Thank You, Mr. Attorney General

Jonah Goldberg tells us why he thinks John Ashcroft's departure is a big loss for America. Despite his despisers and those who gasped at the threat to civil liberties every time the Attorney General sneezed, this nation is deeply indebted to John Ashcroft for his service. Goldberg sums up why in this paragraph:

By conventional standards, Ashcroft was among the best attorney generals in American history. Violent crime dropped 27 percent on his watch, reaching a 30-year low. Federal gun crime prosecutions rose 75 percent, and gun crimes dropped - something that should please liberals. By unconventional standards his service was heroic. There hasn't been a single terrorist attack since 9/11, despite all predictions by experts and efforts by terrorists to the contrary. Ashcroft was willing to take gross abuse to do what was necessary. Indeed, even the 9/11 commission certified that the Patriot Act was absolutely necessary to fix many of the problems that led to that awful day.

Elsewhere in the column Jonah takes on the major criticisms that have been relentlessly levelled at Ashcroft over the last several years and shows them to be utterly without serious merit. He neglects to mention, however, that with all the foaming-at-the-mouth allegations of how Ashcroft was infringing on civil liberties, never once was there an episode during his tenure comparable to the immolation of dozens of women and children in Waco, Texas, or the shootings of other innocent women and children by federal agents in Idaho under Janet Reno. Nor was there anything nearly as shameful as the Elien Gonzalez episode in Florida.

He might have noted, too, that Ashcroft became Attorney General after losing a bid to retain his senate seat. He lost the election because he chose not to campaign after his opponent was killed in an airplane crash. His opponent's wife allowed her name to be placed on the ballot and, in an outpouring of sympathy, she won. Ashcroft's decision not to campaign against her was an act of graciousness that's hard to imagine his detractors duplicating.

Goldberg also declines to mention the real animus behind the vilification of this dedicated public servant. Ashcroft is seen as a threat by, and to, the secular left chiefly because of his strong Christian convictions. The left cannot abide the thought that someone in power would take Christianity seriously. Ashcroft does, and consequently nothing he could have done short of resigning would have mollified the attack dogs in the press and elsewhere.

The left, whether consciously or not, wishes to make it as difficult as possible for a man or woman of faith to serve in the upper reaches of government. They ultimately may be successful in making public service so personally unpleasant that many good people will simply avoid it, but, if so, our government will suffer grievously from the want of most of the virtues without which any government becomes corrupt and ineffective.

Men like John Ashcroft are the salt of the earth, his Justice Department was a breath of fresh air after the Janet Reno interlude, and he will be greatly missed by those who admire rectitude, integrity, and common sense in their leaders.

No Tears For Yasser

Viewpoint sheds no tears over the death of Yasser Arafat. More than any other single figure in the region he bears responsibility for the crisis between the Palestinian and Israeli people. He was a thug, a thief, and a mass murderer with the blood of hundreds of Israelis, dozens of Americans, and countless Palestinians on his hands. The Palestinian people languish in misery and poverty today largely because of this man's personal corruption and psychotic obsession with destroying Israel. Andrew McCarthy composes an excellent overview of his venal and blood-stained life at National Review Online. We decline to mourn.

If Democrats Went To Church

Morton Kondracke writes a lovely essay on what the Democrats need to learn about religion, specifically evangelical Christianity. We commend the entire piece to the reader but would like to highlight a couple of paragraphs which are particularly good and a couple of others which merit comment. Kondracke writes:

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, next to Charles Krauthammer the owner of the highest I.Q. on the nation's op-ed pages, wrote last week that "my problem with the Christian fundamentalists supporting Mr. Bush is not their spiritual energy or the fact that I am of a different faith. It is the way in which he and they have used that religious energy to promote division and intolerance at home and abroad."

Friedman's vaunted intelligence evidently abandons him when it comes to thinking about religion in the public arena. Why is it okay for Kerry to say that he's motivated by religious principles when it comes to fighting for equality and justice and for the environment, all of which involve imposing his values on other people, but it's not okay for Bush's positions on abortion, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, and the importance of freedom around the world to be informed by his religious principles? Why are Bush's positions on these issues divisive, when roughly half the country agrees with him, but Kerry's positions are not divisive even though half the country opposes him? For people like Friedman being divisive means proposing policy that Friedman doesn't like, being intolerant means not tolerating different things than Friedman doesn't tolerate.

Kondracke goes on to say that:

If fair-minded secular Democrats went to church - they are open to the public, by the way - here's some of what they'd learn: Lesson No. 1: Far more than abortion, evolution or homosexuality, Evangelical Christianity is about love, redemption, forgiveness, charity, humility, hope and self-sacrifice.

