Gun Rights

The Supreme Court has finally ruled on the question of whether the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution applies to private ownership of firearms or whether it applies only to those firearms used in the service of a state militia. In a 5-4 ruling the Court decided that the right to own firearms is not merely tied to membership in a militia but applies to individual citizens. This is, I think, the first time in U.S. history that the Court has ruled on this.

The case involved a District of Columbia law that prohibited residents from keeping handguns inside their homes and required that lawfully registered guns, such as shotguns, be locked and unloaded when kept at home. This ban was found to be in conflict with the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution.

Once again we see the paramount importance of the Supreme Court and who we elect as president to appoint the Justices who serve on it and who we elect to the Senate to confirm them. Justices like those in the minority in this case are much more likely to be appointed by a Democrat president (although, ironically, two of them, Stevens and Souter, were indeed appointed by Republicans) and Justices like those in the majority are much more likely to be appointed by Republicans (indeed all of them were).

Also, we note that whereas Senator McCain has taken a firm position on the 2nd Amendment's reach, Senator Obama has, not surprisingly, equivocated.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Genius Isn't Wisdom

In the course of writing my criticisms of The God Delusion I remarked that we cannot conclude from a man's brilliance in one area of intellectual endeavor that he will prove brilliant in every area or, for that matter, that he'll even be reasonably bright in other areas. Intellectual ability is like athletic ability. A man might be a great basketball player but a terrible swimmer.

Algis Valiunas in The New Atlantis gives us a fine illustration of this phenomenon in a wonderful glimpse of the life and genius of Albert Einstein.

Einstein was perhaps the most extraordinary thinker of the 20th century, but his personal life was heartbreakingly chaotic and his political and philosophical notions were often naive, inconsistent or even incoherent. For example, Valiunas tells us:

In 1935, animated by the Nazi military threat, Einstein reversed his earlier militant pacifism and insisted "no reasonable human being would today favor the refusal to do military service, at least not in Europe, which is at present particularly beset with dangers." Confirmed pacifists must support the concerted action of decent states to foil the warlike designs of the indecent. In August 1939, having been informed by the Hungarian refugee physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner that the Germans may already be working on a nuclear bomb, Einstein famously wrote a letter to President Roosevelt urging that the U.S. government initiate a nuclear program of its own; it took months to see serious action, and Einstein was left out of atomic research during the war, but his letter was a prime impetus for the Manhattan Project.

If pacifism is the correct moral position then one must be a pacifist regardless of the nature of the threat. One cannot be a pacifist with regard to that war but not this one, or be a pacifist regarding wars in which the carnage is in the thousands but not in wars which threaten to kill millions.

Einstein's political thinking was also naive:

In 1953, during the height of the Red Scare, he published an open letter in the New York Times exhorting a Brooklyn schoolteacher subpoenaed by a congressional investigative committee to remain silent: "What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi's. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country." To do otherwise, he concluded, was to live as a slave.

Valiunas observes:

One can only cringe at the rhetorical bluster, utterly oblivious to the fact that America was facing a potent enemy that kept tens of millions of slaves in the gulag archipelago. Einstein's genius suffered no greater injury than from his lifelong political crusading.

Another example of Einstein's massive intelligence failing to spill over into areas other than math and physics can be found in his philosophical ideas, some of which were incoherent. He was, for example, totally committed to a deterministic view of everything:

"I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense," he declared in the 1930 essay "What I Believe." If he meant by this no more than that we are all creatures and cannot make ourselves anything we want to be, there is little to quarrel with in that. But elsewhere he averred, "Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player."

Having said that, however, he nevertheless also says this:

"The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life."

Valiunas concludes that:

[Einstein] seemed finally to live a riven life, one of spiritual incoherence, denying freedom of choice yet preaching an exigent morality.

What this all teaches us is that we must not be overly impressed when we hear someone who has demonstrated intellectual accomplishment in one sphere of life offering opinions we find disagreeable in some other sphere. When scientists pontificate upon politics or religion, it's best to simply consider the merits of what they say and not put too much weight on whom it is that's saying it.

HT: No Left Turns

RLC

Concessions from the Other Side

A Darwinian materialist and journalist, Gordy Slack, writes about what Intelligent Design theorists get right. He lists four items:

First, I have to agree with the ID crowd that there are some very big (and frankly exciting) questions that should keep evolutionists humble. While there is important work going on in the area of biogenesis (origin of life), for instance, I think it's fair to say that science is still in the dark about this fundamental question. It's hard to draw conclusions about the significance of what we don't know. Still, I think it is disingenuous to argue that the origin of life is irrelevant to evolution. It is no less relevant than the Big Bang is to physics or cosmology.

