Po-Mo Crackup

A couple of Saturdays ago I posted on an old Chuck Colson column in which he critiqued postmodernism. I mentioned that Brian McLaren, a Maryland pastor who has become well-known for his books urging the church to accomodate itself to the postmodern mindset, wrote a rejoinder to Colson and then Colson wrote a response to McLaren. Despite the fact that the exchange is almost five years old all three essays are very much worth the time it takes to read them, and the latter two can be found here.

HT: Byron

RLC

Grand Finale

The last of the Loser Letters is up at National Review Online. All's well that ends well.

RLC

Iowa and New Orleans

In the wake of the Iowa floods Dick Francis passed along a few pertinent questions:

• Where was the hysterical 24/7 media coverage, complete with reports of cannibalism?
• Where was the media asking the tough questions about why the federal government hadn't solved the problem and where the FEMA trucks (and trailers) were?
• Why wasn't the Federal Government relocating Iowa people to free hotels in Chicago?
• When will Spike Lee say that the Federal Government blew up the levees that failed in Des Moines?
• Where were Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks?
• Where were all the looters stealing high-end tennis shoes and big screen television sets?
• When will we hear Governor Chet Culver say that he wants to rebuild a 'vanilla' Iowa, because that's the way God wants it?
• Where are the people declaring that George Bush hates white, rural people?
• How come 2 weeks afterwards you never heard anything more about the Iowa flood disaster?

Well, why was the media response to Iowa so much different than the response to Katrina, and why was the reaction of the victims of the Iowa floods so much different than the reaction of the victims of Katrina?

Perhaps we have fostered a culture of dependency among urban blacks that has all but extinguished in many of them the qualities of self-reliance and initiative that were so much in evidence in the people along the upper Mississippi. Could it be that the media sees members of the black underclass as fundamentally incapable of taking care of themselves and considers it unfair to expect them to be able to react to crisis with the same moxie as white middle class Americans? Do poor blacks feel that way about themselves?

It would be interesting if the media and others engaged in a little self-examination of the racial assumptions at play in the way these two natural disasters were covered and responded to.

RLC

Twilight of the War

The Associated Press has a story on Iraq that all but declares "Mission Accomplished". This is the AP, mind you, so there's no praise in the story for the White House, although Gen. Petraeus gets some grudging credit for the surge. The writers of the piece declare as if it were news what anyone who had been paying attention has known for some time, "The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost".

The scales having fallen from the AP's eyes, Senator Obama's narrative over the last two years that Iraq is irretrievably lost is deeply complicated and compromised. The Senator now appears to be the only person left in American politics, outside of a handful of left-wing diehards, who still thinks that the surge was the wrong thing to do. Like the Japanese soldier holding out on some lonely atoll still fighting the war thirty years after it had ended, Senator Obama still refuses to admit that the surge was a strategic and tactical success and that it has made an enormous difference in the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

He's in a tough spot, actually. If he acknowledges the success of the Bush/Petraeus/McCain surge he concedes that his own judgment of such matters is greatly inferior to that of his rival, but if he continues to refuse to acknowledge that the surge was the right thing to do then he looks like a man who can't see the sun at noon on a clear day.

P.S. We wrote a few days ago that, by choosing the Victory Column as the site for his speech in Berlin Obama "tacitly endorses the Nazi symbolism of the Column and makes himself appear just as blissfully ignorant of European history and culture as the feckless tourist who speaks no French."

It was objected by a reader that this was too strong. It's possible, the reader rightly pointed out, that Obama doesn't know the history of the column or that he will use the backdrop to denounce militarism. Unfortunately, the senator surely knew by the time of the event what the monument represented and there was nothing in his speech which would redeem his choice of the site for his rally. So, I think the original point stands - Obama tacitly endorsed the symbolism of the monument by holding his rally there, or, at best, simply chose to ignore the symbolism. Imagine the media reaction had John McCain done something similar.

