Obamamessiah.com offers up a somewhat unnerving video of Barack Obama set to Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus:
Check out the site. It's a little spooky to see how people are responding to Obama's candidacy. Maybe it's time to dust off your copy of Eric Hoffer's classic analysis of mass movements titled True Believer.
HT: Michelle Malkin
RLC
Those interested in the racial "discussions" triggered by the video of Jeremiah Wright's angry tirades against white America will find an essay by Ed Kaitz at The American Thinker a very important contribution. It starts with this:
Back in the late 1980s I was on a plane flying out of New Orleans and sitting next to me was a rather interesting and, according to Barack Obama, unusual black man. Friendly, gregarious, and wise beyond his years, we immediately hit it off. I had been working on Vietnamese commercial fishing boats for a few years based in southern Louisiana. The boats were owned by the recent wave of Vietnamese refugees who flooded into the familiar tropical environment after the war. Floating in calm seas out in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, I would hear tearful songs and tales from ex-paratroopers about losing brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers, and beautiful Vietnam itself to the communists.
In Bayou country I lived on boats and in doublewide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice. When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.
They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope." Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.
While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.
His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season ....
Follow the link and read the rest. It's really very good.
RLC
Apparently one California high school teacher thinks that religion has no place in the public school classroom unless it's to serve as an object of criticism and ridicule. One of his students, however, has decided he isn't going to put up with this breach of religious neutrality and is taking the self-appointed de-programmer to court:
Capistrano Valley High School sophomore Chad Farnan sued his Advanced Placement European history teacher, James Corbett in December. Corbet, a San Clemente resident and 35-year educator, is accused of fostering hostility toward Christians and promoted "irreligion over religion," therefore violating the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages and attorney fees, says that Corbett typically spent "a large portion of class time propagating his personal views to a captive audience." He railed against Christianity and traditional Christian viewpoints on topics such as birth control, teenage sex, homosexuality and erectile dysfunction, according to the lawsuit.
Court papers cite statements tape-recorded by Farnan such as "Conservatives don't want women to avoid pregnancies - that's interfering with God's work" and "When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth." The Christian legal group that filed the lawsuit, Murrieta-based Advocates for Faith and Freedom, released additional quotes Monday attributed to Corbett, including "When you pray for divine intervention, you're hoping that the spaghetti monster will help you get what you want."
The complete audiotapes, however, have not been released for independent review. Corbett's attorney said the statements were taken out of context.
I'm sure. Corbett is a 61 year-old who teaches AP European history and AP art history. He's also faculty adviser to the Free Thinking Atheist and Agnostic Kinship student club, whatever that is.
RLC
Barack Obama has taken some heat for referring to his grandmother as "a typical white person" because she felt threatened by a black man in what was in fact a threatening situation. Even so, I think too much is being made of Obama's choice of words, and I urge the Senator's critics to dial back the outrage. It seems to me to be making mountains out of molehills.
Nevertheless, if Barack's Texas grandparents' attitudes are typical of white people in general, I think Obama is handing whites, perhaps unintentionally, a compliment. Consider this excerpt from Obama's book reported by Judith Apter Klinghoffer:
. . At a bank where she worked [in the early '60s], Toot (his grandmother's nickname) made the acquaintance of the janitor, a tall and dignified black World War II vet she remembers only as Mr. Reed. While the two of them chatted in the hallways one day, a secretary in the office stormed up and hissed that Tood should never, ever, "call no nigger 'Mister.'" Not long afterworlds, Toot would find Mr. Reed in a corner of the building weeping quietly to himself. . . .
They (grandparents) decided Toot would keep calling Mr. Reed "Mister," . . . . Gramps began to decline invitations from coworkers to go out for a beer, telling them he had to get home to keep the wife happy.
Klinghoffer writes that Obama goes on in the book to tell a story about his 11 year old mother who played in the front yard with a young Black girl. Neighborhood Children gathered outside the picket fence shouting: "Nigger lover!" and "Dirty Yankee!" The grandmother tried to get them into the house. The grandfather went further:
Gramps was beside himself when he heard what had happened. He interrogated my mother, wrote down names. The next day he took the morning off from work to visit the school principal. He personally called the parents of some of the offending children to give them a piece of his mind.
No, his grandfather did not say that he could no more disown racist whites than disown the white community. The grandmother, he dismisses as a "typical white (racist) person" explained their attitudes thus:
Your grandfather and I just figured we should treat people decently, Bar. That's all."
