Trickle Down

The Washington Post reports that GM will be cutting 2400 of its 6000 dealerships by the end of next year and Chrysler is closing 789 of its 3181 dealerships. Think for a moment the effect these layoffs will have. The corporation gets itself into financial trouble and the problems ramify all the way down to the mechanics working in the service bay and the stockboys working in the parts department. Many of these workers will lose their jobs so they'll have no money to spend in the communities in which they live. There'll be less money spent in restaurants, movie theaters, on home maintenance, etc. which means that those businesses will suffer also. Moreover, when the dealership goes out of business the local community takes a huge hit in its tax revenue. Thus the devastation trickles all the way down to minimum wage workers in every business in the local municipality.

This all seems pretty obvious so why mention it? Because there has been in our country over the last couple of decades a lot of derision leveled at the idea of "trickle down" economics, the idea that what helps businesses at the top helps everyone all the way down the economic ladder. The left misses no opportunity to mock this notion which is a key element in the justification for tax cuts in the midst of difficult economic times. When the corporation has more money to spend everyone all the way down to the waitress in the local restaurant benefits even though they're unaware of it. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats as Ronald Reagan used to say, much to the scorn of his critics.

It's amazing that people have no difficulty seeing that economic malaise is a trickle down phenomenon, but they refuse to acknowledge that economic vigor also cascades through the society and lifts everyone up. When taxes are cut on corporations they have more money to invest in the business and that provides jobs not only for their own employees but, as in the case of the car industry, also for the dealerships and thus for communities all across the nation. Tax cuts also enable the business to keep their prices lower so their customers have more money to spend on other businesses in their town and a prosperous business is a source of tax revenue for the local municipality.

It all seems so obvious that it astonishes me that the left has been so successful in persuading people that the best way to achieve prosperity is to raise taxes on business, increase their costs, and diminish the amount of wealth available to the hundreds and thousands of people who are effected by that business's economic health.

"Trickle down" is almost a law of economics, whether it's trickle down malaise or trickle down prosperity, and what's happening right now at Chrysler and GM should convince even the most otiose of its inexorability.

RLC

Milestone

Tomorrow is a special day here at Viewpoint. It was five years ago, May 16th, 2004 that my brother Bill and I launched this humble venture. It was born out of the conviction that there had to be a better way to share ideas with friends and family than by bombarding them with articles and e-mails. Not only was it annoying to the recipients but it was getting a little cumbersome because among my acquaintances there were different audiences for different topics, and I didn't think that most people had the time to read a lot of the stuff anyway.

I wondered if it might not be more effective to just have a site where people could come if they were interested and find commentary on current events, religion, science, and philosophy - the topics that most interest me. I had no idea how to go about creating such a site, but Bill said that it was fairly easy and set about doing it. Viewpoint is what emerged from his efforts.

Since then we've churned out over 5160 posts on a variety of topics and had over 347,450 hits, averaging around 7500 hits a month over the last three years.

Surely it's a conceit to think that one has something to say that others might wish to read or hear, but I suppose that it's a conceit shared by everyone who writes, teaches or preaches so I don't let myself feel too guilty about it.

I do wonder sometimes, though, how long I'm going to keep it up. It does take time to put a day's posts together, and I often wonder if there aren't other ways I should be spending that time. Then I get an e-mail like the following from a reader named Dave, and I'm energized to keep going for another couple of months.

Dave wrote:

I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your website. I am relatively new to it, but I look forward to checking it every day. I love the range of topics you post on; it all is very interesting and thought-provoking to me. I am a recent college grad (I grew up in York) now living in Philadelphia, so as you can imagine with the liberal way-of-life out here, it is very refreshing to hear common sense ideas and rational, well-informed thinking.

Your archives and search capabilities are great tools for learning more about specific topics. In fact, since earlier today I overheard people talking about gay marriage, I searched for that on the website and just finished reading nearly all of your posts about it. I now feel as though I have a much more tenable, and convincing, stance should I ever find myself debating someone.

Finally, I feel I must comment on your communication skills. Your command of vocabulary is top-notch. Sometimes I find myself going back and forth between the dictionary and your posts, only to find you've chosen the exact word needed for your idea. In this day of cryptic internet abbreviations and phrases, it is a welcomed change to read your polished writing. It has certainly helped me add to my own vocabulary.

