Religion is Science

The atheist philosopher of science Daniel Dennett was interviewed in Science and Spirit and along the way uttered this remarkable claim:

There are no factual assertions that religion can reasonably claim as its own, off limits to science. Many who readily grant this have not considered its implications. It means, for instance, that there are no factual assertions about the origin of the universe or its future trajectory, or about historical events (floods, the parting of seas, burning bushes, etc.), about the goal or purpose of life, or about the existence of an afterlife and so on, that are off limits to science. After all, assertions about the purpose or function of organs, the lack of purpose or function of, say, pebbles or galaxies, and assertions about the physical impossibility of psychokinesis, clairvoyance, poltergeists, trance channeling, etc. are all within the purview of science.

I say this is remarkable because it completely undercuts the rational for excluding intelligent design from the science classroom. If ID is, as its critics insist, a religious theory, and if, as Dennett says, all religious claims are ultimately matters which science can investigate and assess, then why would ID not be appropriate in a science classroom? If religion just is science then what's the problem?

Richard Dawkins, another adamantine atheist, makes a claim similar to this - but even more strongly worded - in The God Delusion. So, will Dennett and Dawkins be called upon to testify for the ID side the next time there's a prominent court case over teaching ID in schools? If so, will they stick to their guns or will they start backpedaling like an NFL defensive back as soon as they realize the harm they're doing to the materialist cause is causing their comrades in the cause to grow furious with them?

Dennett certainly proves his point that people who accept the claim that religious assertions are within the purview of science don't consider its implications. He and Dawkins are exhibit A.

RLC

Finger Pointing

There's lots of finger pointing going on as to who should shoulder the blame for the mismanagement of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Bros., AIG and other failing finacial institutions. The Obama campaign instinctively faults the policies of George Bush and John McCain for the debacle that has rocked Wall Street this week and last, but their indictment is rich in hypocrisy which I will explain below.

Meanwhile, Jim Wallis of Sojourners tends to agree that there's something wrong with the prevailing ethos in Washington:

In the search for blame, some say greed and some say deregulation. Both are right. The financial collapse of Wall Street is the fiscal consequence of the economic philosophy that now governs America - that markets are always good and government is always bad. But it is also the moral consequence of greed, where private profit prevails over the concept of the common good. The American economy is often rooted in unbridled materialism, a culture that continues to extol greed, a false standard of values that puts short-term profits over societal health, and a distorted calculus that measures human worth by personal income instead of character, integrity, and generosity.

Wallis is right, I think, as far as he goes, but it's not the whole story. If we're looking for villains we should examine the political prostitutes who were in bed with the corporate CEOs throughout the last twenty years. Turning our gaze toward Washington we discover an interesting irony in Senator Obama's indictments of Bush/McCain:

In 2003 George Bush requested that Congress act to reign in Freddie and Fannie, but he was resisted by Barney Frank and other Democrats who insisted there was no crisis and that Bush's request would stifle home loans to poor people and minorities. Congress did nothing, partly, at least, because the financial giants were flooding Capitol Hill with cash through their lobbyists.

Two years later John McCain co-sponsored legislation that would impose regulations on Freddie, Fannie and other mortgage institutions that would force them to do a better job of bookkeeping, make them more accountable and tighten up their lending practices. McCain predicted in 2006 exactly what came to pass these past weeks, but the legislation he endorsed died in committee. The committee was chaired by Democrat senator Christopher Dodd.

The lenders didn't want to be regulated, and they had bought influence in Washington with millions of dollars of campaign contributions. Records show that Senator Dodd ranked first among over 300 recipients of such contributions, receiving over $165,000 from the lobbyists over twenty years. John Kerry was third. Barack Obama, the man who criticizes John McCain for not doing anything to prevent the collapse, managed to be second, having collected over $123,000 from the lobbyists, even though he had only been receiving these emoluments for just three years.

What's more, the former CEOs of both Freddie and Fannie, men who had made millions while their companies hurtled toward collapse, have both served as economic advisors on Obama's campaign team. Whoever Senator Obama has in mind when he promises us change from the old ways of doing business in Washington, he's not thinking of himself. No one is more wedded to cronyism and big dollar politics than is Barack Obama.

Here's John Gibson's report on this sordid tale:

For more see Hot Air.