Obama's grandparents weren't typical of whites in Texas in the early sixties, but I think it something of which whites should be proud to be told by the Senator that the attitudes his grandparents had then are typical of the attitudes most whites have now.
RLC
One of the arguments against the belief that on the first Easter Jesus actually did rise from the dead is that the records of that alleged event (the New Testament gospels) were written much later, perhaps a hundred years or so after the event was supposed to have happened. The greater the temporal distance between the event and when it was written down, the thinking goes, the less reliable the written testimony is considered to be.
There are lots of reasons for rejecting this argument, but I came across one recently while reading Anglican theologian N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope that I don't remember ever hearing before, although I'm sure others have.
Wright points out that throughout the gospel narratives the authors constantly cite Old Testament precedents and prophecies and tie them to the life of Jesus. This indicates that some time had elapsed after Jesus' death during which the community of believers was able to reflect on the events of his life before those events were written down. This reading back into the Old Testament runs right up through the crucifixion narratives. Thus we may surmise that these stories about Jesus were put into the form we have them in today some time after Jesus' death.
But then a striking thing happens. Once the accounts move on to the events surrounding Jesus' resurrection there are no references to Old Testament sources, prophecies and fulfillments. Their absence strongly suggests, Wright maintains, that the accounts of the resurrection were written down or otherwise fixed even before the accounts of the rest of Jesus' life. It suggests, too, that the resurrection narratives were established soon after the event and before the community of disciples had the opportunity to search the texts for prophetic allusions and echoes.
Here is what Wright says:
This is all the more remarkable when we note that from as early as Paul, the common creedal formula declared that the resurrection, too, was "according to the scriptures," and Paul himself joins the rest of the early church in ransacking the psalms and prophets to find texts to explain what just happened and set it within, and as the climax to, the long story of God and Israel. Why do the gospel resurrection narratives not do the same? It would be easy for Matthew to refer to one or two scriptural prophecies that were being fulfilled, but he doesn't. John tells us that the disciples did not yet know the scriptural teaching that the Messiah would rise again, but he doesn't quote the texts he has in mind.
These accounts were fixed very early, it appears, and then later, when the gospels were being written, attached to those narratives in order to form a more complete picture of who Jesus was. If this is so, they should be granted a much greater reliability than some critics have been willing to give them.
Have a wonderful Resurrection Day.
RLC
Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw (henceforth C&H) are, from everything I can tell, two wonderful young men deeply committed to living as consistently as possible with what they believe to be the Biblical mandates. The pair have co-authored a book titled Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals (henceforth JfP), which I recently finished reading. Inspiring in places, their book is also informative, but as much as I admire C&H for the work they do and their determination to live out their convictions, I think their book is deeply flawed.
For C&H the ideal we should all strive for is to live pretty much like the Amish. The authors are deeply committed to pacifism, opposed to capitalism, and in favor of getting by with as little in the way of material goods as possible.
The book is published in a cut and paste format that makes it seem like the authors are trying too hard to be "edgy." Some pages have little contrast between the text and the paper which makes it very difficult for older folks to read (Does this betoken an insensitivity to old people?). In some places the type size is so small that I just gave up, but these are comparative quibbles.
My real complaint is with the content. Much of the first half of the book is a summary of the Biblical narrative, the most interesting part of which, perhaps, was their comparison of the triumphal processions of the Romans to Jesus' "triumphal" entry into Jerusalem (p.126f). I also benefited from their interpretation of Jesus' words about the gates of hell not prevailing against the church. I had always interpreted this text to mean that the forces of evil will not extinguish the church nor stop its work, but C&H put a different twist on the passage. They argue that the church is to storm hell (an unfortunate military metaphor, perhaps) and the gates of hell will not withstand the assault. I like it.
Notwithstanding such little gems, there was much more that I found uncongenial.
On page 95, for example, we find the authors oddly quoting with approval Woody Guthrie's quip that: "If Jesus preached in New York what He preached in Galilee, we'd lay Him in His grave again." I say "odd" because there are a lot of people preaching in New York pretty much what Jesus preached in Galilee, surely C&H believe they are, and no one is threatening to lay them in the grave, are they? So why recycle this quote?
The authors make a lot of other assertions for which they offer neither explanation nor support. For instance:
"[A]s we are liberated from the yoke of global capitalism our sisters and brothers in Guatemala, Liberia, Iraq and Sri Lanka will also be liberated....they, too, need to be liberated from the [American] empire's yoke of slavery (p.113), but in what sense are these people enslaved by the U.S.? The authors don't say. They, like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, are too busy getting on to the next provocation to answer questions about the last one.
