Subliminal Voting

Apparently Diebald has released a sample of the ballots to be used in battleground states like Florida this November. It looks like those rascally Republicans are up to some dirty tricks.

Kerry v. Kerry

John Kerry debates himself at GOP.com. The site has a video clip of Kerry's inconsistencies titled Top Ten Iraqi Flip-Flops From First Debate and it presents Kerry disagreeing with a number of things he himself said in last night's debate. I'm not sure that all of the disagreements can technically be called flip-flops, but they certainly seem to be confusions.

CBS Breaking New Ground

The Holy Observer has a shocking story. Apparently CBS and Dan Rather have in their possession documents which they claim disprove the Resurrection of Christ. The article contains photos of the actual documents which are apparently fragments of a diary kept by the disciple named Thomas.

This might be just what Rather needs to rescue his career from the ignominy surrounding his recent debacle over the fraudulent National Guard papers.

Another Take On Outsourcing

Economist Daniel Drezner has an op-ed in The New York Times that'll be of interest to those readers who are concerned about job losses due to outsourcing. He looks at the numbers and concludes that it's a non-issue. Here are some excerpts:

The Government Accountability Office has issued its first review of the data, and one undeniable conclusion to be drawn from it is that outsourcing is not quite the job-destroying tsunami it's been made out to be. Of the 1.5 million jobs lost last year in "mass layoffs'' - that is, when 50 or more workers are let go at once - less than 1 percent were attributed to overseas relocation; that was a decline from the previous year. In 2002, only about 4 percent of the money directly invested by American companies overseas went to the developing countries that are most likely to account for outsourced jobs - and most of that money was concentrated in manufacturing.

The data did show that from 1997 to 2002, annual imports of business, technical and professional services increased by $16.3 billion. However, during that same half-decade, exports of those services increased by $20.5 billion a year. In 2002 alone, the United States ran a $27 billion trade surplus in business services, the sector in which jobs are most likely to be outsourced. The G.A.O. correctly stressed that it is impossible to compute exactly how many jobs are lost because of outsourcing, but unless its figures are off by several orders of magnitude, there's no crisis here.

Technological innovation is responsible for a far greater number of lost jobs than outsourcing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that in the first quarter of this year 4,633 workers were laid off because of offshoring. In the same period Kodak, for example, announced layoffs of 15,000 workers because the growth of digital photography reduced demand for film. Few Americans suggest technological innovation be stifled for the sake of preserving old jobs.

Go here to read the whole column.

What To Do About Iran?

Whether George Bush is relected president in November or not he's going to have a very difficult decision on his hands, a decision which evidently must be made before the New Year. Iran will, in a few months by some estimates, begin construction of nuclear weapons. Once they start they must be assumed to be prepared to use them as soon as they can because every day they delay they risk losing them to an Israeli or American attack (It is just fantasy to think that perhaps Europe would have the will to do something to prevent a nuclear-armed Islamist state).

Iran has fifteen sites working on the production of fissile uranium. Those sites are presumably hardened to withstand a bomb drop. Do we try nonetheless to destroy them with conventional ordinance? Do we insert troops? Do we have the manpower available to take out these sites if bombing doesn't work? How will the Iranians respond if we attack? What will they do if we let them produce nuclear weapons? Can we afford to wait and find out? Belmont Club has an interesting discussion of some of the relevant questions.

A Thought On the Debate

Quick debate analysis: Those who are impressed by style will say that Kerry won. He was smooth and articulate. Those who look for substance will say that Bush pretty much dominated. Kerry sounded and looked good, but if one listened to what he was saying there simply was nothing there.

His most puzzling statement, in our opinion, was his claim that Bush made a terrible mistake in going into Iraq and is mismanaging the post-war badly but that he believes we now have to fight to win and that's exactly what he'll do.

The reason this is puzzling is that the first part of this statement is exactly what people said about Vietnam, but Kerry's response then was not to demand that we fight the war properly but that we get out immediately. "How", he asked at the 1971 senate hearings, "do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Now he's saying that instead of cutting our losses and leaving, as he insisted we do in Vietnam, he would stay and fight to win in Iraq. Given his history why should anyone believe him?

Perhaps he would reply that Vietnam was different. He might argue that there are national interests at stake in Iraq that weren't at stake in Vietnam. If so, however, how does he justify his repeated claim, made again last night, that he fought as a young man to defend our country in Vietnam. If there were no national interests at stake in Vietnam then whatever he was doing over there he certainly wasn't fighting to defend the United States.

Kerry said that he hasn't wavered about anything in this campaign, but he certainly is trying to have this both ways.

Watching the Beauty Contest

Assessing the kind of president a man would be on the basis of a debate performance is like judging the kind of wife and mother a woman would be on the basis of a beauty contest. Whatever charms she dazzles us with in her swimsuit are really quite irrelevant to the judgment we have to make, and it would only be a callow young man, in thrall to his hormones, who would think otherwise.

