged in some slicing-and-dicing of their data in hopes of discovering some statistical correlation they could point to as a "risk."

Since there was no correlation between red meat consumption and overall cancer risk, the researchers examined their data looking to see whether there was an association between red meat consumption and cancer of the proximal colon, distal colon and of the rectosigmoid and rectum. The more analyses performed, after all, the greater the likelihood that some newsworthy result will be found, albeit, due to chance perhaps.

These subsequent analyses produced three correlations on which the scary headlines are based: a 50 percent increase in distal cancer risk among high consumers of processed meats; a 53 percent increase in distal cancer risk among those with the highest ratio of meat to chicken and fish consumption; and a 71 percent increase in rectal cancer risk among high consumers of red meat.

With respect to the claims concerning distal cancer risk, both results are of unimpressive size - risks smaller than 100 percent don't have much credibility. They are of borderline statistical significance - meaning that there is a good possibility that the results are due to chance. This statistical weakness is in large part due to the fact that they are based on analyses involving only 79 and 92 cases of distal cancer, respectively. For these analyses to start to be taken seriously, they should involve hundreds, not dozens, of cancer cases.

As to the reported 71 percent increase in rectal cancer risk among red meat eaters, I can only conclude that this result was cherry-picked for sensationalistic purposes. The 71-percent claim is based on an analysis involving only the 1992/1993 data. When the analysis includes the 1982 data, the result drops to 43 percent and becomes statistically insignificant.

These weak statistics are just the surface of the problem. Likely nullifying the entire study is the unreliability of the researchers' data.

The data for the study was initially collected by 77,000 untrained volunteers who interviewed family and friends about their lifestyle habits. None of this lifestyle data was verified or validated.

Exactly what and how much the study subjects ate, smoked, drank, and how much they exercised is really anybody's guess. And forget about reliable information on genetic predisposition to colon cancer, which is thought to be a major risk factor. The researchers acknowledged in their write-up that they didn't even have any information on family history of colon cancer for the analysis of 1992/1993 data.

The results of previous studies on meat consumption and colon cancer have produced similar inconsistent, contradictory, weak and even nonsensical results. There really is no persuasive evidence that meat consumption is in any way related to colon cancer risk.

So what's up with this study?

Aside from the usual hijinks of researchers looking for media attention and their next grant, I noticed that one of this study's authors has somewhat of a track record trying to link meat consumption with cancer.

The National Cancer Institute's Rashmi Sinha has a long history of trying to use weak statistics to convict meat of causing cancer. I first brought her antics to the attention of my FoxNews.com readers in a November 2000 column amid her crusade to link well-done meat with cancer.

It appears that Dr. Sinha remains bent on using her position at the National Cancer Institute to scare us away from eating meat. She's been at it since at least 1994, but with little to show except a stack of scary, but unsupported headlines - which in itself is somewhat revealing.

If after all the time and effort Sinha has put into trying to link meat consumption with cancer, she still can't do it, isn't it time that the NCI reassign her to more productive work?

Indeed. And please make ours medium-rare.

The War Against WW IV

Davi Bernstein of Commentary magazine writes to PowerLine.com to announce an article by Norman Podhoretz entitled The War Against World War IV:

I'm writing, now, to let you know about Norman Podhoretz's latest article, "The War against World War IV," in which he takes vigorous aim at the enemies of the Bush Doctrine--the rising domestic chorus of voices calling for disengagement from the "failure" of Iraq and prophesying both near- and long-term damage to American interests around the world if we persist. The unlikely bedfellows include isolationists both left and right, conservative superhawks, foreign-policy realists, liberal internationalists, and more.

"The War against World War IV" analyzes this new domestic offensive against the Bush Doctrine, systematically taking up and refuting the arguments of the critics. Podhoretz's conclusion is that Bush is determined to stay the course, but that the obstacles facing him--and us--are formidable: not the insurgent forces of violence on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere, but the powerfully gathering culture of defeatism at home.

Podhoretz's essay is indeed a masterful tour de force. We highly recommend it to anyone interested in the greatest struggle of our time, the struggle to prevail against an implacable enemy determined to destroy us. But the article is also more than that. With concision and wisdom Podhoretz lays out the foreign policy challenges which face, not only George Bush, but the American people in the years ahead and makes the case that an irresolute America would be a calamity for the world. It is truly a remarkable piece of writing and analysis.

Nice Try

A Lutheran study group reminds us of the old Boy George lyric from Karma Chameleon to the effect, roughly, that he's a man without conviction who doesn't know how to spot a contradiction. The task force has come up with an interesting solution to the problem of how to appease everyone in the controversy over whether the Church should ordain gay pastors and celebrate gay unions.

This major study on human sexuality by the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) recommends that no change be made in the church policy that precludes the ordination of gay or lesbian people in same-sex relationships. It also recommends that no official church ceremony be adopted to bless same-gender unions.

But on both of these hotly divisive issues, the landmark task force report suggests discretion be granted to local congregations acting in "good conscience" to "make judgments appropriate to each situation." It also suggests the church refrain from disciplining those congregations who may approve partnered gay or lesbian candidates for ministry, out of respect for "the deep divisions among us."