C&H urge us to consider the Mosaic practices of abolition of interest, land redistribution, debt forgiveness, open borders, gleaning fields for the poor, caring for the elderly (presumably by the family), honest business practices, and helping one's enemies (p.151). Americans practice each of these (regrettably, in the case of open borders) except the first two so it's hard to see what their point is. It's hard to think them serious, moreover, when they propose the abolition of interest. How would people own a home or much of anything else were they not able to get credit, and what motivation does anyone have to loan money on credit if they cannot earn a profit from it? Even the Amish own their own homes.
They call free market capitalism a "filthy, rotten system," which Americans don't criticize because we believe it to be essential (p.153), but they never lay out a plausible alternative that would work for 300 million people. Nor do they really say why our system is filthy and rotten.
"How is it possible to support a president while also following Jesus?" they ask (p.166). "Jesus tells us to love our enemies, while the president says to kill them. Jesus admonishes us to forgive debts while the president praises capitalism and the economics of competition." We should follow the example of first century Christians, they advise, and go to the lions rather than kill our enemies.
We could spend a week's worth of posts analyzing these four sentences, but for the sake of brevity let me point out first that, as paradoxical as it sounds, killing someone is not necessarily incompatible with loving them. Second, it is only when a nation has a strong engine of wealth production that it is able to forgive debt. Largely under George Bush's leadership the U.S. has done more than any nation in history to help alleviate the economic misery of Africa, but C&H seem unaware of the fact. Third, by adjuring us to be willing to die rather than take another's life they seem to make an idol out of human life. Surely life is sacred, but suggesting that we should give our life to save that of our enemy seems to me to miss the point. The question is why we should sacrifice our children's lives rather than that of the ones who plot to murder them? Why is the murderer's life more valuable than that of our children?
They deplore that people hear proclamations from the pulpit urging us to "We will have no mercy on the evil-doers" (p.168), yet, though it may be that I don't get to enough different churches, I've never heard anything remotely like this in any church I've ever been in. Nor have I ever seen words like this attributed to any preacher with whom I am familiar. It's too bad they didn't footnote this.
Ronald Reagan defended the U.S. as a militant and unaccountable maverick in the world, they allege on page 172, but Reagan did no such thing. If anything Reagan was loath to use force around the world. When 200 Marines were killed in a bomb attack in Lebanon he pulled our troops out rather than risk a wider war and more bloodshed. C&H play off a left-wing stereotype of Reagan-as-gunslinging-cowboy that is historically unsupportable.
C&H also assert that the Puritans sought to establish a state based on power and violence (p.173), but they offer no support for this rather counterintuitive claim.
The authors hint darkly that Martin Luther King was killed by sinister forces and "not without reason" (p.179), implying an Oliver Stone caliber conspiracy, but the do no more than insinuate that the nefarious reason was that King spoke out against American "imperialism". No need to defend or explain accustaions everybody knows to be true, I guess. On the same page they criticize the U.S. for seizing lands "far and wide" as if they were taken by force from their original inhabitants. Yet their examples were Alaska (which we purchased), Puerto Rico (which is hardly "far" from the U.S.), Hawaii (which petitioned for statehood), Guam, and Guantanamo Bay (which we lease from Cuba).
They go on to fault the U.S. for selling weapons abroad (p.180) which are used to kill poor people, but it's not American weapons which are killing people in the third world. The weapons preferred by the murderous thugs around the globe, or at least most of them, are manufactured in Russia, eastern Europe, Iran, and China.
C&H repeatedly compare the U.S. to Rome and see us as the modern version of the Roman empire (see p. 182), but we have not waged a war of conquest, nor kept land taken in war, nor enslaved anyone for over a hundred and fifty years. This is not how empires behave. I would have liked for them to have fleshed out the sense in which they believe the U.S. is an empire.
As with Rome, they analogize, where war was "omnipresent, normative, nihilistically acceptable" (p.183), so too, with the U.S. This comparison, however, overlooks the fact that Rome waged war to conquer and rule. America's wars have been to defend and/or to liberate. Surely there's a significant difference.
