Why the GOP Blew it

Libertarians share much in common with both conservatives and liberals. With liberals they share a disdain for government interference in matters of personal life-style and choice - for example, abortion and gay marriage. With conservatives they share a disdain for big government and regulatory interference in markets. P.J. O'Rourke is a libertarian who lists toward conservatism, and he offers a trenchant and funny post-election analysis of the Republican party at The Weekly Standard.

I don't find everything he says congenial, but he certainly hits the nail on the head often enough to make his essay worth passing on.

RLC

Economic Basics

The stock market tumbled sharply in the wake of Obama's election a week and a half ago, and the plunge is being attributed by some to fears that President Obama and the Democratic congress are going to raise the capital gains tax, the income tax, and the minimum wage, all of which would be very hard on businesses that operate on narrow profit margins.

Obama could perhaps reverse the downward economic trend before he even takes office. All he'd have to do is promise that he will not impose any new regulation, tax, or new minimum wage rate on businesses, and will in fact ease existing regulations and taxes on business. If he promised that his administration would fight to extend the Bush tax cuts and reduce regulations, investor confidence in the future of business would likely rise and the market might well recover. As it is investors fear that business is in for some very tough times under a Democratic economic hegemony.

President-elect Obama wants to help the poor. So do most people, but the poor are not helped by handouts and stimulus checks. After they've spent their check they're still poor. The best way to help people struggling to get out of poverty is to free up business to hire the marginal worker, the employee they would not hire if they had to pay high taxes and benefits. If burdens on employers are reduced jobs will become available and those who want to work will be able to find jobs.

But if we do what the Democrats and Obama have promised to do, if we increase the cost of running a business by taxing and regulating, unemployment will continue to rise as businesses retrench and cut back on all but essential expenses. In such an environment the primary employer is going to be government, and we will have become Venezuela.

RLC

Please Focus

Adam Rutherford makes a couple of claims in this video that are simply false, one of which is that teachers who accept intelligent design clearly do not understand evolution.

Actually, Rutherford clearly does not understand intelligent design. If he did he wouldn't talk as if evolution and ID were contraries. ID does not oppose evolution (I wish I had a dollar for every time someone, somewhere has had to say this in response to a confused news article or commentator). ID is in conflict with materialism. It denies the materialist claim that the origin of all biological organisms, structures, systems, and processes can, in theory, be fully accounted for in terms of physical processes and mechanisms.

Materialism asserts that mind is not necessary to account for the design of life. ID claims that any examination of the evidence, unfettered by a priori assumptions of the truth of materialism, would conclude that it is. The materialist claim is philosophical, not scientific. There's no empirical evidence for it. Thus, if ID should not be taught in a science classroom because it fails the test of empirical verification, then so, too, should materialism not be taught and any teacher who insists on teaching it should, by Rutherford's lights, be banished from the classroom.

The materialists make this mistake of so often that I suspect there's more afoot here than a simple inability to understand the ID position or to get it right. The materialist knows that if he can confuse the casual observer into thinking that the conflict is between ID and evolution he can discredit ID by producing lots of evidence for evolution. Once ID has been discredited then materialism prevails by default without having to fire a single shot. In other words, evolution is used as a surrogate for materialism to defeat ID which materialism itself could never do. It's an example of "Let's you and him fight."

The problem with this tactic, of course, is that lots of Intelligent Design advocates believe that the designer of life employed an evolutionary process to accomplish the task. Michael Behe is one notable example. There's an increasing fondness among many IDers for the theory of front-loaded evolution, i.e. the idea that the designer packed the genomic potential for all of subsequent diversification into the genome of the first cell or cells (See the excellent book by the pseudonymous Mike Gene titled The Design Matrix).

It may be that this is incorrect. It may be, as other IDers think, that the designer intervened at certain stages of the evolution of life to tinker with the process.

Not all IDers are evolutionists, some are creationists, but the point is that, contrary to what people like Rutherford would have us believe, there's no contradiction between the concept that there's evidence in the natural world that leads to the conclusion that a mind is responsible for it and the concept that life is a result of descent by modification.

Now if we could just get people like Rutherford to focus on this simple truth long enough for it to sink in we will have advanced the dialogue a considerable distance.

RLC

Add Congo to the List

Meanwhile, Africa continues in its doleful role as the most dysfunctional continent on the face of the globe. You've read about the terrors of being a Sudanese and perhaps you've heard of the crimes of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and how he has devastated that once beautiful and productive land. You've seen movies (Hotel Rwanda, Beyond the Gates) about the genocide in Rwanda and other films (e.g. Blood Diamond) about the horrors of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. You may have seen films such as The Last King of Scotland that give some insight into the thugocracy that afflicts these miserable people and you're also familiar, perhaps, with the ghastly gang warfare that plagues Somalia (see Blackhawk Down).