In other words, the ELCA should not change the rules governing homosexuality in ministry, but local congregations don't have to follow them if they don't want to. The ELCA can thus stand four-square against homosexual ordination while at the same time allowing gay pastors to serve in its pulpits and blessing gay unions among its congregants. This is a positively brilliant and fittingly post-modern demarche, and we wonder why it hasn't been thought of before.

Unfortunately, the task force's recommendations will have to be voted on in the Church-wide convention in August in order to become Church policy (whatever that means in view of the recommendations), and here we may expect that more rational heads will prevail.

Not For Sale

Now it turns out that a couple of big time blogs were in the bag for Howard Dean last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that The Daily Kos, the ninth biggest blog in the blogosphere, was paid $12,000 to serve as "technical consultant" to the Dean campaign.

The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.

In their defense the two popular bloggers insist they breached no ethical boundaries:

The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn't believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean's campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.

Mr. Zuniga said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.

Be that as it may, Viewpoint wishes its readers to know that we are not for sale. We have never accepted any money from anyone in return for our support. Of course, we have never been offered any either.

Punishing Syria

This UPI article gives some details about possibly imminent Coalition strikes against Syria.

New York, NY, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- Bush administration hard-liners have been considering launching selected military strikes at insurgent training camps in Syria and border-crossing points used by Islamist guerrillas to enter Iraq in an effort to bolster security for the upcoming elections, according to former and current administration officials.

Pressure for some form of military action is also coming from interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, these sources said.

Some former and serving U.S. intelligence officials who have usually been opposed to any expansion of U.S. military activities in the region are expressing support for such strikes.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told United Press International, "I don't usually find myself in sympathy with the Bush neo-cons, but I think there is enough fire under this smoke to justify such action."

Referring to the escalating attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq by Iraqi insurgents, he added, "Syria is complicit in the (anti-U.S.) insurgency up to its eyeballs."

"Syria is the No. 1 crossing point" for guerrillas entering Iraq," Gary Gambill, editor of the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, said. He added that Damascus "does nothing about it."

An administration official said Syria has "camps in which Syrians are training Iraqis for the insurgency and others where Iraqis are training Syrians for the same purpose" which could be hit by U.S. air strikes.

Recently, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said that senior Baath Party officials from Iraq are operating from Syria where they provide financing and direction to the cells of Iraqi insurgents killing Americans, sparking new discussions within the administration about possible measures against Syria.

U.S. officials told United Press International that money, direction, weapons and personnel are flowing into Iraq from Syria, ending up in Iraqi cities such as Iskanderiya, Baqouba, Latafiya and Fallujah.

Damascus is also home to associates of a top insurgency commander now affiliated with al-Qaida, Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi, who is responsible for many major suicide bombing attacks in Iraq, U.S. officials said.

The presence of a Zarqawi branch in Damascus, discovered last summer, was said to have acted as a major spur in uniting France and the United States in supporting U.N. Resolution 1559 that demanded Syria withdraw from Lebanon and that elections be held in April 2005, U.S. officials said.

Gambill charged that a major Zarqawi deputy lives in Damascus.

In addition to Syria being used as a rear area for insurgents, it is a key center of finance for former Saddam Hussein officials who are leading the insurgency, thanks to stashes of Iraqi cash that could run as high as $3 billion, which is all in the Syrian banking system, according for former and serving administration officials.

There are also allegedly "many millions of dollars" from Palestinian groups flowing into Syria that are also being used to help finance anti-American guerrilla groups in Iraq, these sources said.

The Bush administration has applied increasing pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad to halt the activities of militant groups inside Syria, and to arrest and extradite former Saddam Hussein officials who are the leading financiers, according to several U.S. government sources.

So far there has been no positive response, they said.

The article goes on to talk about the dilemma faced by Bashar Assad and the difficulties he confronts in trying to avoid Coalition assaults on Syrian territory. Perhaps making these plans public is an attempt to intimidate Syria into cooperating, or perhaps it is a signal that such attacks against targets in Syria have already begun. If not then we're left wondering why, if we are going to undertake such missions in the future, we would telegraph that warning ahead of time and afford the targets the opportunity to evade us.

At any rate, it's hard to see how Syria can escape when Bush clearly announced in his initial "Bush doctrine" speeches that nations which harbor terrorists would not be spared. It would seem that both Syria and Iran are daring him to back up his threat.

Say It Ain't So, Armstrong

Whether or not it is illegal for a government agency (the Department of Education) to pay talk radio hosts to promote their programs (in this case, No Child Left Behind), it certainly seems unethical for the radio host to accept a government check, promote the program, and not explain to his audience that his endorsement has been purchased. Armstrong Williams is a good guy and he's on the right side of most issues, but he showed poor judgment on this one. He has forever diminished his credibility with his listeners, and that is a shame.

Conservatives have been rightly clamoring for thirty years for disbanding the Department of Education. If what the Department did in paying Williams $240,000 to promote NCLB is in fact illegal then the DOE has just reinforced the case against maintaining this useless bureaucracy.