Evolution should be able to explain, in theory at least, all the way back to the very first organism that could replicate itself through biological or chemical processes. And to understand that organism fully, we would simply have to know what came before it. And right now we are nowhere close. I believe a material explanation will be found, but that confidence comes from my faith that science is up to the task of explaining, in purely material or naturalistic terms, the whole history of life. My faith is well founded, but it is still faith.

Second, IDers also argue that the cell is far more complex than Darwin could have imagined 149 years ago when he published On the Origin of Species. There is much more explaining to do than those who came before us could have predicted. Sure, we also know a lot more about natural selection and evolution, including the horizontal transfer of portions of genomes from one species to another. But scientists still have much to learn about the process of evolution if they are to fully explain the phenomenon. Again, I have faith that science will complete that picture, but I suspect there will be some big surprises.

Will one of them be that an intelligent being designed life? I doubt it. Even if someone found compelling evidence for a designer, for us materialists, it would just push the ultimate question down the road a bit. If a Smart One designed life, what is the material explanation for its existence?

The third noteworthy point IDers make has its roots, paradoxically, in a kind of psychological empiricism. Millions of people believe they directly experience the reality of a Creator every day, and to them it seems like nonsense to insist that He does not exist. Unless they are lying, God's existence is to them an observable fact. Denying it would be like insisting that my love for my children was an illusion created by neurotransmitters. I can't imagine a scientific argument in the world that could convince me that I didn't really love my children. And if there were such an argument, I have to admit I'd be reluctant to accept it, however compelling it appeared on paper. I have too much respect for my own experience.

Which leads me to a final concession to my ID foes: When they say that some proponents of evolution are blind followers, they're right. A few years ago I covered a conference of the American Atheists in Las Vegas. I met dozens of people there who were dead sure that evolutionary theory was correct though they didn't know a thing about adaptive radiation, genetic drift, or even plain old natural selection. They came to their Darwinism via a commitment to naturalism and atheism not through the study of science. They're still correct when they say evolution happens. But I'm afraid they're wrong to call themselves skeptics unencumbered by ideology. Many of them are best described as zealots. Ideological zeal isn't incompatible with good science; its coincidence with a theory proves nothing about that theory's explanatory power.

Actually, the intelligent Design people get a great deal more right than just this, but this is a good start. It's not that Darwinians haven't conceded that ID is on to something before, but they almost always do it grudgingly, tacitly, and between-the-lines. It's nice to see a materialist freely acknowledge that there are very serious problems with the idea of blind, undirected, mindless evolution.

HT: Bradford at Telic Thoughts

RLC

Job Openings

Coalition forces continue to extirpate al Qaeda in Iraq, recently dispatching the emir (leader) of al Qaeda in Mosul:

The emir, who has not been named, was killed after a special operations team from Task Force 88, the hunter-killer teams assigned to take down terrorists in Iraq, stormed a building in Mosul. The commandos opened fire after one of the terrorists attempted to detonate his suicide vest was shot and another reached for a pistol. A woman with the group attempted to detonate the vest on the dead al Qaeda operative.

The takedown of al Qaeda's emir in Mosul is the latest blow to the terror network in the North. Over the weekend, the emir of eastern Mosul and the leader of car-bombing operations in western half of the city were detained. On June 20, Coalition forces detained al Qaeda's security emir in Mosul. His predecessor was captured just two months prior, and his predecessor was captured in February.

Scores of cell leaders, facilitators, weapons smugglers, and fighters have been captured or killed by US and Iraqi forces during operations in June.

There are real opportunities here for up-and-coming young guys with leadership qualities who only want to work a couple of weeks before being retired.

RLC

<i>Kennedy v. Louisiana</i>

The Supreme Court (Kennedy v. Louisiana) has ruled 5-4 that it is cruel and unusual to impose the death penalty when the crime does not involve a death. The case before it was based on the appeal of a 43 year old man named Patrick Kennedy who raped his 8 year-old step-daughter. The liberals on the court ruled that raping a child is not a sufficient evil to warrant taking the rapist's life. According to Anthony Kennedy, whose decisions seem to be growing increasingly difficult to understand, the death penalty is not proportional punishment for the rape of a child.