The audience will sit on tenterhooks tonight waiting for one or the other speaker to make some trivial "gaffe" and then seize upon it as a reason to vote for the other guy. It's a ludicrous exercise. It debases our democracy and insults the intelligence of its citizens. In their promos for the debate the networks have been replaying what they consider to be the highlights, the salient moments, of past debates. They wax nostalgic over Nixon's heavy beard, Kennedy's attractiveness, Reagan's "there you go again" and his witticism about Mondale's "youth and inexperience," Bentson's ad hominem attack against Quayle, Bush '41's glance at his watch, Gore's oafish sighing and striding across the stage to try to stare down Bush, Jr., and so on.

These are the things people remember from past debates, but with the exception of Gore's buffoonery, perhaps, none of these events tells us what kind of leader a man would be. They may tell us whether the man is likeable or not, but there's no demonstrated connection between likeability and presidential ability. Both Clinton and Reagan were likeable, but you can find plenty of people who would argue that Clinton was a terrible president and probably just as many could be found to argue that Reagan was.

Aside from being an exercise in media auto-eroticism the debates do little more than satisfy the public's desire to turn everything into a spectacle or a game. Who will "win" the debate? It doesn't matter. The winner is whoever is most attractive to the audience. Viewers will not score these debates as if they were really forensics competitions, or as if they were genuine attempts to get at some deep political truth. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if they did because they're not going to vote for the guy who is the technical winner anyway unless he happens coincidentally to be the most articulate, or the best looking, or the most charming, or the wittiest, or the most relaxed guy on the stage.

Ninety five percent of the people watching the debates have already decided for whom they will vote, and they will not be swayed by anything that is said by Kerry or Bush. The other five percent, in an ideal world, should be dissuaded from voting at all. If they haven't decided by now what could they possibly be waiting for? Whatever it is, it can't be substantive because anything of importance that we're going to learn about these two gentlemen has been out there in the public arena for months or years. They can only be waiting for some superficial word or gesture that would rationalize a vote for one of the contenders. If that's the purpose of having these debates, however, to give a handful of people who couldn't care less about their responsibilities as citizens some trivial reason to cast their vote for one or the other candidate, then we're wasting our time.

Even so, I guess I'll watch it. Sometimes even a beauty contest can be interesting.

Fighting the Global War On Terror

Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute offers some excellent advice on what the U.S. needs to do to prevail in the war on terror. In an extensive analysis of what it will take to win this struggle Helprin claims that:

Neither the party in power nor the opposition has awakened to what must be done or what may happen if it is not. Neither party, nor the Left, nor the Right, nor the civilian defense establishment, nor the highest ranking military, nor the Congress, nor the people themselves, has been willing, in a war not of our own making, adequately to prepare for war, to declare war, rigorously to define the enemy, to decide upon disciplined and intelligent war aims, to subjugate the economy to the common defense, or even to endorse the most elemental responsibilities of government, such as controlling the borders of and entry to our sovereign territory.

Later in the piece he says this:

[T]he borders must be controlled absolutely, as is the right of every sovereign nation. It is hardly impossible and would demand no more than adding to the Border Patrol a paramilitary force of roughly 30,000, equipped with vehicles, helicopters, unmanned aerial drones, fences, and sensors. Crowded and slow entry points should be expanded to provide quick and thorough inspection by traditional methods and inspection to the limits of technological advance where traditional methods are impossible, as in searching the interstices of vehicles, or packed cargo containers, for nuclear or chemical warfare material. The sea frontiers can be secured if we undertake to supplement the Coast Guard with a few dozen high endurance cutters, 100 coastal patrol vessels, 50 long-range reconnaissance aircraft, 100 helicopters, and the appropriate additional personnel; and if the navy, by expansion of its anti-submarine assets, fixed and afloat, guarantees against submarine infiltration.

Helprin has much more to say on the matter of what we should be doing in the GWOT and how we should be doing it. His suggestions are certainly thoughtful and merit full consideration. Let's hope the Bush administration is listening.

First Things

The August/September First Things contains much that is excellent, but three articles are particularly good. The first, by Stephen Barr, is entitled here.

Two other pieces are also very much worth your attention. In Capital Punishment: The Case For Justice the inestimable Jay Budzizewski makes a powerful argument for the inherent justice of the death penalty. Some excerpts:

So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is any better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.

The questions we must address are therefore three: Is it ever permissible for public authority to give the wrongdoer less than he deserves? If it is permissible, then when is it permissible? Is it permissible to grant such mercy categorically?

The balance of the article is a fascinating and erudite attempt to answer those questions.

The equally distinguished Robert Bork makes a case for providing marriage with constitutional shelter in The Necessary Amendment. Judge Bork opens his essay with these words:

Within the next two or three years, the Supreme Court will almost certainly climax a series of state court rulings by creating a national constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The Court's ongoing campaign to normalize homosexuality-creating for homosexuals constitutional rights to special voting status and to engage in sodomy-leaves little doubt that the Court has set its course for a right to marry. This is but one of a series of cultural debacles forced upon us by judges following no law but their own predilections. This one, however, will be nuclear. As an example of judicial incontinence, it will rival Roe v. Wade, and will deal a severe and quite possibly fatal blow to two already badly damaged but indispensable institutions-marriage and the rule of law in constitutional interpretation.