RLC

RRAD

A couple of years ago we gave out Dreyfus awards here at Viewpoint to people who, like Inspector Dreyfus in the Pink Panther series, seemed to have been driven mad by their profound hatred for Inspector Clouseau, i.e. George Bush.

Maybe we should start giving another award which we could title something like, the Randi Rhodes Award for Despicability, or something. There would be no shortage of material, that's for sure. In addition to all the distortions, sleaze and rumors about Sarah Palin we were treated to over the past two weeks there's lots else.

Here's an example: A professional photographer named Jill Greenberg was hired by The Atlantic to get some pictures of John McCain. She deliberately set him up to make him look as devilish as possible and then bragged about it on her blog. Not only is she unembarrassed by her complete lack of professionalism and ethics, she seems to think that her behavior is somehow noble and important.

Is there something in the water these people drink that makes them this way? Michelle Malkin gives a number of additional examples of the kind of deranged behavior that's come to be so common on the left, and she has more on Jill Greenberg here.

RLC

Why People Vote Republican

Jonathan Haidt, who identifies himself as a liberal and an atheist, says many interesting things in an essay at Edge titled What Makes People Vote Republican?, but in the end his discussion leaves unanswered a fundamental question that is implicitly raised in his article.

It's hard to summarize his essay because it covers a lot of ground, but essentially he says that there are five domains of moral experience about which people feel strongly. He labels these harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. In other words, people have moral concerns that arise out of behaviors which can either harm others or which are somehow unfair, or disloyal, disrespectful, or unchaste.

Liberals, he maintains, are concerned only with the first two of these and are actually disdainful of the last three, whereas most Americans care about all five. Thus liberals are seen by most people in this country as out-of-touch elitists. He urges his fellow liberal Democrats to recover at least the language of the last three.

But herein lies the problem. Morality itself, whether we're talking about "justice, rights, and welfare", the moral sphere of most concern to liberals, or the wider sphere which encompasses, in addition, patriotism to one's country, family, sexuality, etc., is contingent upon there being a personal transcendent moral authority. Without such an authority to obligate us to follow certain prescriptions there is no moral obligation at all. In other words, in order to sound genuinely interested in the moral realm liberals have to acknowledge that the foundation of secular exclusivism upon which they have tried to stand is crumbling under the weight. Without God there is no morality, no good or bad, no right or wrong. There are just things that people do that other people either like or dislike.

This is what conservative people tend to see, or at least intuit, and to which liberals are largely blind. Liberals talk about justice and human rights on the one hand while, often, minimizing the need to ground these in a God who made us in His image and whose property, to use a Lockean term, we are. Their moral pronouncements thus seem to float like balloons in metaphysical air, anchored to nothing.

Haidt seems to recognize this at several points throughout his essay but, being an atheist, he shies away from drawing the proper conclusion. In the end he winds up calling for Democrats to embrace the larger moral vision of conservatives but gives them no real reason to do so other than political expediency. Such a prescription can only be seen as hypocritical by the people he's trying to win over.

He concludes with these words:

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.

Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three ... foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

The article is a little long but worth the time to read.

RLC

The Multiverse's Appeal

George Johnson in The New York Times reviews a book by physicist Leonard Susskind who is a strong advocate of the idea that there are a near infinite number of mini-universes in our universe, like bubbles in a bubble bath. According to Johnson this theory is appealing. Here's what he says:

Three years ago in "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design," Leonard Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, spun a tale of a multitude of different universes - nooks and crannies of a transcendent multiverse, or "landscape," each ruled by a different physics. This is probably the most controversial interpretation of superstring theory (some of Susskind's colleagues absolutely hate the idea), but it has its appeal. With so many universes out there, the fact of our own existence need not inspire worship and awe. We just happen to occupy one of the niches where the laws are favorable to carbon-based life.

Notice in what the attraction of this theory consists for Johnson. It's not that it is empirically verifiable or that it explains the data or that it is aesthetically elegant. No. For Johnson and others the appeal of the multiverse is that it allows us an out, an escape, from the conclusion that our world is so incredibly organized that it all but screams for an explanation grounded in an intelligent engineer.

According to Johnson, if a world representing every possible physics exists then a world with our physics must exist, and we shouldn't be astonished by its extraordinary fine-tuning and precision. Nor need we conclude that an intelligent designer created it. Johnson is doing metaphysics and calling it science. The multiverse is appealing not because the science confirms it but because it allows us to side-step the conclusion that there's a God.