Theism and Philosophy

To read the first part of this paper by Quentin Smith one might not guess that professor Smith is an atheist. Smith calls upon his fellow atheists to recognize that Christian philosophers have, over the past thirty five years, done brilliant work in the field of philosophy and have become a significant minority of the practitioners of the discipline and have virtually taken over the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion. Here are a few highlights:

This is not to say that none of the scholars in the various academic fields were...theists in their "private lives"; but theists, for the most part, excluded their theism from their publications and teaching, in large part because theism was mainly considered to have such a low epistemic status that it did not meet the standards of an "academically respectable" position to hold.

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga's influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga's even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Gr�nbaum, and other naturalists.

Theists, whom hitherto had segregated their academic lives from their private lives, increasingly came to believe (and came to be increasingly accepted or respected for believing) that arguing for realist theism in scholarly publications could no longer be justifiably regarded as engaging in an "academically unrespectable" scholarly pursuit.

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga's writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion....Of course, some professors in these other, non-philosophical, fields are theists; for example, a recent study indicated that seven percent of the top scientists are theists. However, theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work.

If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected, requiring them to write secular articles if they wanted to be published. If a scientist did argue for theism in professional academic journals, such as Michael Behe in biology, the arguments are not published in scholarly journals in his field (e.g., biology), but in philosophy journals (e.g., Philosophy of Science and Philo, in Behe's case). But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, "academically respectable" to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

The great majority of naturalist philosophers react by publicly ignoring the increasing desecularizing of philosophy (while privately disparaging theism, without really knowing anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion) and proceeding to work in their own area of specialization as if theism, the view of approximately one-quarter or one-third of their field, did not exist.

Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging from philosophy of science ... to epistemology ... being theists. The predicament of naturalist philosophers is not just due to the influx of talented theists, but is due to the lack of counter-activity of naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not "dead" in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.

A hand waving dismissal of theism, such as is manifested in the following passage from Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind, has been like trying to halt a tidal wave with a hand-held sieve. Searle responds to about one-third of contemporary philosophers with this brush-off: Talking about the scientific and naturalist world-view, he writes: "this world view is not an option. It is not simply up for grabs along with a lot of competing world views. Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather than in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from these beliefs, but at bottom we remained convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith."

Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist, which is similar to the attitude expressed by Searle in the previous quote, the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true. This philosophical failure (ignoring theism and thereby allowing themselves to become unjustified naturalists) has led to a cultural failure since theists, witnessing this failure, have increasingly become motivated to assume or argue for supernaturalism in their academic work, to an extent that academia has now lost its mainstream secularization.

If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that "no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith," although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.

These are remarkable admissions. Smith goes on in the rest of the article, which grows rather technical, to describe what he thinks needs to be done in order to take philosophy back from the theist interlopers.

A Moderate Muslim Perspective

We came across the following remarkable article by Mustafa Akyol from the December issue of The American Enterprise at the The Road to Emmaus. Akyol says so many important things that we've decided to post his entire essay. We're sure our readers will find it well worth reading:

A moderate Muslim's prayer for American faith and family values.

"Why do you hate us?" Since the horrendous events of 9/11, Americans have been posing that question to Muslims across the globe. The first answer from someone like me, who is repulsed by terrorists who kill in the name of Islam, is that most of us do not hate you. Yet it must be acknowledged that radical Muslim rage is real in many countries.

This rage is often irrational and ill founded. However, there is one crucial source of anti-Americanism that is built on a genuine threat. Many Muslims detest the moral decline that seems to have pervaded American culture during the second half of the twentieth century. They worry that it will be exported to their own children and societies.

Many Americans would agree that such a moral decline does exist, and would trace it to a view asserting that material life is all there is to existence. Philosophical materialism denies the existence of higher beings, such as God, and higher principles than self-maximization. When applied to human societies, it encourages pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and hedonism, and the consequences are horrifying to many devout Muslims around the world. Through American popular culture such as Hollywood movies, MTV, or pornography, they encounter a culture in which God and religious principles seem to be disrespected, neglected, even attacked or ridiculed.

In his recent book, Why the Rest Hates the West, historian Meic Pearse notes that many people around the globe see Western societies as being ones that "derogate religion, exalt triviality (sports, entertainment, fashion), endorse sexual shamelessness, deprecate family, and discard honor." Pearse argues that these tendencies do indeed have bad results: "social atomization; personal irresponsibility; dehumanizing impersonality; and other wounds to traditional families, communities, and conceptions of the person."

"The al-Qaeda hijackers did not target the Vatican, the capital of Western Christianity," notes writer David Kelley, but rather the World Trade Center, "a temple of modernity." He points out that "Hamas's suicide bombers usually attack Israeli pizza parlors, hotels, and nightclubs, not synagogues." Kelley (who is himself an atheist) concludes that "Islamist hatred of the West is not directed at Christianity as a rival religion but at modernism as an alternative to religion as such."