The only real hope of heading off the judicial drive to constitutionalize homosexual marriage is in the adoption of an amendment to the Constitution.

He makes a good case. Conservatives are in a bit of a bind on this issue because they tend to be loath to tinker with the constitution. On the other hand they value tradition and perhaps no tradition is more highly esteemed than the tradition of marriage. How then can this valuable tradition be protected from complete dissolution without amending the constitution. It appears that legislative remedies are inadequate as they can easily be overturned by a single unsympathetic judge who deems any restriction of the marriage laws to be an unconstitutional infringement on the right of individuals to marry whomever they wish. That leaves conservatives like Bork with only two options: Either acquiesce to the Zeitgeist and watch homosexual marriage become a constitutional entitlement or amend the constitution now to define marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman.

Some ask why we should care if marriage is extended to homosexuals. How, we are asked, are we effected by an expansion of civil rights to include all citizens? A local radio talk show host said the other day that homosexual marriage doesn't affect him in the slightest and the rest of us should keep our religious views to ourselves.

In other words, if we think homosexual marriage is a good thing we should promote it in the public square, but if we think it is a bad thing then we should keep quiet about it. According to this gentleman, the only reasons one could possibly have for thinking that gay marriage is "bad" are religious reasons. Aside from the reply that the only reasons one could have for thinking that anything is bad in the moral sense are religious, one might also point out that whether one is religious or not, if he wishes to preserve heterosexual marriage and the family as we know it, changing our understanding of marriage makes the task several orders of magnitude more difficult.

As Viewpoint has argued before, once we change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman to include two men or two women we no longer have any non-arbitrary basis whatsoever for restricting marriage to just two people, or even to people. Proponents of gay marriage tend to scoff at this concern but to scoff is not to refute. If there are no rational grounds for limiting marriage to two people or to require that the blissful union involve only people it will be a mere matter of time before these conventions are challenged in the courts and when they are they'll be unsustainable. Marriage will come to mean whatever we want it to and at that point it will cease to mean much of anything at all. At that point marriage will be effectively dead.

If we agree with Bork that marriage is worth preserving then it seems that he's also correct that a constitutional amendment is, like some forms of surgery, an unpleasant but absolutely necessary measure to preserve the health of our society.

Winners Are Optimists

David Petraeus on Iraq's progress is an effective counter to the doom and gloom of the Kerryites. Petraeus is the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq and, among many other things, he says this:

[T]here are reasons for optimism. Today approximately 164,000 Iraqi police and soldiers (of which about 100,000 are trained and equipped) and an additional 74,000 facility protection forces are performing a wide variety of security missions. Equipment is being delivered. Training is on track and increasing in capacity. Infrastructure is being repaired. Command and control structures and institutions are being reestablished.

Within the next 60 days, six more regular army and six additional Intervention Force battalions will become operational. Nine more regular army battalions will complete training in January, in time to help with security missions during the Iraqi elections at the end of that month.

Iraqi National Guard battalions have also been active in recent months. Some 40 of the 45 existing battalions - generally all except those in the Fallujah-Ramadi area - are conducting operations on a daily basis, most alongside coalition forces, but many independently. Progress has also been made in police training. In the past week alone, some 1,100 graduated from the basic policing course and five specialty courses. By early spring, nine academies in Iraq and one in Jordan will be graduating a total of 5,000 police each month from the eight-week course, which stresses patrolling and investigative skills, substantive and procedural legal knowledge, and proper use of force and weaponry, as well as pride in the profession and adherence to the police code of conduct.

There will be more tough times, frustration and disappointment along the way. It is likely that insurgent attacks will escalate as Iraq's elections approach. Iraq's security forces are, however, developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition - and now NATO - support, this trend will continue. It will not be easy, but few worthwhile things are.

There are a couple of thoughts which come to mind when reading this article. First, it seems evident that time is on the side of the coalition. The longer things go, the more trained forces the Iraqis will be able to deploy against the terrorists in Fallujah and elsewhere and the less of a threat they will be. The worst thing we can do at this point is to pull out.

Second, no great thing has ever been accomplished by those who are always looking for reasons to justify their belief that it can't be done. Great deeds require men with vision and a positive spirit. They require leaders with a "can-do" mentality, men who see the goal and have the stamina, strength, and courage to pull the rest of us with them to that objective. Winners are optimists. They are cheerful and confident in the rightness of what they are about.

Senator Kerry offers us nothing but retreat, criticism, defeatism, and the politics of pessimism. According to him everything we're doing is wrong. We are, he asseverates, fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. Such an attitude certainly does not inspire our troops to strive for successful completion of their mission. It only discourages, disheartens, and demoralizes the people who hear him. His gloomy negativism makes him the wrong man to serve as our commander-in-chief in these momentous times.