The authors condemn our economic system for our alleged exploitation of cheap labor abroad (p.188), but they never explore the terrible predicament many foreign workers would be in if, in protest against their miserable working conditions, we were to stop buying their products. Once we boycotted their exports the penurious laborers would have no job at all. It's not the consumer who's responsible for the sad plight of the sweatshop worker, it's their own government whose economic policies stifle innovation, advancement, and wealth production.
The economic naivete of which JfP has more than a fair share is nowhere more evident than on page 189 where C&H urge us to "make poverty history" by "making affluence history." Nothing would plunge the entire earth into third world status quicker than the elimination of wealth. C&H seem to think that wealth is like air, of which there's a fixed amount and enough to go around for everyone if only some people weren't hogging it. Unfortunately, wealth is not like that. Wealth is produced by people motivated by the wish to be affluent. Take away the possibility of fulfilling that ambition and you take away the incentive to produce wealth. Take away the incentive and pretty soon everyone will be living at a subsistence level and writing books about how we could help the world's poor if only we weren't so poor ourselves.
We can't follow Jesus and buy from the master who oppresses his workers, JfP instructs (p.189), but, again, what happens to those workers in China and India when the master's business dries up because Americans following Jesus refuse to buy his merchandise? Is it following Jesus to deprive those workers of their only means of staving off starvation? C&H never seem to consider this question.
They also condemn our exploitation of migrant workers (p.190), but what is their solution? We can buy cheap tomatoes, they argue, only because the poor Honduran or Mexican laborers breaking their backs in the fields work for such a pittance. Well, yes, but these people come here to work because there are no jobs at all in their home countries. If their American employers raise their wages the price of tomatoes would also rise. More expensive tomatoes would result in fewer tomatoes being purchased and thus fewer workers would be needed to pick them. So they'd all go back home and sit around and contemplate how much better off they were picking tomatoes for peanuts.
On page 192 they make the puzzling claim that we (Americans) haven't advanced morally. I'm not sure what they're talking about, since we no longer have slavery, we're committed to equal rights for all citizens, we have a higher view of women than a century ago, we are at pains to follow just war theory both ad bellum and in bello, we are careful about degrading our natural environment, and so on. None of these things were the case in 1850 and only slavery was not the case as late as 1950. I agree with JfP that in some important respects we have indeed declined morally, but to say categorically that there has been no moral advance, as if we were still living in 1st century Rome, is to completely ignore our history.
The use of force is always wrong in the eyes of C&H, even in a place like Darfur. Saving the innocent, they argue, doesn't justify the use of violence. Peter, after all, was wrong to try to save Jesus' life with the sword. (p. 202). Well, yes, but Jesus' sacrificial death was intentional. It was for a cosmic purpose. What purpose is served by piously standing by while children are being slaughtered and enslaved by gangs of knuckledragging, doped up paramiltaries? Why is the life of a Sudanese Janjaweed more sacred than the lives of the millions of children they are systematically starving, butchering or selling into slavery?
On page 203 C&H construct for us an absolutely incoherent argument for pacifism. As near as I can make it out the attempt to kill Hitler was wrong because it failed. Not only that, but it was the fault of those who tried to kill Hitler that the Fuehrer went on to kill six million Jews. Presumably, if they hadn't attempted to assassinate him he never would have launched the holocaust. That, at least, is what the authors appear to be saying.
They also claim that violence "inevitably" ends in misery and suicide (p. 204), and as evidence they cite the cases of Judas, Nero, various school killers, and the 9/11 terrorists. This is an interesting argument. Find a half dozen examples of violent men who committed suicide and then claim that violence inevitably leads to self-destruction. This is what rhetoricians call an illicit process: Because some mass murderers kill themselves therefore suicide is the inevitable fate of all violent men.
People who resort to violence, they maintain, feel the image of God dying inside them, and this leads to despair and self-murder. But if the death of the imago dei leads one to kill oneself why then do not militant atheists have sky-high suicide rates?
The U.S. retaliation for 9/11 is blamed in JfP for the deaths of 654,965 innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq (p. 281), but not only is this number greatly inflated (see here and here) it gives the impression that these deaths were all at the hands of coalition forces when, in fact, most of them were the result of Taliban and al Qaeda terrorism.
They insist that we falsely think that we can effectively change the course of history through force (p.284), but I don't know why we should think this a false belief. The Revolutionary War certainly changed the course of history, as did the Civil War. World War II ended one of the worst tyrannies in history, and the threat of force during the cold war ended another. The war in Afghanistan brought a halt to the cruel reign of the Taliban and liberated 25 million people while the invasion of Iraq concluded the horrors Saddam Hussein and his twisted offspring had inflicted on the Iraqi people and their neighbors and liberated 25 million more of the world's wretched. All of these wars altered the subsequent history of our nation and of the world, and I would argue that the world is, on balance, a much better place because of them.
