World War III

Deroy Murdock at NRO has an excellent column that captures in a brief space the essence of the nature of the struggle we are in against the Islamist menace. Murdock amasses the evidence for viewing this conflict as a world war (although he himself doesn't use the term) and closes with this:

As Andrew Higgins chillingly related in the November 22 Wall Street Journal, two days after Van Gogh's death, Islamists aimed their knives at Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, a critic of open immigration. They posted his picture on line beside this message: "The punishment is beheading, and the reward for doing it is paradise."

Moderation against such fanaticism is inconceivable. Fundamentalist Islam must be transcended from within while militant Islam must be vanquished from without. Victory cannot come too soon.

Until then, Geert Wilders [A Dutch politician whose life has been threatened by Islamists] grasps the stakes. "Bush was totally correct," he phoned Higgins while dashing between safe houses on the advice of police. "This is war, a world-wide war."

We are indeed engaged in World War III and the sooner our European and Democratic brethren rouse themselves from their liberal slumbers the sooner we may turn the corner in the battle.

Maybe They Don't Know Any Better

Eruptions of the pathological hatred endemic to North America's left-wing continue to suppurate on our body politic. Several of the signs touted recently by Canadian protestors in Ottawa sicken the stomach. Go here and click on the photos to enlarge.

By the way, is the sign that shows Bush in the cross-hairs being carried by a Muslim? Just asking.

Mosul

Strategy Page gives us this take on the fighting in Mosul:

November 29, 2004: Military and police operations south of Baghdad and up north in Mosul continue. The government is convinced that many Sunni Arab religious leaders have joined with anti-government forces and allowed their mosques to be used as bases for gunmen and terrorists, and is raiding mosques suspected of supporting violence. In Fallujah, 60 of 100 mosques in the city were found to be used for supporting anti-government forces. Since many mosques are large, walled, complexes, they lend themselves to being military bases. Technically, this sort of use is forbidden under Islam, but in times of unrest in Iraq, mosques frequently become centers of military activity. So the government has dropped any pretense of mosques being off-limits. As a result, mosques are now regularly being raided. In southern Baghdad, a mosque was found to house a suicide car bomb workshop, which had seven cars rigged and ready to go. That's a weeks worth of car bomb attacks in Baghdad.

In Mosul, the battle is between the Iraqi security forces and the Sunni Arab terrorists. In the last ten days, about fifty Iraqi soldiers and policemen have been killed, often executed, by Sunni Arab terrorists. Unlike Fallujah, the Sunni Arab gunmen are not doing a "stand and fight," but rather a "hit and run." But they need places to sleep and store their weapons. American and Iraqi intelligence efforts are closing down on these. More and more Kurds, and other non-Arab minorities, are being recruited into the police and army in Mosul. While this angers the Sunni Arabs up there, the non-Arab troops are more persistent, and speak Arabic. As more gunmen are arrested, interrogations provide more information on the anti-government groups. There was also a lot of information, on Mosul rebel groups, obtained from gunmen and documents captured in Fallujah.

Meanwhile the defeatist MSM concentrates on the downside as though that were the only side there was to report. Even when they do report a success they invariably follow it with a "but...". No one wants to be so optimistic as to be blinded to reality, but neither do most people want the media to behave as if the dark side is all there is, especially when there is so much good occurring in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pessimism is the mindset of losers and failures and it is particularly common in the American media. Negativism is a corrosive acid that eats away at a group or a nation demoralizing them and sapping their confidence. No athletic coach, no businessman, no general, no president, and no nation ever accomplished anything great by constantly reminding themselves of the reasons why something couldn't be done. Lots of people, however, have failed because they were fixated on the obstacles, because they couldn't, or wouldn't, envison success.

Three Cheers for the <i>New York Times</i>

Last Sunday's Meet the Press featured a panel of prominent Christian spokesmen discussing religion in America. It was a bit surprising that the panel included Al Sharpton, and it was a bit disappointing that Jerry Falwell was more overbearing and combative than he needed to be. The others on Tim Russert's panel, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, comported themselves well, but Falwell and Sharpton were, each in his own way, less than what one would have hoped. I wondered why, given all of the outstanding evangelical thinkers out there, the networks always seem to draw on the same cast of characters when they want someone to speak on behalf of Christianity.

Apparently, David Brooks of the New York Times thought the same thing. He has a remarkable piece on the evangelical he would most like to see on television instead of the usual lineup of Falwellians and Robertsonians, and various clergy who are in one way or another controversial or disaffected. You'll probably think his column (free subscription required) is the more remarkable because Brooks himself is Jewish.

Since our readers may not have the time to fill out the subscription form we offer the Brooks column to you here:

Tim Russert is a great journalist, but he made a mistake last weekend. He included Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton in a discussion on religion and public life.

Inviting these two bozos onto "Meet the Press" to discuss that issue is like inviting Britney Spears and Larry Flynt to discuss D. H. Lawrence. Naturally, they got into a demeaning food fight that would have lowered the intellectual discourse of your average nursery school.