The Politics of Paranoia

Massachussetts Senator Ted Kennedy has repeatedly made the claim that we are becoming less and less safe from terror attacks on our homeland. We keep hearing this assertion from all sorts of people in the opposition party but the question one wishes someone would ask the senator and anyone else who makes this fatuous claim is: How do you know that what you're telling us is, in fact, true? What is the metric by which Senator Kennedy can descry an increasing probability of a terror strike in the U.S.? Is it that he, like so many others in his party, believes that any assertion critical of the President, no matter how incredible or outrageous, is self-validating?

Of course, claims like these are low risk/high yield investments because there's no way they can be falsified. If there is a terror strike Kennedy and his votaries will shriek and howl about how they warned us that it was coming, and if there is no attack, well, they will assure us, it's on its way, and Bush is doing nothing to stop it. Either way, there's no price to pay for their reckless dishonesty. Indeed, it's possible that by continually shouting to the world that we are in a pitiful state of unpreparedness, the senator and his allies may well be emboldening the Islamists to attempt an attack that they might not otherwise have risked.

At any rate, these sorts of unsupported allegations are rhetorical parries directed at morons. The Democrats have decided that they will say, and perhaps do, whatever they think an intellectually uncritical public will accept. They're putting out so many baseless charges about the administration's "secret plans" to do dastardly harm to virtually every constituency the Dems can think of that the Republicans are finding it impossible to refute them all. There are "secret plans" to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote, to draft young people, to strip away social security from old people, just to name a few, and now Kerry reveals to us the administration's "secret plan" to take away subsidies from Wisconsin dairy farmers.

Perhaps we'll soon be hearing that Dick Cheney "secretly" had Halliburton pilots fly the planes into the WTT on 9/11 in order to boost the administration's poll numbers. One wonders in astonishment how Senator Kerry has come to be privy to the inner machinations of the Republican party. How does he uncover all these "secret plans"? Maybe Bush should have made Kerry head of the CIA when George Tenent resigned.

Of course, incessant assurances of "secret plans" to hurt this or that group of people is the politics of paranoia, and it's quite contemptible. The Democrat party, however, has long ago ceased to care how much it debases the American political process or how foul their allegations are against their opponents. For the left there are no moral constraints as most people understand them. For them the highest good is to win and regain power. Anything which achieves this goal is morally justified. The end of securing power warrants the application of whatever means are necessary.

If the voting public rewards their conduct with victory in November it will ensure that these tactics become standard fare in our elections, and in the long term it will have a severely corrosive effect on our democracy. These people don't deserve to win for a number of reasons, but the fact that they find such slimy tactics so agreeable to their character is surely foremost among them.

What is a Conservative?

In this election season it's not uncommon to hear the ideological labels "conservative" and "liberal" used to describe either an individual or a particular policy position. Since a lot of people may be unclear as to what these terms mean we thought it might be useful to offer a thumbnail sketch on what it is people are referring to when they use the word "conservative". Perhaps later we'll do something similar for the term "liberal".

There are at least four fields or arenas where the labels conservative and liberal are applied: Foreign policy, economics, social policy, and religion. Many people are conservative in some of these and liberal in others. Few people are uniformly one or the other so it behooves us to know, when someone is identified as a conservative, exactly what area of life he is considered to be conservative in.

It also should be pointed out that the ideological spectrum has shifted to the left over the past 100 years so that what is conservative today would in some cases have been considered liberal in the 19th century. Thus, to add to our confusion, people who are considered modern conservatives are sometimes said to be classical liberals. That is, they embrace the values of political and individual liberty advanced by liberals of the 18th and 19th century.

So what does one who calls himself a conservative believe? The foundational principle of conservatism is individual freedom. Conservatives tend to be in favor of small, decentralized government, low taxes and spending, and minimal governmental interference in our economic and personal lives. They believe that excessively high taxes are not only a violation of one's right to keep his own property but are also economically counterproductive.

Conservatives maintain that high taxes are counterproductive for this reason: The more money people have in their pockets the more they will save and spend and both of these activities are good for the economy. The more money people save the more money that is available for businesses and home and automobile buyers to borrow and therefore the lower interest rates will be. The more money people spend, the more money businesses earn and the more jobs that are created. The higher the earnings business enjoys, and the more people who are employed, the more taxes that are paid. Thus lowering taxes actually increases the tax revenues taken in by the government.

High taxes, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They depress spending and saving and reduce the rate of job creation. This increases poverty and accomplishes nothing good except to allow people who resent the wealthy to feel good about taking their money.

The conservative emphasis on individual freedom and small, unintrusive government underlies their support for giving parents the right to send their children to whichever schools they wish. It also accounts for the conservatives' desire to privatize social security. They want the people who earn the money to have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will provide for their senior years, and they oppose what they see as a government sponsored pyramid scheme that passes the obligation to pay for social security benefits onto future generations.