But of course, the West is not monolithic. Materialism is just one side of the West-on the other side, Judeo-Christianity stands firm. This state of affairs is evident only vaguely in Europe, but crystal clear in America. Americans possess one of the most religious societies in the world, and in fact the world's most determined battle against materialism-on cultural, philosophical, and scientific grounds-is going on right now in America.

Muslims who recognize this fact make a distinction between "righteous Westerners" and other ones. For example, take a look at these lines from an article titled "The Final Jihad," published on a popular Muslim Web site:

Western secular materialism takes us from our prayers, takes us from our Islamic culture...gives us a society of crime, violence, drug abuse, alcoholism, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, exploitation of people and resources, and reduces life to a meaningless exercise in futility. [But] we must know who and what is the enemy. It is important to realize that...many good people in Western nations trying to live right lives.... These people are not our enemy; they also are victims of Western secular materialism.

Most Muslims, however, fail to appreciate the distinction drawn above, and don't know anything about the "culture war" going on in American society. They see America only through its materialist pop culture. Distaste for materialism thus translates into a distaste for America.

This distaste derives not only from culture but also from ideas. When "Western ideas" are mentioned, many Muslims think not of Jefferson, C. S. Lewis, Lincoln, or Burke, but rather of Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Carl Sagan. The behavior of some Westernized local elites in Muslim countries make the situation even worse. In my country of Turkey, one popular stereotype of the Westernized Turk is of the soulless, skirt- and money-chasing man drinking whiskey while swearing at Islam. Although a caricature, it carries enough truth to further a bad image of the West.

These negative images, however, can be reversed. Many Muslims are inclined to appreciate the tradition of "family values" in America. During my childhood, in the early 1980s, the most popular TV series among conservative Turkish Muslim families was Little House on the Prairie, which portrayed the life of a very devout American family. People were saying that such ethics were what made America strong. Today, Turks complain about the "corrupt American culture" streaming into their houses through the TV and Internet. They would love to see the America of Little House again.

It would provide an antidote to Islamic radicalism and its inherent anti-Americanism if more Muslims realized that today's Hollywood portrayals don't accurately reflect the moral lives of most Americans. The masterminds of Islamic radicalism work hard to mask the religiosity and decency of average Americans. They insist that America is totally materialistic and that even its religious practices are superficial and insincere.

Sayyid Qutb, the godfather of Islamic radicalism, alleged that even churches in America were tools for profitmaking and publicity seeking. He insisted that America is not Christian or Jewish at all, but jahiliye-a term used to define the pre-Islamic, barbarian, pagan Arabia. Although this is a bigoted and often intentional misrepresentation, it feeds anti-American feeling.

Note that Osama bin Laden defines Americans as "crusaders" (lustful plunderers) rather than "Christians." The Koran, after all, declares that Christians are "nearest among men in love to the Muslims, because amongst them are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant." To attack the U.S., radicals have to de-Christianize it. And this is exactly what they do�-with a big assist from the entertainment and news media of the United States itself.

Obviously, that is a distortion of the truth. America stands out in the Western world as "a nation under God," particularly compared to "Old Europe." The aggressive secularism of Europe is one reason why European Muslims are especially radicalized. (Another spur is the lesser opportunities for upward mobility in Europe as compared to America.) As a Muslim, I feel at home in America when I see people saying grace at the table, praising the Lord, filling houses of worship, and handling currency inscribed "In God We Trust." When I'm in Europe, on the other hand, with its empty cathedrals, widespread atheism, and joyless cynicism, I feel alienated.

One can reasonably ask why, then, radical Islamists target the U.S. more than Europe. The answer comes from the image of a monolithic West. For the average Middle Eastern Muslim, there is no difference between Americans and Europeans in terms of secularism-he thinks they are both Godless-but America is more powerful, more effective, more omnipresent. The U.S. is viewed as the citadel of Western civilization (the civilization that has turned its back to God), and therefore the logical place to attack.

To erase this false image, America must help Muslims see that it is indeed a nation under God. The culture it exports should celebrate more than materialism, disbelief, selfishness, and hedonism. America must do a better job of portraying the principles of decency that undergird its society. Otherwise it will be despised by devout Muslims throughout the world, and radicals will channel contempt into violence.

Of course, avoiding radical Islamist rage is only one reason for Americans to resist empty materialism. A deeper reason is because materialism is a mistaken philosophy. If they will save themselves from its disappointments, America will enjoy many benefits-including a better chance to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world, and avert a clash of civilizations.

There is a rich irony implied in this excellent article. The decadent, secular left, both at home and in Europe, hates America because they see us as being too Christian, and the Islamic radicals in the Arab world hate us because they see us as being too decadent and secular.

Another irony is that as much as we believe that Islamism is a curse on the world and needs to be defeated, as much as we find Shari'a a ghastly distortion of God's will, as much as we oppose Islamic irredentism, we can't help but agree with Akyol's Muslim critique that there is much in American culture to despise. Indeed, we know no one who is a Christian who wouldn't agree with almost everything Akyol writes.