The logic mystifies me. The five liberal Justices ruled that only if someone is killed is the crime heinous enough to merit the death penalty. Simply destroying someone's life in other ways doesn't. They believe, incredibly, that it would be either cruel and/or unusual to execute a man who wrecked a little girl's life by, say, torturing her, sexually mutilating her, dismembering her, repeatedly sodomizing her, and ultimately paralyzing her if in the end he didn't kill her.

How it could be either cruel or unusual to execute such a monster escapes me, but then I'm not very enlightened concerning the arcana of liberal thinking, I guess. I wonder how the five Justices in the majority would have ruled had their own eight year old daughters ever been subjected to such treatment.

This is why the choice of who we vote for in November is so important. A President McCain may wind up appointing more liberals to the Supreme Court, especially given the Democratic control of the Senate which must confirm his appointments, but a president Obama certainly would. In other words, if Obama is elected we're sure to get a lot more decisions like Kennedy v. Louisiana.

I wish someone in one of the debates coming up would ask the candidates whether they agree with the Court's ruling that enemy combatants captured on the battlefield should be given the same rights as American citizens and the ruling that child rapists aren't really doing enough harm to warrant being put to death. I think I know what McCain would say, but I think Obama would start his familiar tap dance around the question until he had managed to give every possible answer to it.

UPDATE: Senator Obama was indeed asked whether he agrees with the decision and replied that he disagreed with it and endorsed capital punishment in cases such as that of child rape. I applaud him for this but have a couple of questions: Is it not true that he would appoint judges who ruled as did the majority in Kennedy? Will his support on the far left be bummed by his claim to favor capital punishment in at least some cases? Would he have given this same answer were he not running for president? Given his history of standing on both sides of an issue one can't be sure. The best way to tell is to ask him to name a Supreme Court Justice present or past who best models the type of Justice he'd be likely to appoint to the Court.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

The Inconstant Candidate

The other day we noted that Senator Obama reversed his position on FISA and public financing of his campaign. These switches in position come in the wake of numerous others. Here's a partial list of Obama's recent tergiversations:

• Within a couple of weeks of saying that he could no more disown Rev. Wright than he could disown a member of his own family, he essentially disowned him.
• When speaking to a meeting of American Jews a couple of weeks back, he told them he supports Israeli control of Jerusalem. The next day, trying to placate angry Arab supporters, Obama said "negotiators" should work out the contentious Jerusalem issue.
• He criticized Hillary Clinton for months for voting to list Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Days after Clinton conceded, Obama flipped and said he himself supported the designation.
• Obama repeatedly vowed to meet with various heads of terror states-most notably Ahmadinejad of Iran-"without preconditions." Then he changed his mind: "There's no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad. He's not the most powerful person in Iran."
• In October, he supported NAFTA expansion. In March, campaigning in the Ohio primary, he called for a "reopening" of the trade pact's terms. This week, he called his own primary rhetoric "overheated" and said NAFTA has had a positive effect on the US economy.
• After signaling opposition to nuclear power, he told Democratic governors he's open to expanding it.
• He gave every indication that as president he would start withdrawing troops from Iraq immediately upon taking office but has lately proposed a more gradual withdrawal based on conditions on the ground.

The man is as hard to pin down as Osama bin Laden. Just when you think you know where he stands he turns up somewhere else. Is this the new politics his admirers in the media are swooning over?

RLC

Confused Atheists

The Pew Foundation survey on religion in America turns up some interesting statistics:

Consider this stunner: 21% of atheists and 55% of agnostics say they believe in God. Eight percent of atheists and 17% of agnostics are even certain that God exists. What's up with that? What's more, 10% of atheists and 18% of agnostics pray at least once a week.

I never suspected our local atheist club of opening their meetings with prayer, but maybe they hold hands in a circle, bow their heads, and ask God to bless their proceedings during which they'll all explain to each other why they don't believe he exists.

It could be that the atheists who identify themselves as believers are the non-believers' version of religious liberals. If very liberal protestants are almost atheists, perhaps very liberal atheists are almost protestants.

Anyway, 99% of evangelical protestants and 97% of Catholics say they believe in God, but that means that 1% and 3% respectively do not. Why would an atheist identify him or herself as an evangelical or a Catholic?

There's more: Among atheists 12% believe there's a heaven and 10% believe there's a hell which causes me to ask which they think they're going to inhabit and who's going to see that they get there.