RLC

Planet of the Apes

My friend Linda gives us a heads-up on a Weekly Standard column by Wesley Smith in which he foresees very disturbing consequences of Spain's recent decision to confer certain rights upon apes that heretofore had been reserved solely for human beings. Smith asks:

But why grant apes rights? After all, if the Spanish parliament deems these animals insufficiently protected, it can enact more stringent protections, as other countries have. But improving the treatment of apes--of which there are few in Spain--is not really the game that is afoot. Rather, [as animal rights activist Pedro] Pozas chortled after the environment committee of the Spanish parliament passed the resolutions committing Spain to the Great Ape Project, this precedent will be the "spear point" that breaks the "species barrier."

And why break the species barrier? Why, to destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.

Specifically, by including animals in the "community of equals" and in effect declaring apes to be persons, the Great Ape Project would break the spine of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, which holds that humans enjoy equal and incalculable moral worth, regardless of our respective capacities, age, and state of health. Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out and new criteria devised to determine which human/animal lives matter and which individuals can be treated like, well, animals.

The Great Ape Project does indeed seem to be a logical consequence of the loss of belief that we are created in the image of God. Indeed, in a secularized, Darwinized cultural environment we truly are descended from apes, and a number of bleak consequences follow from no longer regarding human beings as if they were in some sense special. Smith talks about some of these consequences in the rest of his fine article.

RLC

Bush and the Dark Knight

Novelist Andrew Klavan compares Batman to Bush in an excellent column at the Wall Street Journal. Klavan writes that:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

He goes on to ask:

Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

The moment filmmakers take on the problem of Islamic terrorism in realistic films, suddenly those values vanish. The good guys become indistinguishable from the bad guys, and we end up denigrating the very heroes who defend us. Why should this be?

Do read the rest at the link, it's just outstanding stuff.

I haven't seen the new Batman, but Klavan has just convinced me that I need to rectify the omission.

RLC

Tale of Two Judgments

While Senator Obama was sucking up all the media oxygen in Europe Senator McCain was in Denver dispensing some hard truths about his rival. Here's part of what the Arizona senator said about the differences between him and Obama on the surge:

Senator Obama and I also faced a decision, which amounted to a real-time test for a future commander-in-chief. America passed that test. I believe my judgment passed that test. And I believe Senator Obama's failed.

We both knew the politically safe choice was to support some form of retreat. All the polls said the "surge" was unpopular. Many pundits, experts and policymakers opposed it and advocated withdrawing our troops and accepting the consequences. I chose to support the new counterinsurgency strategy backed by additional troops -- which I had advocated since 2003, after my first trip to Iraq. Many observers said my position would end my hopes of becoming president. I said I would rather lose a campaign than see America lose a war. My choice was not smart politics. It didn't test well in focus groups. It ignored all the polls. It also didn't matter. The country I love had one final chance to succeed in Iraq. The new strategy was it. So I supported it. Today, the effects of the new strategy are obvious. The surge has succeeded, and we are, at long last, finally winning this war.

Senator Obama made a different choice. He not only opposed the new strategy, but actually tried to prevent us from implementing it. He didn't just advocate defeat, he tried to legislate it. When his efforts failed, he continued to predict the failure of our troops. As our soldiers and Marines prepared to move into Baghdad neighborhoods and Anbari villages, Senator Obama predicted that their efforts would make the sectarian violence in Iraq worse, not better.

And as our troops took the fight to the enemy, Senator Obama tried to cut off funding for them. He was one of only 14 senators to vote against the emergency funding in May 2007 that supported our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. ...

Three weeks after Senator Obama voted to deny funding for our troops in the field, General Ray Odierno launched the first major combat operations of the surge. Senator Obama declared defeat one month later: "My assessment is that the surge has not worked and we will not see a different report eight weeks from now." His assessment was popular at the time. But it couldn't have been more wrong.