Susskind himself once said that the only two alternatives are an infinite number of universes or a designer deity. The idea of a deity is presumably philosophically unpalatable so he opts for the multiverse, and Johnson, who also finds a deity philosophically unacceptable, follows along.

But this idea that we are justified as scientists in embracing the theory of the multiverse because it's metaphysically useful raises a host of questions: Why would a scientist, qua scientist, want to avoid the conclusion that there's something more to the universe, an intelligence, that science has been unable to discern so far? Why should a scientist, qua scientist, be invested in the answer to the question of what is ultimately real anyway? Isn't that outside the scientific purview? Shouldn't questions about the cause and structure of the universe be settled, for scientists, at least, on empirical grounds rather than metaphysical flights of fancy?

Philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote that any rule of thought that would prevent me from finding a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule. The rule of thought that says that any explanation of ultimate reality must be a naturalistic explanation - which is the rule embraced by many scientists - would prevent us from concluding that God is really the ground of creation even if God really is that ground. According to James, then, it's irrational to accept the multiverse simply because it's the only alternative to transgressing the bias among many scientists against explanations which invoke intelligent causation.

RLC

Gibson's Gaffe

I guess this is getting to be old news, but Charles Krauthammer lays the wood to Charlie Gibson for his disdainful and supercilious treatment of Sarah Palin when she seemed not to know what the Bush Doctrine is during his interview with her for ABC. It turns out that Gibson, for all his haughty condescension, didn't know what the doctrine is either.

Krauthammer concludes with this biting observation:

Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn't pretend to know -- while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and "sounding like an impatient teacher," as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes' reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

Read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

Who Am I?

Here's an interesting question which has popped up in my e-mail box:

Who Am I?

I am under 45 years old, I love the outdoors, I hunt, I am a Republican reformer, I have taken on the Republican Party establishment, I have a number of children, I have a spot on the national ticket as vice president with less than two years in the governor's office.

The answer: Teddy Roosevelt (1900) whose visage graces Mt. Rushmore today.

RLC

Voter IQ

Before and after the 2004 election there were a lot of snarky comments made about the intelligence and sophistication of people who would vote for George W. Bush. Bush, we were frequently told, was an imbecile, and we had to be imbeciles to vote for him. The insults flew so fast and furiously that if one didn't stop to think about them they might have almost believed them to be true.

But of course they weren't. It wasn't Republican voters, after all, who couldn't figure out how to use a ballot in the Florida election of 2000. Nor is it Republicans who are absolutely dependent upon the least well-educated members of our society for their success.

Nor is Bush the dolt his opponents like to portray him as. Not only did he surpass the relatively modest academic achievements of John Kerry at Yale, but also it turns out that the president is a voracious reader who reads over a hundred books a year. Nor is the stuff he reads just fluff as Steven Hayward notes at No Left Turns. Hayward quotes John Lewis Gaddis:

So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they've appeared, and I'm hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I've found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn't read the latest book on Lincoln, or on-as Bush refers to him-the "first George W." I've even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.

"Well, so Bush reads history", one might reasonably observe at this point. "Isn't it more important to find out how he uses it?" It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested-as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time-in how the past can provide guidance for the future.

Anyway, the calumnies against the intelligence of Republican voters really is a joke. The Democrats, even as I write, are feverishly at work trying to enlist young people as well as the poor and marginalized, groups not noted for their close following of political matters, in the service of Barack Obama. In other words, the Democrats realize that unless they can get a lot of people voting for them who have no idea what they're voting for, they don't have a chance.

RLC

Superstition

An article on superstition in New Scientist has a quote from Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany.

Forstmeier argues that by linking cause and effect - often falsely - science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition. "You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant," he says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, "quite a lot of scientists tend to be ignorant quite often," he says.

I don't know if Forstmeier had Darwinists in mind, but it sure sounds as if he did.

RLC

On Creation

Having read the latest attack on Sarah Palin regarding what she believes as it pertains to the Creation, I have grown weary of the Liberal, anti-religious, anti-creationist body of individuals who actually have no understanding of what the Bible has to say regarding the Creation of all things yet they behave as scholarly and intellectual elite who feel compelled in the name of all that they think to be right and true to assault and degrade those who believe differently than they.