But have you read about what's happening in the Congo? If you haven't yet succumbed to compassion fatigue you might want to peruse a piece at the McClatchey web site that tells the awful tale: Five million deaths over the last decade, 45,000 refugees dying every month, and on it goes. If you've read one of these stories, you've read them all. Corrupt government, rebel militias, unimaginable cruelty and degradation, impotent U.N. and rampant disease and starvation afflicting tens of thousands of terrified refugees. It's the same awful litany of problems almost everywhere across the continent.

In his book The Bottom Billion Paul Collier suggests that the only way African nations like the ones mentioned above, as well as others like Chad and dysfunctional states elsewhere around the world (such as Haiti) will ever be able to achieve some level of normalcy for their beleaguered populations is via a concerted intervention - political, economic, and military - by the developed world. Of course, that means Europe and the U.S. since no other nation with the resources to help has much of a history of humanitarian concern, and unfortunately, because of the violence the radical Muslim world threatens to inflict as it seeks to establish global Islam, our energies must be diverted elsewhere.

It's such a tragedy to be able to help but to be unable and/or unwilling to commit the resources to do anything effective because radical Islamists have us tied down elsewhere. But even if that weren't the case I doubt that many Americans would have the stomach to send troops into Africa when our national interests are not at stake there. Instead we avert our gaze from the teeming mass of humanity that cries out for rescue from the tyrants and thugs and assuage our guilt at doing essentially nothing by sending a few vials of penicillin and a couple of crates of blankets.

The left deplored European colonialism in Africa as oppressive and exploitative, but the people of Africa were far better off under European rule than they are under the boot of the criminals who terrorize them now.

RLC

Jefferson on Public Debt

My friend Dick Francis passes along a crucially relevant insight from Thomas Jefferson:

"If we run into such debts as that must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses;

And the sixteenth [hour of labor] being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers;

And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train, wretchedness and oppression."

What would Jefferson be thinking were he alive to witness the last year of bailouts and President-elect Obama's talk of higher taxes to come?

RLC

Has Anyone Seen Bob?

Those readers who have been on a whale-watch know that you can spend a great deal of time sitting patiently over a spot in the ocean where a whale was seen to have "sounded", waiting eagerly for the creature to rise again from the depths and make its grand appearance as it breaks through the surface. Whale-watching and the sometimes long hours of anticipation, waiting for a whale to "breach", came to mind today as it occurred to me that it had been a long time since the junior Senator from my fair state of Pennsylvania has surfaced.

Two years ago Pennsylvania voters tired of incumbent Senator Rick Santorum, one of the finest men to have served in the senate - a man who fought hard on behalf of the poor, the oppressed and the helpless both at home and abroad, a man who also saw clearly the threat posed by radical Islam, but a man tied too closely to President Bush - and chose in their wisdom to replace him with one Robert Casey.

Mr. Santorum is still involved in his various causes, but that election seems to have been the last anyone has heard from Mr. Casey. The newly-minted senator appears to have "sounded" and Pennsylvanians have been waiting patiently and fruitlessly for two years for him to resurface.

Perhaps it's time that someone file a missing persons report on the gentleman and possibly affix his photo to a milk carton or billboard. Who knows but that he's being held hostage somewhere, bound and gagged, until his term expires at which time he'll be trotted out again by the Democrat nabobs to stand for reelection so that he can once again disappear into the briney depths of political anonymity.

RLC

The Butterfly

The other night I watched a lovely French film entitled "The Butterfly". The movie tells a delightful story about a lonely septuagenarian lepidopterist named Julian (Michael Serrault) and a young girl of eight named Elsa (Claire Bouanich) who is pretty much ignored by her mother. The girl lives in the apartment above Julian and attaches herself to the grandfatherly butterfly collector, somewhat to his dismay. She even manages to persuade him to allow her to tag along as he journeys into the French Alps in search of a rare species of butterfly (it's actually a moth, but no matter) called the Isabella. For those who like stories about how relationships develop this movie will touch your heart.

There is a line where Elsa tells the old man an off-color joke which one might wish were not in the film, but aside from this it's a wonderful movie. You might want to add it to your Netflix queue.

RLC

Without God: Concluding Thoughts

So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads logically to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they lead us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God. In other words, the existence of God is the best explanation for the data of human existence. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair that her worldview pushes her toward. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to defend the claim that the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God. If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice. We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope of life beyond death and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence. Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me, at least, to understand.

RLC

Civilian Security Force?