By November 2007, the success of the surge was becoming apparent. Attacks on Coalition forces had dropped almost 60 percent from pre-surge levels. American casualties had fallen by more than half. Iraqi civilian deaths had fallen by more than two-thirds. But Senator Obama ignored the new and encouraging reality. "Not only have we not seen improvements," he said, "but we're actually worsening, potentially, a situation there."

If Senator Obama had prevailed, American forces would have had to retreat under fire. The Iraqi Army would have collapsed. Civilian casualties would have increased dramatically. Al Qaeda would have killed the Sunni sheikhs who had begun to cooperate with us, and the "Sunni Awakening" would have been strangled at birth. Al Qaeda fighters would have safe havens, from where they could train Iraqis and foreigners, and turn Iraq into a base for launching attacks on Americans elsewhere. Civil war, genocide and wider conflict would have been likely.

Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. ...

Senator Obama told the American people what he thought you wanted to hear. I told you the truth.

Fortunately, Senator Obama failed, not our military. We rejected the audacity of hopelessness, and we were right. Violence in Iraq fell to such low levels for such a long time that Senator Obama, detecting the success he never believed possible, falsely claimed that he had always predicted it. ... In Iraq, we are no longer on the doorstep of defeat, but on the road to victory.

Senator Obama said this week that even knowing what he knows today that he still would have opposed the surge. In retrospect, given the opportunity to choose between failure and success, he chooses failure. I cannot conceive of a Commander in Chief making that choice.

Whereas Obama gives the impression of determining his positions by looking at the political weathervane, McCain does what he thinks is right regardless of which way the wind is blowing. Obama's judgment has been impugned by the success of the surge and McCain's has been vindicated.

HT: Powerline

RLC

Summer Symposium

Kathryn Lopez at National Review Online distributed a number of questions on books, movies and politics to some of the folks at NRO, and their responses are posted here.

These are the questions, and though I was not invited to participate in the symposium (an oversight on their part, I'm sure), just for fun I'll supply my answers to them anyway:

What's the best political novel you've ever read? Why is it the best? I read Advise and Consent so long ago I can't remember anything about it other than it inspired me to pursue a career in politics. The inspiration subsided after a couple of days. Since then maybe 1984 is the best, because it paints such a chilling, dreary picture of the world as the left would make it.

If there were only one book on conservatism you could recommend to a newcomer, what would it be and why? The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk because it gives such a masterful overview of the history of conservative thought. If Kirk's tome is a little bit daunting I'd probably recommend Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative.

Is there one book that you'd recommend to uplift and inspire depressed conservatives this summer? Perhaps Michael Gerson's Heroic Conservatism, but in truth it would take more than a book to uplift conservatives faced with having to vote in November for John McDole and faced with the prospect of at least four years of an Obama presidency. That's depression for which there is no anodyne.

What's your favorite WFB book and why? All the Buckley books I've read I read decades ago and can't recall which of them, if any, was my favorite. I do know that I never read a Buckley book I didn't enjoy.

What's your favorite political movie and why? Man for All Seasons featuring Paul Scofield is my second choice. My first selection is The Lives of Others. It's a film everyone should see who wants to understand the sort of world to which leftist ideas logically leads. It's a great movie with lots of drama and redemption.

If you could read or reread one classic this summer, what would it be? What are the odds you actually do? Well, it's not a reread, and I'm embarrassed to say that I've never read it before, but I recently started Tolstoy's War and Peace. I expect to have it finished by the summer of 2010.

Is there any recent book that's made you want to buy copies for everyone you know and love? Did you actually make the purchases? I actually did buy copies of Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax for my son and daughter who have children of their own. Two other recent books I'd be willing to buy for people are Tim Keller's Reason for God, and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Unfortunately, I have very little success getting people to read books I recommend to them so I haven't bought either of these for anyone. Yet.

Are there any summer movies you're looking forward to? I'm hearing interesting things about The Dark Knight, so I might see that. It's not a summer movie, I guess, but I do recommend Bellah for anyone looking for a wonderful film about real people.

Would you rather listen to John McCain's convention speech or read Dick Morris's new book? I'd rather be assured that John McCain was reading Dick Morris' new book.

