The Perversity of Modern Culture

James Watson the co-discoverer, along with Francis Crick, of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, is an atheistic Darwinian evolutionist. He has recently created a furor in England with his comments that black Africans are simply not as intelligent as Europeans. The Sunday Times in London writes:

[Watson] says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."

Watson's remarks raise several interesting questions. Let's focus on just one for now: Which view of human origins is most likely to lead to genuine racism, the view that men have evolved the traits they have because those traits had survival value in the competition for resources, or the view that all men are created by God in His image and are loved equally by Him?

Ideas have consequences. The idea of materialistic Darwinism, what some scientists call "the greatest idea anyone has ever had," leads directly, as Richard Weikert has pointed out in his masterful book From Darwin to Hitler, to eugenics, racism, and final solutions. The Christian idea of equality before God, on the other hand, leads to the notion that all men have equal dignity, worth, and rights in the eyes of God.

The paradox and perversity of modern culture is that it wants desperately to condemn racism while at the same time embracing Darwinian assumptions that logically entail it. Moreover, modern culture, while professing its abhorrence of racism, is nevertheless eager to minimize, mock and reject the only worldview that is philosophically incompatible with racist ideology, Christian theism.

Very curious.

RLC

Not Too Thin

One of the considerations, or perhaps reservations, expressed by people when the topic of a military strike against Iran is brought up is how we can do such a thing when our military is stretched so thin in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fact is, according to a Newsmax report, a strike against Iran would be carried out primarily by air and naval forces, neither of which are heavily involved in the ongoing conflicts elsewhere:

The new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that despite the commitment of U.S. forces elsewhere, the military is capable of conducting operations against Iran if called on to bomb nuclear facilities and other targets.

Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday: "From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve to respond if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do, and so I don't think we're too stretched in that regard."

Defense and military officials have been preparing American forces within striking distance of Iran, according to the Washington Times. Attacks on the Islamic Republic would be carried out largely by the Navy and Air Force.

Officials say one target of any U.S. military action would be Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps facilities because of their role in providing insurgents in Iraq with armor-piercing roadside bombs. One official said the factory where Iranian bomb materials are being produced has been located.

A second target would be Iran's nuclear facilities, which are chiefly underground and spread across the country.

Appearing with Mullen at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it would probably spur other nations in the region to obtain those weapons themselves. That in turn would raise the risk of nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists.

But Adm. Mullen said the use of military force against Iran would be an option "of the last resort."

Let us hope that it remains a last resort but let us also hope that it remains a resort.

RLC

The Attack on Bhutto

Bill Roggio has details of the attack against former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The Islamists promised they would try to kill her if she returned to Pakistan and they did. She's a very brave woman.

As the toll from yesterday's ambush on former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto convoy rises to 132 killed and upwards of 500 wounded, the details of the strike emerge. The attack was a sophisticated, coordinated strike carried out by professional terrorists. Conflicting reports exist, but it is clear at least one suicide bomber, and possibly two, conducted the attack, possibly in conjunction with snipers, a car bomb and a person throwing a hand grenade. The target of the attacks was the large truck carrying Bhutto and her senior advisors. Bhutto's convoy was surrounded by a massive cordon of police and party volunteers. The security arrangement had two rings: an outer cordon of 20,000 police and inner cordon of 5,000 volunteer's from Bhutto's political party as well as police.

At least one suicide bomber penetrated the outer cordon and hit the inner ring of security. The suicide bomb came close to hitting Bhutto's truck. "The blasts hit two police vehicles which were escorting the truck carrying Ms Bhutto. The target was the truck," senior Karachi police official Azhar Farooqui told Reuters. Witnesses said two dozen police vehicles "were completely shattered." About 15 to 20 kilograms of explosives were used in the attack.

There's more at the link.

RLC

Twilight of a Theory

Jerry Fodor is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. He's also an atheist who has no time for creationism or intelligent design, so this article in which he concludes that it's time to discard one of the two main pillars of Darwinian theory, natural selection (adaptationism), is a bit of a shocker. Fodor says this:

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn't what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, 'hedge your bets' is generally good advice.

