Winning Through Weakness

Among the long list of faults the critics of the President find in him are two that seem especially odd. On the one hand, Bush is periodically rebuked for never acknowledging that he's made a mistake, and, on the other, he has been castigated for having dumped Harriet Miers and capitulated to his conservative base in the appointment of Sam Alito.

That he doesn't explicitly admit to having made a mistake is nothing other than prudent. The Democrats who urge him to such confessions do not do so because they wish to offer him consolation and forgiveness. They obviously want to hang the admission around his neck like a millstone and they resent the fact that Bush denies them this little pleasure.

They are wrong, however, to think he doesn't recognize a mistake when he's made one, and the Miers' withdrawal is an example. If it's true that the administration orchestrated her gracious exit, then it is proof that they do indeed recognize their errors and hasten to correct them. Why this should earn them criticism from opponents who demand that the Bushies admit their missteps is unclear.

In any event, they also attack Mr. Bush for recovering from his initial lapse of judgment by doing exactly what he promised his voters he would do during the campaign - pick Supreme Court Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. After stumbling with Miers, Bush recovered his stride, kept his promise, and was quickly blasted for caving to the radical right, as if the Alito nomination were an unexpected surprise, hastily contrived to appease The Weekly Standard and National Review Online, and not at all what the President has been promising to do all along.

We're told by David Broder and others that this nomination arises from the president's weakness rather than his strength. What nonsense.

Sam Alito is precisely the sort of justice President Bush promised us he'd appoint. If he hadn't wanted to reward Harriet Miers for her faithfulness, Alito would probably have been nominated in her stead. To aver that the President was grudgingly forced to go with Alito in order to placate the right-wingers is to once again misunderestimate the man in the Oval Office.

The Democrats, it may be concluded, view any politician who keeps his word as one operating from a position of manifest weakness.

Singing Out of Harmony

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts posts the following set of quotes:

"Evolutionary theory says nothing about the existence or the non-existence of god." - Hunter R. Rawlings III, Interim President of Cornell University.

"In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism." - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

"Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist" - William Provine, Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University.

The Darwinians all need to turn to the same page in their hymnals. Evolution is not necessarily incompatible with theistic belief, but not many Darwinians seem interested in stressing the point.

Some, like Provine, Dennett, and Dawkins, adamantly insist that a true Darwinian must be an atheist. We wonder how long it will be before the ACLU begins suing schools for teaching Darwinian versions of evolution in science classes. It is, after all, a "Trojan Horse" for smuggling atheism into schools, and it certainly seems obvious from quotes like the above that there's a religious, or anti-religious, motivation for teaching it.

Blowin' in the Wind

Hadley Arkes does a masterful job in the Claremont Review of Books of taking apart Alan Dershowitz's argument in his Rights From Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights. Dershowitz sets out in this book to affirm human rights while denying any objective moral truths and any role for God in the establishment of those rights. He has set for himself an extraordinarily difficult task and Arkes skillfully skewers the attempt. He writes:

Professor Dershowitz has taken it, as the thesis threading through this work, that there are in fact no such moral principles that form the ground of our judgments. He claims to find the standards of practical judgment in a mix of considerations he calls "utilitarian," but he emphatically denies that there are "moral truths" that stand behind these judgments. He professes himself to be "(God forgive me) a moral relativist," and a "skeptic" in moral matters. A moral skeptic denies that there are knowable truths. The relativist denies those truths from another angle by insisting that there are no objective truths, only standards that are "relative" to persons and places. "Nevertheless," says Dershowitz, "I believe strongly in the concept of rights." A concept of "rights"-but with no supporting truths that can explain why they are rightful, and why the rest of us should respect them. Hence the puzzle of this book, and the spectacle of a writer jousting with himself.

Dershowitz flatly asserts that "there are no divine laws of morality, merely human laws claiming the authority of God."

From these inauspicious premises Dershowitz attempts to construct his view of rights, but, in Arkes' telling, it is a dismal failure, as it must be. If there is no God then we are solely the product of blind nature shaping us for the survival of our species. It's not possible to derive a right from an impersonal provenience.

The man who protests that "You have no right" is talking nonsense. In a world without God or objective moral strictures, each of us has whatever rights we wish to have. If we have the power to do what we want, if we can do what we will and get away with it, there is nothing to say that we should not. There can be no moral inhibition against doing what we want if there are, as Dershowitz says, no moral truths. Thus, though Dershowitz blanches at the thought, neither the holocaust nor slavery can be judged to be intrinsically wrong.

In the secular stew pot in which he cooks his vision of human rights, the unfortunate truth is that might makes right. Men have the right to do whatever they have the power to do, and that's the end of the matter.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to agree with John Locke who wrote in his Second Treatise on Government that human rights derive from our status as children of God. No man has a right to harm that which belongs to the Creator. Take God away, however, as Dershowitz does, and the whole notion of human rights is no more than a pile of dust in a wind storm. It simply blows away. Arkes' essay provides the wind.

Thanks to PowerLine.com for the tip.

CBS Poll

A newly released CBS Poll shows President Bush's approval rating at an all-time low of 35%. What the reader might not realize is that the poll was "weighted" so that only 23.8% of the respondents to the poll were Republicans. This is about half of the number of Republicans in the general population. When the libs do a poll they make sure they get the results they want.

Meanwhile, the Rasmussen poll shows Bush at 43%.

Thanks to RealClearPolitics for the links.

Hide Your Daughters

John Hinderaker, a lawyer who writes for PowerLine.com, takes a look at Judge Alito's decision in the strip-search case (Doe v. Groody) that seems to have so offended liberals. As is usual in matters where liberals are outraged there's much less to it than we'll be hearing in the anti-Alito television ads which will soon assail us. Alito's dissent in this case seems to show eminent good sense, which is bound to get him in trouble with the Left to whom good sense is an alien concept.

Hinderaker writes:

Groody was a lawsuit by two "Jane Doe" plaintiffs against four police officers. The plaintiffs claimed that they were illegally searched by the officers, and asked for money damages. The officers moved for summary judgment, arguing that the search did not violate any clearly established constitutional rights. By a two-to-one vote, the 3rd Circuit panel upheld the trial court's denial of the officers' motion to dismiss the case. Alito was the dissenter.