This is why so many people are so misinformed about evangelical Christians. There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don't blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott's name hasn't appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it's never appeared in many other important publications.

Yet, as Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center notes, if evangelicals could elect a pope, Stott is the person they would likely choose. He was the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism. He is the author of more than 40 books, which have been translated into over 72 languages and have sold in the millions. Now rector emeritus at All Souls, Langham Place, in London, he has traveled the world preaching and teaching.

When you read Stott, you encounter first a tone of voice. Tom Wolfe once noticed that at a certain moment all airline pilots came to speak like Chuck Yeager. The parallel is inexact, but over the years I've heard hundreds of evangelicals who sound like Stott.

It is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also confident, joyful and optimistic. Stott's mission is to pierce through all the encrustations and share direct contact with Jesus. Stott says that the central message of the gospel is not the teachings of Jesus, but Jesus himself, the human/divine figure. He is always bringing people back to the concrete reality of Jesus' life and sacrifice.

There's been a lot of twaddle written recently about the supposed opposition between faith and reason. To read Stott is to see someone practicing "thoughtful allegiance" to scripture. For him, Christianity means probing the mysteries of Christ. He is always exploring paradoxes. Jesus teaches humility, so why does he talk about himself so much? What does it mean to gain power through weakness, or freedom through obedience? In many cases the truth is not found in the middle of apparent opposites, but on both extremes simultaneously.

Stott is so embracing it's always a bit of a shock - especially if you're a Jew like me - when you come across something on which he will not compromise. It's like being in "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," except he has a backbone of steel. He does not accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, and of course he believes in evangelizing among nonbelievers. He is pro-life and pro-death penalty, even though he is not a political conservative on most issues.

Most important, he does not believe truth is plural. He does not believe in relativizing good and evil or that all faiths are independently valid, or that truth is something humans are working toward. Instead, Truth has been revealed. As he writes:

"It is not because we are ultra-conservative, or obscurantist, or reactionary or the other horrid things which we are sometimes said to be. It is rather because we love Jesus Christ, and because we are determined, God helping us, to bear witness to his unique glory and absolute sufficiency. In Christ and in the biblical witness to Christ God's revelation is complete; to add any words of our own to his finished work is derogatory to Christ."

Politicians, especially Democrats, are now trying harder to appeal to people of faith. But people of faith are not just another interest group, like gun owners. You have to begin by understanding the faith. And you can't understand this rising global movement if you don't meet its authentic representatives.

Not Falwell, but Stott.

It may be years before we again get to see such a positive piece about an evangelical Christian theologian in the pages of the New York Times. Indeed, we wonder how many Times readers will be canceling their subscriptions because such an overtly sympathetic essay about such a manifestly fine Christian was allowed to grace its op/ed page.

The Ohio Vote

Interested in the status of the Ohio vote count? Rich Lowery has a good article at National Review Online. Here's part of it:

The conspiracy theorists focus on Franklin County, home of the heavily Democratic city of Columbus. They allege, among other things, that long lines there on Election Day were a cagey tactic to keep blacks from voting. It just happens that Anthony is chairman of the Franklin County Board of Elections and also chairman of the Franklin County Democratic party. "I am a black man," he told the Columbus Dispatch. "Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?" Good question.

[Jesse] Jackson and others complain that not enough of the roughly 155,000 provisional ballots - ballots cast by voters who might or might not be legitimate registered voters - are being counted. So far, an ample 76 percent of the provisional ballots have been ruled valid, roughly the same rate as in 2000. A provisional ballot isn't counted when the person casting it wasn't really registered to vote, voted in the wrong precinct or - more rarely - voted twice. Ohio's standards for counting provisional ballots are entirely reasonable. Indeed, they are the same as in such liberal strongholds as New York, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts.

The die-hards also focus on punch-card ballots, which featured prominently in the Florida 2000 controversy and aren't counted if there's an over-vote (i.e., both Bush and Kerry are punched) or an under-vote (i.e., neither is clearly punched). In any election, there is a small percentage of both. Here, Ohio's performance has improved over 2000. Four years ago, out of 4.9 million votes cast, 98,000 were invalid because of over-votes or under-votes. This year, there were more total votes, 5.5 million, but only 93,000 over-votes or under-votes.

It's still possible, believe it or not, that John Kerry could win the election. We'll know by next week. I can't imagine anything, short of another 9/11, that would rock this country more than Ohio finding that John Kerry actually garnered more votes than George Bush. For one thing, all those Hollywood types who moved abroad in the wake of November 2nd would all be coming back again. That prospect alone should be enough to stop the count.

Philosophical Confusion

The normally lucid philosopher John Searle gets himself turned all cattywumpus when it comes to God:

"For us", he writes in Mind, Language and Society, "if it should turn out that God exists, that would have to be a fact of nature like any other. To the four basic forces in the universe--gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces--we would add a fifth, the divine force. Or more likely, we would see the other forces as forms of the divine force. But it would still be all physics, albeit divine physics. If the supernatural existed, it too would have to be natural."

