Public Menace

Imagine that this was not a Democratic governor but, say, a Republican Vice-President:

Gov. Jon S. Corzine apologized to New Jersey residents on Monday as he left the hospital 18 days after a devastating traffic accident in which he was not wearing a seat belt and was being driven at more than 91 miles per hour on the Garden State Parkway.

"I set a very bad example," said a contrite Mr. Corzine, who broke his left femur, his sternum and 11 ribs in the accident, speaking from a wheelchair just outside Cooper University Hospital in Camden. His voice breaking with emotion, he added: "I hope the state will forgive me. I will work very hard to set the right kind of example."

And then what happened?

After the brief comments, Mr. Corzine was helped into a black GMC Savana van, with tinted windows, that he bought and had specially modified for his wheelchair, and left the hospital in a six-car caravan about 1:45 p.m. His vehicle followed a black state police Crown Victoria, and was followed by a Chevrolet Suburban - like the one he was riding in at the time of the crash - a Mercedes station wagon, and two other cars. The motorcade did not use emergency lights, as it had been just before the accident.

The governor's motorcade moved with the flow of traffic on Interstate 295, at some points sustaining speeds up to 70 miles per hour several minutes at a time, according to the speedometer of a vehicle traveling alongside; posted limits were 55 and 65.

Dick Cheney accidentally wounded a companion in a hunting accident and by the media reaction you would have thought that he had deliberately tried to murder the fellow. Corzine, on the other hand, appears to be a chronic threat to public safety, but the media scarcely takes notice. Makes you wonder about their ethics and sense of responsibility.

RLC

The NYT, No Less

What will John Murtha and Harry Reid, both of whom having declared the war lost, say about their biggest media ally running this piece on progress in Iraq:

Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.

"Many people are challenging the insurgents," said the governor of Anbar, Maamoon S. Rahid, though he quickly added, "We know we haven't eliminated the threat 100 percent."

Many Sunni tribal leaders, once openly hostile to the American presence, have formed a united front with American and Iraqi government forces against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. With the tribal leaders' encouragement, thousands of local residents have joined the police force. About 10,000 police officers are now in Anbar, up from several thousand a year ago. During the same period, the police force here in Ramadi, the provincial capital, has grown from fewer than 200 to about 4,500, American military officials say.

At the same time, American and Iraqi forces have been conducting sweeps of insurgent strongholds, particularly in and around Ramadi, leaving behind a network of police stations and military garrisons, a strategy that is also being used in Baghdad, Iraq's capital, as part of its new security plan.

Quick! Pull the troops out! Bush might win this thing after all!

RLC

Tragedy? Not So Much

Last week's San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a shooting in a pizzeria that began with this:

Catarino Piedra, 41, kept a gun underneath the counter at the Coliseum Pizza and Taqueria that he owned in East Oakland because his drivers had been robbed many times while making deliveries.

Allen Joseph Hicks III, 22, was an accused batterer on probation for a drug conviction and an aspiring rap artist whom everybody in his neighborhood knew as "Boonie."

The lives of the two men intersected tragically [emphasis mine] at about 9:30 p.m. Thursday when Hicks, armed with a pistol and joined by two other men, tried to rob Piedra inside the popular pizzeria at 89th Avenue and International Boulevard. Fearful that the assailants might hurt him, his wife and three children -- all of whom were inside the restaurant -- Piedra pulled out his 9mm semiautomatic pistol and opened fire, killing Hicks, police said.

In the chaos, Piedra may have accidentally shot and wounded his 17-year-old son, who was not seriously injured, police said.

Piedra acted in self-defense and won't be charged with a crime, Alameda County Assistant District Tom Rogers said Friday.

"I was scared," Piedra told The Chronicle in an interview Friday. "I had to defend my family. I was in fear for me and my kids."

I confess its hard to see just what the tragedy is when an armed thug threatens a man's family and gets killed by the father. Perhaps the SFC would have thought that had the police intercepted Cho Seung Hui as he was about to commit his horrific crime and shot him dead that that too would have been a tragedy. There is a sense, of course, in which any premature loss of life is usually a tragedy and a sense in which it is a tragedy that anyone lets his life deteriorate to the point where he's sticking up pizza stores, but is it tragic that an armed robber who threatens a man's family gets shot? As Glen Beck would say: not so much.