Sullivan's Silliness

We respect Andrew Sullivan's political independence and often admire his opinions, but this one must have been written while still groggy from a mid-afternoon nap:

ATHEISTS NEED NOT APPLY: What was Bush thinking with this statement: "President Bush said yesterday that he doesn't 'see how you can be president without a relationship with the Lord,' but that he is always mindful to protect the right of others to worship or not worship." So, out of his beneficence, he won't trample on others' religious freedom. But the White House? That's for Christians only. No Jews? Or atheists? Notice also the evangelical notion of a personal "relationship" with the Lord. That also indicates suspicion of those Christians with different approaches to the divine. I must say this is a new level of religio-political fusion in this administration. To restrict the presidency to a particular religious faith is anathema to this country's traditions and to the task of toleration. The president surely needs to retract the statement.

The president merely said that he doesn't know how presidents can serve in such a difficult job without being able to turn to God. He didn't say that they shouldn't be allowed to so serve. The difference between the two is so obvious that one wonders what motivated Sullivan to make an issue of it, and, even more, to demand a retraction.

The End of American Patience

Victor David Hanson argues that Americans are growing world-weary. It is certainly true that we see ourselves as doing so much good, as being so essential for the peace of the world, of making so many sacrifices so that others may enjoy the fruits of freedom, and yet we're hated and despised by so many of the world's people who couldn't care less about the help and welfare we bring.

We are, moreover, growing increasingly apprehensive that the world is determined to destroy itself. It doesn't want what we offer, either materially or spiritually. Nor does it want peace. The world has gone mad and the feeling is that there isn't anything much we can do about it. Here are a few highlights from Hanson's take on the situation:

An American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople - huddled in their churches and shuttered schools - almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets.

After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker. It was precisely that paradox between impotent high-sounding rhetoric and blunt-speaking, roughshod courage that lay at the heart of the classic Western from Shane and High Noon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven.

The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves - swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices - to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims - as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.

China, flush with billions in trade surplus, first offers a few million to its immediate Asian neighbors before increasing its contributions in the wake of massive gifts from Japan and the United States. Peking's gesture was what the usually harsh New York Times magnanimously called "slightly belated." In this weird sort of global high-stakes charity poker, no one asks why tiny Taiwan out-gives one billion mainlanders or why Japan proves about the most generous of all - worried the answer might suggest that postwar democratic republics, resurrected and nourished by the United States and now deeply entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of democracy, capitalism, and humanitarianism, are more civil societies than the Islamic theocracies, socialist republics, and authoritarian autocracies of the once-romanticized third world.

All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory - and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.

In an earlier post Viewpoint recalled the theme of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which Rand imagines a world in which those who produce wealth, ideas, and benefits for all the rest of us finally weary of all the obstacles put in their way by those jealous of their greatness and resentful of their success. At length these Nietzschean supermen decide they've had enough and they all retire from the affairs of the world, leaving the paltry parasitic classes to fend for themselves. Perhaps, Hanson is correct and Americans are beginning to see themselves as the characters in Rand's novel. If so, if we do turn inward and embrace an isolationist foreign policy, the consequences for the world would be catastrophic.

In a post last June we wrote the following:

Consider, for example, what would happen in Asia if the U.S. ceased to be able [or willing] to project power into this region. North and South Korea would quickly be at each other's throats, as would the Peoples' Republic of China and Taiwan. Japan and other states in the region would be unable to remain neutral and would get sucked into a hellish vortex of war that would consume the entire Pacific rim.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Israel's Arab neighbors would seize an opportunity they had been denied by American might for fifty years and invade Israel, spawning a conflict that would almost certainly result in the detonation of nuclear weapons.

A similar scenario would doubtless play out on the Indian subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and would also almost certainly culminate in a nuclear exchange. Africa, too, would likely break out in renewed tribal and racial violence.

Europe would be thrown into turmoil by its Arab populations and by renewed fighting in the Balkans. These stresses would exacerbate old hatreds and open old wounds between the countries of Europe which have warred repeatedly against each other for two thousand years, and would doubtless bring at least some of them into conflict with each other again.

It's hard to imagine the carnage that would result from all of this. The world teeters on a tightrope over a hellish chasm, and it is only the balance pole of American force that has kept us from plunging into that abyss.

The only thing that's changed in the last six months, Hanson tells us, is that some Americans feel a little more like maybe we should just let nature take its course.

Whitewash

Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard offers a succinct critique of CBS's investigation into the Dan Rather affair. He concludes, for compelling reasons, that the report was a whitewash that failed to answer the most important questions.

FOX blocker

Here's an interesting indication of the depths of desperation that liberals are beginning to feel. The following is an article from the New York Daily News:

Attention, blue-state parents. Are you worried about what your children are seeing on TV? Have you caught them ogling Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity as they engage in explicit acts of love with Bush administration policies? Now you can protect your little liberals from hard-core right-wing positions the same way you censor cable porn. For just $8.95, The FOXBlocker eliminates the risk of exposure to Fox News Channel.