Among the attributes which comprise our concept of God is transcendence. God is the creator of physics, not a part of it. Searle is saying, in effect, that if a transcendent being exists then that being is not transcendent. This is what both philosophers and laymen call nonsense.

Searle is in a tough spot. He cannot bring himself to admit the possibility that the universe is the created product of an intelligent being which exists apart from that which He created, but neither can he deny the possibility that God exists. So he's reduced to announcing that should God exist, He wouldn't really be God. This is the sort of claim that gives philosophy a bad reputation.

Thanks to The Philosophers' Magazine Online's Daily Philosophical Quotation for the tip.

The Triangle of Death

There's a good overview of the ongoing battle in the "Triangle of Death" by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. at National Review Online. Smith updates us on what's happening in this region south of Baghdad and how this assault differs from the battle for Fallujah.

Rebuilding Fallujah

Here's anInteresting article on who, exactly, is getting the contracts for rebuilding Fallujah and the rest of Iraq. Two clues. The answer will disappoint the left, and it's not Halliburton:

Iraqi reconstruction is hitting a decisive phase as the Baghdad-based Project and Contracting Office drives for 1,000 project starts by year's end. The PCO wants to establish a tone of success before elections Jan. 31 by giving local Iraqi contractors fast-start projects, especially in hot spots like Fallujah.

The surge in starts-873 as of Nov. 1 and up 24% from Oct. 7-is being achieved in part because months of preparations are hitting the construction phase. But it also is happening because the PCO has rejiggered the schedule to push small, fast projects up the calendar and award local firms the work.

"It's mostly Iraqis," said Charles Hess, director of the PCO, in a telephone interview Nov. 18 from Baghdad. "We had to do that in response to the security situation to avoid having a large expatriate presence on the ground. We use U.S. design-build contractors to shape the more complicated issues we brought them here to help us with....They don't need to be worrying about a $50,000 school when they should be working on a $500-million gas combustion generator in an undeveloped oilfield."

The strategy has been evolving since last summer when negotiations ended major fighting in Najaf, Samarra and Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood. Fastpaced reconstruction drives there have become the model for the effort going forward.

In Najaf, 25 projects were completed in two months, including rehabilitation of the main market, sewer and waterline repair, health clinic upgrades, as well as local clean-ups and road repairs.

Similar efforts, the article goes on to say, are beginning now in Fallujah. Iraq is being rebuilt largely by Iraqis who are getting the jobs and receiving the paychecks.

Our question, however, is how did the evil Dick Cheney allow these contracts to slip from the grasping fingers of his cronies at Halliburton? Maybe this story is just another Karl Rove-inspired sham to cover-up the real plot to enrich friends of the administration at the expense of the American taxpayers and the poor Iraqis. We hear MoveOn.org will be on the case as soon as they're finished exposing how Bush stole the election in Ohio.

Implacable Hatred

Andrew Sullivan mentions, in somewhat disapproving tones, articles by Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan who address two different aspects of the war Islam is waging upon the West. Colson believes that our decadent culture with its obsessions with sex, both hetero and homo, does nothing so much as inspire the Islamists to redouble their efforts to slaughter us and to convince them that they are pleasing Allah by doing so. Colson states that:

We must be careful not to blame innocent Americans for murderous attacks against them. At the same time, let's acknowledge that America's increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When we tolerate trash on television, permit pornography to invade our homes via the internet, and allow babies to be killed at the point of birth, we are inflaming radical Islam.

Radical Islamists were surely watching in July when the Senate voted on procedural grounds to do away with the Federal Marriage Amendment. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America's decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.

One vital goal of the war in Iraq, and the war against terrorism, is to bring democracy to the heart of the Islamic world. Our hope is to make freedom so attractive that other Muslim countries will follow suit. But when radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being "married" in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent-the kind they see as a blot on Allah's creation.

Like Colson's, the column by Pat Buchanan should be read in its entirety. It includes some interesting information about Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and his murder and concludes with this:

Undeniably, Islam is rising. And, like all rising faiths, it is intolerant. Disbelieving that all religions are equal - "There is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet" - Islam does not believe all faiths should be treated equally. Why should they be? If one has God's revealed truth, why should one tolerate lies that lead to the damnation of the faithful?

In its new constitution, the European Union has declared Christianity a dead relic. What Islam is saying - with its militancy, its soaring birth rate, it steady replacement of dying Europeans with young Muslim immigrants - is: "Christianity may be your past, but we are your future." My money's on the true believers.