The case arose out of the execution of a search warrant on a meth house. In the affidavit that the officers submitted to obtain the warrant, they noted that when drug dealers see that they are being raided, they commonly hide drugs on the persons of whoever may also be on the premises, hoping that the search warrant won't allow the officers to search them. So, in this case, the officers requested permission to search anyone they found on the premises, not just the drug dealer who was the target of the raid.

The search warrant was drafted by the police officers and signed by a magistrate. It granted the officers' request for a warrant, but didn't specifically say that they could search occupants of the house other than the drug dealer. The officers testified that this was only because the box on the form where they described the premises to be searched wasn't big enough to contain more information, but that they believed that the information in their supporting affidavit was incorporated by reference.

The majority held that the warrant did not authorize the officers to search anyone but the drug dealer himself. Alito disagreed. In my opinion, Alito got much the better of the argument.... [He] wrote:

"First, the best reading of the warrant is that it authorized the search of any persons found on the premises. Second, even if the warrant did not contain such authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so, and therefore the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity."

Alito noted that, under the controlling authorities, search warrants "are to be read 'in a commonsense and realistic fashion,'" a proposition with which I think most Americans, and most Senators, would agree.

Liberals' reference to a "strip search" by officers will evoke images of slavering voyeurs gratuitously disrobing a mother and child, so it is important to understand what really happened. This description comes from the majority opinion:

"The officers decided to search Jane and Mary Doe for contraband, and sent for the meter patrol officer. When she arrived, the female officer removed both Jane and Mary Doe to an upstairs bathroom. They were instructed to empty their pockets and lift their shirts. The female officer patted their pockets. She then told Jane and Mary Doe to drop their pants and turn around. No contraband was found. With the search completed, both Jane and Mary Doe were returned to the ground floor to await the end of the search."

Judge Alito made it clear that he was not pleased by the fact that searches of this nature may be necessary. But, as in so many other instances, the problem doesn't arise from gratuitous malice on the part of police officers, it arises from the tactics of drug dealers:

"I share the majority's visceral dislike of the intrusive search of John Doe's young daughter, but it is a sad fact that drug dealers sometimes use children to carry out their business and to avoid prosecution. I know of no legal principle that bars an officer from searching a child (in a proper manner) if a warrant has been issued and the warrant is not illegal on its face. Because the warrant in this case authorized the searches that are challenged - and because a reasonable officer, in any event, certainly could have thought that the warrant conferred such authority - I would reverse."

Every indication is that the officers in this case met the highest professional standards. What did they get for their pains? They got sued. Judge Alito's opinion in Groody is well-reasoned and highly persuasive. There is no reason why leftists should be allowed to use it to cast doubt on Alito's qualifications. On the contrary, it is a good illustration of why we need jurists like Judge Alito on the Supreme Court.

What we'll see on the ads, though, will be hysterical claims that Alito wants to strip search your daughters. It's inevitable. The only thing more pathetic than the ads that the Left'll churn out are the people who'll find them persuasive.

CBS' Foul-Mouthed Reporter

First Howard Dean suggests that the White House is playing "Hide the Salami" with Harriet Miers' qualifications and now CBS' John Roberts delivers himself of this bit of smuttiness:

CBS newsman John Roberts asked White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan if today's appointment of a new nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court amounted to little more than "sloppy seconds, or what?" Among other things this has a rather unfortunate sexual connotation.

After his words turned up on The Drudge Report and elsewhere, the new CBS "blog," The Public Eye, carried a full report and this apology:

"At the morning White House gaggle, I used an unfortunate choice of words in a question to Scott McClellan. Please be assured that there was no perjorative intent to my question. I was merely attempting to reconcile past statements about Harriet Miers with the President's new nominee for the Supreme Court.

"The early morning White House gaggle is an informal, free-wheeling and often irreverent forum, which is not broadcast and generally not publicly available.

"Obviously, my tone this morning was a little too casual.

"As we all experience from time to time, it was one of those 'oops' moments which we wish we could rewind and re-record.

"I apologize to anyone who took offense to my poor choice of words. I can assure you I meant none."

No, Mr. Roberts. What you meant is irrelevant. What you said was crude and degrading, not merely "a little too casual." What is it with you guys on the Left? Haven't you ever heard of class?

The irony here is that the media made a big deal about a private vulgarism directed at Senator Leahy by Vice President Cheney a year or so ago, but they have said nothing about Dean's gross breach of taste on national television, and they're certainly not going to criticize one of their own for his tastelessly salacious metaphor in a public forum.

Good News in Iraq

W. Thomas Smith has an article at National Review Online which should be required reading for anyone who has an opinion on the American effort in Iraq. He points out that all the multitude of positive developments occuring in that country are being ignored by our media so that they can emphasize the difficulties and bloodshed.

The American media seems interested in reporting just one thing: casualties and mayhem. Everything else is off their radar screen because to report it would be to inform the American people that are efforts there are largely successful. It's so irresponsible that it should cost those responsible their jobs, but, unfortunately, it will likely continue as long as Democrats can't be given credit for any success we experience. If the day comes when it looks as though our achievement in Iraq is due to the efforts of a Democratic successor to President Bush, the tone and coverage of the media will spin 180 degrees, Iraq will be touted as a twenty first century Marshall Plan engineered by a latter-day Harry Truman, and the media will transform themselves into the biggest cheerleaders of American involvement in the Middle East.

It's all pretty dishonest and contemptible, but dishonest reporting is the price we have to be willing to pay for a free press.

Bono On Religion

Rolling Stone has excerpts of an interview Jann Wenner did with Bono. In the course of a ten hour discussion at Bono's vacation house on a Mexican beach they got around to talking about his religious views. Bono fans will find the whole article interesting, but his Christian fans will perhaps find the discussion of religion of most interest:

What role did religion play in your childhood?

I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she'd married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn't go to the neighborhood schools -- we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.

Did you feel religious when you went to church?

Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. "How many roads must a man walk down?" That wasn't a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It's a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I'm wondering, who do I ask that to? I'm not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open" -- these songs have an intimacy for me that's not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.

Who is God to you at that point in your life?

I don't know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I'm singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" or "Be Thou My Vision," something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.

Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.

Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.

You skipped "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and you went right . . .

. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It's this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age.

There was also my friend Guggi. His parents were not just Protestant, they were some obscure cult of Protestant. In America, it would be Pentecostal. His father was like a creature from the Old Testament. He spoke constantly of the Scriptures and had the sense that the end was nigh -- and to prepare for it.

You were living with his family?

Yes. I'd go to church with them too. Though myself and Guggi are laughing at the absurdity of some of this, the rhetoric is getting through to us. We don't realize it, but we're being immersed in the Holy Scriptures. That's what we took away from this: this rich language, these ancient tracts of wisdom.

So is that why you were writing such serious songs when you're nineteen?

Here's the strange bit: Most of the people that you grew up with in black music had a similar baptism of the spirit, right? The difference is that most of these performers felt they could not express their sexuality before God. They had to turn away. So rock & roll became backsliders' music. They were running away from God. But I never believed that. I never saw it as being a choice, an either/or thing.

You never saw rock & roll -- the so-called devil's music -- as incompatible with religion?

Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six -- he's going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses -- "Jesus died for somebody's sins/But not mine . . ." And she turns Van Morrison's "Gloria" into liturgy. She's wrestling with these demons -- Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she's talking to the pope.

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues, on one hand -- running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy -- running towards. And later you came to analyze it and figure it out.

The blues are like the Psalms of David. Here was this character, living in a cave, whose outbursts were as much criticism as praise. There's David singing, "Oh, God -- where are you when I need you?/You call yourself God?" And you go, this is the blues.

Both deal with the relationship with God. That's really it. I've since realized that anger with God is very valid. We wrote a song about that on the Pop album -- people were confused by it -- "Wake Up Dead Man": "Jesus, help me/I'm alone in this world/And a f****d-up world it is, too/Tell me, tell me the story /The one about eternity/And the way it's all gonna be/Wake up, dead man."

Soon after starting the band you joined a Bible-study group -- you and Larry and Edge -- called the Shalom. What brought that on?

We were doing street theater in Dublin, and we met some people who were madder than us. They were a kind of inner-city group living life like it was the first century A.D.

They were expectant of signs and wonders; lived a kind of early-church religion. It was a commune. People who had cash shared it. They were passionate, and they were funny, and they seemed to have no material desires. Their teaching of the Scriptures reminded me of those people whom I'd heard as a youngster with Guggi. I realize now, looking back, that it was just insatiable intellectual curiosity.

But it got a little too intense, as it always does; it became a bit of a holy huddle. And these people -- who are full of inspirational teaching and great ideas -- they pretended that our dress, the way we looked, didn't bother them. But very soon it appeared that was not the case. They started asking questions about the music we were listening to. Why are you wearing earrings? Why do you have a mohawk?

How did you end up leaving that?

I think we just went on tour.

And forgot to come back?

Well, we'd visit. If you were going to study the teaching, it demanded a rejection of the world. Even then we understood that you can't escape the world, wherever you go. Least of all in very intense religious meetings -- which can be more corrupt and more bent, in terms of the pressures they exert on people, than the outside forces.

What draws you so deeply to Martin Luther King?

So now -- cut to 1980. Irish rock group, who've been through the fire of a certain kind of revival, a Christian-type revival, go to America. Turn on the TV the night you arrive, and there's all these people talking from the Scriptures. But they're quite obviously raving lunatics.

Suddenly you go, what's this? And you change the channel. There's another one. You change the channel, and there's another secondhand-car salesman. You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar . . . to the words out of our mouths.

So what happens? You learn to shut up. You say, whoa, what's this going on? You go oddly still and quiet. If you talk like this around here, people will think you're one of those. And you realize that these are the traders -- as in t-r-a-d-e-r-s -- in the temple.

Until you get to the black church, and you see that they have similar ideas. But their religion seems to be involved in social justice; the fight for equality. And a Rolling Stone journalist, Jim Henke, who has believed in you more than anyone up to this point, hands you a book called Let the Trumpet Sound -- which is the biography of Dr. King. And it just changes your life.

Even though I'm a believer, I still find it really hard to be around other believers: They make me nervous, they make me twitch. I sorta watch my back. Except when I'm with the black church. I feel relaxed, feel at home; my kids -- I can take them there; there's singing, there's music.

What is your religious belief today? What is your concept of God?

If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there's a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in "straw poverty"; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me.

How does it make sense?

As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It's so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don't use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I'm the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut.

Do you pray or have any religious practices?

I try to take time out of every day, in prayer and meditation. I feel as at home in a Catholic cathedral as in a revival tent. I also have enormous respect for my friends who are atheists, most of whom are, and the courage it takes not to believe.

How big an influence is the Bible on your songwriting? How much do you draw on its imagery, its ideas?

It sustains me.

As a belief, or as a literary thing?

As a belief. These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I'm the sort of character who's got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I'm going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it's sort of underpinning for me.

I don't read it as a historical book. I don't read it as, "Well, that's good advice." I let it speak to me in other ways. They call it the rhema. It's a hard word to translate from Greek, but it sort of means it changes in the moment you're in. It seems to do that for me.

You're saying it's a living thing?

It's a plumb line for me. In the Scriptures, it is self-described as a clear pool that you can see yourself in, to see where you're at, if you're still enough. I'm writing a poem at the moment called "The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress." I'm not sure I'm the best advertisement for this stuff.

What do you think of the evangelical movement that we see in the United States now?

I'm wary of faith outside of actions. I'm wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world.

Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn't believe it. It almost ruined it for me -- 'cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS.

I've started to see this community as a real resource in America. I have described them as "narrow-minded idealists." If you can widen the aperture of that idealism, these people want to change the world. They want their lives to have meaning. And it's one of the things that the Democratic Party has missed out on. You know, so much of the moral high ground in the past was Democratic: FDR, RFK, Cesar Chavez. Now I suppose it's Hillary's passion for cheaper medical care. And Teddy Kennedy, of course.