Bible-believing people are not evil and represent no threat to anyone except, perhaps, to those who are truly lost just as Jesus was a threat to the truly-lost Pharisee of His day. Indeed, He threatened their status quo to such a degree that they crucified Him.

To this end, I have added a page to Viewpoint that can be accessed via the "Creation" link at the left of this page under Hall of Fame. Perhaps Ms. Palin will find something of value here also.

Sex and Commitment

With the news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy her mother's advocacy of abstinence education has come under some scrutiny.

Those who oppose abstinence-only education make the argument that kids are going to engage in sexual behavior no matter what they're told so we should give them the means to prevent being "punished with a baby", to use Barack Obama's infelicitous phrase.

This argument seems a little like telling youngsters that they shouldn't shoplift, but since a lot of kids are going to do it anyway, we should give them a coat with deep pockets so they're less likely to get caught. Or they shouldn't speed, but since they're going to do it anyway we should give them a radar detector so they don't get punished with a ticket.

To say that something is wrong, but that as parents and schools we're going to help facilitate the doing of it, is to send our kids a pretty confusing message.

The surest way not to get arrested for shop-lifting is to refrain from shop-lifting. The surest way to not lose your license for speeding is to not speed. The surest way to not get pregnant is to not have sex.

There's a tacit assumption at work among those who say that we should face the reality and acknowledge that kids will have sex anyway and that we should therefore give them the means to protect against pregnancy. That assumption is that there's nothing wrong with sex outside of marriage except that an unwanted pregnancy might result.

I think that assumption is simply wrong. When we decouple sex from commitment, when we make sex a form of recreation, a number of harmful effects follow. Surely, the morally desperate condition of contemporary society is prima facie evidence that somewhere along the line we've gone terribly wrong with regard to our thinking about sexuality.

Mary Eberstadt at First Things writes compellingly that we are reaping the bitter fruit of our divorce of sex from procreation. I don't know about that, but certainly separating sex from commitment, particularly marital commitment, has been a disaster. It has resulted in a long litany of social problems and dysfunctions - everything from rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, a million and a half abortions a year, the objectification of women, marital infidelity, spouse abuse, illegitimacy, child sexual abuse, STDs, broken homes, shattered lives, and the general sleazification of our culture.

Many social problems that seem superficially unrelated to sex are, in fact, the consequence of a sexually permissive culture. Crime and academic failure, for example, are much more common among fatherless young men, but many children are fatherless because men are no longer required to commit themselves to a woman in order to have sexual access to her.

When sex is isolated from profound commitment people tend to lose respect for each other, their relationship changes, they often find themselves quarreling more frequently, trust between them diminishes, and if and when the relationship ends, one person, often the girl, feels used and embittered. I think it was C.S. Lewis who wrote that the question, "Will you still respect me in the morning?" has become a cliché because the concern is so real.

We call it "making love", but sex apart from commitment is rarely about love despite what the participants tell themselves and each other. The harmful consequences are far-reaching, both emotionally and physically, and the rewards, such as they are, are ephemeral and uncertain.

To think that the only hazard of a physical relationship with someone to whom there is no commitment is an unintended pregnancy is, in my opinion, terribly naive.

RLC

Al Qaeda Admits Defeat

Captured documents reveal a level of deep despair among members of al Qaeda in Iraq. The report at Long War Journal reveals a lot of internal dissension and many al Qaeda leaders have given up hope of prevailing against the coalition.

Perhaps we should forward this report to Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader of the senate, who famously pronounced at the outset of the surge that we had already lost the war.

By the way - I read in last night's paper that 2008 has been the worst year for our military in terms of casualties in Afghanistan, and I wondered: Can anyone remember reading anything in the papers or seeing anything on television about the war in Afghanistan that was not about our troops being killed or our people killing innocent civilians? One might think, for all the media tells us about that theater, that the only thing that's happening there is that our troops are taking terrible losses and the only casualties we're inflicting are on women and children.

It's not unlike the template the media followed in Iraq. As long as there were a lot of casualties among our forces and Iraqi civilians we heard about Iraq day and night. Then when the country began to be pacified, Iraq just about disappeared from the news altogether. A year ago it bade fair to be the dominant issue in this year's presidential election, but since we're succeeding no one seems to want to talk about it.

Harry Reid certainly isn't saying much.