In sum, I really appreciate and admire your site. Keep up the fantastic work.

On behalf of Bill and myself I want to thank Dave and all of you for your readership. It's knowing that you think it's worth your time to come here that makes our time and effort all worthwhile.

Thanks again,

Dick Cleary

Letter of Amends

Robin is a self-described "recovering liberal from Berkeley" who writes her family and friends a letter of apology for all the unpleasantness she put them through before the scales fell from her eyes. It's good, especially the second half where she explains what brought about her epiphany.

Here's the nut of it:

In February of 2008, I saw a new client, a bright and sensitive young woman who came in looking like she just escaped a war zone. In some ways she had; she had innocently shared with others at her job that she voted for Hillary rather than Obama. Immediately she was being targeted for abuse that put her in fear for not only her job, but her life.

We both suddenly became aware that something had grown really dark in the Democratic Party. I started hearing about many other incidents where loyal Democrats were being physically and emotionally threatened for supporting Hillary. A woman in Berkeley had her front window broken because it displayed a poster of Hillary. Randi Rhodes, an Air America talk show leftist, called Hillary a f______ witch. (Rhodes was recently promoted to a national talk radio show, illustrating another disturbing trend: the deafening silence about what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed the new "thug-ocracy.)

An acquaintance had her car broken into, and the only item stolen was a NoObama bumper sticker. A South Park episode featured an episode where a nuclear weapon was being aimed at Hillary's genitals. My local greeting card store sold very flattering cards about Obama, insulting ones about Hillary, and a Hillary "nutcracker." When I complained, the young male manager literally laughed in my face.

Things went from bad to worse when Sarah Palin entered the scene. When Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President, there was no debasement of her character, no sexual threats. But with Palin, a full scale "wilding" ensued that chillingly reminded me of the random sexual attacks on women by gangs of men in New York. She was called every vile name in the book by both male and female liberals.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt hoped a gang of black males would rape her. When Palin's church was torched with children inside, the press was missing in action (somehow I imagine the press would have been all over this if Obama's church were torched). Not only was the misogyny disgusting, but the classism was abhorrent. The Democrats, by ridiculing Palin's voice and her education, were acting like arrogant snobs. The party had changed, I had changed, and the differences looked irreconcilable.

The final straw for me was when a close friend flew into a rage at me when she learned I wasn't supporting Obama. The political became personal when she began impugning my character. Worse yet, she tried to intimidate me into changing my mind by threatening to dump me.

Suddenly a light went on. The peace and love and flower power of the old left was dead and gone (if it even existed to begin with except in my imagination). The Democrats had morphed into a power hungry Thought Police, and I was done with them. My new motto in life: don't PC on me.

Robin concludes with these questions:

But now the problem is: how in the world does one be a conservative these days? How to stay brave and committed when conservatives are being targeted, punished, and shunned on a daily basis? How to sleep at night knowing that the country I have finally come to love may be destroyed from within by a massive Big Brother government?

Maybe one reason the Democratic party has shifted so far toward the hard left is that a lot of intelligent people like Robin, people who sincerely believed that liberalism held the answers to our problems, have been so repulsed by the tactics of the ACORNs and the antics of the Keith Olbermanns that in order to preserve their own sense of self-dignity and integrity they just have to dissociate themselves from it all and leave the party to the leftists. Maybe.

RLC

Agile or Indolent?

Changing one's mind is indicative of one of two things: intellectual nimbleness (i.e. the ability to change course in light of new evidence) or intellectual laziness (a failure to think matters through in the first place). When the change of mind occurs only occasionally we may assume the cause is an agile mind. When it happens frequently it's more likely due to the latter cause. In the president's case I'm not sure yet which it is, but his switches seem to be occurring with uncomfortable frequency, at least in matters bearing on national defense.

We noted earlier Mona Charen's recitation of some of them, and now Jake Tapper of ABC informs us that Obama has had yet another change of heart.

President Obama defended his decision to fight the release of photos showing detainee abuse Wednesday afternoon, saying it would only put American troops in harm's way and create a backlash against Americans.

"The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger," the president said before departing on his trip to Arizona. "Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse."

The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

In other words, the Obama administration is going to fight against releasing the photos even if it means going to court and even if it means opposing the ACLU.