Teddy Kennedy? Teddy Kennedy occupies the moral high ground? Geesh. Other than that baffling remark it's an interesting interview.

Thanks to Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost for the tip.

Small is Better

This article in the Christian Science Monitor gives us a peek at what's happening in the Afghanistan front of the GWOT. The article gives two accounts of American engagements against the Taliban - this is the first:

It's mid- morning on June 21, and Lt. Timothy Jon O'Neal's platoon has just been dropped onto a dusty field north of a mud-walled village of Chalbar. Their mission: to check out reports that a local Afghan Army commander has defected to the Taliban and burned the district headquarters, and is prepared to fight.

Within minutes, it becomes clear that the reports are true, and the platoon is in trouble. The radio crackles with Taliban fighters barking orders to surround the Americans. Gunfire comes from the hilltops. Lieutenant O'Neal's men are easy targets. The Taliban have the high ground.

This has been the most violent year here since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The US Army is moving in smaller numbers to lure the Taliban out of hiding for fights they cannot win. The result: More than 1,200 enemy deaths this year, including high-level commanders. But it is also a strategy with profound risks, and one that may be difficult to sustain in Zabul Province - a region so unstable that commanders call it the "Fallujah of Afghanistan" - as current troops return home, their replacements as yet undecided.

Through interviews with soldiers of Chosen Company, of the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the Monitor has reconstructed two recent battles that illustrate how this strategy works, and how it may have weakened the Taliban movement's effectiveness as a military force - for now.

As the Taliban start shooting, O'Neal's platoon scurries for cover. But there's no panic. "They think, without a doubt, they have us outnumbered," recalls O'Neal, a native of Jeannette, Pa., and leader of 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company. "We've got only 23 people on the ground, and I would say the Taliban had over 150 before the day was over."

But O'Neal and his men are not alone. Just to the south, 1st platoon is clearing a village; to the east, the 3rd platoon are marching toward Chalbar. O'Neal's platoon calls for close air support from nearby Apache helicopters. But on the ground, 2nd platoon will have to hold its own, and fight for every inch - uphill.

Much is made about the high-tech gear that US soldiers carry: body armor, rapid-firing machine guns, night vision goggles. But the chief advantage of the US military - especially in a low-intensity conflict, pitted against a crudely trained force like the Taliban - is training and air power.

Taliban fighters, meanwhile, appear to gain courage from numbers, the ability to swarm a smaller enemy unit. A sense of safety in numbers, however, is often the Taliban's undoing if a US platoon can fix an enemy's position long enough for aircraft or other infantry units to arrive. This is the backbone of US military strategy in Zabul, and one reason why the Taliban have lost so many fighters this year.

"We've had a lot of success with textbook tactics, getting the smallest element engaged, and then using other assets to just pile on," says O'Neal. "The Taliban are more willing to engage with us when we have smaller numbers."

Lt. Col. Mark Stammer, the commander at Forward Operating Base in Qalat, is quick to clarify that the US Army is not using small units as "bait."

"I've never sent a squad in as bait," says Colonel Stammer, a native of Redfield, S.D. "I'm sure that it has emboldened the Taliban to attack. But there's no fight where our squads have made contact and lost. Whenever the Taliban fight us, they're decimated."

Darting from boulder to boulder, Sgt. Justin Hormann, a native of Melbourne, Fla., is leading a team of about six men up the hill, just behind 1st squad leader, Staff Sgt. Michael Christian of Montrose, Pa. Above them, about 50 Taliban fighters are raining down a torrent of gunfire with their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades.

Sergeant Christian reaches a shallow plateau on the hill, and pulls himself up to establish a fire position. Almost immediately, he's shot. He crouches behind a boulder and shouts out, "I'm hit." The Talib who shot him is barely 30 feet away.

Sergeant Hormann can see his squad leader is bleeding and needs immediate help. "When he got hit, they were right in front of us," recalls Hormann, while on break between missions at the Forward Operating Base at Qalat. "He could see the fighter in front of him, but he couldn't see the Taliban who was just alongside him."

Hormann makes a snap decision: He bounds up the hill to give Christian first aid. "I said 'to heck with it.' I just ran up," says Hormann. All around him, Taliban bullets continue to ping off rocks as Hormann applies a tourniquet. Under constant fire, he sets up Bravo team to deliver suppressing fire, while he and Alpha team carry Christian off the hill. At the bottom, he regroups the squad for another assault.

"And then we all went back up the hill a second time," says Hormann, who was recently awarded a Bronze Star with valor for his actions that day. For the next four hours, Hormann and a 10-man ad hoc squad move back up the mountain within 60 feet of the enemy. Only when Pfc. Joseph Lorman of Sloughhouse, Calif., is wounded in the neck and shoulder does Hormann move the squad back down the mountain.

By that time, reinforcements from the 1st and 3rd platoons have arrived. All escape routes are blocked. The Taliban are trapped.

"The fire was extremely close," says O'Neal, who was with a second team providing covering fire lower down the hill. "But toward the end it got dark, so we just ran to the bottom."

As night falls, American AC-130 Specter gunships arrive to engage Taliban fighters who have also decided to make a run for it. By the end of the day, 76 Taliban bodies are counted, and another nine Taliban fighters are captured.

To this day, the men of the 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company, can't figure out what the Taliban were thinking. Were they suicidal? Why did they gather so many Taliban in one place? Did they really think they had enough men to defeat the Americans?

"They called the BBC to tell them they had taken the district headquarters," says O'Neal. "They knew we were going to come."

Go to the link for a desription of the second operation involving our forces.

Sam Alito

The conservative blogosphere is elated and reinvigorated by the president's pick of Sam Alito for associate justice of the Supreme Court. Michelle Malkin has a summary of conservative opinions with lots of links from around the community.

Meanwhile, the Left is taking it bitterly, which is how they take pretty much everything Bush does. They see in the Alito pick the end of an era of liberal hegemony in the courts and the end of their ability to implement the liberal agenda via judicial fiat rather than through legislation. If the Left loses the Courts, and cannot regain the House or the Senate in 2006, their future is bleak indeed.