RLC

Selecting Generals

My friend Kyle sends along a link to an article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling in which he offers a stinging critique of our armed forces' senior officer corps and how these officers are selected. He also makes some recommendations for reforming the process. His piece is guaranteed to be the talk of the officers' clubs.

The essay is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is that Yingling is an active duty officer who is taking quite a career risk by saying some of what he says.

I'm in no position, of course, to comment on whether his criticisms are valid, but I do wonder about his proposed remedy. He urges that Congress undertake to reform the process by which generals are selected. This strikes me as somewhat like asking the three stooges to reform public manners. Congress can't even reform itself let alone reform the military. Moreover, there are many in the majority party in Congress who hold the military in very low esteem, even to the point of loathing. Putting the armed forces in the hands of these people seems like a prescription for the complete emasculation of our military force.

Even so, Yingling's criticisms should be read by everyone who takes an interest in the defense of our nation and the success of the war on terrorists.

RLC

Falling Like Dominos

Well, it's an unconfirmed report, but if it turns out to be accurate then the successor to Abu al Zarqawi, who was sent packing to his 72 virgins by a laser guided munition last June, seems to have lasted all of eleven months in office before being introduced to the Grim Reaper by Sunni militiamen who are tired of al Qaeda's heavy-handed ways.

Abu Ayyad al-Masri, who took over the reins of al Qaeda shortly after al-Zarqawi found he had exhausted all of his good luck last June, was believed to have been killed in a battle between al Qaeda and Sunni militia who want al-Qaeda out of Iraq.

The short tenure of the leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq gives new meaning to the concept of term limits. We suggest that when al-Masri's successor takes over, if indeed al-Masri is dead, the first thing he should do is appoint his successor.

RLC

Re: For Bibliophiles

Several respondents commented on our post titled For Bibliophiles. Their comments are good reading and can be found on the April Feedback page.

RLC

Di Fi's Non-Scandal

If Senator Dianne Feinstein were a Republican she'd be on her way to the slammer, but since she's a Democrat, well, it seems no one can be bothered by the evidence of her, ah, lapses in judgment:

The problems stem from her subcommittee activities from 2001 to late 2005, when she quit. During that period the public record suggests she knowingly took part in decisions that eventually put millions of dollars into her husband's pocket - the classic conflict of interest that exploited her position and power to channel money to her husband's companies.

In other words, it appears Sen. Feinstein was up to her ears in the same sort of shenanigans that landed California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R) in the slammer. Indeed, it may be that the primary difference between the two is basically that Cunningham was a minor leaguer and a lot dumber than his state's senior senator.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, or CREW, usually focuses on the ethical lapses of Republicans and conservatives, but even she is appalled at the way Sen. Feinstein has abused her position. Sloan told a California reporter earlier this month that while"there are a number of members of Congress with conflicts of interest ... because of the amount of money involved, Feinstein's conflict of interest is an order of magnitude greater than those conflicts."

And the director of the Project on Government Oversight who examined the evidence of wrongdoing assembled by California writer Peter Byrne told him that "the paper trail showing Senator Feinstein's conflict of interest is irrefutable."

You can read the sordid details at the link. Here's how the story ends, probably in more ways than one:

In spite of the blatant appearance of corruption, no major publication has picked up on the story, the Senate Ethics Committee has reportedly let her slip by, and she is now chairing the Senate Rules Committee, which puts her in charge of making sure her colleagues act ethically and avoid the sorts of conflicts of interest with which she is personally and so obviously familiar.

When you're a liberal in Washington, evidently, the world is your oyster and taxpayers' dollars are yours for the taking. Meanwhile, our vigilant media is busy trying to ferret out the really important stuff like whether any Republican bigwigs' telephone numbers are on the "D.C. Madam's" rolodex.

RLC

No Time to Leave

An Iraqi pleads for us to stay:

Instead of coming up with ideas to help the U.S., Democrats are trying to stop the effort to stabilize Iraq and rescue the Middle East from a catastrophe.

I am an Iraqi. To me the possible consequences of this vote [to withdraw our troops from Iraq] are terrifying. Just as we began to see signs of progress in my country the Democrats come and say, 'Well, it's not worth it. Time to leave'.