C&H plead that Jesus, who should be our example in such things, didn't take charge by force (p.285). True enough, but then Jesus didn't really take charge at all. He didn't come to take charge, he came to die. When he does finally take control of this world, if the testimony of John the Evangelist is any indication, it will indeed be by force.
On page 288 the authors endorse excommunication for Christians who have chosen to live in ways which have hurt themselves or others. Again, they fail to address the tough questions: Suppose a brother decides to be a policeman or join the military, should he be excommunicated? Suppose he manages, or just works for, a store like Wal-Mart which some believe to exploit workers overseas, should he be excommunicated? What if he works for a corporation or an industry which produces environmental pollutants, like the steel or coal industry. Or suppose he works for the gaming industry or as a restaurateur, encouraging people to spend more money than they should on entertainment and food. What then? There are no answers to questions like these in the pages of JfP.
There's much not to like about the authors' social activism as well. They boast of prevailing in a legal struggle to secure for the homeless the right to sprawl on sidewalks, sleep in public parks, and in general use public spaces as their personal latrine (p. 294). The resources spent on fighting for these rights in court, however, may have been better spent securing appropriate shelter for these sad people. Instead their actions guaranteed that the quality of life for everyone else who uses public streets and facilities would be degraded.
On page 299 they inexplicably imply that Harriet Tubman was the subject of the movie Hotel Rwanda.
Despite having condemned market capitalism throughout the book they rejoice (p. 312) in how they were able to use money that had been earned in the stock market to help an indigent friend get medical care, but they fail to see the irony of that. The best way to raise people out of poverty is to produce a society that generates wealth. Two sources of hope to which the poor cling is that someone with resources will help them or that some employer will be able to give them a job. To abjure the greatest wealth generator in the history of the world, free markets, and live like monks is to insure that neither of those hopes will ever be realized. An impoverished United States would mean that billions of poor people throughout the world would be consigned to utter hopelessness. To take one example, if everyone in this country lived like C&H suggest, how would the victims of the Indonesian tsunami have ever found relief from their misery? Who would have come to their aid? Haiti?
There's more to say about Jesus for President, but perhaps you get the picture. The book is not a well-reasoned argument for abandoning contemporary American life and embracing the simple life-style of the Amish. Rather it's 355 pages of bumper stickers - empty assertions in which we are urged to place our confidence but for which few good reasons are provided us for so doing.
RLC
Confirming rumors that had circulated during the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union, has acknowledged his Christian faith for the first time, paying a surprise visit to pray at the tomb of St Francis of Assisi.
According to the UK Telegraph Mr Gorbachev, accompanied by his daughter Irina, spent half an hour on his knees in silent prayer at the tomb.
There's more on this at the link. Word has it that Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and the rest of the New Atheist crowd, are not happy with the news.
RLC
The actor who played Sir Thomas More in the 1966 Academy Award winning film A Man for All Seasons has passed away at 86. A Man for All Seasons was about the conflict between More and Henry VIII over the king's authority over the church. It was a powerful film and Scofield was a powerful actor. It was good historical drama excellently performed. I encourage you to mark the passing of a great actor by viewing Scofield's signature performance if you get the chance.
There's an informative piece article about Scofield here.
RLC
This Good Friday offers an opportunity to reflect on Pilate's question to Jesus: What is truth? Jesus, you recall, had just told the Roman official that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth and that everyone who loves truth hears His voice.
Pilate's question is still echoing through the halls of academe today. The notion of an objective truth-for-everyone has come under unprecedented assault in the last thirty years. Many people no longer believe that there is any such thing as a truth that's true for everyone. Truth is whatever has "purchase" with you, whatever the consensus of your community believes. Your truth is not necessarily my truth and vice versa. The late Richard Rorty once remarked that truth is whatever your peers will let you get away with saying, but, as Alvin Plantinga noted, a lot of Rorty's peers didn't let him get away with saying that.
In such an intellectual ambience Jesus's claim that He is the way, the truth, and the life is revised to mean that he is a way, a truth for those who wish him to be but for those who don't he's pretty much irrelevant.