Democratic Senators have been a little more subdued in their response than have the Lefty bloggers, but their disappointment is manifest. For example Senator Schumer:

"It's sad that the president felt that he had to pick a nominee likely to divide America, instead of picking a nominee like Sandra Day O'Connor that had united America."

And here's Senator Reid:

"I am disappointed in this choice for several reasons. First, unlike previous nominations, this one was not the product of consultation with Senate Democrats. Last Friday, Senator Leahy and I wrote to President Bush urging him to work with us to find a consensus nominee. The President has rejected that approach.

"Second, this appointment ignores the value of diverse backgrounds and perspectives on the Supreme Court. The President has chosen a man to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, one of only two women on the Court. For the third time, he has declined to make history by nominating the first Hispanic to the Court. And he has chosen yet another federal appellate judge to join a court that already has eight justices with that narrow background. President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club."

No mention here by Senator Reid about qualifications, of course, only a lament that the President didn't let the minority pick his Justice for him and the threadbare complaint that Alito doesn't add a diversity of perspectives to the Court. The reasons for Senator Reid's dismay are equally reasons why the rest of us should take heart from this nomination. Even were we not encouraged by what we've read about Judge Alito elsewhere (See Michelle Malkin's site linked above), we'd have to think that anyone who so distresses Senator Reid and the fine folks at the Daily Kos must be good for America.

Understanding Our Moment

Gideon Strauss has an essay at Comment wherein he discerns four challenges facing contemporary Christianity. The four he identifies are those posed by contemporary liberalism, Islam, China, and the emergence of Christianity in the third world.

Here are some excerpts. First are his thoughts on the challenge posed by liberalism:

The most perplexing of these root challenges is also the most immediate to most of us: the challenge of modern liberalism. I am at turns amused and frustrated by my academic colleagues who continue to insist that we live in postmodern times. The suggestion that somehow the spiritual force of modernity has been exhausted and replaced by something altogether different simply does not ring true to what I experience in my own daily work nor to the cultural forces I see at work in the world.

Lest I be misunderstood, this is not a screed against constitutional democracy or a market economy, both of which I belief are blessings to humanity with rich potential for responsible cultural action. Instead, I am concerned about the spiritual power that animates both liberal democracies and capitalist economies. It is a spiritual power that seeks to combine unfettered individual liberty with the commodification and bureaucratic subjugation of all of nature - and that recognizes no law or power beyond or independent of nature.

I am astonished by the power of liberal capitalism to persuade even those whose deepest commitments should predispose them against the libertarian erosion of communal ties and the grasping extension of market logic beyond its proper economic sphere that there is no alternative. Living in a society guided by liberal capitalism is like being submerged in an acid ocean stretching to the horizon - there seems no possible escape, and the very flesh is being eaten off our bones.

Having seen the pragmatic power of liberal capitalism in action up close, in the shaping of the decision-making of marxist politicians in Africa and of evangelical social activists in North America, I am perplexed by the difficulty of figuring out how to live faithfully to the gospel, in every sphere of life, in the smothering embrace of a society that is radically and comprehensively guided by this sweetly destructive force. Given that there is no new found land remaining to which Christians can repair to establish a new city on a hill, how should we now live, in the very midst of this often so seemingly welcoming but yet so profoundly antagonistic social order?

On the Islamic challenge:

What is not at all clear is how Christians should respond to the struggle between modernity and Salafiyyah Islam for global hegemony. I have heard Christians argue that within the context of North America we are more closely cobelligerent with Muslims, against liberal modernity, because of our supposedly shared concern for religion finding a space within a secularist political order, and because of our supposedly shared concern for what is here often term a "social conservative" stance on issues like marriage and abortion. I have also heard Christians argue that within the context of what first Bernard Lewis and then Samuel Huntington has termed the "clash of civilizations," Christianity and liberal modernity are - as the religious expressions of "Western civilization" - closely allied against the global expansion of the Islamic ummah.

Concerning China:

The relationship of China as a geopolitical entity to Christianity as a religion has fascinating and troubling world historical potential. David Aikman, the author of Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power, suggests that China might in this century become substantially Christian, and explores (in an interview with National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez) some of the consequent options:

What would a non-Christian China be like if it became a superpower capable of rivaling the U.S.? Probably dangerous and unpredictable. A Christian China would be far more likely to view its role in the world as containing a global moral responsibility, an "Augustinian" national self-view, if you like.

China presents its own Christians with a cultural challenge very different from that presented by liberal modernity, but perhaps no less perplexing. How does one live within an established social and political order that is at once seemingly tolerant of and fundamentally antagonistic to one's most basic commitments and convictions. For Christians in North America, one additional question is how we relate to Chinese Christians as our co-religionists in a complex geopolitical situation, particularly given the high probability of serious international conflict between America and China in the twenty-first century, predicted by pundits like Robert Kaplan?

Finally, on third world Christianity:

While, from my Christian perspective, the growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is an exciting historical development, this massive shift in religious adherence has as yet resulted in only limited positive social change.

The most obviously troubling problem in this regard is the devastating AIDS pandemic in Africa, which is almost entirely the result of personal sexual practices that are in every respect at odds with a Christian sexual ethic. In the long run, however - if we are to take as an example the slow emergence of Christian cultural influence in western Europe between, say, the deposition of Romulus Augustus as Roman emperor in AD 476 and the crowning of Charlemagne as Imperator Romanorum in AD 800 - it is entirely possible that Christianity will result in a rich cultural flowering in Africa, in every sphere of life.

Strauss offers much more in his article than has been excerpted here and much of what he says is very insightful. It would be good to read the whole thing.

Reformation Sunday

Yesterday was Reformation Sunday in the Lutheran Church and my thoughts turned this weekend to the endpoint the present trajectory of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) seems to be taking us toward. Ideological or theological designators like liberal and conservative often obscure nuance and require qualification, but they are also often useful. The ELCA seems to have fallen into the embrace of theological and ideological liberalism, and many conservatives are just beginning to wake up to the fact that the Church of their youth has been hijacked by a leadership that is moving steadily away from the traditional affirmations of the Faith.

