On Believing the Impossible

Joe Carter could never be an atheist because he finds himself incapable of believing impossible things. To see what he means go here, and be sure to check out the excellent dialogue in the comments section.

Hall of Fame

Bill has collated the series we did on Christian Belief and the Dover ID trial to make it easier to access each of them in their entirety. The links are in the left margin of this page under the somewhat pretentious heading of "Hall of Fame."

Ann Sums Up the Week

Ann Coulter summarizes the week's political news by skewering Hillary's inanity and Teddy's hypocrisy in a column carried by RealClearPolitics.com. She also praises Samuel Alito and, perhaps surprisingly, Ray Nagin. Here's the gist:

So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about." As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."

Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!

Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."

Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.

Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:

His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."

He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.

He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."

And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.

In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton. Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.

I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi. It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.

But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)

Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.

Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.

When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!

There are a couple of thoughts we might tack on to Coulter's column. Unlike some, I don't see that there was anything racially pernicious in what Hillary said about the House of Representatives being run like a plantation. Some commentators tried to turn this into some sort of racial gaffe. It wasn't. What was wrong with it was that it was dumb and completely untrue. Democrats have more rights as a minority party today than Republicans did under the Democrats until 1994 when they took control, and the Democrats enjoy those rights because the Republicans changed the rules when they came to power.

Secondly, Coulter is at least partly right in her tongue-in-cheek assessment of Nagin's clunkish remarks. The number of people who are afraid to say anything that has racial overtones, especially if the remarks can in any way be construed as disparaging to members of a minority, has soared in the past two decades. Consider the abject grovelling to which Jimmy the Greek, Al Campanis, Tom Brookshire, and Trent Lott, to name a few, were made to undergo to atone for their "insensitivity". This is as absurd as it is unwarranted. We need a racial conversation in this country, but we'll never get one as long as people are afraid of being tarred as bigots as soon as they open their mouths, and forced to do self-flagellatory penance.

Nagin's comments weren't very adroit and he can be criticized for his exclusionary vision of New Orleans, the utter blockheadedness of his vision, and his arrogation of knowledge of God's will in the matter, but his honesty and clarity are refreshing. Criticize him for being dumb, but let's not be too quick to label people racist.

Objections to ID

Libertarian economist Bob Murphy forays into the realm of scientific/philosophical controversy to put the kibosh on some of the more common objections to Intelligent Design. He does a pretty good job and says some very interesting things along the way.

For example, he observes that:

[The critics claim that] beyond being merely wrong, ID allegedly fails to qualify even as a scientific theory at all. Science invokes only natural causes to explain things in the natural world, and hence (the objection runs) ID is unscientific when it invokes an unseen "designer" to explain, say, the irreducible complexity of the human nervous system.

William Dembski has dealt this objection a decisive blow when he explains the potential for ID in bioterrorism forensics. At some point in the not too distant future, we will probably see outbreaks of genetically engineered viruses or bacteria. After a given outbreak, people will need to be able to determine whether the deaths were due to natural causes, or were instead homicides. Now whom should we ask to perform this task for us? Priests? Philosophers? Or scientists? And if you agree that it should be the scientists who figure it out, how should they proceed? Wouldn't they, oh I don't know, take samples of the viruses and see if they could've been produced by Darwinian processes, and then (if not) report to the government that we've got some terrorists out there designing killer microbes?

I think that even the atheist who carries this thought experiment out will have to concede that the counterterrorism analysts will end up doing things that Behe and Dembski talk about right now. Note that I'm not saying the government will hire Behe and Dembski to do it; maybe they're not very good scientists after all. But their work is not in principle unscientific, unless we admit that scientists would have nothing to say in the autopsies of entire towns wiped out by a mysterious virus.

Later he notes that those who argue against creationism by insisting that God would never create something just to have it go extinct must, if they're consistent, be atheists:

I want to reiterate a point I've made elsewhere: If you think that creationism (which isn't the same as ID, by the way) can be ruled out on theological grounds, then (if you believe in the standard theory of evolution) you have to be a virtual atheist. For if no benevolent God would ever (say) specially create millions of different species such that the vast majority would go extinct, then no benevolent God would set up the initial conditions of the universe such that random mutation and natural selection would lead to the evolution and extinction of 99% of all species. In other words, if you think that the history of life rules out the Genesis account, be prepared for it to rule out any account involving a God who is powerful, benevolent, and wise.