RLC

Jason Bourne Needs to Know

Anika Smith at Evolution News and Views has a little fun with actor Matt Damon over Damon's semi-coherent criticism of Sarah Palin's views on how long ago dinosaurs roamed the earth:

You may have seen the video of Matt Damon attacking Sarah Palin because he doesn't know anything about her (his words, not mine). It's like he read a bad Maureen Dowd column and regurgitated the unfunny parts - that is, the whole thing.

The best comment, and the most relevant to our readers, Damon makes at the end:

"I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago. That's an important - I want to know that, I really do, because she's going to have the nuclear codes. You know, I want to know if she thinks dinosaurs were here 4000 years ago... we can't, we can't have that."

Whatever Damon's command of English might be, he's clearly completely ignorant of the issue at hand. Of course, I don't know much about Matt Damon, which frightens me, actually. I need to know if Matt really thinks random mutation acting on natural selection is capable of accounting for the complexity of life and the universe. That's an important - I want to know that, I really do, because he's going to be making million dollar block buster films I'm probably going to be watching. You know, I want to know if he thinks Darwinian evolution can explain that. Because, you know, we can't have such dogmatic, blind adherence to outdated modes of thinking in such a vocal world leader, we can't have that.

For my part I wonder what the age of dinosaurs has to do with having access to nuclear weapons. I'm sure there's a connection or else someone of Mr. Damon's stature would not think it so important, but I'll be darned if I can figure out what it is.

RLC

With Friends Like These ...

Some on the left seem determined to remind people every chance they get that nothing is beneath them. Here's Randi Rhodes from Air America, the liberal talk radio network, on yesterday's show:

Why do they say these things? How does Randi Rhodes know what Sarah Palin is like? Why does she have to imply that she's a child molester, for heaven's sake?

One reason is that they know they can't fight on the battlefield of issues because they don't have any. Obama has moved so close to McCain that there's really not much difference between them on most of the issues that catapulted him to the nomination. Nor can they keep up the pretense of "change" because Obama has pretty much abandoned that rhetoric and symbolized his apostasy by naming a veteran Washingtonian as his running mate. Whatever Biden represents it's not change.

So instead we get remarks like that made by Sue Fowler, chair of the South Carolina Democrat party and wife of Don Fowler who rejoiced that Hurricane Gustav was coming and would interrupt the GOP convention. Mr. Fowler's better half opined that Sarah Palin's "only qualification for the vice-presidency is that she hasn't had an abortion".

Or we get the inane line, repeated by a gaggle of Democrats, that Barack Obama is like Jesus because Jesus was a community organizer and that Sarah Palin is like Pontius Pilate because Pilate was a governor. Third graders would find this sort of thing too stupid to employ on the playground, but desperation will evidently lead some people to throw away their dignity and say things like this.

Earlier it was smears against her family and gross distortions of her religious beliefs, her prayer about Iraq, and her views on creationism. It just makes you shake your head in dismay at the depths to which some people will sink.

Ed Morrissey reminds us that:

Rhodes recently offered the novel claim that John McCain got treated like a "prince" by his captors in North Vietnam. Apparently her separation from reality has accelerated with this piece of character assassination. There's really no other term for it; she accuses Palin of being at least a latent child molester.

Even apart from that despicable accusation, the rest of Rhodes' argument sounds strangely like projection. What does Rhodes herself do for a living? She "opines about everything from politics to lawn care". Rhodes also acts as though she "knows it all", including Palin's sexual proclivities. If Rhodes finds opinion from strong women so offensive, maybe she should find another line of work. After this bit of lunacy, perhaps her employer should expedite that change.

Barack Obama seems to me to be a fine and decent, if woefully misguided, man, but some of his supporters on the left make one wonder what's happened to their decency. I'm sure he's embarrassed by them.

RLC

Will He Stay or Will He Go?

There's lots of talk around the web about Senator Obama probably regretting his decision to put fellow senator Joe Biden on the ticket rather than Hillary Clinton. I think Obama did the right thing in not picking Senator Clinton, but like most others, I didn't foresee either McCain's selection of Governor Palin or the wildly popular pick she would prove to be. Obama was in a tough spot. Naming Hillary as his VP probably would have guaranteed him the election, but it would have, I think, destroyed his presidency. In the event, he passed on her, McCain picked Sarah Palin, and Obama hasn't been the same since.