This is a good decision. Indeed, in almost every instance where the president has flipped I think he's come down on the side of doing the right thing, but it's worrisome that he could not see it was the right thing until after he had made so much political hay promising the left he would do the wrong thing. Did he really think through those promises before he made them or was he just iterating the knee-jerk positions of his leftist constituency? Do his tergiversations suggest that the president is intellectually gifted or intellectually lazy?

If it is the first we have cause to be hopeful. If it's the second we have cause to be alarmed.

RLC

SCOTUS Pick

There's been much speculation as to who President Obama will pick to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. There seems to be agreement that the nominee will probably be a woman, an African-American, someone relatively young with legal experience and leftist views of the importance of the Constitution.

Given all this there's one obvious candidate who meets all the criteria and who would have the nomination simply by asking, yet her name has never been mentioned: Mrs. Obama. You heard it here first.

RLC

Saving What's Left

New Scientist comments upon the parlous state in which many species of birds find themselves due primarily to the loss of their habitat:

Darwin would not be amused. A bird native to the Galapagos islands, the medium tree-finch, this year joined 191 other bird species newly added to the critically endangered list, the roster of the world's most threatened species.

But while the medium-tree finch is in jeopardy because of parasitic flies introduced to the islands, most of the species on this year's red list of threatened species are imperiled by inexorable loss of their habitat.

There was some good news, however, with six critically endangered species downgraded to "endangered". Some owed their reclassification to successful conservation programmes. The threat to the Mauritius Fody, for example, was lifted by moving the remaining birds to an island off Mauritius free of predators.

Another success story is Brazil's Lear's macaw, named after the English nonsense poet Edward Lear. The spectacular parrot has increased fourfold in number through a joint programme involving the Brazilian government, local landowners and conservation organisations.

Aside from habitat loss and predation, the other ominous factor is the impact of climate change, says Fowlie. Mountain-living birds, for example, would die out if the climate they rely on shifts north or south to non-mountainous zones.

Lear's Macaw

I confess to being very conflicted every time I drive around my county and see the huge swaths of land being gobbled up for housing, highways and shopping malls. I find myself having to fight the temptation to be inwardly pleased that the economy is slowing down and housing starts are depressed. I keep asking myself if it isn't wrong to view the reduced pace of the loss of natural lands as a silver lining to the economic crisis.

I know the economic slump is costing people jobs, and that's the source of my inner conflict. I don't want anyone to be out of work, but neither do I want to see our beautiful countryside and crucial habitat buried under vast deposits of asphalt and cinder block.

If I had my way I think I'd preserve it all and require that all new building be done in areas that are already developed, like our cities and the empty malls that long ago closed their doors.

Don't bother to write to tell me how impractical that is. I know it is. That's why I'll never have my way.

RLC

Chuck Defarge

Here was Democrat senator Chuck Schumer in 2004 when the sobriety imposed upon our political class by 9/11 still had some residual influence:

"Do what you have to do." Gosh. That sounds like Senator Schumer is saying that if the government has reason to believe that a catastrophe can be averted by squeezing information out of a terrorist then most of his colleagues and he himself would advocate extreme methods of interrogation, methods much more gruesome, one assumes, than waterboarding or sleep deprivation.

But that was then. Now the Madame Defarges of the Democratic party, as Michael Barone aptly refers to them, are cackling with glee at the prospect of Bush officials being carted off to the guillotines. So here is the same Chuck Schumer a month ago:

Let's be charitable and decline to call this hypocrisy. Let's just think of it as moral and logical incoherence. Chuck Schumer like Nancy Pelosi and a host of others in their party were in favor of "enhanced" interrogation before they were against it.

So what's different now from then? The chance to avenge themselves on the Bush administration has presented itself to the Democrats who have gained congressional majorities and control of the White House, so they're seizing the opportunity. They've got their knitting needles working furiously, weaving into the sweater as many names of the people they hate as they can.

Thanks to Hot Air for the videos.

RLC

Thirteen Mysteries

If you're into science you might find this article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist interesting. Brooks lists thirteen mysteries that have (mostly) cosmologists and physicists baffled. To give you a sample here's #9:

It's one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

I have to say that I think cosmologists are much more confident that dark energy is the culprit than what this article suggests. I wrote about this phenomenon last December. After discussing what dark energy is believed to be doing to the universe I mentioned that the most fascinating thing about it is this:

Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeroes after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an unimaginably precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky accident.