He finishes by addressing the claim, iterated and reiterated by Judge Jones in his Kitzmiller decision, that ID is just a disguised form of Christianity:

A very popular (and ad hominem) attack is that ID proponents don't really just believe in ID; they're actually Bible-thumping Christians who pretend they don't know anything about the designer in order to keep the classroom textbooks legal. I agree that the vast majority of ID proponents probably fit this description. However, one notable exception is philosopher Antony Flew. When Flew renounced his atheism because of the evidence of design, I recall prominent atheists reassuring their followers that Flew wasn't a Christian, and that all he meant was that life didn't arise purely by accident. So apparently (as even the atheists in this case point out with relief) one can be convinced by the empirical evidence that life exhibits design, without endorsing the God of the Bible.

Murphy is a layman and some might scoff that he's unqualified to pass judgment on the arguments he critiques, but then Judge Jones is a layman who spent the seven years before his appointment to the federal bench as the chairman of the state liquor control board (hardly a scientific think tank), yet the anti-ID folks seem unable to praise his Solomonic wisdom highly enough.

Detached Clergy

A couple of years ago United Methodist Bishop Sprague of Chicago called the imminent U.S. overthrow of Saddam "morally lamentable" and "theologically reprehensible." In Methodist theology, we must assume, it is morally lamentable to overthrow tyrannical murderers who are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of their own countrymen.

Meanwhile, millions of Methodists, too morally untutored to appreciate the grievous wickedness of what Bush did, simply ignored their denominational leadership and voted in 2004 for the man who liberated 50 million Afghans and Iraqis from oppression.

Maybe one reason mainline protestant denominations are in decline is that the people who are supposed to be the sages of the church too often come across as shallow ideologues whose theological wisdom is pretty much informed by whatever the current liberal political fashion happens to be.

The Midnight Hour

In the Midnight Hour, Mustang Sally, and a favorite of 60s college students, Land of 1000 Dances - the man who performed them all, Wilson Pickett, died today at the age of 64. There's a good obit of him here. What a voice.

What Else Would We Expect?

The Washington Post has learned a little something about its readership - they're lefties:

The Washington Post shut down one of its blogs Thursday after the newspaper's ombudsman raised the ire of readers by writing that lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to the Democrats as well as to Republicans. At the center of a congressional bribery investigation, Abramoff gave money to Republicans while he had his clients donate to both parties, though mostly to Republicans.

In her Sunday column, ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote that Abramoff "had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties," prompting a wave of nasty reader postings on post.blog. There were so many personal attacks that the newspaper's staff could not "keep the board clean, there was some pretty filthy stuff," and so the Post shut down comments on the blog, or Web log, said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

"We're not giving up on the concept of having a healthy public dialogue with our readers, but this experience shows that we need to think more carefully about how we do it," Brady wrote on the newspaper's Web site. "There are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech."

Ah, yes. The champions of peace and love, tolerance and diversity are apoplectic that the Post ombudsman would have the temerity to write the truth when it undermines their hopes that the Republicans will take a major hit from the Abramoff scandal. They express their dissatisfaction in the only manner they know: invective and obscenity. Not having progressed emotionally beyond their eighth grade year they resort to forms of dialogue which appeal to the 14 year-old mind, convinced that whoever launches the most vulgar and vituperative insults wins the argument.

These emotional and psychological juveniles are the folks who stand as the ideological alternative to contemporary conservatism. Thank goodness the grown-ups won the last two elections.

Listing Toward Lunacy

Al Gore seems to have no qualms about disdaining the truth in his speeches and levelling the most outrageous allegations at the man who defeated him for the presidency. Gore 's bitterness has transformed him into an amusing parody, a political Elmer Gantry. For a thorough analysis of his recent speech and an examination of the charges he made against the President go here.

It's risible that the man for whom there was "no controlling legal authority" is now accusing the president of having deliberately broken the law in surveilling phone calls coming from suspected terrorists abroad. The irony is that there seems to be no consensus among legal authorities whether the president has the authority to do this or not. That uncertainty, however, doesn't prevent Mr. "No-controlling-legal-authority" from stating with absolute assurance that Bush deliberately broke the law. How does he know that? And if he doesn't know it for sure, why does he say it? Is it only to gin up hatred in others for the man that he himself despises?