The best Evangelicals I know truly change lives - they turn around people who are addicted to drugs and pornography. They give the despairing and the guilt-ridden reason to persevere. They restore marriages. They transform criminals in prison.

They try to follow Jesus, who, if they studied him a little, no Democrat could possibly be scared of. I think this is what Bush's faith is all about - not arrogance or mindless certitude, but humility and a sense of duty.

Lesson No. 2: Evangelicals are scared, too. They are scared of the fruits of secularism and the deterioration of the culture in which they're trying to raise their children. Of hip-hop lyrics that encourage rape and murder. Of PG-13 movies and "family hour" sitcoms that tell children that if they're not having sex at 16, they're out of it. Of the scuzzy showbiz people who often surround Democrats.

I'd guess that most Evangelicals are "homophobic." Some are so in the bigoted sense, but many more in the sense that what they know of the "gay lifestyle" scares them. And they also are scared (I think, wrongly) that the already-battered institution of marriage will be demolished if committed gay couples are permitted to share in it.

This is a fine piece of writing and we're reluctant to quibble with it. Everything he says about Christians and Christianity would be plain to anyone who really tried to get past media stereotypes, but we have to disagree with Kondracke on his belief that gay marriage would not jeopardize traditional marriage.

As Viewpoint has noted on previous occasions, once the gender of the spouses is no longer a matter of law there will no longer remain any non-arbitrary basis for legal limits upon the number of wedded spouses. If legislatures no longer establish the gender, there will be no logical ground for establishing the number, and perhaps even biological relatationship, of the betrothed. Once society has set a tentative foot onto this slippery slope it will quickly find itself tobogganing downhill, unable to stop its plunge until marriage has been transformed into a union between any combination of people (and why limit it to people?) who desire to join together in wedlock for whatever purpose and for whatever length of time.

When this comes to pass marriage will cease to exist in any meaningful sense. The left has always seen the abolition of marriage, and thus of the family, as a progressive desideratum. Many Christians disagree, and in the minds of their critics that makes them bigots and homophobes. So be it.

The Democrats' Dilemma

An article on the Democrats' "religion predicament" by Jonah Goldberg is worth calling to our readers' attention. He writes that:

In the final presidential debate, John Kerry, a Catholic, did his level-best to talk about his faith. It is, he explained, "why I fight against poverty. That's why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this Earth. That's why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith."

But, at the same time, Kerry said he could not "transfer" his faith onto other people by legislating it. This struck many as a political and theological dodge. Why is it OK to brag about imposing the minimum wage and affirmative action - issues his faith is largely silent on - based on God's will, but it's wrong to do the same thing on abortion when his church's views there are clear and ironclad? Kerry wanted it both ways: to claim he was guided by faith on the easy stuff but that he couldn't impose his religion when it wasn't politically advantageous.

The larger problem for the Democrats is that liberalism itself, or what we erroneously call liberalism today, is in a crisis. It recognizes that politics must have an underlying morality to it, but it is antagonistic to traditional morality. This is foolish since our greatest political movements - abolitionism, civil rights, etc. - were religious before they were political. Moreover, attempts to construct new, secular, moralities have been failures, even at the seminar level. At the national level (think feminism, Hillary Clinton's "Politics of Meaning," socialism, etc.), they've been non-starters.

Goldberg puts his finger on something very important in the penultimate sentence. Liberal secular Democrats scorn "traditional morality" largely because they disdain the religion through which it comes and ultimately the God upon which it is based. In their rebellion against God they insist that they can create their own morality based upon reason, but such attempts are chronic failures. Reason, by itself, cannot invent an ethics. It can only help us to see where our ethics leads us given a particular starting point. Unfortunately for the Democrats, if we start from a position of secularism or naturalism then, if we follow our reason, we must end up as either subjectivists, egoists, or nihilists, or some combination thereof, and none of these are conducive to a healthy polity.

Subjectivism says that right and wrong are a matter of one's own individual preferences and tastes. We prefer some behaviors for the same reason we prefer some flavors or colors - we just like them. Subjectivists recognize that if right and wrong are matters of taste then no one's morality is any better than anyone else's and we should not pass moral judgment upon others (which is, by the way, a self-contradictory claim since it itself implies a moral judgment on others). We need to be tolerant of others' values, the subjectivist insists, unless, of course, the values in question are abhorrent to the subjectivist, like racism or homophobia, etc.

In discussions about morality subjectivists can be depended upon to utter inanities like "that's just your opinion" or "who's to say what's right or wrong", or "If it's right for him then it's right". Each of these statements assumes that moral disagreements are simply disputes about matters of taste, but this is a pretty shallow assumption when one thinks about it. Most subjectivists, for example, would be reluctant to say of Adolf Hitler that if killing millions of Jews was right for him, then it was right.

