What If

In a fun parody, Victor Davis Hanson at NRO puts all of Joe Biden's howlers and other goofy utterances in the mouth of Sarah Palin and tacitly invites the reader to wonder what her treatment from the media would be like if she had said half the dumb things that Biden has said.

Tonight Sarah Palin will debate Joe Biden (in an event moderated by Gwen Ifil who has a big financial stake in a Biden win). I was thinking about this debate today and the treatment that Palin has gotten from the media and the left-wing blogs, and the thought occurred to me that it's a wonder that any good person runs for elective office in this country. Fine people like Palin are ridiculed and treated with contempt by the Charles Gibsons of the world while crooks, scam artists, buffoons and perverts like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, William Jefferson, Nancy Pelosi and many others get a complete pass from the media. Why do good people subject themselves to the abuse and humiliation they must endure to serve the people when others who have no business being seated in Congress are never examined, never questioned, never exposed because they happen to be members of the correct party?

I suppose it's true that when the people in a democracy don't take the time to find out what their political leadership is doing, and who they are, they wind up with the politicians they deserve.

RLC

Hurtling Toward the Cliff

I have on many previous occasions argued here at Viewpoint that an atheistic worldview leads to nihilism, or it would if the atheist were consistent with his fundamental assumption that there is no God. Our worldview is like a train which, once we climb aboard, heads off toward a particular destination. The terminus toward which the atheistic train is bound is a yawning abyss of despair and nihilism. If one stays on the train all the way one inevitably plunges into the chasm. Few are willing to go all the way, however, so, once they see the abyss looming ahead, they jump off the train.

Atheistic physicist Stephen Weinberg, in an article in The New York Times Review of Books titled Without God, looks down the track and espies clearly the cliff over which his atheism will plunge him:

[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. What, then, can we do?

Weinberg is about to jump off the train. He won't give up his atheism, but he can't bear to follow it to its logical endpoint either.

So he urges his readers to embrace humor, beauty, pleasure, and moral virtue despite the fact that there's no non-arbitrary reason why anyone should do so and no reason to think that these could inject any real meaning into the otherwise dreary ordeal of life. Weinberg's answer reminds me of a parable that Leo Tolstoy tells in his Confessions:

"There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler in the steppes who is attacked by a furious wild beast. To save himself the traveler gets into a waterless well; but at the bottom of it he sees a dragon with its jaws wide open to devour him. The unhappy man dares not get out for fear of the wild beast, and dares not descend for fear of the dragon, so he catches hold of the branch of a wild plant growing in a crevice of the well. His arms grow tired, and he feels that he must soon perish, death awaiting him on either side, but he still holds on; and he sees two mice, one black and one white, gradually making their way round the stem of the wild plant on which he is hanging, nibbling it through. The plant will soon give way and break off, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this, and knows that he must inevitably perish; but, while still hanging, he looks around him, and, finding some drops of honey on the leaves of the wild plant, he stretches his tongue and licks them.

"Thus do I cling to the branch of life, knowing that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand why such tortures have fallen to my lot. I also strive to suck the honey which once comforted me, but this honey no longer rejoices me, while the white mouse and the black, day and night, gnaw through the branch to which I cling. I see the dragon plainly, and the honey is no longer sweet. I see the dragon, from which there is no escape, and the mice, and I cannot turn my eyes away from them. It is no fable, but a living, undeniable truth, to be understood of all men...."

Weinberg, like many atheists, is like the man in the well about to die but somehow persuading himself that licking the honey has some point to it.

RLC

Sowell on the Bailout

Thomas Sowell explains why the collapse of Freddie and Fannie is not a failure of free market economics but rather a predictable consequence of government involving itself in the marketplace. He says, for example, that:

[V]oters [don't] deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Sowell also explains briefly why it's wrongheaded to try to blame this crisis on the Bush administration. It's a good op-ed but the page on which it's found seems to take a while to load. Nevertheless, it's worth the wait.