Traditionally the two engines that drive evolution have been thought to be random genetic mutation and natural selection. Michael Behe has delivered a blow to the hamstrings of the first of these in his book The Edge of Evolution, and now a prominent atheistic materialist is forecasting the demise of the second. Soon all that will be left of Darwin's theory will be the concept of descent by modification, but how that descent occurs will be anyone's guess.

One guess that might appear more and more frequently will be that life was front-loaded into the evolutionary process. There will be speculation, I speculate, that laws are somehow woven into the cosmos that direct the evolutionary process toward the production of man. Human beings, it will be suggested, were the inevitable outcome of the first primitive chemical reactions that lead to the genesis of biomolecules. This teleological explanation, of course, sounds very much like the view that mankind, or at least, higher life forms, were consciously intended, and once that sort of speculation breaks out people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will be suffering apoplectic seizures.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

X-Cons

Joe Carter identifies a new taxon in the ideological zoo. It's comprised of individuals from Generation X who gravitate toward conservative ideas. He labels them X-Cons, a startling nomenclature, perhaps, given its similarities to the designation for former felons.

In any event, Carter talks about the characteristics of X-Cons here. Check it out and see if you qualify for membership.

RLC

Another Headache in Iraq

If Turkey invades Iraq to punish the Kurds and we don't stop them will that give a green light to Iran to launch raids on the Kurds? And if we do try to stop the Turks what would be the ramifications of that?

This is a real mess and how well it's handled will be a measure of the Bush administration's diplomatic adroitness. Every American should hope that Turkey relents because if they do not the whole region could go up in flames.

Fortunately, good sense seems to have prevailed in the Democratic caucus and enough Democrats are backing away from the resolution to condemn Turkey for the massacre of Armenians in 1915 to place its future in doubt. The last thing we need right now is to offend the Turks with a formal condemnation of a crime committed by the long-gone Ottoman Empire ninety years ago.

RLC

Taking a Bite Outa' Crime

Apparently the criminals in this town don't read the papers. Either that or they're suicidal. Whichever it is one thing is fairly sure, there are fewer of them today than there were a month ago.

RLC

On Time and the Age of the World

Scientists tell us the universe is some 13 billion years old while young earth creationists maintain that according to the biblical book of Genesis it's only about 10,000 years old. So which is it? It may be that both sides are correct - it all depends on how we look at time.

Time is generally considered to be an objective dimension of reality. It's believed to exist independently of our human experience of it. If there were no humans, according to this view, time would still roll on. Perhaps this is correct, but there is another possibility. Suppose that time is not an objective phenomenon at all but rather a subjective phenomenon. Suppose that time, not just our sense of time, is actually something that our minds impose upon the world just like they create color, fragrance, sound, and so on. If there were no minds there'd be no color, only electromagnetic radiations. Color is the mind's interpretation of these radiations and perhaps time, too, is a creation of the mind.

If so, then time, like color or sound, did not exist until there were human perceivers (for the sake of brevity let's ignore animal perceivers) on earth.

If this is the case, then there may have been a vast sequence of events that led up to man's appearance on earth - a Big Bang, stellar life cycles, stellar nucleosynthesis, the origin of our sun and earth, the origin of living things, etc., but these events did not occur in our time frame. They were tenseless events.

To understand this, imagine videotaping a friend going about his everyday life for, say, two hours. Your friend would experience two hours of time elapsing, and, were you to view the tape, it would take two hours to watch it. The tape, however, could be sped up so that every event is still witnessed and still stands in the same relative spatio-temporal relation to every other event on the tape, but it only takes two minutes to watch it, or two seconds. Theoretically the information on the tape could be compressed so that it takes virtually no time at all.

To your friend "in" the film time would be unchanged, but from the perspective of you the viewer "outside" the film the lapse of time would be whatever you chose it to be. You, as an observer, are not in the same time as is your friend in the video and your perspective on the amount of time it takes for the events on the tape to unfold is completely different.