A subjectivist outlook leads inexorably to egoism, the conviction that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others. If this life is all there is then I might as well make the most of it, and if whatever I feel is right is right, then there's no good reason why I shouldn't seek to maximize my own good regardless of the effect that conduct has on others.

Whatever other ethic men might try to live by, whether the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill or the duty-based ethics of the Kantians, or any other, there is no satisfactory answer to the question why one should adopt that particular system. Why should I seek the greatest good for the greatest number, as the utilitarians propose, rather than seek the greatest good for me? Why should I accept the idea of acting in a way that I could want everyone to act, as the Kantians teach, rather than acting in a way that benefits me regardless of its effects on others? Once we step away from the idea that there is a transcendent moral authority we no longer have any satisfactory answer to the question of why I shouldn't just live for myself.

Some will reply to the previous assertion by saying that I shouldn't live egoistically because people get hurt when we only look out for ourselves, but why should I care if people get hurt as long as I don't? The response to that is often that I wouldn't want people to do things that hurt me, and that's true, of course, but that's not a reason why I shouldn't do something that hurts others if it benefits me, and if I can get away with it.

The third possibility, not really very different from the first two, actually, is to simply acknowledge that in a world without God moral right and wrong don't even exist. People just do what they do and there is no moral dimension to it, anymore than there's a moral dimension to a cat's torturing a mouse. Where, after all, does something like moral obligation come from if not from God? Can nature impose moral obligation? Can evolution impose it? Can society impose it? Reason tells us that in the absence of God moral right and wrong are empty concepts. Man is his own creator of values (subjectivism) as Nietzsche wrote, and there is no wrong in choosing to live for oneself (egoism). This is nihilism and it is where our reason eventually brings us if we start from a position of atheism and follow it all the way to its logical conclusion.

Secular man often makes his starting point the principle that we should not harm others and employs his reason to arrive at the best way to implement that principle in his life. But it's his starting point which is in question. If his first principle is challenged he has no satisfactory answer. He cannot give a compelling explanation of why harming others is wrong. To many people, of course, it just seems self-evident. It's wrong to harm others, they believe, because, well, because anyone can see that harming others is wrong. In fact, the starting point is not self-evident at all. It is an arbitrary assumption, and it is quite indefensible.

This is the liberals' dilemma. They wish to secularize society, to construct a secular value system based upon our shared humanity and the harm principle, but the whole enterprise is an exercise in walking on water. By declaring religious reasons to be illegitimate in the realm of public discourse they have neutered all ethical defenses of any public policy proposals. State secularism gives us no foundation for moral obligation or moral judgment. Every time a secular ethic is tried it collapses, as it has in communist countries around the globe.

The Democrats wish to push Christianity out of the public square and yet hold on to the concept of morality, but that's like trying to remove the foundation from a building without having the building collapse. It can't be done in the moral world any more than it can be done in the physical world, and a lot of people just aren't going to trust the Democrats to run the country as long as they keep trying it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost calls our attention to this rather bizarre result of a compilation of surveys of atheists done by the Barna Group.

1 out of every 2 atheists and agnostics say that every person has a soul.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that Heaven and Hell exist.

1 out of every 2 atheists believes that there is life after death.

1 out of every 3 atheists and agnostics talks about faith-related matters during a typical week.

1 out of every 3 atheists prayed to God, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 3 atheists want 'creationism" taught in the public schools.

1 out of every 8 atheists and agnostics believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior probably makes life after death possible.

1 out of every 10 atheists believes that absolute moral truth exist.

1 out of every 12 atheists read from the Bible, other than while at church, in past 7 days.

1 out of every 25 atheists attended a church service, other than a special event such as a wedding or funeral, in past 7 days.

Yikes! And atheists criticize and scoff at Christians for not practicing what they profess to believe!

Buy Generic

Andrew Sullivan directs our attention to an article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker on prescription drug costs. The essay, which is ostensibly a book review, actually does an excellent job of explaining how prices get set and what factors influence them.

Most people tend to believe that pharmaceutical companies bear the entire responsibility for high prices, but, in fact, according to Gladwell there are plenty of guilty parties. Not just manufacturers but the FDA, insurance companies, doctors, and even consumers all share much of the responsibility for driving prices up.