To the Democrats my life and the lives of twenty-five million other Iraqis are evidently not worth trying for. They shouldn't expect us to be grateful for this.

For four years everybody made mistakes. The administration made mistakes and admitted them. My people and leaders made mistakes as well and we regret them.

But now, in the last two months, we have had a fresh start; a new strategy with new ideas and tactics. These were reached after studying previous mistakes and were designed to reverse the setbacks we witnessed in the course of this war.

This strategy, although its tools are not yet even fully deployed, is showing promising signs of progress.

We must give this effort the chance it deserves. We should provide all the support necessary. We should heed constructive criticism, not the empty rhetoric that the 'war is lost.'

It is not lost. Quitting is not an option we can afford-not in America and definitely not in Iraq.

I said it before and I say it again; this war must be won. If it is not the world as you in the United States know it today (and as we here in Iraq dream for it to become) will exist only in books of history. The forces of extremism that we confront today are more determined, more resourceful, and more barbaric than the Nazi or the communists of the past.

Add to that the weapons they can improvise or acquire through their unholy alliance with rogue regimes, combined with their fluid structure and mobility ... well, they can be more deadly than any forces we have faced in the past. Much more.

Read the rest of this impassioned plea at the link.

The lives of twenty five million Iraqis hang in the balance not to mention the fate of the rest of the Middle East and our security here at home. Nevertheless, Harry Reid and John Murtha don't seem to think that any of that is worth staying and fighting for.

RLC

Ideas Have Consequences

Mike Metzger of the Clapham Commentary writes an insightful piece on the connection between one's philosophical worldview and one's way of life. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

...Today also marks the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1899. Hitler, Columbine and Virginia Tech share a common ancestor - Friedrich Nietzsche. But who cares what a German philosopher said?

We're like Andy Sachs, the young assistant to Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada. Skeptical that Paris fashion trends dictate her wardrobe choices, Andy smirks at the fancy belts that "all look the same to me." Miranda, one of New York's biggest fashion magazine editors, overhears the remark and wheels around to Andy who backpedals by saying she's "still learning about this stuff." Oops. "This... "stuff?" asks Miranda, "Stuff?" "Oh ... okay. You think this "stuff" has nothing to do with you. You ... go to your closet and select - I don't know - that lumpy blue sweater for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that sweater is not just blue, its not turquoise ... it's not lapis ... it's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002 Oscar De la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Eves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military gowns ... and then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores ... and then trickled on down to some tragic Casual Corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin. However that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs ... and its sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of ... stuff."

Too many Christians dismiss Nietzsche because he wrote "stuff." We see no connection between philosophy and terrorism - between worldview and way of life. Yet Nietzsche predicted unending horrors like Hitler and Columbine and Virginia Tech. He said people cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a God who points at us with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not." Yet God is dead, Nietzsche said. Our problem is not seeing the inevitable consequences. Without God, life has no meaning or morality. Might makes right. Whoever has the biggest gun wins.

Metzger is exactly right except I think he might include Darwin's influence along with that of Nietzsche. Darwin saw the biological world as one vast, pululating struggle for survival where the fittest squeeze out the less fit in the battle for resources.

Stir together Darwin's concept of survival of the fittest with a dose of Nietszche's atheism and his might makes right ethic, and the toxic vapors of Nazism and nihilistic killers like Cho Seung-Hui quickly condense in the flask of our culture.

Read Metzger's entire essay. It's very good.

RLC

Now it All Makes Sense

In an interview recently, Christopher Hitchens, a writer of considerable ability, and an atheist, was asked:

Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?

His answer was:

Well, I don't talk that much to them - maybe people think I do. I know something which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn't shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, "I'm not fortunate enough to be a person of faith."

We suspect that this revelation has tongues wagging in the editorial offices of Sojourners. Jim Wallis and his staff are perhaps thinking that that explains a lot about this administration.

RLC

Lucy

I once heard it said that if you wait long enough sooner or later every fossil that is touted upon its discovery as another link in the chain of human evolution will be discredited. The discovery of the fossil is invariably front-page news, and its evolutionary significance is thoroughly explored, but its fall from favor, if it is reported at all, is consigned to the more obscure sections of the paper.