Fifty seven percent of people who belong to evangelical churches believe that other religions can lead to eternal life, and, among evangelicals, 86% believe in heaven. So what's the Good News for the other 14% of evangelicals who don't believe in heaven?

The more someone attends church the more they are likely to be politically conservative and the less they attend church the more likely they are to be liberal. That's not surprising, but this was:

Sixty one percent of evangelicals think abortion should be illegal in almost all cases, but only 45% of Catholics do. Sixty four percent of evangelicals believe homosexuality should be discouraged, but only 30% of Catholics do. Who'd have thought that a minority of Catholics oppose abortion?

There's much more on the results of this fascinating, if rather counterintuitive, survey here.

RLC

Lawyers

Ever wonder why people hold lawyers in such low esteem? Here's a video of a trial lawyer/ state representative speaking on the floor of the Massachusetts State House against mandatory sentences for child rapists.

It makes one wonder who's worse, the molester who rapes the child or the lawyer who wrecks the child's life to get the rapist off. I wonder, too, who's more embarrassed by this video, the man's fellow lawyers or his fellow politicians.

RLC

Loser Letter #5

Mary Eberstadt, alias A. F. Christian, laments all the "total craptacular hoser traitor enemy combatant Loser-lover guys" who are leaving the ranks of the Brights to join the Dulls in Loser Letter #5 at National Review Online.

RLC

Microscopic Clutch

The bacterial flagellum continues to give strict Darwinians migraines. Scientists have recently discovered that the flagellum's rotation is stopped by a protein assembly that acts just like the clutch in an automobile transmission.

"We think it's pretty cool that evolving bacteria and human engineers arrived at a similar solution to the same problem," said IU Bloomington biologist Daniel Kearns, who led the project. "How do you temporarily stop a motor once it gets going?"

Indeed. The whole flagellar assembly is a miniature outboard motor and the filament is disengaged from the motor by a clutch assembly such as intelligent engineers have designed for cars. Yet we are to believe that random genetic mutations occurring relatively quickly in geological time acted in tandem with natural selection to produce this astonishing machine completely without any guidance or intention.

Which came first, you may wonder, the flagellar motor or the clutch assembly? What good would each do the organism if the other didn't exist? If it does no good how was it conserved? If they evolved together how did such a marvel happen unless guided by an intelligent agent?

Never mind. It's impertinent to ask such questions. Just believe what the wise Darwinists tell you and don't be difficult.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 7 (part II)

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.

As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million), the Nazi holocaust (6 million), the rape of Nanking (300,000) the war in Korea (2.8 million), the cultural revolution in China (40 million), post-war Vietnam (430,000), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million), the Rwandan genocide (750,000) These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs that committed in the name of God. Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be layed to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.

Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.

Because there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, he concludes that religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm. To each of these, however, the question needs to be put, "why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.

Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.

He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women." What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which is a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.

"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God? This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us. The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God.

A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, their deeds were another. This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview. The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did is wrong.

Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?" He asks. Again this question muddies the water. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay thousands of clergy and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century. If atheism is merely the absence of a belief why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.

Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion has become a best-seller and is making him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle of our young century.

RLC

Kerryesque

Congress has been trying to come up with a FISA bill that will be free of some of the short-comings of its predecessor legislation. The House has now overwhelmingly passed a bill that includes retroactive immunity to telecom companies that may otherwise be liable to lawsuits for helping the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists.

The left is upset that the immunity provision was included. This puts Senator Obama in a sticky wicket since he supported the bill when it was in the House, but now that his base is aroused and angry he has reversed course and promises now to filibuster the bill that he previously supported.

In other words, as with public financing of his campaign, Obama was in favor of it before he was against it. The senator is sounding like a clone of John Kerry.

Ed Morrissey chronicles Senator Obama's political peregrinations on this issue at Hot Air.

RLC

Man from Nowhere

Michael Gerson spotlights the emptiness of Senator Obama's rhetoric about being "post-partisan" and willing to take political risks to reach across the aisle to work with members of the other party:

Jake Tapper of ABC News asked ... Barack Obama: "Have you ever worked across the aisle in such a way that entailed a political risk for yourself?" Obama's response is worth quoting in full: "Well, look, when I was doing ethics reform legislation, for example, that wasn't popular with Democrats or Republicans. So any time that you actually try to get something done in Washington, it entails some political risks. But I think the basic principle which you pointed out is that I have consistently said, when it comes to solving problems, like nuclear proliferation or reducing the influence of lobbyists in Washington, that I don't approach this from a partisan or ideological perspective."