Sam Kimery and Joshua Montgomery, who are marketing the device, say it employs the technology already used to filter adult content.

And every time someone orders one of the gizmos from Foxblocker.com, Fox advertisers receive E-mail telling them that another consumer has just said no to Rupert Murdoch's brand of "fair and balanced news."

"We hope that companies will see people actually paying to block channels that won't offer alternative views, and then rethink how they spend their advertising dollars," Montgomery tells Variety V Life magazine.

Is Fox worried about this new product?

"I mean, clearly, it's not working," a Fox News rep told us. "Our ratings continue to skyrocket."

Since it seems clear that the marketers of this product are at pains to prevent children from watching Fox News (adults can be presumed to be able to select their viewing fare unsupervised), it's interesting that their implicit comparison is of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, et al. to sleazy, pornographic television content. Here's an irony and a difference between the way liberals and conservatives see the world. In the conservative world-view obscenity is a perversion of the intimacy, privacy, and marital context of sex. In the liberal world-view obscenity is the expression of conservative political ideas. Let the tots see as much illicit coitus on screen as they wish, let them hear as much scatological language as they want, let them see the love which dare not speak its name proclaim itself from the rooftops, but conservative political notions must be concealed from the children with programming blockers lest the little ones secretly view Hannity, Hume, O'Reilley, et. al. and be seduced by conservative thinking. If we don't act now to prevent this, the liberals fear, our children will surely grow up to be degenerates.

Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for the tip.

Dem Says Let <i>Roe</i> Go

No Left Turns discusses an article by Benjamin Wittes in The Atlantic who argues that the time has come for the Democratic Party to stop defending Roe v. Wade. Wittes gives two reasons why this makes sense for Democrats. The original article is subscription only so the following is from No Left Turns' post:

Part of Wittes' argument is that the criticisms conservatives have made against it are not totally off the mark.

"Since its inception Roe has had a deep legitimacy problem, stemming from its weakness as a legal opinion. Conservatives who fulminate that the Court made up the right to abortion, which appears explicitly nowhere in the Constitution, are being simplistic--but they're not entirely wrong. In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky; abortion policy is a question that the Constitution--even broadly construed--cannot convincingly be read to resolve."

Of course, this comes as no news to any conservative. But his more interesting argument concerns how a reversal of Roe v. Wade would place the Republicans in a deep dilemma.

"Roe gives pro-life politicians a free pass. A large majority of voters reject the hard-line anti-abortion stance: in Gallup polling since 1975, for example, about 80 percent of respondents have consistently favored either legal abortion in all circumstances (21 to 34 percent) or legal abortion under some circumstances (48 to 61 percent). Although a plurality of Americans appear to favor abortion rights substantially more limited than what Roe guarantees, significantly more voters describe themselves as "pro-choice" than "pro-life." Yet because the Court has removed the abortion question from the legislative realm, conservative politicians are free to cater to pro-lifers by proposing policies that, if ever actually implemented, would render those politicians quite unpopular."

He makes a valid point; as long as Roe stands Republicans can fulminate against it, secure in the knowledge that they don't really have to do anything about abortion. We've spent a good bit of time talking about the divide in the Democratic Party between moderates and ultra-liberals, but a reversal of Roe would no doubt expose a fault line within the GOP that is just as wide--the one separating die-hard pro-lifers from those of us who, while favoring certain restrictions on abortion, see considerable moral and practical problems with an outright ban.

Three things should be mentioned here. First, when Wittes says that Conservatives have not been entirely wrong about the lack of constitutional support for the 1973 Roe decision what he's really trying to say is that Conservatives have been completely correct. Everything he says in that paragraph confirms this. He just doesn't want to state it that baldly for fear of incurring the censure of his liberal associates.

Second, it's not at all clear that the statistics are as Wittes sees them. There is reason to believe that the nation is much more sympathetic to placing restrictions on abortion than pro-choicers would have us think. This is why Kerry tended to downplay and waffle on the issue during the campaign and George Bush didn't.

Third, whether an overturn of Roe would create a political problem for Republicans depends upon how they react to it. If they point out that remanding the matter to the states gives the people greater say in formulating their state's abortion policy, it may well work to Republicans' benefit. Removing abortion from the judiciary and giving it to state legislatures empowers people to decide for themselves where to draw lines on this issue and should be presented that way by Republicans.

It is also not irrelevant that if the pro-choice throng is as numerous as Wittes' suggests it is, then they should have nothing to fear from having state legislatures, which are much more responsive to the will of the people than is the Supreme Court, establish the law. The fact that Pro-choicers are generally loath to have abortion law handled by the states gives the lie to their proclamations of substantial majorities in support of their position. We strongly suspect that they resist throwing the issue back into state houses because they fear that the majority of citizens in most states favor restrictions which they oppose.

The CBS Fallout

We confess to savoring a bit of schadenfreude at the fallout from the RatherGate affair at CBS. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. Well, perhaps that's not quite true. Maybe the New York Times deserves it just as much. At any rate, CBS and the cashiered foursome is getting what it, and they, deserve. They wanted with all their might for this story to be true. They wanted so badly to discredit George Bush that they convinced themselves that the forged memos were genuine. They were blinded by their own wish-fulfillment and threw all professional standards and caution to the winds, chancing their careers on this one throw of the dice.