Perhaps Senator Obama meant nothing sinister by the remarks he made in a call to service speech he made at Colorado Springs before the election, but I would like to know what he meant by his call for a national security force as powerful and well-funded as the military. Given the history of such security forces, and the fondness that thugs and tyrants have had for such enforcement mechanisms, it's a little unnerving.

Exactly what does Mr. Obama have in mind?

RLC

<i>Getting it Right</i>

For political junkies who like a little modern history with their politics, especially those who may have some familiarity with the work of the late William F. Buckley and/or National Review (I hope I haven't narrowed the field too much) I'd like to recommend a novel titled Getting it Right. It was written by Buckley about four years ago and it tells the story of the three-way struggle between Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, and the crowd at National Review for the soul of conservatism.

It's a fascinating account beginning in the 1950s and ending with the Goldwater defeat in 1964. Buckley does a masterful job of allowing Rand to skewer herself in its pages, making her look like the megalomaniacal genius that she was. It also provides a fascinating account of how the John Birch Society got started and how it came a cropper. Along the way you meet many of the key players of the time, including Buckley himself. It's a good read, especially for conservatives eager to bone up on the details of this critical gestation period of American conservatism.

RLC

Things to Come

Quin Hilyer of The American Spectator advises conservatives on what we might expect from Obama's minions and other disciples of Saul Alinsky who will run the government come January. The comments which follow add a few other cautions. It's not pretty and I deeply hope Obama will not do what Hilyer predicts, but I confess I have very little ground for that hope.

Everything he and the Democratic leadership have been saying for the last couple of years conforms to Hilyer's frightening augury. Read the article at the link. It's not long.

RLC

Making a Difference

A student recently mentioned to me that as a science major he thought it a shame that philosophers study stuff that doesn't make any difference in peoples' lives. He was giving me a little dig and said it with a smile.

I returned the smile and told him that actually the questions philosophers deal with are among the most important we can imagine. Questions about God, meaning, morality, justice, human nature, mind and soul, love, etc. These are questions that bear on how we should live and how we can achieve a good life.

I then asked him what string theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, cosmogeny, biogenesis, paleontology, exobiology, much of astronomy, and pure mathematics have to do with most peoples' lives. Not much, I suggested. So why are think the study of these to be somehow more noble or more worthwhile than the study of philosophy? More smiles.

RLC

Jolly Old St. Barack

What was the source of Barack Obama's appeal among the masses? Perhaps it was the conviction that he was really Santa Claus in a business suit:

This isn't just one woman speaking, I'm afraid. Ms Joseph is the whole country - financially troubled state governments, corporations, institutions, individuals - everyone has their hand out and expects everyone else to pay for their gas and mortgage. In American politics it has come to this: If you want to win an election just promise to give more people more goodies than does your opponent.

Ms Joseph's excitement over what she thinks Obama will do for her and the rest of us reminds me of the words attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: "America will last until the populace discovers that it can vote for itself largesse out of the public treasury."

And then comes the eschaton.

RLC

Working for WALNUT

Hot Air's intrepid correspondent Jason Mattera goes underground yet again, this time to get signers on a petition for ACORN's sister organization WALNUT. WALNUT is petitioning for the right of oppressed peoples to be allowed to vote twice. It's pretty funny. Here's part I. Part II follows:

For more Jason Mattera go here.

RLC

Without God (X)

As we continue our series on the existential inadequacies of the atheistic worldview and its inability to conform to the way the world is we might consider this: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. If our self just is our body, as the atheistic materialist believes, since our body is constantly changing we're continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I", only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God, transient physical flux is all there is.

Nevertheless, we seem to be convinced that there is an enduring self, an "I" which exists through time. Either this conviction is an illusion or there's more to us than just a physical body. If we do have a soul, an eternal essence, an identity that exists in the mind of God, then there is something about us which is not transient and which justifies the sense that we are a coherent, enduring self.

In other words, our belief that we have a permanent identity is more compatible with the belief that there is a God than with the belief that matter is all there is.

Finally, human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair. If death is the end then life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." If death is the end then human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is indeed the end if the materialist is right. Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

Karl Marx is said to have called the belief in an afterlife a narcotic which anaesthetized the suffering of people in this life and which kept them complacent and subdued so as not to rebel against their bourgeois overlords. But as Czech writer Czeslaw Milosz says in Roadside Dog it's the belief that there is no afterlife that is the real narcotic. He recalls Marx's phrase that religion is like opium that dulls the pain of life and then goes on to counter that: "And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged." (emphasis mine)

God and the promise of eternal life are necessary beliefs if our deepest existential yearnings and the nature of the world itself make any sense. Atheism may be true, but we have no reason to think it is and a great deal of reason to think, and hope, that it is not.