Nexium provides us with an example of how the pharmaceutical manufacturers manage to boost the price and increase their profits. The story is fascinating so we'll copy a portion of it here:

Ten years ago, the multinational pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca launched what was known inside the company as the Shark Fin Project. The team for the project was composed of lawyers, marketers, and scientists, and its focus was a prescription drug known as Prilosec, a heartburn medication that, in one five-year stretch of its extraordinary history, earned AstraZeneca twenty-six billion dollars. The patent on the drug was due to expire in April of 2001. The name Shark Fin was a reference to what Prilosec sales-and AstraZeneca's profits-would look like if nothing was done to fend off the ensuing low-priced generic competition.

The Shark Fin team drew up a list of fifty options. One idea was to devise a Prilosec 2.0-a version that worked faster or longer, or was more effective. Another idea was to combine it with a different heartburn remedy, or to change the formulation, so that it came in a liquid gel or in an extended-release form. In the end, AstraZeneca decided on a subtle piece of chemical re�ngineering. Prilosec, like many drugs, is composed of two "isomers"-a left-hand and a right-hand version of the molecule. In some cases, removing one of the isomers can reduce side effects or make a drug work a little bit better, and in all cases the Patent Office recognizes something with one isomer as a separate invention from something with two. So AstraZeneca cut Prilosec in half.

AstraZeneca then had to prove that the single-isomer version of the drug was better than regular Prilosec. It chose as its target something called erosive esophagitis, a condition in which stomach acid begins to bubble up and harm the lining of the esophagus. In one study, half the patients took Prilosec, and half took Son of Prilosec. After one month, the two drugs were dead even. But after two months, to the delight of the Shark Fin team, the single-isomer version edged ahead-with a ninety-per-cent healing rate versus Prilosec's eighty-seven per cent. The new drug was called Nexium. A patent was filed, the F.D.A. gave its blessing, and, in March of 2001, Nexium hit the pharmacy shelves priced at a hundred and twenty dollars for a month's worth of pills. To keep cheaper generics at bay, and persuade patients and doctors to think of Nexium as state of the art, AstraZeneca spent half a billion dollars in marketing and advertising in the year following the launch. It is now one of the half-dozen top-selling drugs in America.

In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge-and the extraordinary profits they enjoy-by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn't to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we'd already solved. "The Prilosec pattern, repeated across the pharmaceutical industry, goes a long way to explain why the nation's prescription drug bill is rising an estimated 17 % a year even as general inflation is quiescent," the Wall Street Journal concluded, in a front-page article that first revealed the Shark Fin Project.

Gladwell goes on to explain how consumers almost always have cheaper options but often doctors don't inform them of those choices. The over-the-counter Prilosec is almost identical to prescription Nexium and virtually as effective, and it only costs twenty dollars a month, one sixth the cost of Nexium.

There is much else of interest in this article. Gladwell points out, for instance, that it is a myth that the U.S. has the highest drug costs in the world. In fact, our overall costs are just about the cheapest if one excludes name brands and calculates costs on the basis of generic equivalents. Moreover, patents on many widely-used name brands are scheduled to soon expire, which will open the market to generics and cause overall costs to drop even more. Good news, indeed.

Good Sources On Iraq War

For the latest on Fallujah check out The Fourth Rail, Belmont Club, and Strategy Page. They each have excellent analyses of the fighting and pull together all the latest news reports from the city.

Fools, Knaves, and Radicals

Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times that, "President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is." Carl Bernstein repeated a similar allegation on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Tuesday night.

The assertion is either absurd or dishonest, or both, and those who make it are either fools or knaves, or both. To see why let's look at what the claim is based upon.

George Bush is said to be a radical because he opposes gay marriage and proposes a constitutional ammendment to prevent it. Bush is accused of trying to impose a religious belief on the rest of the nation, but this is silly. He is not trying to impose anything, rather he's seeking to preserve a two thousand year old institution which is essential to the well-being of our children and of our society. Indeed, it is his opponents who are attempting to impose a radical change upon society by by-passing state legislatures and having judges override the will of the people on this matter through the exercise of judicial fiat.

George Bush is called a radical because he opposes abortion on demand and would probably appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would roll back Roe v. Wade. At least three justices on the Court today believe that Roe is an extra-constitutional overreach on the part of the Supreme Court in 1973 and that it was very poorly decided. Even many liberals, Michael Kinsley comes to mind, who do not want it overturned have said the same thing. Maybe half the country agrees that it should be reversed and the decision as to whether abortions should be legal returned to each state so that the people of that state can decide the issue for themselves. Why is that radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he opposes the use of federal tax dollars to subsidize embryonic stem cell research. His policy is essentially an extension of the state of affairs as it was under Bill Clinton. He believes that the embryo is a living human being and, therefore, if it is going to be sacrificed for scientific research, taxpayers should not be compelled to pay for its destruction any more than they should be compelled to pay for abortions. If private industry or universities wish to carry out this research, Bush has put no barriers in their way. He has only declared that such research will not be funded by tax dollars. How does that make him radical?