The biggest mystery about dark energy, it seems to me, is not what it is but rather how it came to be so exquisitely calibrated. Or maybe that's only a mystery for materialists.

RLC

Wouldn't You Know

Okay. I knew it would happen. As soon as I made the comment that I hadn't heard of any conservative making a joke about killing those in the political opposition, or words to that effect, along comes the first instance of it in my memory and puts egg on my face.

A sportscaster told an unfunny and pathetic "joke" and conservative radio talk show host Mark Davis allegedly repeated it with alleged approval. I use the qualifier "alleged" because I didn't hear it myself, but am relying on Camille Paglia's description:

Two days after watching "Seven Days in May," I was utterly horrified to hear Dallas-based talk show host Mark Davis, subbing for Rush Limbaugh, laughingly and approvingly read a passage from a Dallas magazine article by CBS sportscaster David Feherty claiming that "any U.S. soldier," given a gun with two bullets and stuck in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, would use both bullets on Pelosi and strangle the other two. How have we come to this pass in America where the assassination of top government officials is fodder for snide jokes on national radio?

Paglia is right to be upset by this. So am I. This sort of talk should have no place in our public discourse. Wishing or even joking about the suffering and/or death of one's opponents is reprehensible and disgusting whether it's Wanda Sykes telling the sick joke or David Feherty (whoever he is). Moreover, those who laugh at these gibes, whether it's Barack Obama and the Washington press corps, or a conservative talk show host, evince a serious and unpleasant character flaw that should invite our disdain for the flaw and our prayers for the offender.

RLC

Hope He Dies

In 1994 a journalist named Julianne Malveaux distinguished herself by admitting that she hoped Clarence Thomas would develop heart disease and die. More recently Bill Maher lamented that an assassination plot against Dick Cheney during a visit to Afghanistan had been foiled. During the Bush years a a novel was written that fantasized his assassination. Now an alleged comedienne named Wanda Sykes not only calls Rush Limbaugh a traitor and a terrorist, which trivializes both, but adds that she wishes he'd suffer kidney failure.

The remark was despicable enough, but did our president and the audience have to laugh at it? What kind of people are these that they find talk of the death of their political opponents so hilarious?

I know I ask this question a lot, but this video clip just demands that I ask it again. Can you imagine the press reaction had a conservative said something this vicious, this stupid, this cruel about a Democrat? Have you ever seen a Republican president laugh when someone says in his presence that he hopes some Democrat suffers a fatal illness? Come to think of it have you ever heard a conservative say anything like this? Me neither. It's not that conservatives have so much class, it's that liberals, are at least too many of them, have so little.

For more on this see Kathryn Lopez at NRO.

RLC

Power of the Happy Man

Jason sent us a link to an essay by Peggy Noonan on the late Jack Kemp. Like much of what Noonan writes it is graceful and touching. Kemp was a political role model, one who is emulated too infrequently but whose example, if followed, could have a powerful impact on an electorate that seems to be wearying of the politics of humorless viciousness.

Kemp was driven by two things: the power of ideas and a genuine concern for the poor. He believed that the way to help the poor was not just by giving them stuff, which never works, but by giving others the incentive to offer opportunities for the poor to work their way out of their poverty.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

Kemp was the kind of person politics wants more of, the kind who remind us that it is a great profession, that at its best it is a calling, an actual vocation. We all know politicians who are cynical, and whose interaction with the public leaves them convinced of their superiority. Kemp was the opposite. As his son Jimmy said this week, "My father didn't think people were the problem but the solution." He believed people had talent, dynamism, brilliance and hunger, and a good government was one that did not thwart but helped them, through sound policy, to become what God built them to be.

Jack knew how to lead. He spoke of ideas with affability and authenticity. He wasn't angry and dark and simmering, didn't glower. He had the power of the happy man. "Sometimes now the cost of admission into politics is bitterness, bile and guile," said the pollster Kellyanne Conway. He was old-style, and humane. Ms. Conway got her first job in politics as an intern in Kemp's office. "Who are you?" he once said. "I'm just an intern here," she said. "No one is just an intern here," he replied. He saw politics as a team sport, assigned, delegated and promoted from within. In all the years Ms. Conway knew him, she never heard him ask what the polls were saying. When he ran as Bob Dole's vice presidential nominee in 1996, he flopped as a hatchet man. It wasn't in his DNA.