There's one crucial thing Americans and Europeans must understand about the Islamists but evidently not all of us do. They are not going to be mollified by tossing a little foreign aid their way or even by a revival of traditional sexual morality. There is a deep, chronic hatred for the West ingrained in the Muslim psyche and in Arab culture. The hatred grows firstly out of their conviction that God Himself despises us for our cultural depravity and that He is eager for us to be expunged from the face of the earth. They detest us secondly because of our support for the Israeli people whom they hate with more ferocity than they can summon even for us. Thirdly, they loathe us because of their jealousy. When they reflect that they, a once great and proud people who adhere fervently to the one true religion, are living in abject misery and impotence while the wicked infidels skip happily from one success to the next, disdaining God and his prophet, it drives them to acts of horrific violence and madness.

Their spokesmen have been boldly declaring for decades that they will never stop hating or killing us until they have succeeded in destroying both Israel and Western culture and have subjected all non-Muslims either to the sword or to dhimmitude (second class subservience to Islamic law).

We have three alternatives which might mitigate this intolerable state of affairs. We can commit national suicide by every one of us taking a draught of cyanide-laced kool-aid. Or we can commit genocide by bombing the Muslim world forward into the stone age. Or we can do what President Bush is attempting to do and drag the Muslim world kicking and screaming into the modern era. The first option is rather unattractive, the second is morally repugnant, and the third is not guaranteed success. Indeed, the left in this country is working hard to insure that it doesn't succeed. Yet, it is our only viable hope for avoiding endless war and endless terror.

The Continuing Assault on Life

Hugh Hewitt tips us to the ongoing erosion of the right to life. The Netherlands is currently debating whether it should soon be permissible for doctors to arrogate to themselves the legal right to kill children up to the age of twelve if they deem them to be in terrible pain and terminally ill. Parents' wishes will, of course, be considered, but the ultimate decision rests with doctors. Previously, Dutch law only allowed for euthanasia of patients older than twelve.

The following is the first part of an article describing the Groningen Protocol, a set of guidelines for an experimental policy allowing child euthanasia.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Four times in recent months, Dutch doctors have pumped lethal doses of drugs into newborns they believe are terminally ill, setting off a new phase in a growing European debate over when, if ever, it's acceptable to hasten death for the critically ill. Few details of the four newborns' deaths have been made public. Official investigations have found that the doctors made appropriate and professional decisions under an experimental policy allowing child euthanasia that's known as the Groningen University Hospital protocol.

But the children's deaths, and the possibility that the protocol will become standard practice throughout the Netherlands, have sparked heated discussion about whether the idea of assisting adults who seek to die should ever be applied to children and others who are incapable of making, or understanding, such a request.

"Applying euthanasia to children is another step down the slope in this debate," said Henk Jochemsen, the director of Holland's Lindeboom Institute, which studies medical ethics. "Not everybody agrees, obviously, but when we broaden the application from those who actively and repeatedly seek to end their lives to those for whom someone else determines death is a better option, we are treading in dangerous territory."

The Dutch debate is being closely watched throughout the continent. Belgium has laws similar to those in the Netherlands, and a bill permitting child euthanasia is before its Parliament. No date has been set for debate.

Great Britain is considering legalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill, amid reports that doctors already may be helping thousands of patients to die each year.

"Assisted dying is a fact," said Hazel Biggs, the director of medical law at the University of Kent, who's about to publish a report estimating the number of assisted deaths in Britain at 18,000 annually. "We have to regulate it, to ensure that vulnerable people are being protected."

Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child's life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.

Hewitt asserts that, "There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who will react with horror and alarm to this story; those who will applaud it; and those who will shrug it off as of no interest to them. I am uncertain which of the latter two groups is in worse moral condition."

The crucial question here is what safeguards are in place to insure that the policy won't gradually evolve to eventually permit euthanasia of children born to poor families or emotionally distraught mothers or children whose prospects are otherwise bleak? How will doctors be prevented from killing children whose lives they simply deem to be insufficiently pleasant?

The trend here is very disturbing, not less so because the motives for legalizing child euthanasia seem so compassionate.

De-Spinning the No-Spin Zone

Captain Ed deconstructs Bill O'Reilly's recent editorial defending Dan Rather here. O'Reilly sometimes gives the impression of a man who takes bizarre positions simply to make himself noticed. The utter vacuity of his defense of Rather leaves little room for any other conclusion. Excerpts from O'Reilly are in italics:

Bill O'Reilly issues a scathing editorial on all those who dared to criticize Dan Rather over the forgeries used in the 60 Minutes story on George Bush's Air National Guard service. According to O'Reilly, Rather's torment at the hands of critics using (gasp!) the First Amendment to speak out against him shows that the American system of innocent until proven guilty has been utterly discarded. What a load of horse puckey.

The ordeal of Dan Rather goes far beyond the man himself. It speaks to the presumption of guilt that now rules the day in America. Because of a ruthless and callow media, no citizen, much less one who achieves fame, is given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to allegations or personal attacks. The smearing of America is in full bloom.

The presumption of innocence relates to criminal proceedings, Bill, not media criticism. Criticism doesn't equate to legal action, and the cure is either countercriticism -- which CBS News and Rather apologists delivered in spades -- or admitting the obvious: the documents were forgeries and CBS screwed up. To this date, Rather has only done the former.