For a candidate running as a centrist reformer, this is pretty weak tea. Ethics reform and nuclear proliferation are important issues, but they have hardly put Obama in the liberal doghouse. When I recently asked two U.S. senators who are personally favorable to Obama to name a legislative issue on which Obama has vocally bucked his own party, neither could cite a single instance.

Gerson goes on to contrast Obama's blank record of offending his fellow Democrats in order to work with Republicans to the maddeningly frequent instances of John McCain's hobnobbing with the Democrats. He finishes with this:

It is an odd thing when a presidential candidate bases his campaign on a manifest weakness. Rudy Giuliani ran on a platform of foreign policy experience while lacking it completely. Obama promises post-partisanship while doing little to demonstrate it in the Senate. And the independent voters so eagerly courted in this election may eventually ask about Obama the odd but appropriate question: What dogs has this man bitten?

Indeed, what indications are there that Obama has ever displayed any of the political talents and virtues his supporters believe he will bring to the White House? The Senator has come out of nowhere with nothing to commend him except beguiling speeches about hope and unity. He has no record of accomplishment and has never administrated anything much less a great nation. Yet for reasons that appear utterly non-rational, millions of people are prepared to put him in the White House. It's a little unnerving.

RLC

Three Things

A recent column by Dennis Prager got me thinking about how our country has changed since I was a boy. To see what I mean try this:

Name three things, other than racial discrimination and those advances that depend on technology, that are better about American society and culture today than they were fifty years ago.

I can't either.

Read Prager's column to see the sorts of things he thinks we've lost.

RLC

Of Principles and Polygraphs

The luster is quickly fading from the Obama mystique. The man who has spent his political career campaigning on the promise of reform turns out to be just as opportunistic, at least when it comes to campaign financing, as anyone else.

As soon as it became apparent that his principled opposition to private financing of campaigns was working to his disadvantage he abandoned his principled opposition.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Even Newsweek, a magazine which will almost certainly endorse Obama in November, calls his move "lame."

Liberal columnist Mark Shields is disillusioned to the point of essentially calling Obama a liar. He complains that Obama would be unable to pass a polygraph test.

RLC

Addressing the Energy Problem

The high price of energy is due largely, but not entirely, to the fact that supply is not keeping up with demand. The Democrats have proposed a number of measures to reduce demand (conservation, moving toward alternative sources of energy), a number of measures that would reduce supply even further (taxing oil companies, nationalizing oil refineries and companies - see, for instance, here), and some which just seem both bizarre and desperate (suing OPEC).

Barack Obama speaks for most Democrats when he acknowledges that he's actually in favor of high energy prices (See his response at the 2:30 mark of this interview), he just wishes the prices would have risen more gradually. The left wants high energy prices in hopes they'll encourage the development of energy alternatives, but Obama advocates in the CNBC interview that to mitigate the impact of high fuel costs the government give people a check to help them pay their energy bills. It's hard to understand how high prices will encourage conservation and alternative energy sources if people are going to be given money to offset the higher prices.

The Republican solution to our energy crisis is to increase supply until we can develop alternatives to petroleum. This means building more refineries, building more nuclear plants, and drilling for the oil that lies both off our shores and within our borders.

What a pickle we're in: The Republicans have the better ideas but they lack leadership, including, sadly, in the White House (see Michelle Malkin's piece on this here). The Democrats have strong leadership but they lack good ideas. Would that we could have the best of both parties.

Maybe that's a reason to vote for McCain - he's essentially a Democrat who has come to see the need to drill offshore (but, oddly, not in ANWR) and wants to build more nuclear power plants. Now that's a unity candidate.