The fact is, though, that truth is not simply a matter of one's own subjectivity. If Jesus was indeed God incarnated as a man then he was so whether anyone believes it or not, and if His death on the cross on that first Good Friday was an atonement for the sins of mankind it was so whether anyone believes it was or not.
In the bewildering kaleidoscopic flux that is post-modernism the incarnation and the cross are epistemological lifelines. They're truths we can believe in and they're true for everyone.
RLC
My friend Justin sent along this wonderful video. Keep in mind as you watch it that despite any doubts you may have, these creatures evolved these marvelous abilities purely by undirected random accident. It's important to remember this lest you fall prey to those nefarious Intelligent Design people who are always trying to convince us of the silly idea that the living world, as well as the physical cosmos, is chock full of evidence of purpose and intention:
RLC
Polls show John McCain in a statistical dead heat with either of the Democrat candidates. If the election were held today it would be a tie.
The odd thing is that I have seen no mention of the impact on these numbers of the entry into the race of Ralph Nader. Nader has been getting about 5% of the vote most of which is surely being pulled away from the Democrats. If a state like Ohio or Florida is close in November and Nader gets 5% of the vote there it would swing the election to the GOP and Nader would replace Bush as the most hated man in America.
RLC
Planned Parenthood of Idaho tries to control the damage from the hoax perpetrated upon them by a UCLA student newspaper called The Advocate. It looks like there may be more audio on the way of similar calls made to PP affiliates in Ohio and several other states.
RLC
Somehow, I can't see John McCain inspiring a song like this, but who knows?
AllahPundit at Hot Air, to whom we owe thanks for pointing us to this video, says that after watching it:
I'm thinking of voting for him now, but I have this theory that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the U.S. government and "the Jew" to reestablish their hold over the white power structure and I'm not sure if I'd be welcome in the tent. Oh, I would? Oh, cool. Cool.
Whether he'd be welcome in Obama's "tent" I can't say, but with views like that he'd sure be welcome at Obama's church.
RLC
Well, this is odd. ABC is reporting that the Bush administration is trying to cover up a report released last week by the Pentagon on Iraq's ties to al Qaeda because the report says there were none. Yet if you read the Executive Summary of the report they link to it's clear that Saddam was indeed up to his jockey shorts in terrorist activity, that he was funding terrorist groups at home and abroad, and that he clearly intended to use terrorism to strike at American interests until he fled from Baghdad.
The ES does not say that there were no ties to terrorism, only that a direct connection to this particular terrorist organization, al Qaeda, was not found. Based on this flimsy platform, the New York Times performs a feat of logical acrobatics and concludes that "Oh, by the way, there was no al Qaeda link." The Times is so heavily invested in the meme that Bush had no justification for invading Iraq that it's apparently willing to make itself look stupid rather than admit they were wrong.
Absence of evidence for a direct link to al Qaeda is not proof of the non-existence of the link. But that aside, whether Saddam was in bed with terrorists who called themselves "al Qaeda" or not is completely irrelevant. The question is whether Saddam was engaged in extra-territorial terrorism, and no one, not even someone who works for the Times or ABC, can read the report and not see that he was.
If these good folks had actually taken the trouble to read the very document they link to they may have been more circumspect, even about their claims that there was no connection to al Qaeda. For instance, about al Qaeda the report says this:
Saddam and bin Laden often found a common enemy in the United States....Saddam's security organizations and bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims, at least for the short term. Considerable operational overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the regional groups involved in terrorism. Saddam provided training and motivation to revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists in the region. Osama bin Laden provided training and motivation for violent revolutionary Islamists in the region. They were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historical narrative that promised a return to a glorious past. That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean they saw themselves in that light. Nevertheless, these similarities created more than just the appearance of cooperation. (page 41, emphasis mine)
Saddam's interest in, and support for, non-Iraqi non-state actors was spread across a wide variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. For years, Saddam maintained training camps for foreign "fighters" drawn from these diverse groups. In some cases, particularly for Palestinians, Saddam was also a strong financial supporter. Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives. (page 42, emphasis mine)
Some aspects of the indirect cooperation between Saddam's regional terror enterprise and al Qaeda's more global one are somewhat analogous to the Cali and Medellin drug cartels. Both drug cartels (actually loose collections of families and criminal gangs) were serious national security concerns to the United States. Both cartels competed for a share of the illegal drug market. However, neither cartel was reluctant to cooperate with the other when it came to the pursuit of a common objective - expanding and facilitating their illicit trade. (page 43, emphasis mine)
The report is titled Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, and it's chock full of information about Saddam's use of, and ties to, terrorism, both internal and international. To suggest, as some in the media evidently want to do, that unless it can be proven that the terrorists actually called themselves al Qaeda they don't really count as terrorists is unbecoming anyone with more than a third grade education.