Conservatives also tend to see human nature as inherently sinful or flawed. They believe that, although society should maximize individual freedom, it needs to balance liberty with the need to maintain a healthy moral environment for families to thrive in. Society needs to erect fences around human appetite to keep people from shedding the tenuous moral leashes which enable us to live together in community. Thus conservatives prize free speech, but believe that some speech, like anything taken too far, or too broadly interpreted, can be harmful to society. Thus the right to freedom of expression needs to be balanced by the right to raise one's children in a psychologically and morally healthy culture.

Conservatives, furthermore, tend to advocate a strong military which should be employed only in defense of our national interest. Many conservatives opposed the peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti in the nineties because they could see no national interest at stake. Many also opposed the war in Iraq, though not the war in Afghanistan, for the same reason.

This is one of the differences between "paleo" conservatives and "neo" conservatives. "Neo-cons" are much more willing to use American power in defense of those who cannot defend themselves. Paleo-cons would argue that we have no national interest in Sudan, for example, so we should do nothing more than use diplomatic and economic levers to effect change there. Neo-cons would argue that we should not stand by and allow people to be slaughtered if we can prevent it. We should do whatever we can to help those people, and if that includes the application of military force then we should not shrink from such a measure. "Paleos" tend to be militarily isolationist while "neos" tend to be more willing to intervene around the world on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Conservatives also maintain that human rights need to be grounded in the transcendent, i.e. God. If there is no transcendent source of our rights then there are no rights at all. There are just arbitrary words on paper (See here for a fuller treatment of this topic). For this reason, it is less common to find atheists in conservative ranks than it is to find them among liberals who tend to see human rights as somehow inherent in persons.

Conservatives tend to hold, or at least support, traditional values and religious beliefs and oppose major structural change when undertaken just to accommodate current cultural, social or political fashion. They will, therefore, tend to oppose gay marriage, easy divorce, abortion on demand, and attempts to purge the public square of religious influence (for example, removing God from the pledge of allegiance).

They also tend to be strict constructionists with respect to interpretation of the constitution. The constitution, in their view, is not a document which can be stretched to mean whatever a handful of justices think it should mean. Conservatives believe that the constitution should be interpreted in the light of the intentions of those who wrote it. This leads them to oppose some gun control laws, which they see as an infringement of the second ammendment and to oppose the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which overturned the laws prohibiting abortion in every state in the union and for which they can find no constitutional warrant.

Conservatives are strong believers in personal accountability and consequently tend to favor tough enforcement of laws and serious punishment for serious crime. Their belief in personal responsibility combined with their conviction that government should be decentralized and unobtrusive leads them to be skeptical of the efficacy of many government welfare programs. Their objection to these has been primarily that historically they provide relief to people but require no accountability from the recipient and don't really help people in the long run. Indefinite relief with no accountability or reciprocation nurtures vices which tend to perpetuate the very poverty government wishes to eliminate.

It's probably fair to classify President Bush as a conservative or neo-conservative. He certainly fits this identification with respect to his positions on national defense, the constitution, and religion. He's somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum economically, favoring low taxes but indulging in high government spending, a combination that earns him criticism from both conservatives, who are aghast at the high spending, and liberals, who deplore low tax rates, especially if they apply to the wealthy.

On social issues Bush tends to be conservative in his stance on life issues like abortion and stem cell research, as well as on protecting marriage. He receives a lot of criticism for his immigration policy, but it's not clear that the criticism is ideologically grounded. He favors maximum opportunities for people to come to this country, but so do many conservatives and liberals. Both camps are split on this issue for quite different reasons.

There is doubtless much more that could be said about conservatism, and we invite readers to contribute their thoughts on the topic to our Feedback Forum.

PC Lunacy at UNC

Joanne Jacobs reports on a Washington Times story that administrators at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are trying to close down a Christian fraternity on the grounds the student group is violating the university's anti-discrimination policy because it excludes non-Christians and self-professed homosexuals from membership, the Times reports.

So, in order to continue to exist Christian organizations must allow atheists to join which would, in effect, cause them to cease to exist. In their desire to avoid discriminating against anyone the august administrators at UNC are demanding that Christian fraternities commit organizational suicide. Will they next be banning organizations that oppose abortion if they don't allow pro-choicers to join? Does UNC insist that Muslim organizations allow Jews to join? Why not insist that the basketball team allow midgets to participate? May men join the women's groups on campus? Did these administrators actually make it to college themselves or are they the product of an affirmative action plan to hire the mentally disadvantaged?

Apologies

Profuse apologies to the tens of thousands of readers and potential readers who were denied access to Viewpoint this weekend. Apparently the phone company in North Carolina upon which our server depends chose this weekend to shut down service for some sort of maintenance and we were unable to operate as a result.

Kerry on the Economy, Allawi

NRO's Bruce Bartlett has a critique of Kerry's economic plan. The quick summary is that there isn't one, at least not one that makes any sense. Bartlett writes:

Last week, Kerry made an effort to present a coherent economic plan. In a Wall Street Journal article entitled, "My Economic Policy," he made his case. It has four key elements: create good jobs, cut middle class taxes and health costs, restore America's competitive edge, and cut the deficit and restore economic confidence.