RLC

Dissing the Classics

Eleanor Bourg Donlon laments what she sees as a growing disinterest among the young for reading the classics, particularly Dickens and Shakespeare, and she places the blame squarely on classroom teachers, both secondary and college:

The true stage for the anti-Dickens crusade is the classroom. The uninspired pessimism of high-school teachers blights the young receptacle, already numbed into thinking that the Harry Potter series is "quality literature." Jack thinks Sydney Carton is a sap, and Jill doesn't have the foggiest idea what is wrong with Miss Havisham. They agree, however, that the assignment is boring, and they wait longingly for the day when they can escape the class altogether. And so the teachers say, "No one really likes Dickens but we have to read him." Or "Dickens is depressing, but that was because all the Victorians were repressed." Or "Dickens was paid by the word, that's why he wrote such long books." (The last is not only an appalling misunderstanding of Dickensian prose, it is apocryphal. Dickens was paid by the installment, not by the word-a fact that does illuminate much of the structure of the novels.)

Meanwhile, in the universities, Dickens and his characters are accused of homoeroticism, incest, misogyny, and so on: an infamous parade of unseemly sins. Beyond these torrid projections, Dickens is condemned as too sentimental for cynical modernity, too preachy for tolerant modernity, and too prosy for innocent undergraduate eyes. Young students are distracted with Woolf and Joyce and oversexed interpretations of Shakespeare.

I suspect Donlon exaggerates her case at least a little. The teachers of literature that I know best love the classics and teach them with a contagious verve and affection. Even so, those closer to the literature class, whether teacher or student, would be in a better position than I to assess the accuracy of Donlon's indictment.

Her essay is worth reading in its entirety.

RLC

Conflict of Interest

Suppose you were running for high office and were to debate your opponent in front of the entire nation. Would you think it fair that the moderator of the debate stands to make a great deal of money if your opponent wins the election but earn nothing if your opponent loses? Probably not, but this is the situation Sarah Palin will find herself in during tomorrow night's debate with Joe Biden.

The moderator, Gwen Ifil, has written a book about Barack Obama which is due to be released in January right around inauguration day. If Obama is the man being inaugurated, Ifil will probably sell a lot of copies. If Obama has lost the election no one is likely to be interested in her book. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which invited her to moderate, committed a gross error in judgment and, for her part, she should have declined their offer.

The fact that she will be asking the questions means that she is in a position to influence the outcome of the proceedings. Her tone, her inflection, the kind of questions she asks, can all work to the advantage or disadvantage of one or the other debater. A moderator is supposed to be disinterested, but Gwen Ifil is surely not disinterested.

No one who has a financial stake in the outcome should be permitted to be in this position any more than a basketball official who has bet on the game should be allowed to officiate it.

For more on this go here.

RLC

Thoughts on a "Crisis"

Yesterday's events provoke a few desultory thoughts:

How long will it be before the rest of the media starts informing viewers of the facts surrounding our financial crisis (see video below)? And why, if it truly is such a crisis, did Congress take the next two days off for Rosh Hashana? If the situation is as dire as we've been told that it is wouldn't we expect Congress to work on Christmas day, if need be, to get it resolved? Why are Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank blaming Republicans for not getting the bailout passed when 40% (95) of House Democrats voted against it? If only 11 of those Democrats had voted for the measure instead of against it it would have passed. I'm not saying that that would have been a good thing, understand, but it's hard to blame the other party when so many of one's own party didn't vote the way one thinks they should have voted.

The fact that neither Pelosi (nor Obama) seemed to work very hard to get her caucus to support the bailout plan and the fact that the Democrats adjourned for a two day holiday suggests to me that this "crisis" is more a political ploy than a serious immediate threat to our economy. Either that or the Democratic leadership is even more irresponsible than I thought they were.