The liberals (or progressives, as they fancy themselves) argue that the Church is called upon to do social ministry, and they are simply responding to that call by waging a decades-long campaign against sexism, racism and imperialism and contending on behalf of gay marriage, abortion rights, and the poor. What Christian, they ask, would or could oppose such causes?

The difficulty is this: There are two ways of looking at our social mandates and responsibilities. Conservatives hold that whatever policies we advocate must be rooted in, and governed by, Scripture. Liberals believe that our policies and support should be shaped by sociological consensus, and if contemporary theory conflicts with the Bible or the theological traditions of the Church then so much the worse for the Bible and tradition.

Thus the Lutheran Church, or at least that part of it represented by the ELCA, struggles against sexism by publishing a new worship book that minimizes references to the masculine in hymns, creeds, and liturgy, and by supporting expansive abortion rights even though all previous social statements of the Church, including the present one, condemn abortion.

It opposes racism by endorsing liberal Democratic approaches to welfare, affirmative action, and entitlement. It will surprise no one if we hear calls for racial reparations arise during future national assemblies.

It condemns imperialism by demanding that Israel tear down the wall that it has erected to protect itself from Palestinian murderers and that the U.S. turn over the global war on terror to the U.N. so that it can be treated as a police matter.

It is, finally, exceedingly sympathetic to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered agenda despite the fact that all sexual norms found in Scripture would have to be abandoned in order to accommodate it. Notwithstanding the Biblical proscription of same sex intimacy, large sectors of the Church, including the leadership, favor the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same sex relationships.

This is the direction of the contemporary ELCA, and this is why a growing number of Lutherans are praying for another Reformation (See here, for example). We need, they insist, a Martin Luther for the 21st century to rescue a Church whose membership is in free-fall and whose leadership seems committed to running this once great institution off the cliff of cultural syncretism.

All A-twitter on the Left

It is a measure of the desperation of the Left that they are enormously excited about the indictment of a minor administration figure, of whom no one had ever previously heard, for lying to a grand jury in an attempt to cover up responsibility for behavior which, it turns out, wasn't even criminal.

Now that the indictment has been handed down, we're hearing dark suggestions, based chiefly upon the Left's eternal hopefulness, that somehow this will lead all the way to the top, and they will be able to exorcize from the body politic the Great Satan in the White House.

We doubt very much that the Left will get significant traction from the indictment of the heretofore anonymous "Scooter" Libby, although they will certainly try. They'll attempt anything at this point, so great is their obsession with destroying this president and their hatred of him for his ability to dash their hopes every time they're raised to incandescent levels of intensity.

It'll probably happen again this time, too.

A Glimpse at the Future

Let's grab a glimpse of the future that the Islamists envision for our children:

Three teenage Christian girls were beheaded and a fourth was seriously wounded in a savage attack on Saturday by unidentified assailants in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi.

The girls were among a group of students from a private Christian high school who were ambushed while walking through a cocoa plantation in Poso Kota subdistrict on their way to class, police Major Riky Naldo said.

Naldo said the heads of the three dead victims were found several kilometres from their bodies.

[Since 2002] there has been a series of bomb attacks and assassinations of Christians. These included a blast at a market in Poso, a predominantly Christian town, that killed 22 people in May.

Christian leaders have repeatedly accused the authorities in Jakarta of not doing enough to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

Perhaps the authorities have no idea who the perpetrators might be. Let's try to help them narrow down the suspects. Let's ask where the perpetrators might most likely be found. Should the authorities look in a:

a. convent of nuns

b. monastery

c. missionary clinic

d. mosque

If you answered a, b, or c you get the Norman Y. Maneta award for dopey adherence to political correctness, named after our current Secretary of Transportation. The award is so named for Mr. Maneta's unswerving fidelity to such bedrock principles of left-wing ideology as that octagenarians in wheel chairs should be searched every bit as thoroughly for bombs before being permitted to board an airplane as sullen, twenty-something Arab males. To do otherwise, Mr. Maneta believes, is to betray an intolerable ethnic bias.

Heaven forgive us if we're guilty of thinking that we're far more likely to be blown out of the sky, or have our torsos relieved of our heads, by young Arab males than by elderly Anglo-Saxon women. It just reveals how ingrained our racism is that we can't seem to shake the thought that a young Muslim Arab is a far greater threat to our well-being than is a feeble great-grandmother.

1776

I recently finished David McCullough's wonderful, if slightly mistitled, 1776. I say wonderful because once I got about a third of the way into it I didn't want to put it down. McCullough is a masterful writer and the story he tells is full of fascinating anecdotes and detail that seize the reader's attention and cause him to regret arriving at the last page of the book.

I say it is slightly mistitled because it's not really a story of the year 1776 so much as it is an account of the trials, travails, and tribulations of George Washington during those bleak twelve months.

McCullough tells a tale that one doesn't ordinarily read in popular accounts of Washington who is often portrayed as a man with near-perfect judgment and almost infinite wisdom. That his judgment was often excellent and that he was wise there is no doubt, but in the year 1776, the first year of the revolution, Washington made several serious mistakes and were it not for what McCullough refers to as miracles and the excessive caution of his adversary William Howe, the fledgling Continental army would probably have been destroyed at New York. Until the very end of the year the story of the war was a narrative of ignominious American retreats. As McCullough writes victories are not won by withdrawals no matter how well executed.

It is hard to imagine, although McCullough does a good job of describing it for us, the darkness of those months: the steady string of defeats, the abandonment by thousands of citizens who fled to the British, the demoralization and lack of training and discipline of the troops, the desertions, poor equipment, harsh living conditions, and the seeming indifference of the Continental Congress, and, not least, the utter despair that many, including Washington himself, must have felt. Yet, despite the fact that he didn't win a major engagement until late in the year when he caught the Hessians by surprise at Trenton, he never allowed himself to succumb to his forebodings and trepidations about the prospects for success, at least not for long. He learned from his errors, some of which were extremely costly in terms of lives lost, and he didn't permit the harshness of his critics nor the betrayals of friends to deter him. He truly was a great man.