Perhaps, were we an observer embedded somehow in the universe during the events leading up to the appearance of human beings, it would seem to us to have taken billions of years, but since there were no observers to these events, at least not observers in our temporal frame of reference, it's really meaningless to talk about how long it actually took to go from the moment of creation to the first appearance of human beings. All the events that precede man's arrival might be compressed like a zip file, occurring almost instantaneously, though in the same relationship with each other, and then, once human minds appear, the occurrence of those events gets "stretched out."

Our minds place the events that scientists believe happened into a temporal context so that as we extrapolate back we say that an event that would today take one year would also have taken one year before there were minds, but in fact what we mean is that the event would have taken one year if there had been human witnesses to observe it. If there were no such observers, however, it is meaningless to talk about how long events took to occur. It's like asking what is north of the north pole. The events literally took no time at all.

Perhaps, the writer of Genesis is trying to put something like this into words we can understand when he talks about the days of creation. God creates the universe in a relatively brief period of time, perhaps instantaneously, perhaps more slowly. If this is so, then the Genesis account gives us a good idea of the age of human civilization, but how much time preceded the appearance of humans is inscrutable. It may have been very long or it may have been relatively brief or there may have been no time at all. We can only say that were those same events to occur in such a way that we could observe them they would take billions of years. Whatever time it actually took, however, was determined by God's temporal context, not ours, since He was the only observer.

RLC

Willful Suspension of Belief

Bill Roggio observes that even The Washington Post has taken note that things are looking much better in Iraq than they were just last spring:

Ten months after the announcement of the new counterterrorism strategy in Iraq -- often misleadingly referred to as "The Surge" -- and four months after the last combat brigade was positioned and major operations against al Qaeda and the Shia extremist groups began in mid-June, the US military can point to real results in the security field. Violence has dropped in Iraq, and dropped significantly.

The Washington Post laid out the evidence of the drop in violence in Iraq. Iraqi deaths are plummeting. US combat deaths -- which can be a poor indicator of success or failure -- are at a near all-time low. Al Qaeda's declared Ramadan campaign did not materialize. "The evidence of a drop in violence in Iraq is becoming hard to dispute," The Washington Post reported.

Maybe the Post will send the column to Senator Clinton. Having told General Petraeus that his testimony before the Senate required "a willful suspension of belief" and effectively branding him a liar, she would no doubt appreciate learning that Petraeus was telling the truth.

RLC

Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

You may have heard reports that an Air America (a liberal broadcasting network) radio host named Randi Rhodes was mugged in New York the other day. Without bothering to check with Ms Rhodes the left wing blogosphere and her co-host at Air America immediately deduced that the villains were conservatives who were trying to shut Ms Rhodes up.

You can read the details along with samples of the bizarre and hate-filled allegations here. They're pretty funny given that what actually happened was that Ms Rhodes fell while walking her dog and bumped her head. No mugging, no right-wing fascists, just a common accident and a lot of egg dripping down the faces of the left-wing paranoids at Daily Kos and Air America.

RLC

Do it Yourselfers

So you think you'd like to try nationalized health care. That's the system being touted by Senator Clinton who promises to get it for us if she's elected. It's also the system they have in Canada where those who are able come south for American medical treatment and those who can't often wait for months for the simplest procedures. It's also the system they have in England where dental patients, in pain and unable to find a dentist, are so desperate they're pulling their own teeth with pliers.

When was the last time you couldn't get an emergency appointment for dental care, or any other kind of medical attention? Looks like if Senator Clinton is elected President a year from now a lot more of us might be able to give an answer to that question. On the other hand, it may be good for us to learn the virtues of rugged individualism, self-reliance, and the use of hand tools.