RLC
Barack Obama tried yesterday to dissociate himself from his pastor's hateful remarks without dissociating himself from his pastor. In many ways his speech was outstanding, but in the end it seems as if he's extending Pastor Wright a grace that he withholds from others. When asked a year ago about what should happen to Don Imus for the remarks he made about the Rutgers women basketball players that subsequently got him into so much trouble, he makes it clear that he thinks Imus should should be fired:
Ultimately, Senator Obama failed in his speech to do what he was trying to do, which is to somehow help us understand why he continued for twenty years to sit at the feet of a man filled with anger, bitterness, and racism. To explain that there are residual bad feelings prevalent among blacks of Wright's generation seemed somewhat beside the point and unhelpful. There was nothing stopping Obama from seeking out a church pastored by someone whose views were more in line with his own. Besides, those parishioners in the pews who were enthusiastically applauding Wright's nonsense were not septuagenarians.
There seem to be two Obamas. There's the Obama who wanted to punish Imus for his offensive racial remarks and there's the Obama who wants us to understand Pastor Wright. There's the Obama who wants to transcend race and there's the Obama who takes his children to hear the ravings of a race hater.
Perhaps as time goes on it'll become a little easier to discern exactly who the real Obama is. Meanwhile, the media have chosen to ignore the obvious conflict of church and state they're so vexed about when conservative pastors preach politics. Nor are they asking themselves what their reaction would be were a Republican candidate associated so intimately with a pastor like, say, the execrable Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, whose parishioners picket funerals of slain servicemen to emphasize Phelps' belief that their deaths are God's judgment for our tolerance of homosexuality.
The most eloquent speech since Demosthenes wouldn't save a GOP candidate from the media whipping post if the candidate had shown such poor judgment as to associate with Phelps, or even with the relatively innocuous Pat Robertson.
RLC
The Daily Kos is a major liberal web log, perhaps the biggest blog in the country in terms of traffic. Thus we can learn much about the liberal mind set as well as the Democratic party, which is strongly influenced by the Kos site, from what is posted there. What we find is often not very pretty. One of the diarists recently posted a piece in which he argues that America is no longer a compassionate nation and that what we need is to be invaded and occupied, to have our children slaughtered, and then maybe we'll wake up.
You might think that this was taken from a left-wing version of a Three Stooges script, but you can check it out yourself. This is the sort of thing many in the mainstream left believe:
As a nation the United States no longer has the remotest idea about what it really feels like to be part of a war zone. Americans have lost the empathy that is necessary to make an informed, meaningful, compassionate decision about whether or not war should be waged. While candidates fight over who has the required experience to properly oversee our republic's international interests, none realize that none of them have ever felt what it is like to have war waged in their neighborhood and occupied by intruders. While they may claim to know when to wage wars and to know the horrors of war, they only know them intellectually. They can't claim that they have emotionally felt them. No one who was born and raised in the United States can claim that and none can really feel it. We have allowed a Congress and an administration to encourage hate and to hi-jack our compassion. In fact, as a nation we have lost our compassion.
Unfortunately, America is at a point that to be able to really feel again, to regain that compassion, it needs to be invaded and occupied in the same way that we have invaded and occupied Iraq. Then there might be a greater chance that Americans will be more reluctant to accept the invasion of another country. Maybe seeing and feeling the same level of destruction that we have inflicted on Iraq, at least the American public will understand why invading another country is unconscionable except in the most dire circumstances - which means after that country has directly attacked the United States. And that has not happened since World War II.
Talk about a lack of compassion. Unfortunately, compassion isn't the only thing this guy lacks. Reading this does help us, though, to understand how Barack Obama could sit under the tutelage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright for twenty years. To a man of the left, like Obama, Wright probably sounded pretty moderate.
Maybe somebody should invite the Kos diarist, and Rev. Wright, for that matter, to read this piece by lefty rocker Bob Geldof. It'd teach them something about American compassion.