As I was reading McCullough's narrative I thought of our current commander in chief. Like Washington, he has been pummeled, slandered, and ridiculed by his critics. He has faced dark days when success was anything but assured. He has had to bear up against a steady drumbeat of defeatism in the press. There must be times when he thinks that nobody cares about winning the war on terror but him, and yet he refuses to bend to the cavils of critics. Bush's situation is perhaps more like that of Lincoln than of Washington, but even so, some of the similarities with Washington are striking.

I recommend 1776 to anyone with an interest in American history and especially the history of the first year of the American revolution. There is much in it that we can apply to our own parlous times.

Make No Mistake

Lest anyone be uncertain concerning the aspirations of the radical Islamists, President Ahmadinejad of Iran dispels any misunderstanding. The following excerpts, made available by MEMRI, are from his recent speech at the World Without Zionism conference in Tehran. The conference was attended by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and hundreds of students:

"... They [ask]: 'Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?' But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved ...."

"Very soon, this stain of disgrace [i.e. Israel ] will vanish from the center of the Islamic world - and this is attainable."

"Regrettably, 27 or 28 years ago... one of the countries of the first line [i.e. Egypt ] made this failure [of recognizing Israel ] - and we still hope that they will correct it."

"The issue of Palestine is by no means over, and will end only when all of Palestine will have a government belonging to the Palestinian people. The refugees must return to their homes, and there must be a government that has come to power by the will of the [Palestinian] people. And, of course those [i.e. the Jews] who came to this country from far away to plunder it have no right to decide anything for the [Palestinian] people."

"I hope that the Palestinians will maintain their wariness and intelligence, much as they have pursued their battles in the past 10 years. This will be a short period, and if we pass through it successfully, the process of the elimination of the Zionist regime will be smooth and simple."

"Oh dear people, look at this global arena. By whom are we confronted? We must understand the depth of the disgrace imposed on us by the enemy, until our holy hatred expands continuously and strikes like a wave."

Mr. Bush's assessment of Iran as part of an axis of evil looks more trenchant with every passing week. Imagine that some unstable lunatic like Ahmadinejad gets his hands on a nuclear weapon. Does anyone seriously think that a man like this, so full of hatred, will decline to use it? This speech lends all the more urgency to attempts to put an end to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. And if diplomacy fails, which it almost surely will, the world, or at least a part of it, must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to keep such weapons out of Iran's arsenal.

Click on the link for more on the speech.

The Left Shouldn't Celebrate Yet

The media have been busy this week gleefully writing George Bush's political epitaph (see here, for example), but as Mark Twain might have put it, the funeral celebration is a bit premature.

To be sure, Mr. Bush has had a rocky couple of months what with Katrina, problems in Iraq, the unravelling of the Miers nomination, today's indictment of the Vice President's Chief of Staff, and a number of lesser travails. All of this has brought the president's media antagonists to the political graveyard to dance a conga around the tombstones in eager anticipation of the interment of the Bush presidency.

Nevertheless, it's not difficult to imagine this administration gathering itself up and rebounding from the present difficulties. Indeed, President Bush is well-positioned to execute a fourth quarter rally that could still place him among the greatest presidents of modern American history. Here's why and how:

The economy is growing steadily. Note that the Democrats rarely refer to the economy anymore by way of criticizing the president. Yet our economic health is the most crucial issue, as the Dems insisted in 1992, in determining which party will prevail in an election. If the Democrats could use our economic condition against Bush they would be doing it, but they can't so they aren't. If the economy continues to grow - and with gas prices falling to less extortionist levels there's reason for optimism in this regard - the public will forget the troubles of the last two or three months like one forgets a dream upon waking.

Iraq seems to be progressing steadily toward a historically unprecedented Arab democracy. Despite the steady drizzle of left-wing criticism and negativity, Bush's strategy in Iraq might well ultimately succeed. It's still unclear if it will, of course, but if it does, history will hail his effort, and that of our military, as an astonishing political, strategic, and human rights achievement, perhaps the greatest that any president or world leader ever accomplished. Success in Iraq will reverberate and ramify throughout the entire region and around the globe for generations. It's very difficult to overstate the significance and importance of such a consummation.

With the withdrawal of Harriet Miers the president has been given an unusual second chance to appoint someone of the very finest timber to the Supreme Court. Miers may have been a good appointment, but there was cause for serious skepticism. Mr. Bush can now name someone about whom there is no doubt. Another conservative justice in the mold of Antonin Scalia, as we were promised in the campaign, and the legal course of this country could be altered for the good for the next thirty to fifty years. Such a nomination would also unify the president's base and make him much more politically formidable.

Assuming there are no further indictments, the Scooter Libby affair will scarcely register on the historical record. On the other hand, it could serve, as did Katrina, as a prod to rouse the administration from complacency. There are signs that this is already happening. We're beginning to hear noises about getting the budget and our borders under control. Success breeds success. If the administration recovers its legislative momentum it may even try again to reform social security. If by 2008 just some of these things are happening, or at least appear to be under way, George Bush, to the everlasting chagrin of the portside media, will be regarded as surpassing even Ronald Reagan and FDR.

The ghoulish excesses of the liberal media are as premature as they are inappropriate. Too much still hangs in the balance for them to be indulging their hopes of a failed presidency just yet.

Monkeying With Probability

No doubt you've heard the venerable Darwinian dogma that given enough time and enough monkeys banging away randomly on a typewriter keyboard one of them would eventually produce Hamlet purely by chance.

The claim is designed to illustrate that even though life on earth is unimaginably improbable on the naturalistic hypothesis, it's not impossible. Given enough time and enough molecular combinations even the improbable becomes probable, and the probable becomes actual.

Unfortunately for this argument, however, its persuasiveness does not survive an actual look at the math.