That smear came on the heels of the "Swift boat" attacks on John Kerry, an ordeal that may have cost him the election. While some of the Vietnam vets had valid points, more than a few of the accusations against Kerry were simply untrue.

We hear this a lot, but no one who makes that suggestion ever comes up with a single argument from the Swiftvets that was proven false, let alone "more than a few". O'Reilly doesn't back this up, either, making himself a hypocrite for at least the first time in this piece.

Right-wing talk radio in particular pounded Kerry and also bludgeoned Dan Rather for his role in another smear incident - the charges against President Bush about his National Guard service. Again, Rather was found guilty without a fair hearing.

Fair hearing? Rather used the broadcast medium of CBS to constantly defend himself, hardly a mismatch against Rather.

Charges that he intentionally approved bogus documents that made Bush look bad were leveled and widely believed. It was chilling.

Perhaps that's because he told the nation that he personally vouched for the authenticity of the documents, Bill. Even today, after we've found out that CBS's own experts warned them the documents could not be authenticated and every accredited expert in the field has thoroughly debunked them, Rather and CBS have yet to admit they're forgeries. They only admit that they aren't "thoroughly authenticated". Issuing bulls**t statements like that and stonewalling the critics got Rather and CBS in the hot water they're in.

It may be true that Rather did not vet the information supplied to him by producers, but few anchor people do.

Rather is more than the anchor at CBS News, he's also the managing editor. Isn't he supposed to be responsible for what gets broadcast on CBS News? Or is that just a phony title, meant to build up his credibility through fraud?

But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed.

Oh, grow up. If Dan Rather can't take criticism about how he performs his job, then he should have gotten out of the media business a long time ago. And to reiterate the point, Rather hasn't been charged with a crime, he's being criticized in the same manner that he and his cohorts at 60 Minutes have made careers off of doing to others. As has Bill O'Reilly, for that matter.

Let me ask you something: In the future, do you think potential public servants and social crusaders are going to risk being brutally attacked within this insane system?

Dan Rather is NOT a public servant. He has made a very lucrative career appearing in front of a camera and pretending to be a journalist. If free speech is an "insane system", perhaps you'd like to tell us what you'd replace it with, Bill. Would we all need licenses to dare offer criticism of Dan Rather? Or do you believe we should all sit quietly and watch whatever CBS tells us without a hint of dissent?

Dan Rather did not get what he deserved in this case. He made a mistake, as we all do, but he is not a dishonest man. Unfair freedom of speech did him in. This is not your grandfather's country anymore.

"Unfair freedom of speech" ... I wonder how many of your victims would have said the same thing, Bill. George Bush could certainly make the same claim after the TANG story. If that's your position, then Dan Rather should have been tried for his participation in the story and possibly jailed, or at least silenced by the government, for his role. Is that what you propose for America, Bill?

Get a grip and a clue, O'Reilly. If Dan can't handle the criticism, then perhaps he shouldn't have sat behind the big desk in the first place. If he hadn't personally vetted the material as you say, then this "honest man" lied to the American public when he told us he personally vouched for its authenticity. He still can't bring himself to admit that he lied and his producers knowingly aired a story based on documents that they had been warned were not authenticated. Only through the efforts of Rather's critics did the truth finally come out.

That's what should interest you, Bill -- the truth. If your first priority is to Dan Rather instead of the truth, you're in the wrong business and you should get out. Now.

Viewpoint would add only this: In stating that "Dan Rather is [only] guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded" O'Reilly demonstrates a marvelous facility for missing the point. The problem with Rather's use of fraudulent documents wasn't his lack of skepticism so much as the reason for that lack. Why did Rather suspend his skepticism? Why did he run with these documents even after having been cautioned against it? The only answer that makes any sense isn't very flattering. Rather wanted so badly to crucify George Bush that he threw caution to the wind, believed what he most earnestly wanted to be the truth about the memos, and then refused to face the facts when they became so apparent that only an obsessed partisan zealot could have failed to see it.

It's this reckless betrayal of journalistic standards in Rather's Ahab-like pursuit of the President that makes his conduct so reprehensible. For O'Reilly to be unable to see this strikes us as peculiar. Might he have been using the treatment Rather received over this affair as a surrogate for the treatment he feels he unjustly received when the sexual harassment suit was filed against him? Just wondering.

Conservatism and Liberalism

Here's a good column by Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online on the use of the labels conservative and liberal. The heart of the piece:

Consider a story last week in the Financial Times about the views of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer. According to the FT's Washington correspondent, Scalia speaks for "radical Republicans" because he wants to interpret the constitution literally. Meanwhile, Breyer represents the "moderate Democrats" because he "offers a more pragmatic vision: Judges should consider not just ancient words but modern consequences, he said, adding that courts should try their best to interpret the law in ways that 'are consistent with the people's will.'"