Here's an interview you can expect never to see on MSNBC:

RLC

Obama's Gestapo

A couple of weeks ago we mentioned Senator Obama's attempt to intimidate and squelch free speech by prosecuting those who produce ads that the Obama campaign doesn't like. Now comes an organized attempt in Missouri to use police and prosecutors to respond to ads the campaign deems to be unfair.

This is unconscionable, and, as we said in the earlier post, it reveals something truly frightening about the Obama mindset and what an Obama presidency would be like. No politician has any business recruiting law enforcement personnel to serve as truth squads. The only purpose this could have would be to frighten people away from voicing their opinion. By threatening people with litigation or police scrutiny for speaking their mind, Obama is bringing gestapo tactics into the political arena. This is precisely what totalitarian governments do, it's a first step on the road to tyranny, and it has no place in our politics. It's amazing to me, or would be if I hadn't come to expect it, that the liberal media is letting him get away with this. Where are the media guardians of free speech?

Watch the news clip about this here, and go to Hot Air for more.

It seems to me that Obama has handed John McCain's people a tremendous gift. This news clip should be turned into an ad and played around the clock in every battle ground state in the nation so that voters see that, as Jonah Goldberg says, liberalism really is fascism with a smiley face.

RLC

Diplomatic Genius

In the midst of trying to arrive at a bipartisan plan to save our economy Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi decided to go to the well of the House and blame the Republicans for the entire mess. By choosing at this delicate moment to resort to partisan attacks against them, and accusing Republicans of being the cause of the crisis, she so angered GOP congressmen that a number of them recanted on their agreement to hold their nose and vote for the bailout. Consequently, it failed to pass 207-226.

I don't know what she was thinking, but it appears that she wasn't thinking at all. It should also be noted that, as the following post makes clear, any attempt to blame this crisis on Republicans reflects either ignorance, stupidity or dishonesty. No one who occupies the Speaker's chair could possibly be ignorant of the facts so we're left with some rather unfortunate alternatives regarding Nancy Pelosi.

RLC

Where the Blame Lies

Anyone following the news this past week will probably have heard Democrats and other liberals repeatedly blaming the Republicans for the current financial crisis. The historical fact is, however, that Republicans have tried on several occasions to rein in these institutions and have been forcefully resisted by Democrats who wanted banks to be forced to give mortgages to people who couldn't afford them and for taxpayers to essentially guarantee those loans.

This video is from a 2004 congressional hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Capital Markets. It leaves no doubt that the Democratic members chose to attack the credibility of the regulator rather than take any action against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or their CEO's whom they chose to defend.

Watch the whole thing and the next time you hear someone try to blame the current mess on the Bush administration dare them to watch it as well:

Here's a rich irony. The very same people who preferred to beat up on the regulating agency at this hearing, Barney Frank and his fellow Democrats, now run the committee and are the same people to whom is entrusted the task of designing legislation to solve the problem.

Here's another irony. More people trust Barack Obama to fix this crisis than trust John McCain despite the fact that Obama has accepted more money in the last two and a half years from Freddie and Fannie than any other politician except Democrat senator Chris Dodd and despite the fact that he numbers among his economic advisers the two men most responsible for the corruption at these two institutions, Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. It's hard not to be cynical about the intelligence of the American voter.

For more background on this video go here.

RLC

Palin's Qualifications

There's lots of concern that Sarah Palin's inexperience and lack of intellectual polish disqualify her from being just a heartbeat away from the presidency. A common rejoinder to this is to point out that Obama has even less relevant experience than does Palin, but there's another comparison I've never seen called to our attention that should be. Nancy Pelosi is only two heartbeats away from the presidency and there are probably few people in government less qualified for the Oval Office than she. Those who complain that it's painful to listen to Palin stumble through her interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson ought to be made to sit and listen to Nancy Pelosi's brutal assaults on both logic and veracity.

If the woman who appears in this video is qualified to be Speaker of the House then Sarah Palin is eminently qualified to be vice-president:

What Pelosi said about Republicans being opposed to contraception is nonsense, of course, but her statements about the teaching of the Catholic Church are even worse. See here for the Church's response:

This video also has some interesting discussion of Obama's claim that pro-lifers are lying about him having voted against a bill that would have protected children from infanticide. It's old news, I know, but it's good to be reminded of this stuff now and then.