RLC

Mythologizing

Ben Johnson at FrontPage Mag summarizes the Left's narrative of the last eight years under George Bush:

"President Select" George W. Bush stole the 2000 election after his daddy's Supreme Court justices stopped the Florida election boards from counting all the votes. When he got into office, he did not make terrorism a top priority but immediately began dividing the nation along political lines. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the entire country came together in unity to get those who perpetrated this atrocity, and we stayed united as we fought al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But soon Bush and his neocon allies took our eye off the ball and used the attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq based on lies. Administration officials pressured CIA analysts, twisted intelligence, and insisted Saddam Hussein was an "imminent threat" who had sponsored 9/11. Bush lied that Saddam had WMD stockpiles and invented a story about him trying to buy nuclear material in Niger. But there were never any WMDs; Iraq had no ties to terrorists at all, much less al-Qaeda; and our presence in Iraq is drawing these terrorists to Iraq. (The CIA did not misinform him, because it is an instrument of ruling class hegemony and probably puts manganese into the crack it sells in black neighborhoods, when it's not blowing up levees in New Orleans.) The administration's perpetual campaign mode had them slur anyone who got in their way, questioning the patriotism of anyone who opposed the war and revealing Valerie Plame's identity when Ambassador Joseph Wilson told the truth about them. Bush even declassified sensitive information in the NIE to punish his political enemies. Ultimately, a jury convicted Scooter Libby of fixing Iraq intel to get us into war. Our soldiers - who are too poor and uneducated to help getting stuck in Iraq - are caught in the middle of a civil war. Even though the American people overwhelming want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and voted for it in 2006, the cowardly Democrats keep passing funding bills and ignoring the will of the people. The Surge has failed, and our best option is to redeploy within six months, even if genocide follows.

Johnson argues that every single assertion in this narrative is either misleading or false. For anyone confused about why this country seems so politically divided today it might be salutary to take a few minutes to read his essay.

RLC

Haditha

Of the eight Marines who were charged with committing an atrocity in the Iraqi town of Haditha, seven have been exonerated or had the charges dismissed. One remains to be tried. I haven't seen much about this in the MSM, a large portion of which was ready to march these young men to the gallows two years ago. You might also remember the execrable words of Congressman John Murtha who publicly pronounced the Marines guilty of murder: "Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood."

HT: Ramirez

Michelle Malkin documents not only Murtha's slanders but also those of Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, and The Nation magazine, all of whom tried to turn Haditha into an Iraqi version of My Lai which was a genuine atrocity from the Vietnam war.

We shall await an apology from these people for their willingness to publicly and repeatedly assume the worst of our young men, but I doubt very much whether any of them would even consider an apology. They ruin reputations and lives for a living, why start apologizing for it now?

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 7 (part I)

We continue our critical journey through Richard Dawkins' best-selling case for atheism, The God Delusion, with a look today at chapter 7. Here Dawkins sets two tasks for himself. The first is to discredit the Bible, particularly the Old Testament (O.T.), and the second is to offer an alternative ethical narrative, what he calls the "moral zeitgeist," to that of the Bible. None of what he says in this chapter has anything to do with the question of God's existence, but it may nevertheless be of interest to Christians.

It has to be understood that Dawkins' arguments are often logically flimsy, and his facts and interpretations are often suspect. TGD is so poorly argued, in fact, that it would not be worth the time it takes to read it were it not that it has sold so many copies and had such a powerful impact on audiences around the world.

One part of his argument in chapter 7 seems to be that it is inconceivable that any God as great as theists imagine him would care about the paltry sins of tiny human beings on our speck of a planet. "We humans," he writes, "give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our pokey little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance."

But of course our sins are of cosmic significance, and so are we, since the creator of the cosmos chose to atone for those sins by offering himself on the cross. Dawkins, almost child-like, seems to equate significance with relative size. Since we're so tiny compared to the universe, he reasons, it's absurd to think that a creator God would care about us. His reasoning reminds me of a scene in the classic film The Third Man where a criminal named Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, takes his antagonist to the top of a Ferris wheel. From that vantage the people all look so small and their lives seem so insignificant. From that perspective it was easy for Lime to justify the crimes he committed against them. His victims were little more than ants. Dawkins apparently holds the Harry Lime view of humanity. We're so small that a God, if he existed, couldn't possibly care about us.

The Oxford professor goes on to examine the Old Testament stories and wonders why Christians would think that the people who are featured in them, people like Abraham, are moral exemplars. I know of no one, though, who has ever said that they were. The stories we read in the O.T. are instructive precisely because they teach us about the failings and faults common to humanity and how we are lost without God, not because they hold up the often sordid behavior of the characters as a model for the rest of us to emulate.

His basic point in the chapter, he tells us on p.279, is that because the O.T. characters are so depraved we can conclude that wherever modern moral ideas come from they don't come from the Bible. This, of course, is as silly as it can be. How does it follow from the fact that the Bible tells us about human sinfulness that therefore there are no moral principles to be found within its pages? Here are three principles that jump off almost every page of the Old Testament: Love God, do justice, and show compassion to the weak and poor. Dawkins apparently thinks that because these principles are often not followed that therefore they're not there.