I thought of this when I came across this report about Australopithecus afarensis better known as "Lucy." Lucy was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by a team led by Donald Johanson and immediately hailed as an evolutionary common ancestor of the great apes and man. Now it turns out, thirty three years later, that researchers are doubtful that Lucy was ancestral to man at all.

An entire generation has been taught that Lucy was a missing link in human evolution. Now that the link to man seems to have been an illusion the perception still remains, like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, that there is nevertheless much fossil evidence that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors. It may be that we indeed have a common ancestor with the apes, but the evidence in support of that hypothesis seems about as substantial as the cat's grin.

Don't look for this story to get nearly as much play in the media as did the account of Lucy's discovery and the excitement in the scientific community over the confirmation they thought it provided of the evolutionary model of man's descent. Evidence of evolution is news, the debunking of that evidence is not.

RLC

Virtual Wall

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has likened the barriers that the U.S. is erecting along its southern border to the Berlin Wall. Does that mean that Mexico is like East Germany?

Speaking of barriers along the border the story linked to above says that most of them are going to be "virtual walls" which should detect 95% of those trying to cross into this country illegally. It'll consist of lights, sensors, cameras and more agents and will essentially halt illegal crossings along the Arizona border, the busiest section for clandestine entries.

Officials expect to complete 28 miles of the high-tech system in Arizona by June, and by next year it should run into New Mexico and parts of Texas.

The only problem with a virtual wall is that, unlike a real wall, it only works if the political leadership in Washington make it clear that they want the laws against illegal entry enforced by the border patrol. At this point there's not much reason to think they do.

RLC

Thank Heavens for Sen. Leiberman

Senator Joe Lieberman respectfully, politely, and powerfully grinds the arguments advanced on behalf of the Iraq war funding resolution by Harry Reid and the Democrats into fine powder. In the process he respectfully and politely exposes Senator Reid as an utter buffoon.

Here's an excerpt of Leiberman's speech yesterday on the floor of the senate, but one should read it in its entirety. It's a marvelous example of well-reasoned argumentation.

In his speech Monday, the Majority Leader described the several steps that this new strategy for Iraq would entail. Its first step, he said, is to "transition the U.S. mission away from policing a civil war-to training and equipping Iraqi security forces, protecting U.S. forces, and conducting targeted counter-terror operations."

I ask my colleagues to take a step back for a moment and consider this plan.

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn't be "policing a civil war," that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them-no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians-men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur.

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

He's just getting started.

RLC

Dobbs on Illegals

CNN's Lou Dobbs wonders why we're not being told the truth about illegal immigration:

The mainstream media report as if America would no longer be a welcoming nation if we stopped illegal immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why do the national media conveniently and routinely neglect to report that the United States brings in more lawful immigrants than the countries of the rest of the world combined? Each year, we accept 2 million immigrants legally. We give a million legal immigrants permanent residency every year. We bestow citizenship on 700,000 people a year and provide almost half a million work-related visas a year.

Illegal immigration, in fact, has the potential to change the course of American history: Demographers at the Brookings Institution and the Population Reference Bureau paint a troubling picture of the future of our democracy. As more illegal aliens cross our borders and settle in large states like California, Texas and Florida, congressional seats will be redistributed to these bigger states following each decennial Census. States with low levels of immigration will ultimately lose seats as a result. Unfortunately for American citizens, this seismic shift in political representation will be decided by noncitizens that cannot vote.

Congress will soon take up so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and a bipartisan House bill would probably admit 400,000 guest workers a year. And since any plan calling for eventual legalization would include family members who live outside the United States, the legislation would open our borders to tens of millions of people. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector estimated that the 2006 version of the McCain-Kennedy bill would have added an additional 66 million immigrants over the next 20 years. The bill may change, but that estimate has yet to be refuted.

There's no question this type of mass immigration would have a calamitous effect on working citizens and their families. Professor Carol Swain, professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University and author of "Debating Immigration," would like to see more people speak up for the sectors of society most affected by illegal immigration.

"How many African-American leaders have you seen come out and address the impact that high levels of illegal immigration [are] having in the communities when it comes to jobs, when it comes to education, when it comes to health care?" she asked. "And often, these low-skilled, low-wage workers compete in the same sectors for jobs."