President Bush is called a radical because he believes that God grants world leaders wisdom if they seek His will, and he believes that God acts in human history. This belief places him in the company of a long line of great presidents including George Washington and Ronald Reagan. It also puts him in the company of some Democratic presidents like Jimmy Carter. Most of the people in this country, whether they are Christian or not, believe pretty much what George Bush believes. In fact, the convictions George Bush embraces place him in the historical mainstream in this country, so what is radical about that?

A radical is one who seeks to overturn the settled practice and norms of a society. A conservative seeks to preserve them. A radical is a member of a minority who is well out of the mainstream of social and political thought. A conservative may be in the minority, but usually he is not. George Bush either does not wish to overturn settled norms, or, if he does, as in the legal acceptance of abortion on demand, his position is not out of the mainstream. Fifty percent of the country agrees with him. Krugman and Bernstein know this, but it suits their purposes to simply paint the President as an extremist even though they're fully aware that he's not. That's why their claims are both foolish and dishonest.

A Little Bit of Heaven

We hear that some Democrats, Lawrence O'Donnell for instance, are recommending secession of Blue states from the union as a viable response to Bush's election. Presumably, these desperate souls hope to form a country where women will be able to abort their babies willy-nilly, unhindered by the sort of qualms voiced by those dreadful pro-lifers; where gays will be able to marry freely and marriage will mean whatever "enlightened", "reality-based" people want it to mean; where entertainment celebrities will decide how the police and military will be employed, if at all; where no Christians will be admitted to the public square, in order to insure social tranquility; and where 70% tax rates, or higher, will be imposed on the wealthy to insure social equality. Sounds like heaven on earth.

The Moral Apostasy of the Left

Atheist Christopher Hitchens recognizes an important difference between left-wing atheists and the Christian George Bush: The left apologizes for religious fanatics. The President fights them. In an excellent essay for Slate Hitchens delivers an indictment of his erstwhile allies on the ideological left. A couple of salient excerpts:

So here is what I want to say on the absolutely crucial matter of secularism. Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda?

Suicide murderers in Palestine-disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO-described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time....

George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he-and the U.S. armed forces-have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al-Qaida network, and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries. The "antiwar" faction even recognizes this achievement, if only indirectly, by complaining about the way in which it has infuriated the Islamic religious extremists around the world. But does it accept the apparent corollary-that we should have been pursuing a policy to which the fanatics had no objection?

Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. We are now in the middle of another such war and revolution, and the liberals have gone AWOL.

Now if Hitchens were only willing to see that the strong sense of moral purpose and judgment which inspire his writing are without any substantial foundation in a universe without God, perhaps he would abandon not only the left but also the left's atheism. After all, a consistent thinker like Mr. Hitchens must recognize, once he reflects upon the matter, that one cannot be both an atheist and a moralist. Ultimately, one or the other must be thrown over.

If there is no God then there is no right or wrong apart from our subjective tastes or preferences. Our personal predilections, however, offer us no ground at all upon which to stand while passing judgment on the behavior of others, and Mr. Hitchens has built his career upon the passing of such judgments.

The Good News Keeps Coming

Arthur Chrenkoff's 14th edition of Good News From Iraq is on-line, and there's a ton of it. One wonders how many Democrats know about this site. Surely they aren't aware of it at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN else their reportage on Iraq wouldn't be so consistently gloomy and pessimistic.

Speaking of Iraq, and more particularly, Fallujah, Belmont Club is on top of military developments there.

PEST

Captain's Quarters offers some pungent thoughts on the self-absorbed snifflings of Florida Democrats who are seeking therapy for what's being called Post Election Selection Trauma:

Just when I thought it was impossible for Democrats to sink any lower in their post-election tantrums - after all, it's hard to top secession as a political strategy for the arrested-development set - now they have their very own psychological disorder, according to the Boca Raton News:

The Boca Raton News reported Tuesday that Palm Beach, Florida trauma specialist Douglas Schooler alone has already treated 15 clients and friends with intense hypnotherapy since the Democratic candidate conceded on November 3.

"I had one friend tell me he's never been so depressed and angry in his life," Schooler said. "I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated," he told the daily.

"We're calling it 'post-election selection trauma' and we're working to develop a counseling program for it," said Rob Gordon, the Boca Raton-based executive director of the American Health Association.