RLC
The Easter season seems a good time to note that courses in comparative religions sometimes go an entire semester without pointing out the essential difference between Christianity and all the other belief systems on offer. This video does it in three minutes:
Too bad one of the passersby wasn't an atheistic materialist. It would have been interesting to hear what he would have to say to the man in trapped man. Perhaps it would've been something like: "Sorry you're trapped, but life's tough and there's really no hope. Good luck."
RLC
"Today the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the most significant gun-rights case of our lifetime," writes the Washington Times. The Times goes on to say that:
District of Columbia vs. Heller promises to settle the constitutionality of the District's handgun ban and others like it, laws which we've long considered to be unduly restrictive. Here are the 27 words of the oft-interpreted, and oft-misinterpreted, Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
The editorial concludes with these words:
In practical terms, it is a signal injustice that the District of Columbia has deprived law-abiding citizens of gun rights as the drug wars raged and as violence escalated before, during and after the D.C. gun ban's imposition.
D.C. residents should resist the more fevered predictions of mayhem in the event that District law is overturned. The court is not ruling on the wisdom of background checks, the prohibition of arms possession by dangerous persons or restrictions on certain very dangerous types of arms. The court would merely be ruling that a municipality may not strip its law-abiding citizens of an inalienable right. Since 1976, this law also has served to deprive those citizens of appreciable means of self defense while murderers and other criminals simply disobey. The Supreme Court must step in to protect their rights.
I'm not sure when the decision will be handed down but it will surely be front page news when it is.
RLC
A former student taking a grad course in Old Testament ethics asks this question (slightly edited):
What do you think about the idea of non-conflicting absolutes? With regards to moral laws, for example, do you think it is correct to claim that there are moral absolutes that never conflict? Do you think there may be exceptions intrinsic to the absolute, which allow for a "non conflicting scenario" to take place...?
Here's my reply:
Good questions, Jeremy. No, I don't think moral absolutes never conflict. Nor do I think there are exceptions to an absolute. Absolutes may certainly be in conflict with each other, and if there were exceptions to them they wouldn't be absolutes.
In my view there are only two moral absolutes (unless we count our duty to love God with our whole self as a moral absolute): Do justice and do compassion. These two could be conflated into a single absolute as Jesus does in Matthew 22:39, i.e. Love others, but for the sake of this discussion I think we are commanded to always do what is just and do what is compassionate. These may sometimes conflict, however, and that creates a tension. For example in the matter of war, criminal punishment, or even disciplining a child, it may be that the demands of justice and the command of compassion seem to tug us in opposite directions.
It's part of our responsibility as free and thinking Christians to find in any situation the best balance between the two. It's as if they sometimes reside at either end of a see-saw and we need to find the center of gravity at which point they're in balance. Thus, in a particular situation we may have to punish to satisfy justice, but our punishment should be tempered with compassion. We should not punish someone who tortured someone to death by doing the same thing to him. Whether the fulcrum is closer to the justice end of the see-saw or the compassion end may depend upon the details of the case.
It's a consequence of living in a fallen world that moral decisions are often not as neat and clear as we'd like them to be. There are situations in life where we have no specific rules to guide us, only the principles of compassion and justice. In those situations we must decide what to do, it is our existential burden, but our decisions must be informed by those two absolute principles and a desire to maximize both to the extent possible.
RLC
David Paul Kuhn has an interesting piece at Politico.com on public perception of the surge:
American public support for the military effort in Iraq has reached a high point unseen since the summer of 2006, a development that promises to reshape the political landscape.
According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans - a slim majority - now believe "the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals" in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.
The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going "very well" or "fairly well" is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.
Views of the war in Iraq have long varied depending upon party affiliation, unlike during the Vietnam War. Although even Democratic discontent has ebbed for the first time in more than a year - 29 percent now support keeping troops in, an increase of 8 percentage points since last summer - foreign policy advisers to both candidates dispute the idea that Democrats are in the unenviable position of disagreeing with the majority of Americans over whether the war in Iraq can succeed.
There's more on this at the Politico link.
The trend lines here explain why the media has suddenly lost its voice on Iraq and why the war has almost ceased to be an issue for Democrats. The poll results are certainly good news for Republicans, especially John McCain who was an early advocate of the surge and has been a steady supporter in the Senate of the need to win both militarily and politically in Iraq.
We have argued in the past that to yield to the Democrats' call for withdrawal would be a calamty for the region, the U.S. and the whole world. Any candidate for president who says he or she would pullout of Iraq before the country has been secured demonstrates a myopia that ipso facto disqualifies him or her from the office. We give our reasons here.
RLC