Let's have a vigorous open debate on illegal immigration in this country, and let's begin with the facts. Estimates of illegal aliens in this country range from 12 million to 20 million people. Why doesn't our government know how many there are?

Shouldn't this Congress and this president at least recognize that the industries in which illegal aliens are employed in the greatest percentages also are suffering the largest wage declines? And shouldn't there be an economic impact statement researched and delivered to this Congress, this president and the rest of us before any legislation granting amnesty is even considered?

Shouldn't we first bring the facts of illegal immigration out of the shadows?

Well, yes. I'll start. I heard an interesting claim the other day to the effect that ten years ago the average hourly wage in the meat-packing industry was about $19 an hour. Today it's closer to $10 an hour because the industry is able to find so many illegals who will work so much cheaper. The availability of cheaper labor is driving down wages for everyone in the industry.

Why are not the advocates of the poor raising Cain about the effect that illegals are having on wages and jobs in this country?

RLC

For Bibliophiles

If you are a bibliophile (a lover of books) then you'll very much enjoy this essay in Comment by Mark Bertrand who sounds like a biblioaddict. Bertrand begins his tale this way:

Before the package from Amazon UK reached my doorstep, someone had given it a good kicking. The corners dimpled inward and a jagged gash ran like a scar down one side of the box, giving the cardboard a battered, sinister air.

I probably yelped at the sight. I don't remember. It all happened so quickly. I hoisted the package and moved it inside to the dining room table, then rummaged around for a knife to undo its taped edges. I peeled back the damaged layers, afraid of what I might find, only to breathe a sigh of relief upon discovering the contents safely wrapped in a protective sheen of plastic.

About this time, my wife came in, arms crossed, shaking her head at my anxiety.

"We have thousands of books already," she said. "The walls are lined with them. But you still had to order more."

When I lifted my new treasure out of the box, she rolled her eyes. But I paid no attention.

Instead, I was mesmerized by the orange slipcase, about a foot and a half long, and the row of tiny paperbacks contained within it, their spines arranged by color in a spectrum that ran from blue to orange. Seventy slender volumes, printed in honor of Penguin's seventy years in publishing, but to me they represented more than a milestone. This set was the answer to a baffling conundrum, a problem that had kept me up at night. This was my solution. This was my Godsend.

This was my summer reading.

If you love books you'll want to read the entire piece, nodding the while and thinking "That's me he's talking about."

RLC

Reasons for Unbelief (Pt. II)

A week or so ago we began a series of posts on three main reasons why people find belief in God difficult. We listed those reasons as:

1. The problem posed by human suffering
   
2. Christian exclusivism
   
3. Bad experiences with Christians or with a particular church
   

We talked about the last of these reasons in that first post, and I wish to take up the second reason in this one.

Some people find it very difficult to accept the belief, which is orthodox among conservative Christians, that only those who possess a firm belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will have eternal life. Everyone else is pretty much damned to spend eternity separated from God.

This is a very difficult doctrine to explain to non-Christians and one which many of them find not only implausible but also repugnant. Almost everyone has a loved one, a friend or relative, who has died outside the Church. The thought that that person is lost forever pushes people away from accepting a faith that insists that they're doomed.

There are three ways one might respond to this reaction:

The first is to say that the truth cannot be compromised just because people find it unpleasant. One difficulty with this is that the problem is not so much that people find the doctrine unpleasant but rather that they find it unjust.

The second is to argue that exclusivism is incorrect and that salvation is not limited only to Christians. The problem with this is that the primary source book of Christian doctrine, the Bible, seems to say that it is.

The third response is to argue that whatever Christianity teaches about salvation it is not really germane to the question of whether there is a God. In other words, one is behaving irrationally if one rejects belief in God simply because one rejects a particular tenet of Christian theology.

It is of course the case that unpleasant truths are still truths and that the existence of God does not hinge on the truth of the doctrine of Christian exclusivism, but, even so, there have been some Christians, including luminaries like C.S. Lewis, who think that the second option may also be correct. People who believe this are called "inclusivists," and they hold that it is reasonable to believe that young children, the mentally infirm, and some, perhaps many, people who lived prior to the Christian era will have eternal life. Thus, it is possible, they reason, that those in the present era who never heard of Christ, or who for various reasons were psychologically unable to accept the truth of the revelation of God in Christ, might also be embraced by God.