Name one book we're going to be shocked you read. The Devil Wears Prada. I read it for a book club I was in. In my defense I should mention that I never finished it.

Thanks to Jason for passing on the link.

RLC

Supporting the Troops

The MSNBC website tells us that:

"During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops," Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign."

A U.S. military official tells NBC News they were making preparations for Sen. Barack Obama to visit wounded troops at the Landstuhl Medical Center at Ramstein, Germany on Friday, but "for some reason the visit was called off."

One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama's representatives were told, "he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers." In addition, "Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."

The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."

I sure hope that he didn't cancel the visit to the wounded troops just because he couldn't take along photographers. I heard yesterday, but cannot confirm, that instead of the hospital visit Obama went shopping and worked out.

If he did cancel the hospital trip because it wasn't a politically advantageous use of his time then what are we to think of him? The reason he gave, that it wasn't appropriate to visit the troops as part of a trip funded by the campaign, doesn't make any sense at all since he visited wounded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to cancel the visit makes it look an awful lot as though Obama's just exploiting the wounded troops for his own political purposes.

The cancellation makes it appear that if Obama's going to visit our wounded and maimed soldiers and Marines he wants everyone to know that he's doing it. I wonder how many visits to our kids McCain has made that nobody but his people and the hospital staff and patients know about.

RLC

The Giant Amoeba

Throughout his tour of the Middle East Barack Obama sounded as though he were a member of the Bush administration when talking about Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. Almost nothing he said, except for his 16 month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, differs substantively from what the White House has been saying for years. This was especially true of his thoughts on Iran:

Barack Obama asserted that he would bring "big sticks and big carrots" to make Iran stand down on its nuclear program, but take no option off the table. Answering reporters' questions in the missile-battered southern town of Sderot, July 23, Obama stressed that preventing Iran [from] acquiring a nuclear weapon must be of paramount concern for any US administration. It would lead to the disintegration of the non-proliferation regime, other Middle East nations would also obtain nuclear weapons and some would reach terrorists. "This is the single most important threat to Israel and the US."

The logic of Senator Obama's words leads to this: If the nuclearization of Iran is the single most important threat to this country then, if all else fails, military force would be justified to prevent it. This is exactly the Bush/McCain position.

I don't know whether Obama actually means what he's saying, but if he does it's a significant departure from the Obama who campaigned in the primaries as the candidate least likely to ever go to war. He has now moved so close to McCain on foreign policy that the two are almost occupying the same ground.

Like a giant amoeba Obama he's slowly engulfing and absorbing the differences which had distinguished McCain from himself. He seems eager to make the campaign not about policy distinctions but about image, style, and charisma. He realizes that on the issues McCain is pretty much where the country is, but that the old man can't compete with Obama's charm, wit and afflatus, qualities which seduce many voters who haven't a clue what the issues are or where the candidates stand on them.

The rookie Senator appears to recognize that on policy matters and experience he has nothing much to offer so in order to win the presidency he has to maximize his strengths, and neutralize McCain's by making McCain's positions his own. If this is correct, then Obama is going to continue moving right and continue to look just like many another politician - a dishonest, insincere opportunist.

I hope for the country's sake that this is not what Obama is up to, but if we see him moderate his views on taxes, health care, and/or off-shore drilling then we'll know that it is.

RLC

Sound Advice

I'm told by a friend that the letter below appeared in Letters to the Editor in the Richmond Times Dispatch, Richmond , VA on July 7, 2008.

The writer has an important lesson to impart here although he goes a little too far with his analogy:

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30 I celebrate my independence day and on July 4 I celebrate America's. This year is special, because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.

On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba, and a few months later I was in the United States to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.

I've thought a lot about the anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were right. So when a young leader came along, every Cuban was at least receptive.

When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press fell in love with him. They never questioned who his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone followed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said "Praise the Lord." And when the young leader said, "I will be for change and I'll bring you change," everyone yelled, "Viva Fidel!"