He then analyzes each of these four proposals and concludes that they are little more than political rhetoric. His promise to create jobs, for example, is based on ending outsourcing, but it's not clear that the advantages of this would outweigh the disadvantages:

Kerry's proposal to create jobs involves reducing outsourcing by closing a tax provision that he believes encourages U.S. companies to invest abroad. The $12 billion per year that this would raise would be used to reduce the corporate tax rate slightly. He would also reinstate a failed tax credit for new jobs and crack down on imports from China and elsewhere.

Economy.com, a respected independent forecasting service, looked at these tax provisions and concluded that their net impact on job creation would be "very modest." On the other hand, Kerry's implied protectionism could be very damaging to economic growth. Renowned Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati calls Kerry's trade policy "muddled and maddening" and "the voodoo economics of our time."

He closes his column with these words:

In the end, all John Kerry has is the charge that everything George W. Bush has done on the economy has been wrong. This may be enough for hard-core Democrats and Bush-haters. But anyone who is remotely open-minded is going to have a hard time believing that Kerry will do better. He would have helped himself by proposing something bolder and more interesting. You can't beat something with nothing.

The critique of the other three points is helpful, as well. It seems that Kerry's problem is that once he gets past criticizing Bush for everything he can think of he has really nothing to offer in his place. All he gives us are vague platitudes about how he'd do better.

Given the lack of a solid counter to Bush on the economy and other issues, he's decided to attack Bush on the war in Iraq where he hopes that he can still get some traction by heightening fears that Iraq is descending into chaos. This is why he was so quick to criticize Allawi's speech yesterday. Allawi claimed that the situation in Iraq is much better than the media portrays it, and Kerry couldn't let that notion take root in the public mind. Thus, in a rather unseemly act of disrespect for a man who is working hard to bring freedom and democracy to his people in the face of a very good chance of being murdered every day, Kerry, who didn't even show enough courtesy to attend the session to which Allawi spoke, essentially accused him of fabricating his story.

This strikes us as a sign of desperation. Why couldn't Kerry have been gracious enough to at least offer Allawi his support and good wishes and wait until he was back home before he attacked the man's claims? For the Kerry campaign there's nothing good happening in Iraq and anyone who says there is, is lying. Allawi is a genuine hero, even if he doesn't have a wall full of dubious citations, and all Kerry can do is criticize him, challenge his credibility, and embarrass him when he visits this country to thank us for what we've done for the Iraqi people. It's sad and pathetic.

A Trio of Lies

Someone who repeatedly and willfully says, or endorses, contemptible things is in danger of becoming a contemptible human being. This is the danger John Kerry treads precariously close to in this campaign. Desperate to cut into Bush's lead in the polls the Democrats have decided to resort to the politics of fear and loathing, but in order to make it work they have to shed whatever integrity they had and try hard to sell the public the Big Lie. In the present case, three big lies, one each directed at Blacks, young people, and the elderly - three groups the Democrats cynically believe they can easily bamboozle.

The first lie is that Bush and the Republicans are going to suppress the African-American vote. There are currently ads on television claiming precisely this, but whenever a spokesperson has been asked for the evidence that this allegation is true, he can only answer with irrelevancies about mythical disenfranchised voters in Florida in 2000. No such voters are identified, however, because the claim that there were such is an urban legend. There's not a shred of evidence that the Republicans have done anything in the past, or the present, to prevent minority voters from exercising their right to vote, but facts don't matter to those who seek to create a climate of fear and resentment.

The second deception is that if re-elected the Bush administration is going to reinstitute the draft. It would take an act of Congress to reinstate the draft, and it's hard to imagine any politician pushing for such legislation in the current climate. When spokespersons are asked what they base this allegation upon they cite their belief that we are undermanned in Iraq. This is an example of liberal logic: We need more troops (maybe) so the Republicans must be going to reinstate the draft. They also cite two bills which have been languishing in committee and which call for young people to serve a period of national service, but these have nothing to do with a draft. See here for more on why this charge against Bush is implausible at best.

The third falsehood is that Bush's plan to privatize social security means that he intends to cut off benefits to the elderly. This is a patent and willful misrepresentation on the part of the Democrats of the president's plan. Bush's proposal leaves current recipients alone and the Dems know this, but they try to scare the old folks anyway. It is a despicable, if not unsurprising, tactic. After all, we shouldn't wonder that the campaign of a man who deliberately slandered his fellow veterans in order to advance his own reputation in 1971 would hold truth in such low esteem.

Interview With an Iraqi Soccer Player

Hugh Hewitt posts this interview by an Iraqi blogger with an Iraqi Olympic soccer team goalie. You'll recall that some of his teammates distinguished themselves last month by making some anti-American remarks that were notable for their abject stupidity. This fellow has a different take, but you won't see his opinions on the evening news. Here's the interview:

Yesterday I was in Al Hurriya Olympic Swimming Pool together with my friends. While we were there, the Iraqi soccer team alternates entered the place with the goalkeepers' coach, Ahmed Jasim. I met one of the players, Akram Sabeeh, the goalkeeper and talked for a few minutes, then I asked some questions and told him that I'd publish his words on the internet and he agreed, so I gladly began my questions:

A: What do you feel when you play now? Do you think there's a difference from those days during the ex-regime?