Nevertheless, what's done is not necessarily what has to remain done. Biden dropped a bit of a hint this week that he might not be long for the race when he said that Senator Clinton would have probably been a better pick than he was. If Barack Obama really wants to neutralize the Palin factor he could arrange for Biden to drop off the ticket and ask Senator Clinton to join him as his VP. I'm sure he doesn't want to do that, but if the poll numbers continue to drop and, perhaps worse, if Congressional polls also show the Dems at risk of losing the House of Representatives, which they now are, I would not be surprised to see Biden go and Hillary graciously assent to serving as Obama's loyal right hand.

There is precedent. George McGovern's choice of VP, Thomas Eagleton, dropped out of the race in 1972 when it became public that he had been treated for depression, and he was replaced by Sargent Shriver. More recently, Robert Torricelli withdrew from the New Jersey senate race of 2002 when it became apparent that he would lose, and he was replaced by popular retired senator Frank Lautenberg who won and who's still in the senate today.

There will be more twists to this fascinating election before it's over, I think.

RLC

The Palin Interview

Tim e-mails me from Penn State with a couple of questions about the ABC news interview of Sarah Palin by Charles Gibson and asks for my thoughts. He writes:

It's difficult to blame her for looking uncomfortable in the face of Gibson's questioning, but I felt the interview highlighted her utter lack of foreign policy experience. She said she's never met a foreign leader and that she's traveled very little outside of the United States. She said Alaska's proximity to Russia gives her insight into the current situation in Georgia. More troubling was the fact that she'd never heard of the Bush Doctrine, which could very well become a central part of our next president's foreign policy, given our current relationship with the Islamic world.

Just a few weeks ago Republicans were saying a lack of experience is a fatal flaw. Why the sudden turnaround?

Three times Palin refused to answer whether our troops should cross the Pakistani border without approval from their government. She talked her way around the question and never gave a straight answer. Her lack of decisiveness was disturbing. Is this what we want from a woman who could soon become our next leader in the war on terror?

A vice presidential pick is not simply a political weapon used to "energize" a voting bloc. A vice president should be able to step in at a moment's notice as leader of the United States. Do you believe she's ready?

Here's the crux of my reply edited somewhat:

Good to hear from you and to read your thoughts on the Palin interview. You asked at the end if I thought Palin had enough foreign policy experience to be ready. I think the best way to answer that is to say that I think she's at least as ready as Senator Obama. Until he won his party's nomination he had no foreign policy (FP) experience either, and all that he's gotten since then came on his recent trip during which he met with several foreign leaders. I think that to the extent that a lack of FP experience is problematic it's much more problematic for the head of the ticket than for the veep.

Having said that, though, I'm not real impressed by the FP qualification. Unless they have first served as a vice-president most people who become president have very little FP experience until they get to the White House. They have usually been governors, and governors don't deal with FP. Nor do most senators. Probably the only two presidents since the 1930s who had any real prior FP experience before becoming Commander-in-Chief were Eisenhower, who was our commander in Europe during WWII, perhaps Nixon who was Ike's VP, and the first Bush who was head of the CIA for a while and a vice-president. Truman and LBJ were vice-presidents but neither had much FP responsibility in that role. FDR, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and the current Bush were all governors. JFK was a senator.

So I don't hold a lack of that particular kind of experience against either Obama or Palin.

Nor am I troubled that Palin didn't know what Gibson meant by the Bush doctrine (BD). It was a "gotcha" question that her opponents will make a lot of hay over but which is really kind of silly. For one reason, the BD is not a formal doctrine but a name given by the media to a set of policies. As such it has gone through a number of revisions in the last eight years, and what Gibson said the doctrine is is not the whole story. In its current incarnation, the "doctrine" is the policy of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. Gibson said that it was the policy of preemptive war, but actually it's both of those, and Palin should be given some slack for not knowing exactly what he meant or how to respond to his question.

As for the Pakistan question, she was wise not to give a definite answer. That was another rhetorical trap that Gibson had laid for her. If she said we should not go into Pakistan then her answer would be used to discredit both Bush and McCain since we are, in fact, sending troops surreptitiously across the border, and McCain, I think, supports that (So does Obama, btw). If she had said that we should go in then she would be criticized for embarrassing our "allies" in Islamabad who must keep up the pretense, for domestic reasons, of being outraged that their territorial sovereignty is being violated by American incursions. By answering Gibson's question she would have either embarrassed the administration and her patron, Senator McCain, or she would have committed a diplomatic blunder.