But nobody asked about the change, so by the time the executioner's guns went silent the people's guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked down a couple of notches to third-world status. By the time the change was over more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes. You can call those who made it ashore anywhere else in the world the most fortunate Cubans. And now I'm back to the beginning of my story.

Luckily, we would never fall in America for a young leader who promised change without asking, what change? How will you carry it out? What will it cost America? Would we?

In America he would could be voted out of office after 4 years, the longest he could be in office is 8 years, but his actions could take years to fix.

The lesson we should take from this letter from a Cuban refugee is not that Senator Obama will turn out to be another Castro, but rather that when people give their support to a virtual unknown without asking any really tough questions just because that individual is charismatic and youthful, they put at grave risk the future of their children and their nation. The Cubans did that and it has cost them dearly for two generations.

I think the letter writer is urging us to ignore the "tingling feeling up our legs" (Chris Matthews on MSNBC) that the candidates might give us, to refuse to be beguiled by their eloquence and charm, and to find out all we can about who they are before we give them our vote.

I think that's pretty sound advice.

HT: Dick Francis

RLC

Postmodern F-Word

Comment Magazine's Peter Menzies has a few interesting reflections on Bono, John Lennon, Josh Hamilton, and the inability of journalists to sift the gold from the dross. Here's an excerpt:

Journalists and faith have never had a comfortable relationship. Given the skeptical role of media in society, that isn't surprising.

Neither is the awkward news that journalists are not typically very good with ideas. Yes, some are brilliant and most are okay with facts, great with controversial quotes (such as when John Lennon described the Beatles as bigger than Christ), and anything hypocritical. They are even okay when it comes to faith leaders such as the Pope or the Dalai Lama whom they understand to have political roles.

But when it comes to ideas-concepts that demand texture, nuance, and precision of thought-most journalists and their editors are lost. Too many have little memory of their social responsibilities, and they are unconscious as to how their suppositions undermine public confidence in the veracity of news and therefore their own credibility. Trust me on this: I have been directly involved in journalism for thirty years. I know. Too few of my colleagues understand that the stories they choose not to tell can be every bit as important as the ones they do tell. And they are.

If you read it all you'll probably learn something about John Lennon that you never knew.

Menzies refers in his piece to C&W star Paul Brandt's acceptance speech upon being recognized for humanitarian service. Here's the speech (9:50):

RLC

The Pilgrimmage

Gerard Baker at the UK Times Online has some fun with those in the media who seem to regard Senator Obama as the savior of the world in this send up of how the Obama World Tour might have been conceived, if not actually chronicled, by the Western press. It's pretty good.

The only thing he might have included would have been the narrative of how The One takes the three network anchors, Couric, Gibson, and Williams, to the Mount of Transfiguration where they behold his glory in raptures too ineffable for words.

RLC

Necessary and Sufficient

One of the tropes to which the media has been treating us of late, and which Senator Obama has himself danced close to endorsing, is that the improved conditions in Iraq are due to all sorts of factors - the Sunni awakening, the improved economy, the al Qaeda atrocities, the improvement of the Iraqi security forces - everything but the American military surge. The role played by the surge is often dismissed as an almost coincidental event in Iraq that really had little to do with changing the conditions there.

Despite the persistence with which this notion has been advanced, I think it's just obtuse to believe that any of those other factors would have had any effect at all were it not for American military might being brought to bear to subdue both al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents. It's possible that, by itself, adding more troops would have failed to pacify Iraq, but it seems to me undeniable that had we followed Senator Obama's advice and never implemented the surge, he would not have been able to safely walk around that country this week. In other words, even if the surge was not in itself sufficient to pacify Iraq it certainly can't be concluded that it therefore wasn't necessary. It's like arguing that just because scoring runs in a baseball game is not enough to guarantee victory that therefore runs aren't crucial to winning.

For Obama and his sycophantic media to downplay the decisive importance of the surge in bringing us to where we are in Iraq is symptomatic of an inability either to be objective, clear-headed, or honest, or all three.