I have a theory that Democrats are secretly thrilled to have lost this election to George Bush, and this report confirms it. Nothing makes a Leftist happier than to belong to a victim class, and now they have created one that may exceed any that came before. It makes them feel more complete than even an official apology would. Next up, of course, is forcing employers and health-care providers to recognize it as a disability under ADA.

I would have thought that such a report could only be published by the Onion, but unfortunately this may be the least irrational reaction by Democrats this week. We've had MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell call for secession, his colleague Keith Olbermann proclaim the election rigged (while providing no evidence whatsoever), and massive requests for immigration information from Kerry supporters to everywhere except, oddly enough, France.

So far, the Democrats are demonstrating that they are anything but; in order to support democracy, one has to accept when their candidate loses as well as when they win. I'd like to ask how it feels to be less committed to democracy than the Afghanis, whose opposition candidates readily accepted their election results despite numerous hardships and difficulties. It's embarrassing when mainstream voices in a major party call for the breakup of the United States, and it's an insult to the men who gave their lives to keep the Union together less than 150 years ago, especially since the stakes are so superficial and petty.

At least they gave the "illness" a good name. Post-election selection trauma, or PEST, describes these summer patriots to a T.

The symptoms of the disorder make the sufferers sound like spoiled, self-centered brats who are so used to having their way that they can't believe they didn't get it in the election. One wonders how many of Mr. Schooler's clients beat their legs with their fists and stomped their feet when they realized that George Bush was going to win.

Hewitt On Specter

Hugh Hewitt has been arguing persuasively against denying Arlen Specter the chairmanship of the judiciary committee. His latest on the subject is here. He asks a number of pointed questions of those, like us, who think that Specter's intemperate and ungrateful remarks at a press conference last week make him unfit to serve. We find his argument compelling and are willing to abide a Specter chairmanship until the moment the Senator shows any sign of wavering with regard to a qualified Bush nominee.

Hewitt asks the following questions:

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that he would vote for Bush nominees to move from the committee to the floor?

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that Specter would vote to end filibusters on the floor?

Would stopping Specter make it more or less likely that Specter would vote to confirm nominees once they had made it to the floor and once a filibuster had been broken?

What would the effect of blocking Specter have on the conduct of his colleagues from the GOP's "center-left" wing, especially Senators Snowe and Collins of Maine and Chafee of Rhode Island? Would blocking Specter increase the likelihood of their opposition to Bush nominees? Can opponents of Specter guarantee that they can have their cake and eat it to, or might these four (and perhaps Hagel of Nebraska) respond by returning fire on nominees?

Specter's opposition to Bork in 1987 was 15 years ago. Specter supported Clarence Thomas and every Bush nominee since W's election in 2000. On what basis do opponents of Specter base their belief that he will oppose Bush nominees in the second term?

The answer to the last question, of course, is that he as much as said he would, but nevertheless, Hewitt is correct that bumping Specter could be counterproductive, especially by making an enemy out of him and hence his liberal Republican allies in the Senate.

Even so, the outcry that Republicans heard in Washington about Specter's pending selection is salutary. It sends a message to both the Republican senators in general and Specter in particular that the base back home is watching their every move and the good folks who comprise that base expect that the President's agenda will not be unfairly impeded, especially by members of his own party.

Tightening the Ring of Fire

Excerpts from the fourth rail, a milblog which is providing good analysis of the Fallujah battle:

Power has been cut off in the city, and all roads have been closed. The only people permitted to exit the city are women, children and boys under 15 and men over 50 years of age. The task force is using the full compliment of tools at its disposal: tanks, Bradley infantry vehicles, artillery, airstrikes, JDAMs, UAVs, robots, and the most effective tool in the U.S. military, the Infantryman and Marine trained in urban warfare (Military Operations on Urbanized Warfare - MOUT). The U.S. military seems to have perfected urban warfare and took historically low casualties in Fallujah last spring and in Najaf last summer. But the insurgents in Fallujah have had seven months to prepare the battlefield. Expect heavily fortified bunkers, roads littered with IEDs and buildings extensively booby-trapped.

A look at the map below [at the link] indicates that the city is effectively surrounded (blue boxes indicate suspected troop positions, keep in mind my assumptions on the Coalition forces both West and Southwest of the city). The neighborhood believed to be the stronghold of the insurgents is Jolan. Expect a box to form around this neighborhood as the Coalition forces segment and destroy all opposition in their area of operations; everything moving in this box will be fair game. The Marines and infantrymen will take buildings that will give then tactical superiority, then proceed to segment the Jolan neighborhood and clear the areas block by block, leveling any buildings deemed a threat to Coalition forces and clearing lanes of fire if needed. The railroad embankment to the North of Fallujah, the highway to the East (not pictured) and the Euphrates River to the West are effective man-made and natural boundaries that will help prevent the escape of insurgents fleeing the battlefield.