This has, um, exactly everything wrong. Saying that the courts should follow the Rousseauian General Will of the people isn't "moderate" at all - indeed, it's a form of radicalism. Meanwhile, saying that we should follow the strictures of our written constitution and laws is definitionally conservative. And conservatism and radicalism are opposites.

In 1957, Samuel Huntington wrote a fabulous essay titled "Conservatism as an Ideology," in which he noted that conservatism lacks an inherent ideal. "No political philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia," wrote Huntington. Unlike socialism, Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism, conservatism merely aims to preserve that which is deemed worth preserving in a given society. As Huntington noted, bona fide "conservatives" in America, Great Britain, and Portugal each want to conserve very different things. A "conservative" in Saudi Arabia wants to preserve their crapulent monarchy. Similarly, a "conservative" in the Soviet Union would want to preserve the rule of the Politburo. Meanwhile, someone in contemporary Russia who wanted to restore the Soviet system would properly be called a "reactionary."

But here in America, a conservative is someone who wants to preserve those institutions and ideals enshrined in the Constitution. For example, a "conservative" at a liberal university would be someone who wants to preserve what they love about that university. Pym Fortuyn the gay libertine politician who was murdered in Holland for saying he wanted to limit immigration from Muslim countries so he could keep the party going was, in effect, a conservative. Similarly, this is why Huntington and philosophers like Friedrich Hayek argued that America might be the only place in the world where conservatives were the real defenders of liberty because they wanted to preserve our classical-liberal institutions.

Good stuff.

The Cost of Citizenship

The Chicago Sun-Times has a sad article by Mary Laney about Steve Gardner. Gardner was a swift vet who served on under John Kerry in Vietnam and who spoke out vigorously against the prospect of having Senator Kerry elected Commander-In-Chief. Now this father of three finds himself in very difficult straits under very suspicious circumstances. Here are some excerpts from Laney's column:

This is the story of a military veteran whistleblower. He spoke out against someone he thought was dangerous for the nation, talked to local newspapers, and appeared on talk shows. In return, he was vilified by reporters, threatened by a political operative, fired by his company, and now he's broke.

"I had confrontations with him [Kerry] there. He nearly got us rammed by the VC one night because he wasn't watching the helm. I heard the motor coming close, turned on the spotlight, and the boat was only 90 feet away, coming fast. The VC was aiming an AK47 at us. I shot him out of the boat. We pulled a woman and a baby off the boat."

"Kerry wrote it up that we captured two VC and killed four more on the beach. None of that was true. The only thing true on Kerry's report was the date. The woman was catatonic and wouldn't call her baby VC and there were no VC on the beach. If we had seen that report before Kerry sent it up the chain of command, he would have been court-martialed and never allowed to run for office. And that's just the San Pan incident. There was much more. He is a self-aggrandizing bold-faced liar. I believe he caused the extension of that war."

Gardner told this story and others to radio stations and he wrote a piece for the local paper. Then, he says, he received a phone call from John Hurley, the veterans organizer for Kerry's campaign. Hurley, Gardner says, asked him to come out for Kerry. He told Hurley to leave him alone and that he'd never be for Kerry. It was then Gardner says, he was threatened with, "You better watch your step. We can look into your finances."

Next, Gardner said he received a call from Douglas Brinkley, the author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. Brinkley told Gardner he was calling only to "fact check" the book -- which was already in print. "I told him that the guy in the book is not the same guy I served with. I told him Kerry was a coward. He would patrol the middle of the river. The canals were dangerous. He wouldn't go there unless he had another boat pushing him."

Days later, Brinkley called again, warning Gardner to expect some calls. It seems Brinkley had used the "fact checking" conversation to write an inflammatory article about Gardner for Time.com. The article, implying that Gardner was politically motivated, appeared under the headline "The 10th Brother."

Twenty-four hours later, Gardner got an e-mail from his company, Millennium Information Services, informing him that his services would no longer be necessary. He was laid off in an e-mail -- by the same man who only days before had congratulated him for his exemplary work in a territory which covered North and South Carolina. The e-mail stated that his position was being eliminated. Since then, he's seen the company advertising for his old position. Gardner doesn't have the money to sue to get the job back.

We're reluctant to be too quick to conclude that this was a political hit job by despicable low-lifes who would rob a man of his livelihood and jeopardize his family in order to gain revenge on him for exercising his rights and duty as a citizen. It may actually be a coincidence that all this happened to him when it did and in the manner that it did.

And maybe there really is a tooth fairy.

Mathew Shepard

Andrew Sullivan directs us to this interesting article on the Mathew Shepard murder. The reader may remember that Shepard was a homosexual who was brutally murdered after leaving a nightspot with two other men. The crime became a cause celebre among those pushing for hate crime legislation as well as those who wished to portray America as a hot-bed of homophobia.

It turns out that the sordid facts of the case don't lend themselves to either of these purposes.

Modern Marvel

This story tells of a woman who had been paralyzed for twenty years who is now able to walk at least a little as a result of stem cell therapy. This is wonderful news and a partial vindication of President Bush's stance on stem cell research. The cells which were used were taken from umbilical cord blood, not human embryos.