I hope you'll read the rest of Noonan's column. It paints an image of a man we might wish all our political leaders would pattern themselves after.

RLC

Flip Flops

Mona Charen tells us that the Obama administration is reversing itself on many of the national security positions it took during the campaign. Having soundly and frequently rebuked the Bush administration for warrantless surveillance, Guantanamo, denial of trials to detainees, military tribunals, and other assorted crimes against humanity, it looks like Obama is quietly pursuing the same policies, and may even decide to keep Gitmo open for business:

You won't find it on the front pages, but the Obama administration has been walking back its position on many national-security questions. Attorney General Eric Holder has asserted that the U.S. has the right to hold suspected terrorists without charges. Solicitor General Elena Kagan has reiterated that position. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that military commissions were "still very much on the table," and rumor has it that the Obama administration will soon formally reverse itself on Guant�namo.

The New York Times reported that "Officials who work on the Guantanamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies." No kidding? Not only that, but not a single detainee was read his Miranda rights when he was taken into custody.

Additionally, Congress is balking at letting Guantanamo's inmates anywhere near their hometowns. Sen. Dianne Feinstein even put Alcatraz off limits. "It's a national park and tourist attraction," she explained.

Former senator Rick Santorum, now with the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has been keeping an eye on other national-security flips by the new president. Remember how Obama had lambasted the Bush administration for relying on the "state secrets" privilege? The Obama Justice Department has already invoked the doctrine twice - most recently to defend the National Security Agency's surveillance of communications. The Justice Department explained that "attempting to address the allegations in this case could require the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods that are used in a lawful manner to protect national security. The administration cannot risk the disclosure of information that could cause such exceptional harm . . . " Query to the ACLU: Does that mean the Obama administration is "shredding the Constitution"?

It would be a lot easier to commend the president for bending to reason and choosing to follow the Bush polices were it not for the fact that he has been so contemptuous of those very policies and the people who implemented them. Instead of seeming wise he comes across like a callow teenager who takes shots at his elders on matters he scarcely comprehends and then is startled to learn that the most sensible course is to do the very things he condemned and derided others for doing.

A bigger man would publicly acknowledge his misjudgment and admit that Bush was correct after all.

RLC

Suspicious Minds

Uh oh. There's something fishy about that $328,000 photo of Air Force One over New York. Actually there are several things fishy. The folks here are saying that for some reason the White House's story doesn't add up and that the Obama administration isn't being straight up with us about this fiasco. Imagine that.

I don't know whether there's more to this that we aren't being told - after all this is the most transparent administration in history - but I have to say that there are some puzzling questions being raised, some of which had occurred to me but which I never really thought much about (Like why did the photo have to be done when it was and why is it of such amateurish quality?).

Anyway, check it out. It'll satisfy your minimum daily requirement for suspiciousness.

RLC

Unconditional Love

Dennis Prager is always worth reading and this recent column is no exception. In it he discusses the significance of the fact that English is the only major language that has the concept of "to earn":

One of the reasons for the ascendance of the English-speaking world has been that the English language is almost alone among major languages in having the word "earn." Those of us whose native language is English assume that the phrase "to earn a living" is universal. It isn't. It is almost unique to English. Few languages have the ability to say this.

In the Romance languages, for example - a list that includes such major languages as Spanish, French, and Italian -- the word used when saying someone "earns" money, is "ganar" in Spanish, "gagner" in French. The word literally means "to win." In Hebrew the word "marveach" means "profits." In German, the word "verdient" means "deserves."

Obviously, it is very different to "win" or to "deserve" or to "profit" than to "earn."

Since the 1960s-'70s, a concerted effort has been made to weed the word, and therefore the cultural value, of "earning" from American life. Increasingly little is earned. Instead of earning, we are increasingly owed, or we have more rights, or we are simply given.

Many American kids no longer earn awards or trophies for athletic success. They are given trophies and awards for showing up. These trophies are not earned, just granted -- essentially for breathing.

This is a good insight and I think there's a lot to it. Prager then builds on the idea of "earning something" by launching an interesting disquisition on the concept of unconditional love:

Another increasingly widespread concept that undermines the notion of earning is "unconditional love." The term, which was barely used prior to the 1960s, is now ubiquitous. It is a prominent goal, a human ideal to strive for. The idea of having to earn love is more than unheard of today; it would strike most moderns as morally suspect.