Even if the president does turn out to have been in technical violation of the law, the matter is so unclear that it's absurd to say that he did it deliberately. Moreover, if it should happen that he overstepped his authority, not knowing precisely where the limits lay, isn't it better that he erred on the side of protecting the American people? After all, he didn't authorize the surveillance for political or self-serving reasons, he did it to protect our children from being blown to pieces by murderers. Doesn't anyone on the Left understand this? Or is the goal of discrediting and ultimately impeaching Bush so important that nothing else matters, not even the safety of those we love?

Al Gore has allowed his resentment at having missed out on the presidency to turn him into a vindictive, irresponsible, and pompous buffoon. He's a man listing toward lunacy. It's a shame, really.

More Job Openings at the Top

Bill Roggio assesses the missile strike against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan:

The final results of from the airstrike in the Pakistani border town of Damadola are now known. In addition to Abu Khabab al-Masri, who was al-Qaeda's chief bomb maker, head of the WMD program, and former terror camp commander, two other al-Qaeda commanders were killed in the strike. ABC News confirms that Khalid Habib [or Khaled al-Harbi] and Abdul Rehman al Magrabi perished in the attack. Khaled al-Harbi is al-Qaeda's operational commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Al-Harbi splits duty in Afghanistan with Abd al Hadi Al Iraqi, and both are considered "two of [al-Qaeda's] most able commanders".

Abdul Rehman al Magrabi ["the Moroccan"] is thought to be al-Qaeda's commander in Pakistan, and is said to have replaced Abu Hamza Rabia, who was killed in Pakistan on December 1, 2005.

According to a trusted source, the DNA tests are complete and the two other other "foreigners" killed are said to be al-Qaeda bodyguards. Ayman al-Zawahiri appears to have slipped the net. ABC News provides further important details on the meeting that took place:

Authorities tell ABC News that the terror summit was called to funnel new money into attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan... "Pakistani intelligence says this was a very important planning session involving the very top levels of al Qaeda as they get ready for a new spring offensive," explained Alexis Debat, a former official in the French Defense Ministry and now an ABC News consultant.

It is clear the reports from earlier in the week that al-Qaeda is refocusing efforts in Afghanistan are accurate. With the recent capture or killing of several high-level al-Qaeda leaders, including Abu Hamza Rabia and Abu Musab al-Suri before last week's strike, it is clear U.S. and Pakistani intelligence is gaining a clearer picture of al-Qaeda's network and operations in and along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

As al-Qaeda amasses strength in the region and grows more confident in its abilities to operate more openly, they expose themselves to intelligence operations and military strikes. The nature of the intelligence on this meeting gives clues as to the nature of intelligence operations in the region: either the U.S. has sophisticated signals intelligence able to penetrate al-Qaeda's communications; or there are one or several high value human intelligence sources within al-Qaeda and the Taliban; or a combination of the two. Whatever the answer, al-Qaeda has lost five senior leaders over the span of five weeks.

The meeting in Damadola was a high value target of opportunity which could not be passed up. U.S. intelligence took the risk, pulled the trigger and bagged three senior al-Qaeda commanders. Masri, Habib, and al-Magrabi have been removed from the chain of command, and must be replaced by junior operatives who possess neither their stature, experience or connections. Al-Qaeda has been weakened.

Al-Masri was a particularly odious character. Roggio gives us his resume here, and Dan Darling has a more extensive piece on him in The Weekly Standard. The world is a much better place with al-Masri no longer a part of it.

Speaking of which, one wonders how eager the al Qaeda underlings must be to fill the vacancies that keep opening up among the leadership. On the one hand there must be an expectation of rapid advancement up the corporate ladder. On the other, with an attrition rate of one top leader per week, there doesn't seem to be much to look forward to as one of the top al-Qaedans, especially if you had been anticipating a long and pleasant retirement.

UPDATE: Tonight's news is reporting that there were four senior al-Qaeda leaders killed in the strike, not three.

Fifty Most Influential Christians?