RLC

Uncivil War

Ever since John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate there has been an "uncivil war" brewing in the Republican party. Elite Republican pundits like David Brooks ("Palin is a cancer on the GOP"), Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, and others have been sniping at Palin as soon as she uttered her first "You betcha'". Now that the election is over McCain staffers are taking their shots as well. David Frum thinks the staffer responsible for the leaks is Nicolle Wallace.

In any event, one might wonder what's going on here. It seems that there's a struggle taking place between two factions of Republicans, the conservatives and the moderates. Palin is a hero to the former so the moderates are trying to short-circuit any influence she may have as the GOP seeks to reformulate itself for 2010. Sarah Palin is a force of nature and this scares the moderates who act as if they believe that the best way to serve the country is to remain in the minority.

It's odd that attacks from the McCain camp on Palin are much more personal and vicious than anything they were willing to say about Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. They completely ignored Obama's associations with some pretty sordid characters, they completely ignored the chuckleheaded string of remarks by Joe Biden, they never commented on Obama's geographic shortcomings or the fact that he thinks there are 57 states in the union. All of that was out of bounds during the campaign, but now they want to hammer Palin for not understanding African geography and for answering her door in a bathrobe.

No wonder they lost.

RLC

When Human Life Begins

Robert P. George addresses himself to the faux question of when human life begins in a recent National Review article. It is, as George points out, a question about which there is, in fact, no mystery. To pretend there is simply obfuscates a matter about which there is no confusion at all. George begins:

When does the life of a human individual begin? Although the question is of obvious importance for our public policy debates over abortion and embryonic-stem-cell research, politicians have avoided it like the plague. Of late, though, things seem to be changing. Recently some of our nation's most prominent political leaders, from the Speaker of the House to both contenders for the office of president, have weighed in on the question.

Faced with the complicated and not-very-widely-known facts of human embryology, most people are inclined to agree with the sentiment expressed by Speaker Pelosi, who has stated "I don't think anybody can tell you when... human life begins."

Yet is Speaker Pelosi correct? Is it actually the case that no one can tell you with any degree of authority when the life of a human being actually begins?

No, it is not. Treating the question as some sort of grand mystery, or expressing or feigning uncertainty about it, may be politically expedient, but it is intellectually indefensible. Modern science long ago resolved the question. We actually know when the life of a new human individual begins.

Read his response to the question at the link, and thanks to Jason for passing the article along.

RLC

Capt. John Ripley, RIP

Most heroes are people whose deeds are unheralded and largely anonymous. When we come across accounts of incredible bravery we want to do what we can to let the world know about it. Byron passed along a story by Keith Pavlischek written on the occasion of the death of a Vietnam vet named Capt. John Ripley who received his country's second highest award for valor. You can read how he earned the award here.

It's worth a minute or two of your time.

RLC

Loyal Opposition

I was listening to Glen Beck on the radio this morning, and I really appreciated what he had to say about how those who feared an Obama win on Tuesday should react to his victory. Listening to him I thought of the hatred, ugliness and the acid-in-your-face rhetoric that followed Bush's 2000 win and which dogged him throughout his presidency. I thought how contemptible it was, and I hoped that those who oppose Obama would act with a lot more class and civility toward him and his supporters than many of those who opposed Bush treated him and his supporters.

As Beck said, we have to behave like we're all Americans. We can't afford divisiveness just for the sake of hurting an Obama presidency. If we love our country we have to hope and pray that he does well, that he solves our problems, and that he turns out to be a good leader. It would be crazy, literally, to hope that he fails and to hope that the challenges he faces prove beyond his abilities to meet.

This does not mean that we should docilely accept whatever medicine he prescribes for our ills, especially the more radical stuff, but it does mean that we pray for his success, we support him issue by issue as long as we think he's on the right track, we give him credit for doing the right thing, and we let him know of our displeasure when he's doing the wrong thing in civil and respectful fashion.

This means we avoid name-calling and vituperation. It means we give him the benefit of the doubt whenever that's possible and plausible. It means that, as hard as it may be, we regard him as our president, deserving our loyalty and respect insofar as we can give it without compromising our principles.

We may not have much influence with Obama and Congress even if we do conduct ourselves with Christ-like maturity, but it's for sure we won't have any influence if we don't, nor should we. At some point someone has to break the pattern of the out-party acting as though the president were the incarnation of Lucifer. Let that someone be us. God keep us from being anything remotely like the Bush haters of the last eight years.

RLC

Anti-Christian Poet

Hot Air's Jason Mattera goes undercover to interview an anti-Christian pro-abortion protestor/"poet" at Denver's Planned Parenthood facility:

How does he find these people? Maybe the more troubling question is whether these people are that easy to find that he doesn't really have to look very hard. For more Jason Mattera madness go here.

RLC