These Christians insist that Christ's death on the cross is crucial because it's the reason why anyone who receives eternal life does so, but they also believe that there may be many who receive the gift without knowing how or why.

These Christians also insist that this view is compatible both with scripture and with much of the Christian tradition although it must be said that it is a minority view among conservative Protestant theologians, most of whom believe that the Bible squarely rules it out.

In any case, the recent decision of the Catholic church to abandon its teaching on limbo has interesting implications for this issue.

Consider this comment by a Notre Dame theologian:

"If there's no limbo and we're not going to revert to St. Augustine's teaching that unbaptized infants go to hell, we're left with only one option, namely, that everyone is born in the state of grace," said the Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame.

"Baptism does not exist to wipe away the "stain" of original sin, but to initiate one into the Church," he said in an e-mailed response."

If McBrien is correct, his words lead logically to the acceptance of Christian inclusivism. If it's true that people are born in a state of grace, or that some people who did not - because they could not - make a conscious decision to accept Christ as their savior, will nevertheless enjoy the "beatific vision," it's very difficult to exclude from that experience others who have, for the same or similar reasons, also not made such a decision.

The mentally infirm, or people in the ancient world, or people in the modern world who never heard the gospel, or, perhaps, people who are aware of Christianity but who for deeply seated psychological reasons have great difficulty believing that the God they love actually became a man and who have such a high view of God that the notion that He was human strikes them as blasphemous, might all, like the child, be psychologically unable to make the decision to believe.

It may be, inclusivists argue, that God saves all who love Him and who want to spend eternity with Him. If so, the essential Christian contribution is the emphasis on the fact that it is only through what God did on the cross in Christ that makes it possible for anyone, Christian or non-Christian, to have eternal life. The difference between Christians and non-Christians in this regard, then, is that Christians have a deeper, more thorough understanding of how God has worked in the world than do their theistic cousins. But that doesn't mean that those others who are non-Christians are necessarily outside the grace of God.

Whether inclusivism will ever be accepted by the majority of Christians remains to be seen. It certainly has a very big hurdle in its way for it has to show that it does not distort the meaning of Scripture and this, its detractors believe, it will never be able to do.

RLC

Feel the Pride

Michael Roberts, a black owner of several television and radio stations, has finally had enough. See the letter he wrote to his employees here. Let's hope that others follow his example.

RLC

White Lies

Novelist Andrew Klavan has a very interesting essay in City Journal which he begins this way:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. I don't have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don't have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don't have to say that everyone's special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don't have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don't have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It's not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies. That's its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they're installed. But because it depends on-indeed is defined by-describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence-he's not crippled, dear, he's handicapped; it's not a slum, it's an inner city; it's not surrender, it's redeployment-leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

I don't know that calling these euphemisms "white lies" isn't a bit overstated, but Klavan's point is nevertheless well-taken. We have allowed ourselves to fall into the grasp of a PC culture that makes it a "sin" to use certain words which mask the truth of things. We're so reluctant to appear insensitive or judgmental that we shrink from saying anything that'll make us sound callous or unsophisticated.

What Klavan doesn't tell us, however, is that this is not an exclusive practice of the left, although they are doubtless the biggest offenders in our socio-cultural life, but the right, especially the military, also employs euphemisms, some of which are almost laughable. One example that sticks in my mind was that offered by a military spokesman who, at a news briefing, explained how our troops "addressed" an enemy position with an M-1 Abrams tank.

Anyway, read the whole article.

RLC

Evil Molecules

"....if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists ... Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way - molecules acting upon molecules."

Dinesh D'Souza writing on the Virginia Tech murders.

He's correct, of course. If all we are is a collocation of atoms then what we do is just the product of chemical reactions in the brain. Those reactions follow the laws of physics, and there's no room in this picture for something like morality and no reason to think that what we do is either good or bad. It's just molecules doing what molecules do.

RLC

Biological Animations

Over the last three years Viewpoint has from time to time featured animations of various processes of cell biology that we've come across in our travels around the internet. Now Denyse O'Leary has catalogued the animations and makes a lot of the links available at one location.

Anyone interested in cell biology who would like to use these as a reference or, in some cases, as a means of having your breath taken away, will find this site very useful.

RLC