The Church Report surveyed its readers to come up with the top 50 most influential Christians in America. There are some surprises on the list. For example, I know Sean Hannity is influential, and I know he's a Christian, but I was surprised that he ranked higher than Pope Benedict.

I was also taken aback that Benny Hinn was even on the list, but that's just me, I guess. It's distressing, though, to see who Christians think of when they think of influential leaders of the Church.

Joe Carter is even more depressed. Check out what he has to say about the list here.

Emperor of Ocean Park

At the recommendation of a former student I picked up The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen Carter and found it a delightful read. Carter is a very good prose writer and he's formulated an interesting mystery about a judge who seems to be a cross between Clarence Thomas (black, conservative) and Robert Bork (denied confirmation to the Supreme Court) written from the standpoint of his son. The judge dies mysteriously and his adult children, very well-to-do African-Americans, struggle to discover why so many underworld types are taking such an interest in his death.

Throughout the book the son, Talcott Garland, like Carter, a law school professor, wrestles with a collapsing marriage, racial insecurities, his own sense of inadequacy, which is at times humorous, and his apparent targetting by the shady characters that keep intruding into his life. Through it all Talcott's Christianity runs unapologetically in the background in a way that I found very refreshing in an otherwise secular novel.

Emperor has no vulgarity to speak of nor any real sex or undue violence, and it does a fine job of realistically exploring the pathos of a good man's life. It'd make an excellent read for someone looking for an entertaining and intelligent mystery.

The Dover Decision V: Final Thoughts

In this our last installment in our series on the opinion of Judge John Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover we'll follow the Judge as he moves from his critique of the scientific standing of Intelligent Design to an examination of the motives of several prominent board members in trying to get ID formally mentioned in biology classes. If it can be shown that the primary movers on the board had a religious purpose in trying to accomplish their goal then, the Judge argues, their attempt would fail the Lemon test (from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 1971) which explicitly forbids such motivations in introducing curricular materials into schools.

Whether Lemon is good law or not, it is the law, and it does appear that the board members violated it's stipulation that there must be a secular purpose to all public school curricular materials. Highlights of the Judge's reasoning are excerpted in what follows:

We initially note that the Supreme Court has instructed that while courts are "normally deferential to a State's articulation of a secular purpose, it is required that the statement of such purpose be sincere and not a sham."

Although as noted Defendants have consistently asserted that the ID Policy was enacted for the secular purposes of improving science education and encouraging students to exercise critical thinking skills, the Board took none of the steps that school officials would take if these stated goals had truly been their objective. The Board consulted no scientific materials. The Board contacted no scientists or scientific organizations. The Board failed to consider the views of the District's science teachers. The Board relied solely on legal advice from two organizations with demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions, the Discovery Institute and the TMLC. Moreover, Defendants' asserted secular purpose of improving science education is belied by the fact that most if not all of the Board members who voted in favor of the biology curriculum change conceded that they still do not know, nor have they ever known, precisely what ID is. To assert a secular purpose against this backdrop is ludicrous.

Finally, although Defendants have unceasingly attempted in vain to distance themselves from their own actions and statements, which culminated in repetitious, untruthful testimony, such a strategy constitutes additional strong evidence of improper purpose under the first prong of the Lemon test. As exhaustively detailed herein, the thought leaders on the Board made it their considered purpose to inject some form of creationism into the science classrooms, and by the dint of their personalities and persistence they were able to pull the majority of the Board along in their collective wake.

Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective.... Defendants' previously referenced flagrant and insulting falsehoods to the Court provide sufficient and compelling evidence for us to deduce that any allegedly secular purposes that have been offered in support of the ID Policy are equally insincere.

Accordingly, we find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom, in violation of the Establishment Clause.

The core notion animating the requirement that . . . [an official act's] 'principal or primary effect . . . be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion,' is not only that government may not be overtly hostile to religion but also that it may not place its prestige, coercive authority, or resources behind a single religious faith or behind religious belief in general, compelling nonadherents to support the practices or proselytizing of favored religious organizations and conveying the message that those who do not contribute gladly are less than full members of the community.