RLC

Above His Pay Grade

The science journal Nature worries that a creationist may inveigle her way into the White House and then all will be lost:

The most worrying thing about a McCain presidency is not so much a President McCain as a Vice-President Palin. Sarah Palin, Alaska's governor and McCain's running mate, opposes all research into human embryonic stem cells. She is a creationist....

But there's still hope. Barack Obama may ride to our aid and rescue us from the calamity of having a vice-president who thinks that students should be able to discuss the issues involved in the debate and decide for themselves what to believe rather than being told what to believe. Nature interviewed Barack Obama on this issue. Here's what they said about his response:

Contrast that with Obama's statement on page 448, in which Nature asked him about the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. It is not easy to address students' questions about evolution without falling prey to the false notion of 'teaching the controversy', as the Royal Society's director of education discovered last week in a public-relations meltdown (see 'Creation and classrooms'). But Obama could not be more clear: "I do not believe it is helpful to our students to cloud discussions of science with non-scientific theories like intelligent design that are not subject to experimental scrutiny," he wrote.

Isn't it odd that Barack Obama didn't think questions about the philosophy of science to be above his pay grade? Anyway, maybe someone will ask our science educator-in-chief whether he thinks ideas like string theory and the multiverse should be excluded from physics classes.

RLC

Trivial Pursuit

Well, most of the commentary I consulted last night had John McCain winning his debate with Barack Obama. Given my political leanings I guess I should be pleased about this, but I'm not, particularly. I want to ask these people how they define a win. The experts I heard and read mentioned fine points of delivery, factual errors by Obama, a little testiness showing around the Illinois senator's mouth, a level of disrespect manifested by his calling McCain by his first name, and on and on. I find all this very annoying. I personally feel presidential debates, as they're usually conducted, are a waste of time and especially so if the winner is decided on the sort of scoring that would be more appropriate to a high school speech and debate tournament or a beauty contest.

We're electing neither a debater-in-chief nor a beauty queen. An error or two, a stumble or stammer, mean nothing in terms of the kind of president a candidate would make. The media treats these events as if they were dancing competitions and whoever scores the most style points in the dance wins the prize.

Much of the post-debate television commentary centered around whether either man committed a blunder or got off a zinger, as if McCain and Obama were auditioning for a comedy club rather than the White House. Undecided voters watch the debates looking for the slightest reason not to vote for one candidate or the other, and the criteria they use are often totally irrelevant to a man's qualifications to be president. Richard Nixon fared poorly in the first ever television debate with John Kennedy in 1960 because he had a "5 o'clock shadow" and visibly sweated from the hot studio lights. JFK, on the other hand, seemed cool, calm, and vigorous even though he was debilitated by back pain that his handlers managed to conceal from the public. Viewers later reported that they voted for Kennedy because he "looked more attractive".

The media, by the way they stage and analyze these dog and pony shows, implicitly encourage us to evaluate our candidates in terms of their personality, eloquence, charm, grace and appearance, none of which are particularly indicative of the kind of president a man would be. We're manipulated by the media into electing a celebrity rather than a leader. It's as shallow as it is depressing.

Last March I wrote the following post. I repeat it today, slightly edited, because I think it's even more timely now than it was then:

The media continue to trivialize our politics by treating the presidential campaign as though it were a board game in which gaffes, scandals, missteps and debate zingers all get tallied up to delight the talking heads and newspaper columnists. Meanwhile, the voting public wishes they'd grow up and start doing their job. They can begin by pressing the candidates to answer some urgent questions and holding their feet to the fire until they do. Here are five questions with which each candidate should be confronted at the earliest opportunity, and they should be badgered for answers every time they make a public appearance until they finally produce them:

1) The National Intelligence Estimate notwithstanding, the consensus seems to be that Iran is still engaged in the production of a nuclear device. The Iranians have threatened to use such a weapon against Israel once they have it. What will you do if Iran (or North Korea, for that matter) persists in pursuing a nuclear weapon? Please do not answer that you will sit down and talk with their leaders. The question presupposes that all such diplomatic efforts have failed. How far are you prepared to go to stop Iran or North Korea from obtaining a nuclear weapon?