We haven't seen anything to suggest that there are simultaneous operations going on in Ramadi and other Sunni cities. Apparently, the commanders on the ground have decided that they would deal with these cities seriatim rather than all together as had been thought a possibility a couple of weeks ago.

Sudden Death

Belmont Club has a fascinating anecdotal account of U.S. capabilities in Fallujah. Here's part of it:

The Daily Telegraph has an atmospheric article which describes the terrible effect of networked forces on enemy forces inside Fallujah.

"I got myself a real juicy target," shouted Sgt James Anyett, peering through the thermal sight of a Long Range Acquisition System (LRAS) mounted on one of Phantom's Humvees. "Prepare to copy that 89089226. Direction 202 degrees. Range 950 metres. I got five motherf****** in a building with weapons." A dozen loud booms rattle the sky and smoke rose as mortars rained down on the co-ordinates the sergeant had given. "Yeah," he yelled. "Battle Damage Assessment - nothing. Building's gone. I got my kills, I'm coming down. I just love my job."

... The insurgents, not understanding the capabilities of the LRAS, crept along rooftops and poked their heads out of windows. Even when they were more than a mile away, the soldiers of Phantom Troop had their eyes on them. Lt Jack Farley, a US Marines officer, sauntered over to compare notes with the Phantoms. "You guys get to do all the fun stuff," he said. "It's like a video game. We've taken small arms fire here all day. It just sounds like popcorn going off."

This engagement is all the more chilling because it probably happened at night. Five enemy soldiers died simply because they could not comprehend how destruction could flow from an observer a mile away networked to mortars that could fire for effect without ranging. All over Fallujah virtual teams of snipers and fire-control observers are jockeying for lines of sight to deal death to the enemy. For many jihadis that one peek over a sill could be their last.

"Everybody's curious," grinned Sgt Anyett as he waited for a sniper with a Russian-made Dragonov to show his face one last, fatal time. A bullet zinged by....

His officers said that the plan to invade Fallujah involved months of detailed planning and elaborate "feints" designed to draw the insurgents out into the open and fool them into thinking the offensive would come from another side of the city. "They're probably thinking that we'll come in from the east," said Capt Natalie Friel, an intelligence officer with task force, before the battle. But the actual plan involves penetrating the city from the north and sweeping south. "I don't think they know what's coming. They have no idea of the magnitude," she said. "But their defences are pretty circular. They're prepared for any kind of direction. They've got strong points on all four corners of the city." The aim was to push the insurgents south, killing as many as possible, before swinging west. They would then be driven into the Euphrates.

Stay tuned.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Ever since the day after the election despondent Democrats have been casting their aspersions far and wide across Red America. Bush voters, we're told, are "stupid" and "ignorant". A headline in the London Daily Mirror asked the question that many American Democrats were asking, "How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?". Kerry voters by contrast are "reality-based" i.e. they are too sophisticated and smart to embrace all that religious hokem that the Bush people in their unbelieveable stupidity actually think is true. The spin on the election is that there are just too many dimwits out there voting for Bush and not enough of the enlightened crowd who voted for Kerry. The spin, however, collapses as soon as we start asking some questions about it.

Let's ask who's more stupid and who's more grounded in reality.

Is it those who believe that Kerry would have made a good leader, or is it those who in vain searched his twenty year record in the Senate for some scintilla of evidence of a predisposition to lead and an ability to do so?

Is it those who took him at his word when he claimed to have a plan for every contingency, economic, social and military, or those who asked to no avail to see those mysterious plans or to be told how, exactly, the plan differed significantly from what the President was already doing?

Is it those who believe he would stick it out in Iraq until the insurgents were defeated, or those who believed that since Kerry said that it was wrong to ask a man to die for a mistake in Vietnam and since he believes that Iraq is also a mistake, he could not be expected to ask soldiers to continue to die in Iraq any more than in Vietnam?

Is it those who believe Kerry would've been able to persuade the French and Russians to join us in killing the goose that was dropping golden eggs into their avaricious and unscrupulous hands, or those who believed that if something is right to do then it's right to do even if you have to do it by yourself?

Is it those who believed that Bush would end Social Security for the elderly, reinstate the draft, and suppress the black vote, or those who demanded evidence that any of these allegations was true?

Is it those who believed that Kerry could lower the deficit, keep all his spending promises, and yet not raise taxes on the middle class, or those who believed that this was all political posturing and flummery?

Is it those who believed Kerry's claims to piety, or those who thought these claims just as phony as his Ohio goose hunt?