RLC

Getting it Wrong

I was watching a talk show on Fox Saturday night, and a couple of the members of the panel roundly condemned conservative bloggers for "attacking" (I think scrutinizing is a much more accurate word) Graeme Frost and his family and for thrusting them into the media spotlight. The fact is that it was the Democrats who used this 12 year-old boy in an ad criticizing Republicans and the President for not supporting SCHIP. If Democrats are going to publicize his story then it seems inappropriate for them to complain if their opponents question the boy's family's circumstances and whether they really should be receiving taxpayer paid insurance.

Conservatives have indeed made a number of claims about the family's financial status (the value of their house, their income, the businesses the father owns, etc.). I have read that the data that has been cited is either mistaken (value of the house) or outdated (the business didn't do well) so the question of how wealthy the Frost family is seems to be up in the air, but it's a legitimate issue nonetheless.

What would not be legitimate would be to attack the twelve year old boy, which, to my knowledge, no one has, or to accuse conservatives of attacking him - as some certainly have - if, in fact, they did not.

One has to wonder why people would make such a terrible accusation if it were not true. For example, the progressive blog Think Progress has a post on this brouhaha that is either very dishonest or very dumb. They take information put out by conservatives about the family's financial abilities and present it as an attack on the boy. That sort of thing is inexcusably shoddy or malicious.

As I said, the financial circumstances of this family that some have cited may be out of date or otherwise incorrect, but for pro-SCHIP people, having introduced the Frosts into the debate, to say that their ability to buy their own insurance should not be part of that debate is absurd. To furthermore misconstrue references to that ability as an attack on the boy, as Think Progress does, is pretty low.

Here's another fact that makes this smear all the worse: The boy was not denied medical coverage. He actually received the help he needed under the old SCHIP program, the same program the President wants to expand. The President and others, though, are being maligned by their opponents because they don't want to expand it as much as the Democrats do. Bush wants to increase the program by five billion dollars. His opponents want to increase it by 35 billion.

Michelle's been following the whole thing here.

Parenthetically, one pro-SCHIP blogger has claimed that the left would never do anything like attack a child for political reasons, only the right would resort to such reprehensible tactics. Aside from the fact that no one has "attacked" this child at all, this claim is absurd for another reason. It turns out that two years ago the left actually did launch a vicious attack on young Noah McCollough.

Allahpundit reminds us that in 2005 the Republicans used nine year old Noah to tout their Social Security reform proposals, and the bloggers on the left savaged him. They made sexual references to him, called him a "budding young fascist" and made up a derogatory nickname for him.

Pretty disgusting stuff, but when all that matters is winning this is the sort of thing you get.

RLC

New Abortion Documentary

British filmmaker Tony Kaye tackles the subject of abortion in what is called a powerful and graphic new documentary.

"Lake of Fire," currently on limited release in the United States, unwinds over more than two and a half hours of interviews with some of the leading figures from the pro-life and pro-choice camps. But it is the graphic and disturbing depiction of termination procedures, filmed like the rest of the movie in black and white, that marks the film out.

"From the moment I started making the film I thought I have to show an abortion, which at the time had never been done before," Kaye, best known for his 1998 neo-Nazi feature "American History X," told AFP in an interview. "There was no question about whether or not that was the right thing to do because if I'm documenting two sides of the argument, that is one side of the argument and you have to show it," he said.

One scene depicts a doctor sifting through a surgical tray after performing a late-term abortion, where the grisly residue of an arm, a foot and part of a face can be clearly made out. "It's about as shocking as any motion picture can ever get. It's illegal to film someone being killed," said Kaye.

They may be the kind of images used by anti-abortion activists, but Kaye also doesn't shy from showing pictures of a kneeling and bent-over naked woman who died after performing a botched abortion on herself with a wire coat hanger.

Kaye worked for more than 15 years on "Lake of Fire" -- anti-abortion activist John Burt's description of the hell awaiting abortionists -- and said his goal when he set out was simply to show both sides of the argument.

"The concept was to make a film about the debate over the issue of abortion but to make it in a non-propagandist way and to create a kind of war of words." He said he wanted "to create this kind of a weave where we really explore the issue without taking any sides."