Akram: look, I was seriously afraid when I was playing, they were really horrible days under Uday, I was afraid to do anything that might be misunderstood and the result would be the jail. Now, I feel free when I play soccer, I feel that I'm playing to improve myself and never afraid of anyone.

A: So you feel that you are free now?

Akram: Of course free.

A: Have you ever been jailed?

Akram: Yes, for 10 days.

A: What for?

Akram: Because I shouted at the referee!

A: Isn't it a humiliating act to be jailed for this reason?

Akram: Yes, but Uday was enjoying doing so, I might be lucky to be jailed only, other players were being beaten severely, tortured and many other brutal acts, you've heard about that?

A:Yes...let's forget what was Uday doing... what about the economical status?

Akram: My salary was 20$ and now it is 200$.

A: Wonderful...multiplied by 10.

Akram: Yes, I can think in my future now!

A: So what was wrong with other Olympic players, they were so upset when they were shown on the TV after each game, they kept repeating: occupation, targeting the cities..etc, they blamed on the Americans for that, what do you think?

Akram: Well..they were saying this cause they were watching what was going on in AlNajaf and previously in Fallujah, they felt that the families were being killed everyday. A: And do you believe that?

Akram: We are watching all of that on the channels.

A: Have you ever watched some good news regarding Iraq on those channels?

Akram: Frankly...Never!

A: So those channels intentionally collect the bad news and exaggerate most of them and play with our emotions to achieve their goal, and they've succeeded in that with some people..if they are honest they had better look at the good changes also.

Akram: Yes, you are right, we cry and get angry as we watch those channels!

Well, I could ignore all those questions, and ask him directly showing some bored and upset facial expressions: 'DO YOU ACCEPT...what's going on in your country now? Chaos, explosions, bombing the cities...what do you think..isn't it miserable?' !! I could make all the conversation full of hatred and pessimistic views!

I mean, you have to hear the question of the reporter and the manner of asking the players before you judge the players' opinions....Those journalists ask according to what they want to hear or according to what is needed from them.

The reporters should be honest and fair in dealing with the people in Iraq, it's a temporary critical period, and they have to help and support the Iraqis to stand against terrorism and build their country. Unfortunately, there are few of them.

This interview was passed on to Hewitt by a Marine who included his own thoughts and frustrations with the negativism of a media which, in Viewpoint's opinion, seems more and more to be actually hoping for a failure in Iraq. The Marine's e-mail is worth reading.

RLC

Celsius 41.11

Go here to see the trailer and tv ad for the newly released movie Celsius 41.11, the answer to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

The Question of God

Last night PBS ran part two of its two-part presentation of The Question of God (See here for a discussion of part one). The show is based upon an excellent book of the same title by Armand Nicholi of Harvard. In his book Nicholi compares and contrasts the worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis and shows how their fundamental assumptions about God led these men to much different answers to several of life's most profound questions.

Unfortunately, the PBS presentation was disappointing. The dramatization of his life made much of C.S. Lewis' faith in God but said next to nothing about the arguments he offers in his writings to undergird his belief. A viewer might well have come away from the show with the impression that, for Lewis, faith was exclusively a Kierkegaardian leap, a completely existential exercise in subjectivity, with no rational component.

Not only was a solid explication of Lewis' apologetic lacking in the portrayal of the Oxford don, but the roundtable discussions that interspersed the dramatization of both Freud's and Lewis' lives seemed to reinforce the impression that theism is bereft of any rational justification, that it's purely a matter of Freudian wish-fulfillment. The secularists, as they did last week, seemed to have reason and all the best arguments on their side, and the believers were left sputtering about their feelings and lamenting that they can't explain the difficulties that arise in their belief system, but that one just has to trust and have faith.

One man in the group admitted that he can't reconcile his conception of a good God with the existence of suffering, and Michael Shermer, an atheist, observed that he's just a step from atheism and invited him to try it. The Christian had no reply.

I don't know whether the believers around the table actually had no effective rejoinders or whether their best responses were edited out, but certainly there are plausible answers to the questions that were raised in this segment. To take just one, the program addressed the nature and origin of the moral law. What is it that tells us what's right and where does it come from?

The Christians in the seminar maintained that morality comes from God, but the atheists weren't buying that. They questioned why God is necessary for moral behavior. We can come to the same conclusions about how we ought to behave as the theist, they asserted, so why do we need God? People didn't decide to abolish slavery because God told them it was wrong, rather they abolished slavery because a consensus formed around the proposition that freedom is good and that it should be extended to all men. Human beings can be good whether they believe in God or not. We can live by the Golden Rule even if we're not Christians. And so on.