Perhaps one of the most astonishing things about the report is that this woman was able to get up out of her wheel chair despite the fact that John Kerry and John Edwards were not elected on November 2nd.

Academics v. Intellectuals

The Philosophers' Magazine features an article from The Australian which discusses the thoughts of philosopher A.C. Grayling on the difference between academics and intellectuals:

[T]he great Renaissance humanists worked outside the universities, as do today's intellectuals. This makes me much more optimistic about the intellectual tenor of public life than critics of dumbing-down such as Furedi, Wheen and the rest. Grayling argues that surprisingly few university academics in the English-speaking world are intellectuals "in the sense of having wide interests of the mind and deep commitments in moral and political terms, often together with a vocation for deploying these in debate about matters of public concern". A university academic is a specialist in a narrow field who publishes, usually in jargon, technical research in journals of interest only to other specialists.

"Modern academia, on the non-science side, thus reprises the condition of Renaissance universities uncomfortably closely. Contemporary intellectuals inhabit journalism, the media, publishing, non-government organisations; they are writers or artists, commentators or independent entrepreneurs in forms of business related to the media and arts. While many of these intellectuals contribute substantially to the shaping of cultural life, their academic contemporaries pass their time obscurely multiplying footnotes to unreadable, unread and soon forgotten papers."

Ouch! In other words, modern academics, or at least a substantial portion of them, have devoted their lives to a completely pointless pursuit of the trivial and insignificant. One wonders how a haughty author of numerous papers and books that no one has read or cares about reacts to the charge that his life's work is a meaningless waste of time. Not equably, we suspect.

Peter Singer and Might Makes Right

Marvin Olasky does an interview with Peter Singer, the Australian born ethicist now teaching at Princeton, and offers some interesting commentary on Singer's radical views.

Don't expect Peter Singer to be quoted heavily on the issue that roiled the Nov. 2 election, same-sex marriage. That for him is intellectual child's play, already logically decided, and it's time to move on to polyamory. While politicians debate the definition of marriage between two people, Mr. Singer argues that any kind of "fully consensual" sexual behavior involving two people or 200 is ethically fine.

For example, when I asked him last month about necrophilia (what if two people make an agreement that whoever lives longest can have sexual relations with the corpse of the person who dies first?), he said, "There's no moral problem with that." Concerning bestiality (should people have sex with animals, seen as willing participants?), he responded, "I would ask, 'What's holding you back from a more fulfilling relationship?' [but] it's not wrong inherently in a moral sense."

If the 21st century becomes a Singer century, we will also see legal infanticide of born children who are ill or who have ill older siblings in need of their body parts. Question: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children? Mr. Singer: "It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself." Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale? "No."

When we had lunch a month after our initial interview and I read back his answers to him, he said he would be "concerned about a society where the role of some women was to breed children for that purpose," but he stood by his statements. He also reaffirmed that it would be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities, although ideally the question of infanticide would be "raised as soon as possible after birth."

He has consistently tossed aside the Declaration of Independence concept that all of us are created equal. Instead, the worth of a life varies according to its rationality and self-consciousness, with no essential divide between animals and humans. For example, given a choice between keeping alive an adult chimpanzee and a human infant, the chimp should beat out the child. He has also thrown out the historical distinction between liberty and license (as in, licentious behavior): Any activity is ethical as long as it is consensual.

Professor Singer's views are shocking but they shouldn't be. He is simply living out, more consistently than most, the implications of an atheistic worldview. Olasky quotes Whittaker Chambers who wrote a half-century ago that, "Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness."

Professor Singer, we say, is more consistent than most atheists but that is not to say that he is totally consistent. He does seem to think that some things are wrong, for example abusing animals, but here he fails to follow the logic of his assumptions. If he's correct about there being no moral authority outside of our own autonomous selves then moral categories like right and wrong are meaningless and empty of content. There are only things that we desire to do and to say that to impose upon those acts some moral value is arbitrary and gratuitous.

Naturalism offers man no moral anchor to keep him from drifting toward whatever behavior his feelings and impulses incline him. Whatever we can do is "right" to do. If Singer were totally consistent, he would simply say that the only ethical system which makes any sense, given his worldview, is the one which says that might makes "right."

Alexander the Terrible

We had decided sometime ago that seeing Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great would be an inexcusable waste of time and money. Victor David Hanson agrees:

Well, I thought it was simply terrible. The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference; Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander's introduction of both crucifixion and decimation.