It's unfortunate that Judge Jones has never read Roy Clouser's The Myth of Religious Neutrality. Clouser demonstrates in the first part of his book that the only thing that all religions share in common, and which therefore distinguishes a religion as such, is a divinity belief. By this he means that every religion holds a belief that something is unconditionally, non-dependently real and is the ultimate source of everything else. Since everyone holds that something is the non-dependent source of everything else, everyone, even the naturalist who believes the ultimate, non-dependent source is nature, or the materialist who believes it is matter, holds a religious belief.

When the Darwinian therefore claims that all of life is the product purely of natural, blind, purposeless mechanisms he is advancing a religious belief. The effect of the Judge's ruling, though he is unaware of it, was not to ban religion from the science classroom because that's an impossible task, but rather to ban a certain kind of religious claim from the classroom - the claim that matter, or the cosmos, might not be the non-dependent source of everything else.

In an astonishing contortion of justice the judge has banned the claim that the cosmos is not divine and privileged the claim that it is divine against any and all official criticism.

Judge Jones goes on to write:

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

This is simply untrue. As we have pointed out in earlier posts on this decision, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of biologists and other scientists who have testified in print that the theistic beliefs of their youth were extinguished precisely by their education in the theory of materialistic evolution.

It is true that evolution need not be seen as antagonistic to theism, but it is disingenuous of the plaintiffs' witnesses to say that "it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator." Indeed, the Judge regarded the assertion made by ID proponents that ID doesn't entail the existence of the God of the bible as a sham. Yet he does not see that if it is indeed a sham then certainly the claim that there is no conflict between a materialistic, naturalistic theory and a theory that suggests that theism is true is a forteriori a sham as well.

In his conclusion, the Judge states the following:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With this we are in agreement. It is exceedingly distressing that people who call themselves Christians would not act more honorably than a couple of the board members chose to act. We're all weak. We all fail in one way or another, but one wishes that Christians in such a high-profile position, Christians upon whom the eyes of a hostile secular press are focussed, would rise above the level of the rest of us and bring more credit and less disgrace to the Faith to which they claim to adhere.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom. Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.

The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources. To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, � 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID (italics mine).

It must be noted here what the Judge's decision entails. The italicized sentence above is clear that it does not prohibit ID from being mentioned or discussed by science teachers at their own discretion, nor does it prohibit those teachers from discussing problems within evolutionary theory. It merely prevents the Dover school board from requiring that any of this be done. Nor does his ruling prohibit ID from being taught in other classes besides science classes, but it is unclear whether his opinion would prevent a school board from mandating that a philosophy or social studies class, especially an elective, be set up to accomplish this.

Of one thing, though, we can be fairly confident, and that is that the shortcomings of the Judge's reasoning in support of his decision are going to leave plenty of openings for further challenges down the road. It's doubtful that we've seen the last of this issue.

Previous posts in this series can be read, in order, here, here, here, and here.

Death With Dignity

Even though most conservatives are deploring the Supreme Court's decision on the Oregon Death With Dignity Act, and even though three very bright justices dissented, I think the Court came to the right conclusion.

If the matter of choice in abortion should be thrown back to the states to decide what their laws will be, as I think it should, then it's hardly consistent to have the federal government stepping in to stop a person from choosing the time and manner of his own death. If the one is a matter for states to decide then so must the other be.

Attorney General Ashcroft was stretching his constitutional authority when he threatened to revoke prescription writing privileges of doctors who prescribe drugs for terminally ill patients who wish to end their suffering, the Court decided. Whether doctors, as a matter of professional ethics, should do this is a different question than whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to prohibit them from doing it.

Now it will be interesting to see how the six justices who voted to give states the right to decide what the law should be in such personal, private matters - matters in many respects analogous to the issue of whether a woman should have the right to kill her unborn child - will vote when the question of returning abortion law to the states comes before them.

Teddy the Ent

Remember the Ents in Lord of the Rings? They were sentient tree creatures which did everything so slowly that it seemed to take days for them to just utter a sentence. We were reminded of the Ents when we read that Teddy Kennedy - who ripped Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito for ties to a group that discriminates against women - said he's going to quit a club notorious for discriminating against women "as fast as I can."

He's been a member of the club for fifty two years, but now he's going to get out "as fast as he can." What's been keeping him from getting out for the last fifty two years? Did he just now become aware that the club doesn't admit women? Did he just now realize that it's pretty hypocritical to criticize others for doing what you yourself do? Did it just now dawn on him after all these years that membership in the Owl club, as it's known, is not worth the $100 a year he pays in dues because it's a lousy place to pick up chicks? Is Teddy an Ent?