At least that's the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that they knew going in that the documents were suspect, but didn't care. They thought they could damage the president with fabrications, and no one would be the wiser. They may well have done it before and thought they could do it again. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the blogosphere they doubtless would've gotten away with it.

The difference between the two interpretations is the difference between being reckless, careless, and gullible because of ignoble political motives and being overtly malicious and vicious because of ignoble political motives.

Some bloggers are a little miffed that the CBS report didn't come down harder on what they perceive to be the obvious political motivations of the principal players in this farce, but motivation is much easier to discern than it is to prove. Even so, in this case there can be little doubt, whether the report makes it clear or not, that the impelling force was a desire to destroy the Bush presidency.

Here's what Bernard Goldberg, former CBS reporter and author of the expose Biased, said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

"And I'm going a step further. I'm saying there was an agenda at work. I'm not saying that Dan Rather went into this saying, I'm going to get George Bush. It's never -- that is not the nature of bias in the news. It never, ever happens that way. But I am saying that he wanted this story to be true, and Mary Mapes sure wanted that story to be true. And did he depend too much on her? Yes, that's obvious. But if he didn't want this story to be true, if it didn't fit the culture of CBS' preconceived notions about liberals and conservatives and Democrats and Republicans, it would have never seen the light of day and we would never be talking about it..."

"I think when you're working with investigative producers -- and it's the scariest thing in the world -- I've worked with them -- when they fall in love with the story, head for the hills. Because you may have big, big problems, as we see here. But what I'm saying is, they didn't simply fall in love with a great story. They would have never -- I know these people, I know these people. And even more than knowing these people, I know the culture at CBS News. They would have never fallen in love with a story that made the other side look as bad as they made George Bush. They just wouldn't have."

We hate to sound like Madame DeFarge, but we're satisfied that the job-ending guillotine at CBS is doing condign work. The only injustice is that Dan Rather is allowed to walk away with his dignity and dubious reputation somewhat intact while underlings suffer a season of public humiliation. Rather's head should have rolled with the rest of them, metaphorically speaking of course. The good news is that everyone knows it.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't

In Dover, PA the school district is being sued for allegedly trying to smuggle religion into the school curriculum under the guise of Intelligent Design. Meanwhile, in Toledo, OH a school is being sued for trying to keep religion out.

Superintendent Luci Gernot prohibited a Christian Rock Band, comprised of both students and graduates from the school, from performing in what would have been an optional anti-drug assembly. Now the band's parents and others are planning to sue the school for abridging students' freedom of speech.

Why are school administrators so afraid of an optional assembly that might present a Christian-oriented anti-drug message? Students would only attend if they wanted to. They would not be a "captive audience". What, exactly, is wrong with that? The only plausible answer we can think of is that administrators like Ms Gernot believe that Christianity is somehow deleterious to student welfare. They must believe that the harm of exposing students to Christian themes outweighs the good of exposing them to the anti-drug lesson.

It is rather astonishing that such bigotry exists and is tolerated in our educational system. We hope the parents follow through with their suit.

Pacifying Mosul

Here's interesting news just released by Central Command about progress in the terror war in Iraq:

THREE OF FOUR KEY TALHA LEADERS CAPTURED IN MOSUL

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Multi-National Forces detained a key leader of the al Qaida-linked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul on Dec. 22.

Following a thorough investigation, the individual detained was positively identified as Abdul Aziz Sa'dun Ahmed Hamduni, aka Abu Ahmed.

Abu Ahmed served as a deputy to the emir of Mosul, Abu Talha, and assumed command of terrorist operations in Mosul in Abu Talha's absence. Abu Ahmed admitted to receiving money and weapons from Abu Talha as well as coordinating and conducting terrorist attacks in Mosul.

"The capture of Abu Ahmed, and the subsequent capture of Abu Marwan on 23 December, show significant progress in the inevitable destruction of the Abu Talha-led Al-Queda-Zarqawi terrorist network in Mosul," said Brig. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel III, spokesman for Multi-National Forces-Iraq.

Security forces in Iraq have previously announced the capture of Abu Marwan, also a senior-level terrorist in the Talha organization. Security forces also recently captured another senior Talha member whose name cannot be released due to operational security reasons.

"Currently, security forces in Iraq have three of Abu Talha's four most senior leaders in custody," Lessel said.

The capture of these key members has led to additional captures throughout the Mosul-based AQ-AMZ network. More than 20 percent of Talha's key members have been captured in the past few weeks.

Abu Ahmed's capture removed one of Abu Talha's most valuable officers from the Mosul-based AQ-AMZ terrorist network. Abu Ahmed remains in detention and is providing information regarding the Talha network.

The use of car bombs and other explosive devices by Abu Ahmed and his affiliates shows disregard for the well-being and security of innocent Iraqi civilians. The Central Criminal Court of Iraq is committed to providing a fair trial to those allegedly engaging in terrorist activities. Those found guilty will be punished accordingly, and thus lose the ability to provide for the future of their families.