This is all true enough, which is why the Christians had a hard time responding to it, I suppose, but it's all irrelevant. To see why, consider this hypothetical conversation between a theist and an atheist:

Theist: Why would it be wrong for me to hurt someone?

Atheist: It's wrong because society couldn't function if everyone went about harming each other.

T: Maybe, maybe not, but at best that's an argument for not universalizing the behavior. The question is why would it be wrong for me to harm another individual? My act isn't going to have a significant influence on the rest of society.

A: It's wrong because you wouldn't want people to hurt you.

T: That's true, but that's not a reason why I shouldn't hurt someone else. If I can do it and get away with it why would that be wrong? What makes a might-makes-right ethic morally wrong?

A: People won't like you very much if you behaved that way.

T: Why should I care whether I'm liked or not? Is right just a matter of doing whatever makes you popular? Besides aren't you now tacitly admitting that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with hurting others. The only thing that makes it wrong, according to what you've said, is that it may not be in my best interests. But if it were in my best interests to harm another, you'd have no basis for saying that my act is wrong.

In other words, the problem isn't that the atheist can't adopt the same values as the believer. Of course he can. The problem is that the adoption of those values is completely arbitrary, as are the values themselves. Someone who lived by radically different values would be doing nothing "wrong" because right and wrong cannot exist as anything other than social conventions. I might adopt a value of human kindness because that appeals to me. Someone else might value cruelty because that appeals to him. Which of us does the atheist say is right?

This problem is implicit in the above discussion of slavery. Slavery was ended because people decided that freedom was good and should be extended to all men, but what if they hadn't so decided? Would they have been wrong to continue to enslave Africans if the consensus had been that slavery was acceptable? And why should freedom be extended to all men? Where does that belief come from? Are right and wrong simply a matter of whatever society decides? If so, then if society decides to kill off all its minorities, like the Nazis tried to do, that would not be wrong.

Shermer says that the Golden Rule is a product of evolution, not of God. Very well, but then why should anyone follow it? Why should a product of blind, impersonal forces which shaped us for life in the stone age be in any way binding upon us today? Besides, lots of things are products of evolution, but we don't advocate submitting to them. We have an evolutionary penchant for aggressiveness and violence, for sexual promiscuity, avarice, and selfishness. Why should we suppress these inclinations but adopt the Golden Rule? Isn't that just an arbitrary choice? What criteria or standard are we holding these various evolutionary proclivities up to in order to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is superior to the others?

The point is that unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is no morality. There are just behaviors that people like and dislike. People can agree to adopt a certain set of behaviors and arbitrarily choose to value them, but that doesn't make someone who dissents from the consensus immoral. Nor does it mean that if society had adopted different values they would have been wrong. Moral right and wrong are empty, meaningless concepts unless there is a God.

What Are We Waiting For?

President Bush has always taken hits from the left for his management of the post-war in Iraq, but now he's getting more heat from his own party. The neo-cons are rightly upset that several cities in the Sunni triangle have been allowed to fester and become havens for insurgents and terrorists. Word is that foreign fighters, emboldened by our reluctance to crush al Sadr in Najaf, are streaming into Fallujah and Samarra and a couple of other cities in the Sunni stronghold. The question that even Bush's supporters are asking is, why are we allowing this to happen? Our troops say they can take Fallujah in three, maybe four days, if they are given the go-ahead, so why aren't they?

There are two possible answers to this question, one of which is completely unacceptable. If the troops are being restrained by the administration because the suits don't want to give the impression of chaos and large numbers of casualties until after the election, then they don't deserve to be re-elected. If they're playing politics with this war then they've forfeited their right to our support (although it certainly doesn't follow that Kerry has done anything to merit it).

If, however, the administration is following a recommendation made by the commanders in the field then I think we need to be supportive. After all, if the commanders had recommended holding off on an attack and the administration overruled them for political reasons and ordered our troops into Fallujah and elsewhere, that would be as reprehensible as the scenario traced in the preceding paragraph.

If our military thinks it best, for whatever reason, to delay taking down these cities then we should defer to their judgment. Indeed, if that's the reason we're tolerating the current difficult situation I think the administration is to be commended for letting the military make those decisions, especially as the pressure mounts on the White House to do something.

One reason that has been floated as to why there seems to be so little aggressive activity is that our generals have decided that when we go in they want Iraqi troops in the mix. This is undoubtedly a wise long-term decision since it will give the Iraqis a sense of ownership as well as garner more support among the Iraqi residents of the cities we assault. It appears that the next wave of Iraqi trainees will not complete their training until sometime next month at which time Fallujah will come in for serious house-cleaning.

So, we'll see. If an assault does come in October the President's critics will scream about the "timing" of an attack coming so close to the election, but let them. Despite the fact that people are dying in Iraq because of the delay, the long term benefit of waiting until the Iraqis are ready to contribute could be a much more stable Iraq in the future. Let's hope that terrorists and others continue to flood into these cities over the next couple of weeks. It'll make those environments that much more target-rich.