We expect unconditional love not only from parents to babies and toddlers, but to children of any age, no matter how they act. Parental unconditional love means that all people, no matter how disgracefully they act --- even toward a parent -- and no matter how old they are, must be shown infinite love from their parents. Parental love is never to be earned, always to be given.

We expect God to show unconditional love to all people, again no matter how they act. According to the doctrine of divine unconditional love, God loves sadists as much as He loves the kindest individuals. No one earns God's love; we receive it, like sports trophies, for breathing. Many fine people believe this about God, but I think it is religio-cultural-specific, and non-biblical. In 15 years of study in a yeshiva I had never heard the phrase, and it would have struck me, as it still does, as quite odd. It depicts God as a love machine who, like an air-conditioner that emits the same amount of cold air no matter how the inhabitants of a house act, emits the same amount of love no matter we act. It means that we in no way influence God's love for us. I don't find that comforting. And it is certainly no more likely to induce decent behavior in human beings than a God who does show conditional love based on human decency.

Here I think Prager slips. The Christian doctrine of the atonement is, I think, a paradigmatic example of unconditional love. It's predicated upon nothing that man deserves. God suffers and dies in Christ as a profound demonstration of his love for us and to pay the price for man's betrayal and infidelity. As a consequence each person is offered the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation to God. That seems to me to be an act of pure agape, or unconditional love. Of course, whether we accept that gift is up to us, and many people choose to reject it. God doesn't force it on them, but that He nevertheless makes it available to them is an act, I think, of pure unconditional love.

Prager has more to say about this, which you can read at the link, but the matter of forgiveness leads into the next part of his essay.

We also expect forgiveness to be given without being earned. Many people believe in what I call automatic forgiveness -- the obligation to forgive anyone any crime, committed against anyone, no matter how many victims and no matter how removed from my life. Thus the pastor of a church attended by then-President Bill Clinton told the president and all others at a Sunday service that all Christians were obligated to forgive Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist murderer of 168 people. Did McVeigh earn this forgiveness? Of course not. So where did the notion of unearned forgiveness come from, especially unearned forgiveness from people who were not the victims of the evil being forgiven? It is one thing for me to forgive those who have hurt me; it is quite another for others to forgive those who have hurt me. God Himself demands that we earn forgiveness. The term for that is repentance. No repentance, no forgiveness.

Here I think Prager is exactly right. Few things sound sillier to me than someone who lost nothing and no one in the 9/11 terror proclaiming that they forgive the terrorists. Who do such people think they are?

What does it mean to forgive someone who has done you no harm, anyway? To forgive a person does not mean to forget what they did, it means to not hold what they did against them - to not demand retribution. If someone murders another person's loved one it's simply absurd for a third individual, who had no connection to any of the people involved, to say that he forgives the murderer.

Finally, the increasingly powerful culture of entitlement and rights further undermines the value of earning anything. The more the state gives to its citizens, the less they have to earn. That is the basic concept of the welfare state -- you receive almost everything you need without having to earn any of it. About half of Americans now pay no federal income tax -- but they receive all government benefits just as if they had paid for, i.e., earned, them.

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one.

I think Prager is right about this, as well. We should be compassionate with those less fortunate, but it should be made clear to everyone involved that our largesse is the fruit of compassion and is not an entitlement. When people think they're entitled to the contents of your wallet the desire to help them dwindles as rapidly as resentment toward them rises.

It's a major difference between conservatives and liberals that conservatives see a sense of entitlement as a serious flaw in social welfare programs and liberals seem to be relatively unconcerned about it. Most liberals would be indifferent to your right to decide whether to keep and how to dispose of what you earned and they're much more inclined to think that those who have earned little are somehow entitled to have a share of what you have worked hard for.

RLC

About Time

An article at Foreign Policy by Christian Brose notes that Australia has gazed at the tea leaves and concluded that the United States, especially under the current administration, is no longer much inclined to use military force to protect its allies and that it's time for Australia to start building up its defenses.