Even after spending years working on the project, Kaye, however, admits to not knowing where he stands in the debate. "My position on the subject is that I don't really know what's right. I didn't know much in the beginning... and at the end I was just as confused."

Well, he doesn't seem to be confused about the fact that he has been filming "someone being killed." If that is the case then surely Mr. Kaye can acknowledge that many abortions involve killing someone and at the very least we shouldn't be able to just do that for any reason whatsoever, which, in the U.S., we pretty much can.

By the way, Mr. Kaye states that no one has ever filmed an abortion before but I think the sequel to the 1980s anti-abortion film "Silent Scream," a film called "Escape From Reason," did that. Maybe not.

RLC

Dangerous Resolution

The Democrats are intent on getting us out of Iraq no matter the cost, and their latest tactic could wind up having calamitous consequences. It consists of a non-binding resolution, approved by the House Foreign Affairs committee, to censure Turkey for its massacre of Armenians over 90 years ago. Turkey is extremely offended by this resolution, which Speaker Pelosi promises to bring to a vote by the full House in November, and threatens to retaliate by shutting down access to our air base in Incirlik from which we supply troops in Iraq.

Turkey is also threatening to invade the north of Iraq to deal with the Kurds who are fighting a low grade insurrection against Turkey to carve out a Kurdish state in the eastern part of the country adjacent to Iraq. Our State department has been trying hard to talk Turkey out of such a move, but the Democrats' insult may have hardened Turkish hearts to our entreaties.

It may be that this resolution is not an attempt to make it harder for us to succeed in Iraq, but if it's not, what other purpose could it possibly serve? President Reagan already condemned the Armenian massacre back in 1981 and there are plenty of other massacres going on today (Burma, Darfur) that Congress could devote its energies to condemning. Why pick one that's almost a century old, and what purpose is served by it other than deliberately antagonizing an ally?

Jed Babbin's column on this at the link is an excellent overview of the situation and the Democrats' rationale for their resolution.

RLC

Good News on Cancer

Here's more good news on the battle against cancer: Death rates are dropping faster than ever, thanks to new progress against colorectal cancer.

A turning point came in 2002, scientists conclude Monday in the annual "Report to the Nation" on cancer. Between 2002 and 2004, death rates dropped by an average of 2.1 percent a year. That might not sound like much, but between 1993 and 2001, deaths rates dropped on average 1.1 percent a year. The big change was a two-pronged gain against colorectal cancer.

While it remains the nation's No. 2 cancer killer, deaths are dropping faster for colorectal cancer than for any other malignancy - by almost 5 percent a year among men and 4.5 percent among women.

One reason is that colorectal cancer is striking fewer people, the report found. New diagnoses are down roughly 2.5 percent a year for both men and women, thanks to screening tests that can spot precancerous polyps in time to remove them and thus prevent cancer from forming.

Still, only about half the people who need screening - everyone over age 50 - gets checked.

If you're over 50 and have never had a colonoscopy done call your doctor to get an appointment for one. The procedure is painless (although preparation for it is a bit tedious) and very effective. If you've never had one it's probably one of the most important things you can do this week.

RLC

Assassination Target

News agencies are reporting a terrorist plot to kill Russian president Vladimir Putin during his visit this week to Tehran. DEBKAfile has some details about the plot that I haven't seen elsewhere:

Vladimir Putin has decided not to accept his security services' advice to call off his trip Tuesday, Oct. 16 to attend the Caspian Sea summit and meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Its cancellation would damage Russian-Iranian relations.

Iran's foreign ministry dismissed the reports as "completely baseless and part of a psychological war to disrupt Russian-Iranian ties."

DEBKAfile's intelligence sources report that the assassination plot, hatched by three gangs which joined hands ad hoc, was betrayed to the Russians by a Chechen who was detained before he managed to slip into Iran and join the conspirators.

The three groups are: Chechen separatists, whose revolt is almost completely crushed in Russia; an al Qaeda-Taliban group bidding to settle scores with Putin for his denial of Muslim rights in Kosovo; and an ultra-extremist wing of the clerical regime, which accuses Russia of selling out Iranian interests as an American vassal.