2) The sub-prime mortgage crisis and the falling dollar have placed us on the verge of a global economic recession. What, precisely, will you do about the crisis we are facing? Please don't answer with platitudes about "hope" and "change", "yes, we can", and "mavericks". What measures will you take, that the Bush administration has not taken, to fix the problem?

3) Illegal immigrants are flooding into this country and placing enormous burdens upon our schools, hospitals, justice system, and welfare system. What, if anything, do you propose to do to stop the flow of illegal immigration? Please be specific. Telling us that we must secure our border is vague and unhelpful. Please state exactly what you propose to do, if anything, to secure the border.

4) Please name a Supreme Court justice, current or former, who would be most similar to a nominee that you would select for the court or federal bench should the opportunity arise during your presidency.

5) Exactly how do you propose that we achieve energy independence from the Middle East? Do you believe such independence is possible without exploiting the petroleum resources we have within our own borders and without building more nuclear power plants?

If the media neglect to ask these questions and to demand answers they will have failed to meet their responsibility to the public. If the questions are asked, but the candidates refuse to give clear answers then the candidates will have failed the voters, who will be given little upon which to base a responsible vote.

RLC

Genesis of a Crisis

Here's a quick course on how the financial crisis came about and why the Democrats in Congress dare not blame Republicans for it. Even so, if more Republicans had been doing their job when they controlled both chambers of Congress Democratic efforts to block reform would not have been successful.

It's worth the time to watch this, but when I say it's a quick course I mean that it helps to be a speed reader:

RLC

Irrational Belief

From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate, and more civilized society. This article in the Wall Street Journal, however, throws a bucket of ice water on that piece of mythology. Here's an excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us.

"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama's former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin's former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

It has been clear to most evangelicals for a long time that the people likeliest to believe the craziest things were not Christians but those who had forsaken belief in the Judeo-Christian God. As G.K. Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

RLC

The Obama Test

A friend passes along the Obama Test. It's a survey to see how closely one's views hew to those of Barack Obama. Some of the questions are poorly framed, and some lead too obviously toward a desired answer, but even so it gives a good idea of where Senator Obama stands on a wide range of issues. You can take the survey here.

I found that the senator and I agreed about 4% of the time.

RLC

More on the Bailout

Donald Luskin at NRO writes on the administration's $700 billion bailout of the financial markets that, "To arrive at a principled view on this intervention, we must answer three critical questions: Is it necessary? Will it work? And even then, is it morally justifiable?"

Good questions, these. Go here for Luskin's thoughts on them.

I do not profess to know the ins and outs of the mess we're evidently in, but I do have a thought on any package put together to get us out of it. In my view any such proposal must have four elements: It must ensure that the taxpayers reap whatever profit is made from the investment of the $700,000,000. It must ensure that people working for the financial institutions that receive our largesse are fired and given no severance compensation. It must not help those who defaulted on speculative mortgages nor assist illegal aliens whose mortgages, apparently a significant number, are in default. The taxpayer should not be compelled to underwrite speculators nor buy houses for illegals. Thirdly, there needs to be a provision set up to establish a grand jury to investigate the relationships between the failed firms and Washington politicians, particularly Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd.

Our economy is on the brink of total collapse in large part because politicians and bureaucrats pressured banks to give loans to high risk buyers, congress and the SEC refused to impose any constraints on the practice, and CEOs of major lending institutions were only too happy to go along because they were making a fortune.

None of these guilty parties should be absolved of their culpability for their derelictions, irresponsibility, and greed.