The Gedrosian desert gets a few seconds. And what was the elephant scene in the jungle? Was that supposed to be dirty fighting in India, or the battle at the Hydaspes-which in fact was a brilliant Macedonian victory? The elephants were visually good, but without context or significance. So since Stone omitted the controversial and key issues of Alexander's career, what do we get instead for at least over two thirds of the movie? Mostly sit-com drama, with gay and bi- subplots, in various bedrooms and banquet halls. Olympias was something out of a teen-aged vampire movie, not the sophisticated and conniving royal we read about in the sources. It is the old Dallas or Falcon Crest glossy pulp in Macedonian drag. Stone's Alexander is a pouty, wimpy bore; the real figure, whatever your thoughts on him, was a killer and a fearful man of action. Gladiator's Maximus was a far more engaging and forceful character-and that was a far better film as well.

There is also irony here. If we remember the embarrassing Troy, we are beginning to see, that all for all the protestations of artistic excellence and craftsmanship, Hollywood has become mostly a place of mediocrity, talentless actors and writers who spout off about politics in lieu of having any real accomplishment in their own field. I've heard so many inane things mouthed by Stone that I would like someone at last to address this question-why would supposedly smart insiders turn over $160 million to someone of such meager talent to make such an embarrassing film? Alexander the Great is third-rate Cecil B. Demille in drag.

We're glad we passed it up.

Predestination

Kudos to David Wayne at Jollyblogger for calling our attention to the Reformed view of predestination and for doing such a fine job of laying out the case for it. He admits in his piece that the implications of the doctrine are difficult to reconcile with the concept of a perfectly just and good God, but the Bible seems clear, he argues, that some people are predestined to be saved and some are predestined to be lost and that whether we understand it or not that's where we have to take our stand.

We're not theologians here at Viewpoint, but we're not so sure that the words of the Bible actually demand this interpretation. It's possible to read the verses cited by Wayne as suggesting that those who freely accept Christ and are saved are, or have been, predestined to then go on to become sons of God. We grant that this may not be the plainest sense of the words, but when the plain sense doesn't make sense then it is sound exegesis to seek another sense. And if anything about this controversy is clear it is that the conjunction of the following two propositions does not make sense:

1) God is good, just, and merciful.

2) God intentionally creates some people to suffer eternal torment.

One Calvinist reply to the apparent contradiction between these two claims is to quote Paul who asks "does the clay ask the potter why have you made me thus", but this seems an inadequate response to a very perplexing question. Clay pots are not conscious. They don't feel and suffer, much less do they endure for eternity. Human beings are more than clay. For a conscious eternal soul, capable of profound suffering and anguish, to be placed upon this earth simply to suffer forever is completely alien to any notion of justice or goodness of which we are capable of conceiving.

One way around the difficulty, some have suggested, is to maintain that the "lost" do not suffer for eternity but rather are annihilated upon death. This may indeed be better, but one still wonders how denying some individuals eternal happiness is either good, just, or merciful when the individual had no ability to choose that destiny for himself.

Wayne points out that the possibility mentioned above, that God only predestines those who freely choose His salvation, doesn't help exonerate God of the charge of being cruel since it still leaves His goodness open to question. If God foreknew who would accept salvation and who wouldn't, but nevertheless went ahead and created those He knew would ultimately choose to reject His offer of salvation, He would still be open to the charge of cruelty or malevolence.

Perhaps Wayne has gotten himself tangled in the web of His Reformed theology and can't get out of one difficulty without enmeshing himself in another. In this case he's entangled by the Reformed doctrine of Divine sovereignty which holds that every single detail of creation was foreordained and predetermined. It may be, however, that God doesn't deliberately and willfully create every individual who has lived on earth, any more than He directly causes every event that happens to a person in his lifetime. Perhaps God only created the progenitors of mankind. The individual progeny of the original creation may be a result of chance and human volition. If so, God would be absolved of the charge of cruelty since He did not cause the birth of any particular individual nor did He foreordain that any given individual would spurn His love.

Another possibility is that God simply doesn't know what free beings are going to choose to do in their future (See a fuller discussion of this possibility here). Such knowledge may be beyond the capabilities even of a Being who possesses omniscience, just as the ability to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it is beyond the scope of Divine omnipotence.

In any event, the question of exactly what Scripture is referring to when it mentions predestination is very puzzling and every potential resolution carries with it its own set of problems. Some Christians argue that whether our eternal destiny is predetermined or not makes no practical difference since each of us has to live as if we are free agents responsible for our own choices. This is true, of course, but the importance of the question lies not in its significance for our individual salvation, rather it lies in its apologetic significance. Those hostile to the Christian faith have long used the image of a cruel, malevolent deity gleefully creating beings for no greater purpose than to spend eternity condemned to torment and agony as a powerful tool with which to discredit Christianity. It's an image of God that makes Him seem more like Saddam Hussein than the source of love and goodness. It's an image that Christians must dispel, and so we must not throw up our hands and say the problem is too mysterious to be solved. We need to work at solving it.

Beyond Dirty Politics

This is extremely weird. Go to Drudge to look at the before and after pictures of Viktor Yushchenko, the challenger in the disputed Ukrainian election, and then read the story here.

And Americans were outraged at reports that people had voted multiple times and that some ballots weren't counted. This is an entirely new twist in the evolution of negative campaigning.