Putin aroused their ire by his "treacherous" offer to transfer Iran's uranium enrichment program to Russia, his calculated foot-dragging on the delivery of fuel for the Bushehr reactor and delays in completing its construction. Moscow moreover is held accountable for voting twice with the United States on UN Security Council sanctions against Iran.

The cancellation of his trip would "damage Russian/Iranian relations," according to the above report. Does this imply that his murder would be less damaging to relations than cancelling the trip?

RLC

The Education Gap

The local Sunday paper yesterday ran another in the series of op-ed pieces I've been invited to write for them. The column (below)was based on a couple of posts I'd done for Viewpoint:

Recent test scores in the California reveal a glaring disparity in student performance between blacks and Latinos and their white and Asian counterparts - regardless of family income. According to state Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell, "These are not economic achievement gaps. They are racial achievement gaps and we cannot afford to excuse them."

Statewide, only 30 percent of black students and 29 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better in English/language arts. In contrast, 62 percent of white students and 66 percent of Asian students scored proficient or better. In math, only 26 percent of black students and 31 percent of Latino students scored proficient or better, compared to 54 percent of white students and 68 percent of Asians.

O'Connell said the new state test scores clearly show that lower achievement by black and Latino students cannot be "explained away" as the result of poverty. "The results show this explanation simply is not true."

So what is the explanation?

Randolph Ward, San Diego County superintendent of schools claims that the achievement gap persists for several reasons. One is that the most experienced and talented teachers often work at more affluent schools, while younger and less experienced teachers fill slots at poorer schools, which typically enroll minority students. Less experienced teachers, Ward believes, have lower expectations of their students and that students unfortunately live down to what is expected of them.

I doubt, however, that this is the real reason for poor minority performance. Whether these students had highly experienced teachers or not their difficulties would likely persist. In fact, it's younger educators who often have the highest expectations from their students and are most enthusiastic about making a real difference in their students' lives. It's only through years of bitter experience that teachers come to realize that disproportionate numbers of minority students simply don't achieve at the level other students do.

Teachers usually love their students. They want them to do well. They long for them to succeed, but teachers also know their students' capabilities better than anyone, and they know that too many of them simply don't have the tools to compete.

The problem is not confined to California, of course. It afflicts almost every community and school across the nation.

So, why do relatively fewer minority students possess the tools necessary for academic success? If the reason isn't their teachers, nor racism, nor economics, we're left with two obvious possibilities. One is that Charles Murray was correct when he wrote in The Bell Curve in 1994 that some groups are, on average, inherently less capable than others. The second possibility is that the problem is cultural. Before we resign ourselves to Murray's very controversial thesis we really should make a concerted effort to take the second seriously.

Many minority students come from communities where, for whatever reason, neither traditional family nor educational excellence is valued. Many youngsters are allowed to dress, speak, and act as if they are mentally handicapped and proud to be so, and the culture in which they are immersed not only permits this perversity but often encourages it.

Moreover, students who grow up with only a single parent invariably find school more of a struggle than do those who grow up with both biological parents. The job of keeping after children to do their homework, or taking them to libraries, historical sites, and cultural events, is daunting to many moms who exhaust themselves just putting food on the table. When children, especially sons, grow to be about twelve or thirteen they're often very difficult for a single mother to control, and mom's pleas that the boy focus on academic work frequently go unheeded. Instead, young men, flush in their incipient manhood, often prefer to gravitate to the streets to affirm their masculinity by identifying with thugs, siring another generation of fatherless children, and dressing and talking as if their IQ were somewhere around the freezing point of water.

The problem certainly exists in every racial group in the country, but it's most severe in minority communities where almost 70 percent of children are born to unwed mothers (It's close to 90 percent in some urban neighborhoods). Until we begin to take the plight of fatherless children seriously all our talk about improving minority academic performance is just going to be so much wasted time and breath, and all our efforts to help minorities close the achievement gap will be like bailing floodwater out of New Orleans with a spoon.