Not only does Dawkins actually make the startling assertion that the Bible gives us no such principles, he also says that he doesn't think there's an atheist in the world who would do the sort of thing that religious people (Taliban Muslims) did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient Buddhist shrines and other sites of historical and religious value. Only religious people would be so philistine as to commit such an atrocity, he avers. Perhaps he was suffering a brain-freeze when he wrote this and had forgotten the crimes of the communists, committed in the name of state atheism, against Christian churches and clergy all through the twentieth century.

He wonders, too, who God was trying to impress by dying on the cross. Presumably, Dawkins sneers, he was trying to impress himself. This jejune comment reveals the utter shallowness of Dawkins' theological thought. If the crucifixion was intended to impress anyone it was intended to impress us. It was the greatest demonstration of love in the history of the world. The creator of the universe became one of us, not only to atone for our sin, but to give us a glimpse of how much he cherishes us. It's wonderful enough that a man would die for his friends who love him, but God died as well for those who, like Richard Dawkins, despise him. He wanted, among other things, to impress his beloved with the immensity of his love and what better way to do it than through such an unimaginable act of self-abnegation and sacrifice? Perhaps someone might send Dawkins a copy of Tale of Two Cities to help him understand how love can motivate such deeds.

Professor Dawkins vouchsafes to us the further revelation that Jesus never intended for his teaching to be given to anyone other than Jews (p.292) and that it was Paul who thought up the innovation of taking the gospel to the gentiles. He quotes with approval another writer who asserts that Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that Paul had taken his message of love and forgiveness to the 'pigs' (gentiles). Regrettably he does not try to explain how this idea squares with the last couple of verses in Matthew's gospel where Jesus directs his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world, baptizing them and teaching them all that he has commanded. Nor is this claim easily reconciled with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that we are enjoined to show compassion to everyone with whom we come in contact.

There is so much in chapter 7, as in the book as a whole, of which to be critical that it's difficult to limit oneself to spotlighting these few samples of Dawkinsian reasoning. Moreover, his reasoning is often so bad, so sophomoric, that one feels it is almost unsporting to deconstruct it. Even so, we'll plod on and look at some more of chapter 7 next time.

RLC

Ten Reasons for High Energy Costs

William Tate at the American Thinker offers his top ten reasons why we're suffering high gasoline prices and why the Democrats are largely to blame for each of them. Here are numbers ten through seven:

10) ANWR: If Bill Clinton had signed into law the Republican Congress's 1995 bill to allow drilling of ANWR instead of vetoing it, ANWR could be producing a million barrels of (non-Opec) oil a day--5% of the nation's consumption. Although speaking in another context, even Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, no proponent of ANWR drilling, admits that "one million barrels per day," would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately," according to a recent George Will column.

9) Coastal Drilling (i.e., not in my backyard) Democrats have consistently fought efforts to drill off the U.S. coast, as evidenced by Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's preotestation against a failed 2005 bill: "Not only does this legislation dismantle the bi-partisan ban on offshore drilling, but it provides a financial incentive for states to do so."

A financial incentive? With [other countries] now slant drilling for oil just 50 miles off the Florida coast, wouldn't that have been a good thing?

8) Insistence on alternative fuels: One of the first acts of the new Democrat-controlled congress in 2007 was an energy bill that "calls for a huge increase in the use of ethanol as a motor fuel and requires new appliance efficiency standards." By focusing on alternative fuels such as ethanol, and not more drilling, Democrats have added to the cost of food, worsening starvation problems around the word and increasing inflationary pressures in the U.S., including prices at the pump.

7) Nuclear power: Even the French, who sometimes seem to lack the backbone to stand up for anything other than soft cheese, faced down their environmentalists over the need for nuclear power. France now generates 79% of its electricity from nuclear plants, mitigating the need for imported oil. The French have so much cheap energy that France has become the world's largest exporter of electric power. They have plans in place to build more reactors, including an experimental fusion reactor.

Read the other six at the link and every time you fill your tank or pay your home heating bill remind yourself that while these solutions remain unimplemented Congress spends much of its time and your tax dollars feverishly searching for a reason to impeach George Bush or to indict someone in his administration.

RLC