RLC

Brain Trust

CNN brightens our day with this bit of buffoonery from a man who has made a career out of embarrassing himself. Speaking to a panel about the shared agenda of Jewish and African-American Democrats Rep. Alcee Hastings (D,FL) delivered himself of this asseveration:

"If Sarah Palin isn't enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don't care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through."

We're told that the room erupted in laughter and applause which leads me to conclude that thinking things through must be as novel a concept among the members of his audience as it is for Rep. Hastings. The impeached former judge managed to pack an exceptional amount of racial demagoguery and logical incoherence into just a single sentence. Apparently, both Hastings and his audience believe that anyone who hunts is a neo-nazi. Either that or Hastings and his listeners have the IQ of protozoa.

CNN goes on to tell us that Hastings was joined on the panel by Rep. Steven Cohen (D,TN). Cohen is the gentleman, you'll recall, who recently proclaimed from the House floor that Barack Obama is like Jesus Christ (they were both community organizers) and Sarah Palin is like Pontius Pilate (they were both governors). Get it?

It's fitting, I suppose, that these two fine minds should appear together on the same stage. They have a lot in common.

Not having exhausted his supply of theologically edifying pronouncements before Congress, Cohen added this observation at the event with Hastings: "A lot of what Jesus talks about is wonderful, talks about helping people and lifting them up and caring about people who are sick and all those things. He's a great Democrat."

Indeed. The difference, however, between Jesus and many congressional Democrats is that Jesus actually did more than talk about helping people.

Anyway, Hillary was also at the event. The photo below shows her listening to Mr. Hastings. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but she appears to be marveling at how anybody who was once a judge and who now serves in Congress could possibly say anything so pathetically stupid:

A nation shares in her wonderment.

RLC

Is McCain Fit?

My friend Jason calls our attention to an essay by George Will in which he lays hold of a troubling aspect of Senator McCain's character that we ourselves have fretted over on a number of previous occasions - his volatile temperament. Will argues that the man is temperamentally unsuited for the office of the presidency, and it's hard to argue with him, especially since we've made a similar case ourselves before and during the primaries.

In this election, however, one has to keep in mind one very important fact. We are voting not just for the next president. We are voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of others. It's a vote to help the Democrats achieve their goal of removing all restrictions on abortion, of altering the meaning of marriage, of effecting a massive redistribution of wealth from the middle and upper classes to the underclass, of treating terrorism as a police matter, of piling onto American business onerous regulations and taxes that will make it impossible to compete in the global market, of continuing the accelerating secularization of our society, of opening our borders to anyone who wants to take up residence in our country, of nationalizing health care, of denying parents the choice of where they send their children to school, of maintaining high fuel costs, of quelling freedom of speech, particularly when it is conservative or religious, and much else as well.

Some of this may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of it, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress.

Will is correct. The GOP has nominated a less than ideal candidate which is why most of the enthusiasm for him is a result of his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. But we must look at more than just the two men running for president. We must also consider what kind of society their respective parties will create for us. For my part, I don't feel at all comfortable with the Democrats' vision of what the future should be.

RLC

Just Tell the Truth

What is Senator Obama's position on social security? He goes to Florida and tells retirees there that had George Bush been successful in privatizing social security three years ago seniors would have lost a bundle in this latest bear market, an assertion which is patently untrue. For one thing, Bush's program would have not been open to anyone 55 or older, which would exclude current seniors, and would have been optional in any event.

Then the senator's website quietly removed from their social security statement Obama's previous assurance that it would be both unnecessary and unfair to raise the retirement age.

So what's going on here?

Ed Morrissey thinks that Obama's Florida statements were a way of preparing the ground for a new social security plan that would indeed raise the retirement age. In other words, the misrepresetation of Bush's plan is the run-up to another policy back flip.

Maybe, maybe not. Raising the retirement age may be the right thing to do, even if Obama has been saying all along it would be the wrong thing to do, but misrepresenting Bush's plan to retirees in order to discredit Bush and, by extension, McCain, is not.