Maverick Democrat

Reuters informs us that Ben Nelson of Nebraska, a moderate voice in the U.S. Congress, on Tuesday became the first Senate Democrat to announce his support for conservative Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, who is expected to be confirmed later this month by the full Senate. "I have decided to vote in favor of Judge Samuel Alito," Nelson said in a statement issued by his office.

Michelle Malkin wonders whether the media will now be referring to Nelson as a "maverick" or whether that appellation is reserved only for Republicans like John McCain who endear themselves to the MSM by bucking their party.

Chocolate Racism

"New Orleans should be a chocolate New Orleans." "This city will be chocolate at the end of the day." "This city will be a majority African American city." "It's the way God wants it to be." So saith the honorable mayor of New Orleans, "school bus" Ray Nagin.

God has spoken to him, evidently, and revealed that this is His will for New Orleans. Well, we're hearing that God is also speaking to white taxpayers and telling them that since this is going to be a chocolate city, He wants African-Americans to foot the bill for its reconstruction. That's what we heard, anyway.

For video of his honor the racist, bigot mayor's speech go here.

The Liberal Mind

Julie Ponzi at No Left Turns writes a pair of posts in the wake of the Alito hearings that offer some interesting insight into the liberal mind. Her analysis, in my opinion, helps to explain why liberalism today is so much different from what it was in the forties and fifties:

Democrats do not have big thinkers....it appears that all they care about is abortion. That's part of the story. It's certainly their biggest issue. But what I think they are really afraid of is how powerful and persuasive and serious people like Alito, Scalia, Roberts and Thomas are. Of course they looked silly and juvenile--even purile [in the Alito hearings]. But that's really not the issue. Republicans have their hacks as well.

I think I have come around to the belief now that these guys no longer have faith in their own roots. They don't even take themselves seriously--on an intellectual level. They have so lost their capacity to respect reason that they are in a total malaise. Anything could be true. That's why they cower in the face of the radicals among them. When anything can be true the guys with the biggest stick or the thickest wallets win. They certainly don't put forward very many serious people who can argue from the old-line Democratic beliefs. They do not have the equivalent of the conservative movement, with thinkers and scholars who inspire people. The are beyond post-modern. They are inspired by nothing and they really don't believe in much beyond a lazy adolescent cry for "freedom" and "rights." They can't articulate what that means in any sensible way.

We are in the position now of arguing with people who have no argument. It's almost not even fun.

She continues her thoughts in this post:

I've heard liberals complaining alot about how Alito defined his role as a judge (i.e., to be an impartial interpreter of the law) and dismiss that as alot of baloney. Some have even gone so far as to imply that the hearings are a waste of time because we should know that conservatives will appoint conservatives and liberals will appoint liberals--that's just the way it is. If you want your guys in, win the election. Well, there's a certain amount of truth in that. And you've got to admire the libs who have the gumption to say that. It's factual, anyway. But there is more to the whole truth than a simple recitation of the facts.

Many liberals don't buy that Alito is serious about his job description, not because they think he is a liar (though some may think that as well), but because they have a distorted understanding about the nature of politics that breeds cynicism.... Politics, to them, is a power struggle only. It's not about an attempt at impartial application of justice. They do not really believe that impartiality is possible because they think that judicial philosophy is nothing more than your positions on the issues. A confirmation hearing to them should be about spouting your positions on the issues and garnering the votes you need for confirmation based on whether enough people agree with your positions.

They do not see that Alito really does believe that his personal positions on the issues do not matter. He can't argue them from the bench unless the law calls for it. If you tell them that Roe v. Wade is bad law, they look at you with a blank face. You must be "pro-life" then. That can be the only reason you have that opinion. These libs think politics is only a power struggle because they do not believe that people are capable of reasoning from a point that is not tied up in their own self-interest. They certainly do not respect the Constitution as that starting point--because they think it was meant to change as tastes in hairstyles change. To them, American politics is just interest combating interest until someone ends up on top.