After listing the upgrades Australia is undertaking (and under a very leftist prime minister, no less) Brose goes on to write:

But why is it a bad thing for our allies to strengthen their defenses? .... I see the Australian white paper as a reason to be optimistic that America's relative decline can be managed in a smart way that leaves us in a good strategic position. Westhawk puts his finger on one reason why:

"If the Australian defense ministry can reach these conclusions [that the U.S. is a declining power], why shouldn't the Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Singaporean, Indian, and Russian defense ministries also formulate these same planning assumptions?.... The greatest loser from such a chain reaction would be China."

I'd go even further. The United States should want the Indians, and the Japanese, and the South Koreans, and the Indonesians to reach the same conclusions. We should actively encourage them to reach the same conclusions. And that goes for our NATO allies as well. (The Russians, not so much.) We should work to get more and more of America's like-minded allies investing in the capabilities to shoulder a greater share of our collective defense. And to that end, the perception that the "unipolar moment" is passing can actually play in our favor, as will the fact that China's "peaceful rise" remains an open question at best.

Brose is right, I think. It is time our allies started carrying more of the burden of our common defense. Europe, for example, has evolved into a continent-wide welfare state largely because they've had the luxury of not having to spend large sums of money on their militaries as long as the U.S. was guaranteeing their safety. It's time, though, that Europe stopped acting like the guy who mooches off his parents well into his thirties and never moves out on his own. Let the Europeans follow Australia's example and provide for their own security. Except for Britain and Poland they haven't been much help to us when we needed them anyway.

HT: PostModern Conservative

RLC

Post-Christian?

Stephen Prothero, chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, argues that claims that the United States is a "post-Christian" nation are simply false.

He points out that the vast majority of people in this country self-identify as Christian:

What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming "post-Christian." If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic. And even if we accept the ARIS survey as gospel, the United States today has more Christians than any other country in human history. The current U.S. population is more Christian than Israel is Jewish and Utah is Mormon. Meanwhile, Christianity remains, for good or for ill, a vital political force, not just on the right but also on the left, and the Christian Bible remains the scripture of American politics, invoked thousands of times a year on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

[B]orn-again Christians,... now constitute 34% of the U.S. population. The "non-denominational Christian" category that populates U.S. megachurches has exploded from under 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to in excess of 8 million today.

The problem, though, is that whether this nation is Christian or post-Christian should not be measured by the religious sentiments of the masses. The religious status of this country is actually a function of the attitudes of its cultural elite. The university professors, artists, scientists, media personalities, the people who make our movies, our music, and write our books, politicians, professionals (doctors, lawyers, journalists, clergy) and wealthy businessmen.

The elite shape the culture and put their stamp upon it. It's their religious sentiments that matter and any attempt to determine the extent of religious influence in this country that focuses on the beliefs of the common folk is pretty much beside the point. As far as I know the cultural elite have never been subjected to the kind of analysis that would tell us definitively what their views are. Nevertheless, I think that if we look even cursorily at the products our culture is turning out it would be pretty hard to think that the U.S. is still a Christian nation.

Consider the hostility of the pop culture to anyone who on religious principle takes a stand that conflicts with progressive orthodoxies. Look at how the culture has savaged Carrie Prejean and Sarah Palin. Consider how people who embrace "traditional" values, who are pro-life, opposed to gay marriage, sympathetic to intelligent design, and who actually go to church on Sunday are depicted by the entertainment media.

There is, furthermore, reason to believe that the ground is being prepared in much of the Western world, and even here in America, to make Christian conviction an automatic disqualification for engagement in the public square.

But beyond all that, I wonder how many, even among the masses, are serious about their religious affiliation. Being a Christian is more than just being a CHINO (Christian In Name Only). Most people when asked about their affiliation will name the church they had their children baptized into, but that identity makes no real difference to them in the decisions of their everyday life. For many people, God is like a parent who lives on the other side of the country and who one gets to see maybe at Christmas and Easter but who has little input into how they manage their daily affairs.

At any rate, a survey of American religious convictions that fails to go beyond a simple affiliation question is neither informative nor useful.

RLC

Which Party Is More Ideologically Diverse?

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he challenges the media meme that the GOP is too narrow and intolerant of diverse views to be a national party. Santorum points out some inconvenient truths:

According to the American Conservative Union, in 2008, only two of the 51 Senate Democrats had conservative ratings above 25 percent. But 21 of the 49 Republican senators had conservative ratings of 75 percent or less.