The fundamental solution to the problems of our inner cities, whether the problem is educational achievement, poverty, or crime, requires reinvigorating and restoring the biological family and discouraging behaviors which send the message that it's cool to be stupid. Nothing else will make any real difference unless we do.

RLC

Truth Matters

Many of us grew up thinking that truthfulness was the highest of human virtues. Dishonesty was seen as a contemptible character trait and the liar was among the worst sort of people. To tell a lie as a child, especially to one's parents, was the source of considerable guilt. Without honesty and integrity, we believed, none of the other virtues could flourish, trust would diminish, character would become obsolete and society would unravel.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what has happened. It's no longer the case that truth holds an exalted place in the catalogue of virtues. For many, especially among secular progressives, truth has been stripped of its status as an objective good in itself, and reduced to a pragmatic function, a tool to be employed in the service of promoting higher goods. Truth, in our post-modern world, is now seen as whatever works to advance whatever goal or project to which one aspires.

The change has had seriously deleterious, even tragic, consequences in our personal and corporate life. It has also had a terribly corrosive effect on our political life. Politicians, for some of whom power is the highest good because without it none of the lesser goods are possible, can lie about themselves and other people, and the lie, like base metal transmuted to gold, is transformed into something "true" and virtuous by the fact that it helps the liar succeed in acquiring the power, influence, and success he needs to promote his agenda.

Politicians all along the ideological spectrum lie, of course, but conservatives still generally believe that lying is a moral wrong. Liberals, particularly secular liberals, are less likely to feel bound by traditional moral assumptions, and thus more likely to distort and misrepresent the truth than are conservatives. Thus our recent politics is befouled by unseemly allegations which are at best irresponsible and at worst exceedingly harmful:

1. George Bush is labelled a liar for telling us there were WMD in Iraq when there apparently weren't. This charge was itself false because it was clear to anyone who looked at the matter that the intelligence services of the whole world thought Saddam had WMD. So did most Democratic senators. Bush may have been mistaken, but a mistake is not a lie.

2. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have had their reputations smeared by allegations of racism (O'Reilly) and insulting the troops (Limbaugh). Their accusers, including senators on the floor of the Senate, allege them to have said things the transcripts and witnesses affirm they clearly did not say. Nevertheless, the accusers have not relented or withdrawn their charges.

3. Senator Clinton insinuates that General Petraeus is dishonorable because his testimony doesn't conform to what she and others in the Senate expected to hear. MoveOn.org, without offering a shred of evidence, accuses the General of betraying his country in a full page New York Times ad which the Times originally gave them at a fraction of the going rate for ad space. Neither MoveOn or the Times has apologized.

4. Opponents of SCHIP are accused of not caring about the poor or the elderly because they do not wish to see health care be taken over by the government. Bush is accused of heartlessly cutting the program when in fact he wants to expand it but not as much as its proponents want.

5. False or misleading statistics are used to color the debate on everything from racial discrimination to the number of homeless, the severity of the threat of HIV, the prevalence of rape on college campus, the number of uninsured people in the U.S., and much else.

Lies and deception are an acid eating away at the fabric of our society. When our politicians lie to us and we lie to each other it dissolves trust and spawns suspicion. A society which has lost the ability to trust its leaders and to trust each other is a society doomed to disintegrate. John Adams wrote that our form of government was designed for a moral people and cannot survive under any other.

Progressives don't disagree with Adams, necessarily, but many of them simply don't think that lying about people or promoting falsehoods is really immoral as long as the cause is in their eyes just. Since the most just cause for them is the promotion of the liberal agenda, whatever works to advance that agenda is by definition good, even if they know, or should know, that it's not true.