Hmmm. Wonder what they mean by that last sentence. And who is the unnamed terrorist leader who was captured? We wonder if he isn't the gentleman whose capture was bruited about the Arab press last week as being that of abu Zarqawi himself.

Thanks to Adventures of Chester for the tip.

New Development in the WOT

Strategy Page gives us a look at a new development in the war in Iraq. A couple of brief extracts:

The puzzle of the growing, at least in the number of people killed, anti-government attacks shows a lot of the key people, especially the money guys, operating across the border in Syria.

So the government has told the coalition to do whatever it takes to suppress the Baath Party and its supporters. This could get very ugly, because it means sending in raids with orders to take certain people "dead or alive." Family members will be arrested and held hostage (a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender). Specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab police SWAT teams will be used for a lot of this, supervised by American Special Forces. Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year, but the Iraqi government has now authorized the use of a much larger list of suspects.

In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up. This will be seen, and reported by the media, as "war on Sunni Arabs." Well, not quite. It will be war on a minority of the Sunni Arab community. The war will extend into Syria, where the attacks will be made by Iraqis or Syrians hired for the occasion. There are a lot of hired guns in that part of the world. There might even be a smart bomb or two going off in the middle of the night, in the middle of Syria. And the Syrians, knowing the alternatives, may feel compelled to ignore all of this. Who wants to go to war to defend Saddam's war criminal buddies.

The reports from both January 7th and January 9th at the Strategy Page will interest anyone following the war against the Iraqi Baathists.

Gonzales and Torture

Jonah Goldberg on the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings:

As befits the funhouse logic of such hearings, a number of issues are being confused, conflated and confounded. First of all, most of the things that are being called torture are something a bit shy of torture. Being forced to sit in a cramped area until you give up valuable intelligence is rough, but this ain't beanbag. Being draped with an Israeli flag or even being "waterboarded" - where a detainee's face is surrounded with a wet blanket and he's made to feel like he's drowning isn't torture either. Our own cadets at the Air Force Academy have been water-boarded in training. The war against torture should begin at home!

Second, much of the stuff that does qualify as unacceptable treatment is not condoned by the White House or the Pentagon. The Pentagon is prosecuting the Abu Ghraib offenses, not defending them, and it has always said the Geneva Convention would apply in Iraq.

As for the Geneva Convention and al Qaeda, you'd have to be higher than a moonbat to treat them as signatories to it. Everything they do is a violation of the convention. It may be fun to mug for the cameras and criticize Gonzales for saying that the Geneva Convention is "outdated" when it comes to al Qaeda. But unless you think Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed deserves an allowance in Swiss francs that he can spend at the local canteen, you have to concede Gonzales is right.

For excellent insight into how our military interrogators actually handle their job, as opposed to how the Democrats imagine them to be handling it, this outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal is a must read. Mac Donald gives us the most thorough and interesting account of the American use (or non-use) of torture in the WOT. It's a lengthy piece, but well-worth the read.

For our part it is astonishing that we claim to be engaged in a life and death struggle against terrorists, but act as if we're playing a child's game, punctiliously observing rules designed to insure that we lose. The article will make you wonder how serious the paper-pushers in the Pentagon really are about protecting American lives.

Time's Up on Newdow's Fifteen Minutes

Even the thoroughgoing secularists at Dispatches From the Culture Wars are weary of Michael Newdow's jejune attempts to banish any and all traces of religious expression from our public life:

I am obviously one of the more staunch advocates of church/state separation one is ever likely to encounter, as volumes of my writing can easily attest. But let me say this: it's time for Michael Newdow to go away. He is the father who filed the lawsuit to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance, a lawsuit he won on the merits at the appeals court level only to have the Supreme Court overturn that decision due to a lack of standing. He has since refiled that suit on behalf of other parents and the whole process has begun anew. I think he's correct on the Pledge case, though I think it was argued pretty badly, and overall I just don't think it's a big deal.

His latest case, however, takes nitpicking to a whole new level. He has now filed suit in Federal court claiming that the fact that Bush (and all other presidents, as far as I know) will have a minister say a prayer at his inauguration constitutes an illegal "establishment of religion". Now, it's one thing to say that the government cannot force school children to pray, as the courts did in 1963. It's quite another to say that a President cannot choose to have a prayer spoken at his own inauguration ceremony.

The government is forbidden from taking official positions on religious matters, but that doesn't mean that government officials cannot offer their opinions or participate in religious ceremonies or, for that matter, spend 12 hours a day praying if they want to. They just can't give those things the force of law, demand that the government endorse their beliefs, or force others to participate in them.

Michael, it's time for you to go away. This is no longer about taking a principled stand for the establishment clause, it's now about your ego and your desire to stay in the public eye. Your 15 minutes are up.

Precisely. Perhaps Newdow should read David Gelernter's essay in Commentary that Viewpoint featured on Saturday. For that matter, so should Dispatches From the Culture Wars.