This means that the senate Republicans are much closer to the ideological center than are the Democrats. Here's further confirmation that the most ideologically rigid party is the Democrat party:

Furthermore, 12 Democrats had a conservative rating of zero, while an additional 25 scored under 10 percent. By contrast, only one Republican scored a perfect 100, and a scant seven others scored above 90 percent. (Note that Pennsylvania's other "moderate" senator has a conservative rating of 8 percent.)

I spent 12 years in the Senate. It has one doctrinaire, narrow, intolerant caucus, and Specter just joined it.

In fact, Specter's ACU rating of 44% makes him the most conservative Democrat in the senate. It's amazing that despite the obvious ideological imbalance in the Democratic party the media and others are insisting that it's the Republicans who need to become more diverse. It'd be nice if they'd check the relevant facts and figures once in a while before they write their stories.

RLC

Those Anti-Intellectual Republicans

This video shows why people have so little respect for both politicians and media talking heads. Republican Congressman Mike Pence, an otherwise admirable man, simply doesn't know how to answer a question that probably 99% of people in Congress wouldn't know how to answer, but instead of admitting that he hasn't really given the matter much thought he bobs and weaves and temporizes hoping that the clock will run out and rescue him from Chris Matthews' hectoring. It's not his finest hour.

Matthews, on the other hand, doesn't know any more than Pence, and probably wouldn't understand a reasonable answer to his question if Pence had given him one. The host of Hardball claims that there are people in the GOP who oppose stem cell research, but I challenge him to name one. His assertion is completely uninformed. There are people who oppose embryonic stem cell research, to be sure, but that's hardly the same thing as opposing stem cell research. He later avers that some Republicans believe that liberal scientists have "planted" fossils in order to provide confirmation of evolutionary theory, a notion that is certainly a revelation to me. I have never heard of anyone who believes such a ridiculous hypothesis except, of course, for those scholars who freely acknowledge that exactly this was done in the case of the Piltdown hoax (c.1912).

Anyway, I was hoping Pence would ask Matthews to define "evolution." That would have ended the matter right then, I suspect, because I doubt that Matthews could have given a non-trivial response to the request. Anyone who believes that the debate today over evolution is between science and religion, as Matthews apparently does, simply doesn't understand the issues. If Matthews was able to give an adequate definition of what he meant by evolution he would have had to define it in such a way as to make Pence's objections to it seem perfectly reasonable to the majority of his viewers. But, alas, Mr. Pence didn't ask for the definition. Too bad. It would've been fun to watch.

It would've been even more fun if Pence had thought to ask Matthews, who is a Catholic, if he believed in transubstantiation, the immaculate conception, the assumption of the virgin Mary, or papal infallibility. If Matthews affirmed these doctrines of his Church Pence might have then asked his audience to judge whether such beliefs are more scientifically plausible than the belief that the universe and life show evidence of intentional engineering.

RLC

Man Without Conviction

Remember the old Boy George tune, Karma Chameleon? It could've been written about Arlen Specter.

It must be plain by now even to someone who has been on a space voyage for the last twenty years that the senator is a man without principles. He announced Tuesday that he wanted the courts to declare Minnesota senator Norm Coleman the winner in his prolonged contest with Democrat Al Franken and then realized that this wouldn't set well with his new brethren in the Democratic party, so before you could say "so long seniority" he started backpedalling.

It didn't matter, though. His new friends in the Democratic party stripped him of his seniority anyway, and now poor Arlen is about as consequential as a midget in the NBA.

Senator Specter's explanation for his moonwalk away from Coleman is precious:

"In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates," Specter said. "I'm ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I've made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke."

In other words, he's made a career of knowing what to say and what to do in order to get himself elected, but somehow in this instance he lost his focus. We can be assured it won't happen again.

RLC

Gay Marriage and Black Outrage

African-American ministers are incensed at the decision of the District of Columbia City Council to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere - Marion Barry, succumbing to the temptation to hyperbole, predicts a "civil war" - but I don't know why these gentlemen are blaming the Council. They should be incensed at their own parishioners. Blacks vote Democratic at rates in excess of 9 to 1. If African-Americans are going to vote for liberals they can hardly fault them for doing what liberals do. Until socially conservative blacks realize that the Democratic party is the very last organization that will defend socially conservative policies black ministers are going to find themselves with lots to keep their outrage occupied.

RLC