RLC

Peace Prize

A blog called The Daily Gut speaks for many (including us) in presenting the case for who should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday:

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this morning, and I'd like to congratulate Irena Sendler. Sendler was a former history teacher who rescued 2,500 children during the Holocaust and was a top contender for the wondrous prize. Back during the early 1940's, Sendler was a Catholic social worker who had gone into the Warsaw ghetto to rescue Jewish kids who were destined either to starve there, or die in death camps. She would sneak the kids past Nazi guards, sometimes hiding them in body bags, or would provide them with false documents - inevitably getting them to Polish families for adoption, or hiding them in convents or orphanages. She also made a list of the children's real names, put them in a jar and buried them, so that some day she could dig them up and find the kids to tell them their true names. The Nazis captured her and beat the crap out of her, but she later escaped, and she went into hiding. She's now in her late 90's , living in a nursing home in Poland.

I want to congratulate her, because she didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead it went to Al Gore, the guy who invented the Internet. Go figure.

Actually, it's not all that hard to figure. The Nobel committee swoons over liberal nominees who hold all the "correct" views and who also hold celebrity status. The Goracle is all of those and more. There's no way he wasn't going to receive the prize despite the fact that Ms Sendler displayed personal courage that Mr. Gore has never had to exhibit and has saved more lives and done more good for humanity than has Mr. Gore. Ms Sendler is now a feeble old woman and Mr. Gore is a famous member of the glitterati. Ms Sendler is yesterday and Mr. Gore is the future. Ms Sendler risked her life to save lives but Mr. Gore risks nothing to make millions lecturing a fawning world about global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize is a joke.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Dim Prospects for Social Conservatives

First Things has a series of fine essays by Nat Hentoff, John DiIulio, and Joseph Bottom on the current crop of presidential candidates.

Hentoff is the rarest of political commentators, a staunch pro-life atheist leftist. Every paragraph of his portion of the article is a gem. For example:

I wish - although I know it is not going to happen - that at least one contender for the presidency would repeat what Cardinal O'Connor asked at the Harvard Law School (not a friendly audience for him but a challenge he enjoyed) in April 1986: "How safe will the retarded be, the handicapped, the aged, the wheel-chaired, the incurably ill when the so-called quality of life becomes the determination of who is to live and who is to die? Who is to determine which life is 'meaningful,' which life is not? Who is to have a right to the world's resources, to food, housing, to medical care? The prospects are frightening."

Hentoff thinks Hillary would be a disaster for the pro-life cause, but DiIulio argues that, from the standpoint of meeting our obligation to help the poor, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee are the best candidates in their respective parties.

Bottum dejectedly observes that we should "be honest and admit what we all know: The weakest set of candidates in living memory has taken the field, and we still have more than a year left of watching these people, lumbering and blumbering toward the goal line." He goes on to make a strangely contradictory claim. He argues that Hillary has a lock on the nomination but will almost certainly lose to any candidate the Republicans put against her except Ron Paul. But oddly Bottum then goes on to express doubt that Guiliani would beat her.

He makes an excellent point, though, about what Americans have to look forward to should a Republican win the presidency and the Democrats pick up more seats in the Senate:

Nonstop congressional investigations of everything the president does, rejections of Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, the Democrats freed of responsibility for actually prosecuting foreign policy - all pushed by a netroots base of leftist activists convinced that, once again, the presidential election had been stolen from them. No wonder some conservatives seem to think it would be better to go ahead and elect Hillary Clinton.

Bottum concludes that 2008 looks grim for social conservatives:

A Fred Thompson nomination, a slim election victory over Hillary �Clinton, a stealth pro-lifer slipped on the Supreme Court through a Democratic Senate - that weak �scenario is about the best a social conservative can hope for today. Everything else is bad. Very bad.

In my opinion this is much too pessimistic. The right man in office can still prosecute the war on terror, enforce existing immigration laws, keep spending and taxes down, and appoint at least two good justices to the Supreme Court. This last may be difficult, but depending on who the President is, it may not be impossible.

The country may be Slouching Toward Gomorrah, to employ the title of Robert Bork's famous book, but the right man in the White House, though he may not be able to turn things around without a sympathetic Congress, can at least keep us from falling completely over until the American people, perchance, come to their senses.

RLC