Is ID Boring?

At Telic Thoughts Bilbo recalls that in the documentary, Expelled, professor of evolutionary biology William Provine complains that Intelligent Design is "boring." Provine goes on to insist that Darwinism leads to the view that life is meaningless, there's no foundation for ethics, no basis for free will, and no life after death. Provine is surely correct about these entailments of a Darwinian worldview, but he's hardly correct about ID being boring. Nevertheless, a lot of commenter's at Telic Thoughts agreed with him, so I felt constrained to throw my two cents in:

Boring? What could be more exciting than to believe that scientific investigation actually means something, that the whole universe is imbued with purpose, that there's a reason, an intention, for why things are the way they are? What could be more exciting than thinking that one's research is literally thinking the designer's thoughts after it?

On the other hand, what could be more depressing than Professor Provine's view that life is meaningless, moral obligation is groundless, free will is an illusion, and the universe is just a pointless, accidental ontological burp?

Not surprisingly, several readers disagreed with me. One remarked that:

...except that the ID community doesn't do any research. And most of the time doesn't show much interest in biology except insofar as it supports their metaphysical predilections. While Darwin's Theory spawned generations of research, entire new fields of study, ID is a deadend.

Whatever the truth of these claims may be, they're a bit beside the point. The question is not whether intelligent design is a research program, it's whether it's interesting as an interpretation of the results of scientific investigation. Regardless of its merits as a scientific enterprise in itself, ID is a fascinating way of looking at the world. It maintains that the world is filled with transcendent purpose and meaning. It holds that scientific labor is not just mere fact collecting, but is actually a way of discovering how a superhuman intellect thinks.

Another commenter took exception to this claim. He wrote that, "Grandiose self-delusion like that is more properly the domain of theology and philosophy departments."

On the contrary, the idea that science is "thinking the designer's thoughts after it" goes back as far as Johannes Kepler and is certainly the attitude held by many of the founders of modern science. Men of the intellectual stature of Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Boyle, Einstein and, more recently, George Smoot, all have employed some variation of this sentiment in describing their work. To call it "grandiose self-delusion" is to belie an unfortunate ignorance of the history of science.

At any rate, I thought it interesting that no one chose to respond to the second part of what I wrote, i.e. that what's really discouraging and boring is the view Provine derives from his Darwinism that life is fundamentally pointless. If that's true, and I think it is given Provine's atheism, then what is the point of scientific research? Scientists spend their lives gathering a few facts, and some small number of them may even discover something that makes life better for a while, but in the end it's all for nothing. We all die, the world perishes in a solar explosion, and none of it matters at all. That view may not itself be exactly boring, but it sure does sap the motivation to go to the lab each day out of anybody that allows it to sink in. How can someone who really thinks this take their work seriously?

RLC

Presidential Trends

Sitting in my favorite restaurant the other day I reflected over lunch on the last five presidential elections and realized that there are some interesting patterns to be found in them:

Since 1992 we have had five presidential elections. In every one of them (3 elections) in which a younger candidate ran against a significantly older candidate the younger man won. In every election in which one candidate was a former governor and the other was not (4 elections) the former governor won. In every one in which one candidate was a war veteran and the other was not (all 5), the veteran lost. In every one of them (all 5) in which one candidate appeared considerably more at ease talking about his religious faith than did his opponent that candidate won.

The implications of this seem obvious. If the GOP wants to enhance its prospects of reclaiming the White House in 2012 they should look not to aging senators but to young, charismatic governors or ex-governors who hold sincere and well-thought out religious convictions.

It sounds like a recipe for Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, or Jeb Bush, if he had a different last name. Of course, if the Republicans do decide to go with another war vet in 2012, and choose David Petraeus, the trend against electing vets could come to a screeching halt.

RLC

Age of Confusion

National Review's Katherine Jean Lopez reflects on a recent poll of teenagers which found that 50% of them blamed Rihanna for the drubbing she received at the hands of her boyfriend Chris Brown. Half of the teens surveyed believed that Rihanna must have deserved it somehow. Here are some highlights of her post:

It's just one survey. But it's very bad news. And feminists are to blame.

I don't say that to bash Gloria Steinem, or whoever the most easily blamed feminist would be at this point. I say that so we can collectively get our heads out of the feminist fog in which we've been lost.

What has happened - and what Rihanna and Chris have to do with Gloria and us - is that by inventing oppression where there is none and remaking woman in man's image, as the sexual and feminist revolutions have done, we've confused everyone. The reaction those kids had was unnatural. It's natural for us to expect men to protect women, and for women to expect some level of physical protection. But in post-modern America, those natural gender roles have been beaten by academics and political rhetoric and the occasional modern woman being offended by having a door opened for her. The result is confusion.

And perhaps, too, a neo-feminist backlash.

The need for some return to sanity is presented pretty clearly in an article in the April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine. The article details how some women find themselves leaving men in favor of relationships with partners of their own gender.

One recently divorced academic describes what attracted her to a future female lover. "She got up and gave me the better seat, as if she wanted to take care of me. I was struck by that," she said. "I felt attracted to her energy, her charisma. I was enticed. And she paid the bill. Just the gesture was sexy. She took initiative and was the most take-charge person I'd ever met."