That's why liberals think they're the better people all the time. They think they are "championing" the little guy in this tug-o-war of interests. We argue that we are only interested in "championing" justice--we don't wish to play the game. Because they assume that ignoring the game is impossible, they say we're engaged in nothing more than a covert operation to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful. There is no such thing as true impartial "justice," they argue....

But I digress . . . the long and short of it is that I wonder if it is even possible sometimes to engage in conversation with these folks because we're not speaking the same language or coming at the conversation with anything like the same assumptions about politics. We say one thing and they hear another--and vice versa. Maybe the hearings are a waste of time on some level. We can only hope they were useful to those watching/listening to them (especially the young). One thing is certain, it will not be to the Democrats' benefit to keep this thing on the front page another week! That's what I mean about being beholden to interests--they have to try this in order to satisfy their way-left base of donors. It will fail and they will be exposed even more.

Liberals, it should be said, are much more likely than others to have succumbed to the contemporary fashion that there is no truth, that there are only varying "perspectives" on matters which concern us. If there is no truth, however, then there's no point in trying to persuade others to your point of view through the force of ideas. The only thing one can do is acquire and hold power so that he can compel others to abide by his point of view. Politics, for the Left, has become a struggle for power in which there are no rules. Low blows, head butts, kicking, gouging, and biting are all justified if they work, and that's why we see the sort of behavior we've witnessed from the Left in this country ever since the Robert Bork nomination. Conservatives are the enemy and if they must be lied about, smeared, slandered, and destroyed, then, well, the end of defeating the enemy justifies whatever means are necessary to bring it about.

I am reminded of words attributed to Lenin in 1920. In a speech to the Young Communist League he is alleged to have said that: "We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas...Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old...order and for uniting the proletariat."

If it works it's right. That was the view of the totalitarian Left in 1920 and it's the view of much of the liberal/Left today.

Al-Qaeda Membership Application

Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters has come into possession of an al Qaeda membership application which he has posted for our consideration:

Application For al-Qaeda Membership

Allahu akbar! So you've decided to join the fastest-growing organization of psychopathic murderers in the world today. Due to the exciting type of work we perform, we always have room for more volunteers, and so we welcome you to our ranks. We'd like to get to know you, while we can, so please answer a few questions for us:

Name: Abu ____________

Real name: __________________

Gender: ______ Male __________ Chattel (if so, stop here)

Marital Status: ____ Single _____ Married (# of wives: ______)

Reason For Interest In al-Qaeda (circle all that apply):

a. Hatred for everything Western, except those hot babes on Baywatch

b. Suicidal impulse but lacking the skills to carry it out

c. Inability to get women to date me

d. Want to travel and see the world before I realize my ambition to destroy it

e. Having 72 inexperienced young girls later sounds better than dealing with one nagging woman now

Would you be willing to relocate? Y/N

If Y, in pieces? Y/N

Do you have any of the following disqualifying conditions?

a. Conscience

b. Soul

c. Survival instinct

d. Half a brain or more

e. Fear of flying

Thank you again, mujaheddin, on behalf of al-Qaeda -- an Equal Opportunity Destroyer.

Who Said That?

Quick, who said this:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting. "Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country."

Pat Robertson, you say? Well, it sounds like Pat, but if it had been Robertson there would've been wall to wall derision from the Left directed at the hapless evangelist on all the news shows. No, it wasn't Pat. The only person who could get away with saying something like this without being hooted down by the media and forced to apologize to every offended minority on this side of the Atlantic would have to be a black liberal Democrat. The media has bestowed upon BLDs a kind of immunity, an immunity that is really a form of reparations for all the sins of the past. It's an immunity that arises out out of the guilt that white liberals wallow in and that exempts BLDs from criticism when they say what anyone else would be crucified for saying.

The source of the quote? Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans.

The NYT Gets it Wrong Again

The New York Times ran a picture on their website Saturday purporting to be a photo of the remains of a missile fired by a predator drone at poor Pakistani peasants by the CIA in a futile attempt to kill the al Qaeda second in command, al Zawahiri.

Unfortunately for what remains of the Times' credibility, they were either duped or they were complicit in a hoax. The munition in the photo, as is evident to anyone who looks at it, except, evidently, Times staffers, is obviously not a missile. It's much too bulky and heavy.

The American Thinker provides some background.