RLC

Scandal

Jack Shafer at Slate.com thinks there's a double standard at work in the press' refusal to run the story of John Edwards' recent late night visit to a Los Angeles hotel. Shafer thinks that, though the Edwards story is not exactly analogous to Senator Larry Craig's airport restroom solicitations, still there's a huge disparity between the way the press played Craig's homosexual peccadillo and the almost total news blackout on Edwards' possible tryst and illegitimate child.

Shafer thinks that the explanation is, in part, that:

[The press is] observing a double standard that says homo-hypocrisy is indefensible but that hetero-hypocrisy deserves an automatic bye.

That may be part of it, but there's another big difference between Craig and Edwards. Craig is a Republican and Edwards is a Democrat. Republicans are held to a much higher moral standard by the media than are Democrats, and when they fall the media is much more enthusiastic as they close for the kill than they are when a Democrat is caught en flagrante delicto.

At any rate, it looks like Edwards' hopes of being named Obama's veep have pretty much evaporated.

RLC

Why Jackson Hates Obama

Shelby Steele, a former English professor and author of several excellent books on race in America, including White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, writes a fascinating analysis at The Wall Street Journal of why Jesse Jackson wants to geld Barack Obama.

Steele explains in plausible accents not only Jackson's antipathy for Obama but also Obama's wide cultural appeal among both whites and blacks. Here's a glimpse:

Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.

It's an outstanding column and you should waste no time getting to it.

RLC

Loser Letter #9

Mary Eberstadt finally gets around to explaining why she left the Dulls to join the Brights in the ninth installment of her wonderful Loser Letters.

RLC

Buffoonery

In a recent column at Slate.com Christopher Hitchens displays his ignorance of the issues at stake in the intelligent design/Darwinism debate on several different levels. He flatters himself to think that he has discovered a novel argument against intelligent design when in fact the argument he has stumbled upon has been around for at least a century:

It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct. To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth ....Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed-in particular of the salamanders-that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.

Hitchens believes that he has discovered a powerful refutation of intelligent design:

But what of the creatures who turned around and headed back in the opposite direction, from complex to primitive in point of eyesight, and ended up losing even the eyes they did have? Whoever benefits from this inquiry, it cannot possibly be [intelligent design advocates]. The most they can do is to intone that "the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Whereas the likelihood that the post-ocular blindness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to constitute a near certainty.

Of course, only someone completely ignorant of the issues in the debate between Darwinian evolutionists and intelligent design theorists would suggest that functionless eyes in cave salamanders is an argument against intelligent design. The only thing that Hitchens has stumbled upon is an argument against the doctrine of fixity of species which no one has held for over a hundred years anyway.

Everyone acknowledges that organs can lose their function and atrophy through disuse. Mutations that would diminish the ability of the salamander embryo to produce functional eyes would be eliminated in a lighted environment via the death of the young salamander, but they would not necessarily be eliminated in a dark environment where eyes are of little use anyway. Thus there'd be no selective pressure in a cave environment to retain eyes. Not even the most stalwart special creationist disputes this.

The challenge is not in explaining the degeneration of biological organs and machines, it is explaining through random genetic drift, mutation and natural selection their origin.

Hitchens has great fun ridiculing the ID folks, but his ignorance makes him look like a buffoon. He'd do better to approach matters beyond his competence with a little more humility.