RLC

Sam Harris' Silly Column

I've never been impressed with the arguments advanced by uberatheist Sam Harris (See Ten Myths about Atheism in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page), and little that he says in a recent column in Newsweek gives me reason to reassess my opinion. The article is, like much of his work, a rant against Christian belief, embodied, in this case, in the person of Sarah Palin. His list of particulars against her includes the following:

She's a closet theocrat:

"If anyone could make Christian theocracy smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could."

Harris offers, however, no evidence that Palin has theocratic tendencies so his charge is little more than petty libel.

Harris also castigates Ms Palin for being as unprepared for the responsibilities of the presidency as, well, as is the Democratic standard-bearer:

"She comes to us, seeking the second most important job in the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges and responsibilities that await her....She is a beauty queen/sports reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history."

"The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security ... the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them."

"What doesn't she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth."

To all of which one must ask how much Barack Obama knows about these matters and how have the last 44 years prepared him for the presidency? Harris doesn't seem interested in these inconvenient questions, however. He much prefers to dash off to compile more reasons to dislike Palin.

For instance, like many of the most brilliant thinkers in the history of Western civilization, Governor Palin believes God is sovereign. Harris finds this both disagreeable and disqualifying:

"I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events."

Also, like millions of Americans Governor Palin has the temerity to think that parents should be able to decide whether their minor children have an abortion:

"She has also fought vigorously for a 'parental consent law' in the state of Alaska, seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors. We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning-or, indeed, of the 21st century."

Most galling to Harris, perhaps, is that Palin is a confident woman:

"Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth: 'Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child's brain?' "

Among the most annoying of Harris' indictments of Palin was this one:

When asked about these remarks [her prayer that the U.S. would be within God's will in Iraq] in her [ABC] interview with [John] Gibson, Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd; it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious infatuations.

Harris' accusation has the misfortune of being completely misleading, grossly unfair, and manifestly wrong all at once - a kind of trifecta of intellectual irresponsibility. Palin was explaining to Gibson that her intent when she made those remarks was to reiterate, however imprecisely, Lincoln's response to a clergyman who ventured to say, in his presence, that he hoped 'the Lord was on our side'. Lincoln replied "I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side." Palin was obviously trying to emulate Lincoln, to hold his prayer up as her model. For Harris to call her a liar just makes him look the ignorant fool.

But speaking of having a tenuous relationship with the truth, Harris himself seems to be no stranger to the seductions of making stuff up. He writes:

[W]e cannot ignore the fact that Palin's impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs. Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity.

I don't know of any conservative writer or commenter who has suggested that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is anything but an unfortunate illustration of the sorts of problems that so many people have to wrestle with in our world. For Harris to characterize conservatives as interpreting Bristol's situation as somehow benign is ridiculous. But, perhaps, when your goal is to diminish someone in the eyes of others and when you're philosophically unhampered by any moral constraints yourself, such fabrications come easily to the tongue.

Harris concludes his essay with this:

[H]ow has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth-in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

Here I agree somewhat with Harris, but I think I know the answer to his rhetorical question. Washington is in a mess precisely because we've entrusted it to the graduates of the Ivies. Who does Harris think has been running this country for the past century? Who does he think has run our financial markets into the ground? What makes Harris think that what we need is more of the same? Why does Harris think that a degree from an expensive college means anything more than that you had a rich daddy? Why does Harris think that the children of privilege are better suited to run this country than anyone else? Didn't the execrable George W. Bush graduate from Yale? Money and brains are worthless without values and virtue, and Harvard and Yale do nothing to instill either of those in their graduates.

The late William F. Buckley once famously opined that he would rather be governed by the first 100 people in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. A lot of Americans see his point. What we don't need are bigots like Harris telling us that those who've come from humble backgrounds are not suited to assume the duties of citizenship just because they never got stoned at an Ivy league school.

RLC