Is it those who believed John Edwards' claim that he and Senator Kerry would have quadraplegics up and walking within a few years of being elected, or those who laughed in derision at such asininity?

Is it those who didn't believe any of the Senator's twaddle but voted for Kerry anyway knowing he didn't mean a word of it, or those who didn't believe it and refused to vote for someone who was so obviously untrustworthy?

Is it those who believe that anyone who refuses to go along with their sage plans to reform American society and culture is an intolerant bigot, or those who believe that it's wiser not to tinker with millenia-old institutions whose stability is crucial to our social and individual well-being?

Is it those stuck in menial jobs earning less than $30,000 a year who voted overwhelmngly for Kerry, or those who have the talent and drive to earn over $50,000 a year who voted overwhelmingly for Bush?

Is it those who received their education in blue counties where schools are often abysmal and drop-out rates are the highest in the nation, or those who received their education in red counties where public schools are often excellent and drop-out rates are low?

Is it those who paid money to see Michael Moore's patently dishonest and spiteful movie and came away thinking they'd just learned something profound, or those who saw the movie for what it was?

Is it those who based their vote on hate and spite for a candidate, or those who based their vote on respect and admiration?

Is it those who saw Teresa H. Kerry as a potentially impressive first lady, smart and sassy, or those who saw her as a self-absorbed whiner who's pretense at profundity was evidently delusional?

Is it those like George Soros who saw millions of dollars of his personal fortune spiral down the toilet of his foolish hatreds?

Is it those like Dan Rather, who, in his obsession to unseat the President, got taken in by an amateurish fraud, and, like Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale, sacrificed whatever credibility and integrity he had as a journalist that he might heroically slay George Bush's candidacy with forged documents?

Is it those who are so despondent and angry that they've cancelled family visits because their families live in red states?!

We here at Viewpoint may not be the brightest lights on the Christmas tree, but we don't think it's hard to see in this instance who's smart and who isn't and who's been grounded in reality in this past election and who hasn't.

Success of the Simpletons

Mark Steyn favors us with another enjoyable column on the Democrat's seemingly invincible inability to face up to the fact that the reason they're rapidly fading into oblivion is that their message is frozen in the 1960s like a wooly mammoth in the arctic permafrost.

Steyn writes:

I had a bet with myself this week: How soon after election night would it be before the Bush-the-chimp-faced-moron stuff started up again? 48 hours? A week? I was wrong. Bush Derangement Syndrome is moving to a whole new level. On the morning of Nov. 2, the condescending left were convinced that Bush was an idiot. By the evening of Nov. 2, they were convinced that the electorate was. Or as London's Daily Mirror put it in its front page: "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?"

Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

The rest of the piece is just as good.

Iran's Options

The Monterey Institute of International Studies offers an analysis of difficulties and consequences of an Israeli or American preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities and concludes that the negative long-term liabilities of such a strike would negate any short-term benefit. It's the best argument we've seen for essentially doing nothing about Iran's imminent nuclear weapons capability.

The problem is that many of the dire consequences the above report cites as reasons for declining to attack Iran's nuclear facilities are already upon us. They argue, for example, that Iran would certainly work hard to undermine the nascent democracy in Iraq and bring our efforts there to grief, but as this article makes clear, Iran is already doing pretty much whatever it can to destablize Iraq.

It seems likely that whatever Iran can do to hurt and thwart the United States it will do whether or not we take out its weapons-making capability.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for the tip.

Yasser, We Never Knew Ye

We never would have guessed, but apparently it's an open secret that Yasser Arafat is homo/bi-sexual and is currently dying from AIDS. The cause, if it is the cause, of his grave condition is shrouded in secrecy because such a lifestyle, and such a denouement, would be an intolerable affront to Muslim piety. If word got out that Arafat was a homosexual it would severely tarnish his image in the Arab world. There is, nonetheless, considerable evidence that he is, in fact, dying from AIDS. See here for the scuttlebutt, so to speak.

The Assault Begins

The assault on Fallujah has begun. For analysis of events visit Adventures With Chester:

The New York Times is reporting that the hospital was seized by the 36th Iraqi Commando Brigade in conjunction with US Special Forces. This is important in that it shows the high initial involvement of Iraqi National Forces.

NYTimes also reporting (same article) that thousands of Marines are moving from their base to a point north of Fallujah. Their base is likely Al-Taqqadam airfield, and they are likely moving across the western bridge they just seized. This makes sense; a large armored force will now be positioned on the eastern side of the Euphrates, and north of the city. That means it can either rapidly move along the highway toward Baghdad in pursuit of insurgents, or it can use the same highways to position itself on three different sides of the city, with the Euphrates on the fourth.

There's much more at his site.