Bill Dembski directs us to a decade-old site where the math is actually worked out. It happens that even if we hypothesize 17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away and producing one line per second for 17 billion years, the chances of the phrase "To be or not to be, that is the question" not being included in the results are:

0.99999999999994657593795077819 6079485682838665648264132188104299 326596142975867879656916416973433628

In other words, even given parameters unimaginably more lenient than those which actually obtained in the real world, it's about 99.999999999995% sure that the monkeys would fail to produce just a single sentence of Hamlet by random pecking.

The Darwinian objects, however, that this extraordinary improbability assumes that the monkeys have to get the whole sequence right or else they have to start over as soon as they make a mistake. What if there is a mechanism, though, which conserves any letters that come up correctly so that if, say, a TO is typed by some monkey somewhere it's preserved until a BE is typed and then that's saved, etc? If so, the target sentence would appear in no time at all, relatively speaking. The rest of Hamlet would then eventually follow on in like fashion.

This is essentially the argument made by Richard Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker, and it's intended to send the doubter scurrying away in abject embarrassment at having had the temerity to challenge scientific orthodoxy. The problem with it, though, is that it must assume the very thing that Intelligent Design has been asserting ever since its inception. It assumes that there is some goal toward which life is striving. It assumes that somehow life knows to preserve combinations that "work" until they can be incorporated into the sequence of letters. It assumes that nature has the ability to see a goal and to strive toward it. In other words, it assumes that nature is somehow programmed to produce life.

Such a teleological aspect in nature is precisely what the Darwinian vigorously denies. There is no need to introduce purpose, he avers, since natural selection acting with no conscious purpose selects combinations on the basis of their survival value and thus acts as if it were intelligent. But again this answer won't work. The reason is that natural selection acts only on reproducing populations of organisms. What needs to be explained is how information far more complex than our target sentence (a strand of genetic material, for example) emerged before it developed the ability to replicate itself and thus be subject to the pressures of natural selection.

We suppose that technically speaking it could have happened, just as it's possible that a blind-folded man might select a single marked atom out of all the atoms of the universe just by luck, but it takes faith far greater than the size of a mustard seed to believe that it actually did happen in the few million years between the time the earth cooled sufficiently to allow bio-molecules to form and the appearance of the first living organisms. Of course, when one is a priori committed to the notion that only mechanistic, unintelligent forces were at work in the production of life, then one is constrained to accept the most outlandish and implausible of stories.

It took an intelligent writer to produce Hamlet. There is no basis for believing that any conceivable combination of chance, luck, and blind, impersonal force could accomplish it. Likewise, neither is there any basis for believing that blind, impersonal forces built DNA. The conviction that such mechanisms did indeed accidentally achieve this astonishing miracle is an article of faith that only true believers in the church of Materialism can convince themselves to embrace.

Lawyers

Pete Schramm, who is himself a lawyer, posts a joke at No Left Turns that some of you will think funny:

One afternoon a wealthy lawyer was riding in his limousine when he saw two men along the roadside eating grass. Disturbed, he ordered his driver to stop and he got out to investigate. He asked one man, "Why are you eating grass?" We don't have any money for food," the poor man replied. "We have to eat grass." "Well, then, you can come with me to my house and I'll feed you," the lawyer said. "But, sir! I have a wife and two children with me. They are over there, under that tree" "Bring them along," the lawyer replied. Turning to the other poor man he stated, "You come with us also." The second man, in a pitiful voice then said, "But sir, I also have a wife and SIX children with me!" "Bring them all, as well," the lawyer answered. They all entered the car, which was no easy task, even for a car as large as the limousine was. Once underway, one of the poor fellows turned to the lawyer and said, "Sir, you are too kind. Thank you for taking all of us with you." The lawyer replied, "Glad to do it. You'll really love my place -- the grass is almost a foot high."

My apologies to those of my friends (maybe they're now former friends) who are lawyers.

A Virtual Shoo-In

Here's John Fund's take on the Miers' imbroglio:

I believe it is almost inevitable that Ms. Miers will withdraw or be defeated. Should that happen, it is important President Bush understand how it really happened. While he acted out of sincerity, the nomination was quickly perceived by many as merely a means to a desired end: getting another vote for his views on the court. While some conservatives backed her because they honestly believed she would rule independently with an understanding of the limited role of judges envisioned by the Founders, that message was drowned out by accusations of cronyism and mediocrity.

The president also was let down by seven senators in his own party who in May agreed to scuttle plans to end judicial filibusters blocking nominees from ever getting a vote. It wouldn't have been unreasonable for him to think the Senate wasn't in a position to confirm a nominee with a long paper trail.

But he may soon have a chance for a fresh start and no choice but to have a fight over substance. When Douglas Ginsburg asked to have his nomination to the Supreme Court pulled in 1987 after allegations he had used marijuana, Ronald Reagan won unanimous confirmation in a Democratic Senate for Anthony Kennedy, then a judge with a decade-long conservative track record on a federal appellate court. Similarly, Mr. Bush recovered quickly from losing Linda Chavez as his nominee for Labor Secretary and Mr. Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security. The damage to his relations with his conservative base would blow over quickly if Mr. Bush were to quickly name a well-qualified nominee who was not a sphinx when it came to judicial philosophy. Perhaps this time he might even expand the talent pool to include--gasp--men.

Pace Mr. Fund We have a somewhat different take on Ms Miers' prospects. If she doesn't withdraw, her persistence will set the stage for some novel political irony. She will be broadly disliked for quite different reasons by both Democrats and Republicans, but most of them will reluctantly feel compelled to vote to confirm her. Miers will likely be given a pass by many Democrats who will give her every benefit of the doubt since she's probably the best nominee, from their point of view, they can hope to see. If she's rejected, whoever comes after her is going to be far stronger, more ideologically conservative, and much more impressive than she, and far more difficult to oppose.

Republicans, for their part, will be unenthusiastic about Miers but also reluctant to vote against their president's pick, and indeed most of the current opposition to her is coming from columnists and bloggers, not senators.

Unless she's a disaster in the hearings, which she may be, Ms Miers will probably be confirmed by a comfortable margin, unless defections by Republicans, unlikely as they are, bring her down. In other words, nobody in the Senate will want her as a SCOTUS justice, but almost everyone in the Senate will feel constrained to vote for her.