Either way the question was a "no-win" and she was smart not to answer it.

At any rate, now we can look forward to Gibson's interview with Joe Biden and the snares he has set for him. Or maybe not.

RLC

Let's Mock McCain's Disability

From the same campaign that gave us Senator Joe Biden urging a wheel-chair bound state legislator to stand up and take a bow, we have this ad mocking John McCain because he doesn't use e-mail.

What the ad doesn't tell us is the reason Senator McCain doesn't use the computer. The torture he suffered as a POW has disabled his arms such that he can not comfortably use a keyboard. So, if he doesn't have to, why should he?

Nice ad, fellas. Next time get someone older than fourteen to write your script.

Jonah Goldberg wonders what's next. It's a good thing New York governor David Patterson isn't a Republican or else we'd be getting ads about the outrage of having a blind man who doesn't know how to drive a car serving as governor. After all, Goldberg says, transportation issues are pretty important. How dare he serve as governor while being ignorant of what it's like to navigate New York's highways.

RLC

Large Hadron Collider

No doubt you've heard that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went on line this week in Switzerland. Scientists are hoping that the giant particle accelerator will allow them to smash protons into each other at such high energies that they will gain deeper insight into the composition and origin of the universe. You may not understand exactly what it's all about, but Kate McAlpine is here to help you with the physics of the LHC with this smash tutorial:

Actually you may not understand any more after watching the video than you did before, but you probably enjoyed the experience of not really learning anything. There's some background on McAlpine and the video here.

RLC

Fear and Trembling at the DNC

Jason sends along an essay from the Politico which reveals a growing discontent in the Democratic party. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party's most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall.

A former top strategist for past Democratic presidential campaigns ... said that: "Obama is struggling with working-class whites just like John Kerry, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis did, and Walter Mondale. He's struggling with voters in the border-state South. And he's struggling with an enormous wind at his back, a hatred for George Bush and a mainstream media that is little short of a chorus for his campaign."

If McCain wins in November the police may have to close every bridge in the country to prevent Democrats from jumping from them.

RLC

Stain on the Presidency

I have occasionally argued on Viewpoint that George Bush might well be regarded by history as an outstanding president. I still believe this, but I do not think Bush's presidency has been uniformly praiseworthy. His temporizing on illegal immigration, for example, has been a major disappointment, as has his fiscal profligacy.

There is, in addition, an ugly stain on both his presidency and his personal character represented by the case of border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

Ramos and Compean encountered a Mexican drug smuggler named Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, trying to move over 700 pounds of narcotics into Texas. The agents tried to apprehend Aldrete-Davila who ran. When they ordered him to stop, he turned as if to fire a weapon. The officers shot, and one bullet hit the smuggler in the buttock. He managed to flee across the border, and the federal prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, went to Mexico and offered him immunity for his testimony against the agents. On this man's word, the border agents were convicted by a federal jury on charges that included assault with a dangerous weapon, lying about the incident and violating the alleged smuggler's Fourth Amendment right to be protected against illegal search and seizure.

Ramos and Compean were offered a plea bargain which would have put them in jail for six months, but they would have had to admit guilt and lose their jobs. They didn't believe they were guilty of anything serious so they declined the offer. The vindictive, narrow-minded, mean-spirited Sutton came down on them hard. He invoked a law that makes using a firearm during the commission of a crime punishable by a mandatory ten year sentence, so, since the two agents were convicted of violating the smuggler's fourth amendment rights and fired at him when they thought he was going to shoot, the two agents are now serving 10-12 years in solitary confinement.

While under immunity this thug tried several more times to bring drugs into the U.S., was caught, and given ten years in prison. He has a briefer sentence than do the two agents. Indeed, if Ramos and Compean serve their full term they'll do more time than some convicted murderers.

President Bush, who had no qualms about pardoning "Scooter" Libby who was convicted of committing perjury, has not been able to see his way clear to pardon these two men who were trying to do their job and prevent criminals from exploiting our porous border. Their reward is to be persecuted by a man, Johnny Sutton, who appears to be a cross between Michael Nifong and Inspector Javert.

John McCain is casting about for ways to distance himself from George Bush. In my opinion, he could do himself a lot of good, especially with Hispanic Americans, if he promised that if elected he would immediately pardon Ramos and Compean. Their sentence is one aspect of Bush and his presidency that everyone should distance themselves from.

RLC