RLC

Simply Irresponsible

The Washington Post, one of the most reliably liberal papers in the nation, is skeptical of the spin Obama's campaign and media supporters have put on the Iraqi response to his plan to have American combat forces out of Iraq by April of 2010. Here's part of their recent editorial:

The initial media coverage of Barack Obama's visit to Iraq suggested that the Democratic candidate found agreement with his plan to withdraw all U.S. combat forces on a 16-month timetable. So it seems worthwhile to point out that, by Mr. Obama's own account, neither U.S. commanders nor Iraq's principal political leaders actually support his strategy.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the architect of the dramatic turnaround in U.S. fortunes, "does not want a timetable," Mr. Obama reported with welcome candor during a news conference yesterday. In an interview with ABC, he explained that "there are deep concerns about . . . a timetable that doesn't take into account what [American commanders] anticipate might be some sort of change in conditions."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has a history of tailoring his public statements for political purposes, made headlines by saying he would support a withdrawal of American forces by 2010. But an Iraqi government statement made clear that Mr. Maliki's timetable would extend at least seven months beyond Mr. Obama's. More significant, it would be "a timetable which Iraqis set" -- not the Washington-imposed schedule that Mr. Obama has in mind. It would also be conditioned on the readiness of Iraqi forces, the same linkage that Gen. Petraeus seeks. As Mr. Obama put it, Mr. Maliki "wants some flexibility in terms of how that's carried out."

Other Iraqi leaders were more directly critical. As Mr. Obama acknowledged, Sunni leaders in Anbar province told him that American troops are essential to maintaining the peace among Iraq's rival sects and said they were worried about a rapid drawdown.

Mr. Obama's account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is "the central front" for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country's strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world's largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama's antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Then there is a piece by WaPo columnist Max Boot who examines Iraqi president Nouri al Maliki's apparent agreement with Barack Obama's 16 month pullout and concludes it is purely for domestic consumption. Boot goes on to make this observation:

But Maliki's public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops. Better to listen to the military professionals. The Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans, "We hope they will stay until 2020." That is similar to the expectation of Iraq's defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

What would happen if we were to pull out much faster, on a 16-month timetable? Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, says that would be "very dangerous" -- the same words used by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The upshot of all this is that, if the WaPo writers are correct, almost nobody in Iraq, Iraqi or American, who has any sense of what's happening outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, thinks that Obama's timetable for withdrawal, so far from being irresistible, is anything but irresponsible.

RLC

OOL

One of the most frequent criticisms of those who believe that life and the physical universe are intentionally designed is that those who believe this cannot adduce any mechanism for how the designer would have accomplished the feat. Since design theorists can't posit a means by which the designer would have created a universe or biological structures and organisms the design theory is said to be unscientific. It may be philosophy, skeptics concede, but it's not science. Science is based on empirical evidence, not faith.

This last claim may be so but if it is much of what passes for science is no more supported by empirical evidence and every bit as faith based as is intelligent design. This is especially true of the belief that life arose purely through the laws of chemistry and chance. Here's part of what Paul Geim at Uncommon Descent says about the problem:

[This belief] is heavily faith-based. We have no experimental evidence for this belief, and the theoretical problems appear insoluble. We have here belief against all the evidence, analogous to the most daring leaps of religious faith imaginable, that is to say, faith not only without evidence but in the teeth of evidence. And it is even worse; there is no appeal to a God Who could reasonably do the feat that needs explaining. It is a miracle without God.

The rationale that I have seen for this leap of faith is usually that "science" has solved all previous problems and will solve this one too. But this argument is wrong, on two counts. First, even if successful, it would only establish that there was relative parity between the argument for the supernatural origin of life and those for abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life). We would still be completely dependent on faith to believe in abiogenesis.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, "science" has in fact not solved all previous problems. Science has come up to a stone wall regarding the origin of the universe. In fact, "science" has come up to several difficult obstacles, issued promissory notes, and moved on without actually solving the problems. The origin of the Cambrian fauna is something that non-interventionalist evolutionary theory has simply postulated without fossil evidence. The origin of the flagellum in a step-by-step manner has never actually been demonstrated (the best try, that of Matzke, was actually a leap-by-leap explanation, and even then without any experimental evidence to back up his scenario). This insistence that nature must be self-contained is in fact faith against the weight of evidence.

Geim has much more to say about the problems inherent in any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life (OOL) at the link.

For more on the things scientists take on faith, often with little empirical warrant, see my letter (May 2006) to First Things.

RLC