This article isn't about closeted homosexuality. It's not making the case that there is a vast population of women who were born to be with women, who are instead trapped in unfulfilling heterosexual arrangements. No, this article, despite its celebration of unconventional lifestyles, boils down to something much more orthodox: Femininity and masculinity mix well together. And women are taking masculinity where they can get it, even if that's in the arms of another woman.

Last year, Kathleen Parker published a book called Save the Males. What a perfect title, what a necessary cause, I thought at the time. As Parker wrote: "For the past thirty years or so, males have been under siege by a culture that too often embraces the notion that men are to blame for all of life's ills. While women have been cast as victims . . . men have been quietly retreating into their caves."

Lopez's article isn't long and could be read with profit by both men and women. Give it a look.

RLC

GOP Fiddles While Economy Burns

While the economy is being consumed in the flames of out of control spending and borrowing, and the administration rushes to throw ever more gasoline onto the inferno, the GOP is addressing itself to the gravity of the problem by valiantly undertaking to change the way we pick the national champion of college football:

Everyone from President Barack Obama on down to fans has criticized how college football determines its top team. Now senators are getting off the sidelines to examine antitrust issues involving the Bowl Champion Series. The current system "leaves nearly half of all the teams in college football at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to qualifying for the millions of dollars paid out every year," the Senate Judiciary's subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumer rights said in a statement Wednesday announcing the hearings.

Under the BCS, some conferences get automatic bids to participate in series, while others do not. Obama and some members of Congress favor a playoff-type system to determine the national champion. The BCS features a championship game between the two top teams in the BCS standings, based on two polls and six computer ratings.

Behind the push for the hearings is the subcommittee's top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. People there were furious that Utah was bypassed for the national championship despite going undefeated in the regular season.

The subcommittee's statement said Hatch would introduce legislation "to rectify this situation." No details were offered and Hatch's office declined to provide any.

Hatch said in a statement that the BCS system "has proven itself to be inadequate, not only for those of us who are fans of college football, but for anyone who believes that competition and fair play should have a role in collegiate sports."

In the House, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, has sponsored legislation that would prevent the NCAA from calling a football game a "national championship" unless the game culminates from a playoff system.

Forgive my asking, but where in the Constitution is Congress granted the prerogative of determining how we select a football champion? What business is this of the government's? Will my grandson's 8-10 baseball team be the next to fall under Senator Hatch's scrutiny?

God save us from our elected leaders.

RLC

Toward a Secular Society

Peter Glover claims at First Things that "the government and media of Great Britain have put in place over the last few decades a determined program to abolish the influence of Christianity" in that nation. Lest you think Mr. Glover exaggerates you should read some of the examples he cites:

How else to read the story, in November 2008, of a foster mother struck off the register by her local council for "allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity"? The woman had looked after as many as eighty children over the previous decade. Although she was a practicing Anglican, everyone agrees that she put no pressure on the girl. The woman testified, "I did initially try to discourage her. I offered her alternatives," including "finding places for her to practice her own religion."

Eventually though, at her own insistence, the girl was allowed to attend church with her foster mother. Within months she asked to be baptized (under Shari'a Law, an act of apostasy for which the death sentence is prescribed). Local officials ruled that the foster mother had "failed in her duty to preserve the girl's religion and should have tried to stop the baptism." Council officers subsequently barred the woman from foster parenting, her sole source of income.

This case was matched by that of Caroline Petrie, who was suspended from her post as a community nurse when she offered to pray for an elderly patient. (The public furor eventually led to Petrie's reinstatement.) In another case late last year, a registrar of marriages asked to be relieved of the duty of officiating at "gay marriages." She was refused and threatened with dismissal.

Jeremy Vine is a highly visible BBC broadcaster and a practicing Anglican. In a recent interview, Vine explained how difficult it had become to speak of his faith on air. It is, he claimed, now "socially unacceptable" to mention one's Christian faith in public. Society in Britain has become intolerant of the freedom to express the religious views that were "common currency thirty or forty years ago," Vine added. "The parameters of what you might call 'right thinking" are closing. Sadly, it is almost socially unacceptable to say you believe in God." All of which is unsurprising, given that last year Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC and a practicing Catholic, issued an edict stating that the BBC should treat Islam "more sensitively" than Christianity.

This is truly disturbing stuff. As we wrote the other day, history shows that nations which self-consciously jettison the Judeo-Christian heritage upon which they were built not infrequently collapse into moral anarchy and thence into oppression and tyranny.

Another unsettling aspect of this trend is that so many Americans think it would be just great if we followed Europe's example.

RLC

The Sky Is Falling. Really.

A reader once pointed out that we at Viewpoint, much like the MSM, seem to dwell disproportionately on bad news. I don't think that's true. After all, we regularly featured Good News from Iraq posts back when few could find any good news about Iraq. We've also reported on medical advances that promise to make our lives better, and we have even on occasion wished our readers merry Christmas. Nonetheless, we're sensitive to the charge that we're rivaling Glenn Beck for perpetual "gloom and doom."

Yet, having said all that, we still find this depressing report from the National Academy of Sciences irresistable.

It appears that, in fact, we're all doomed, and by the very thing that has made modern life so wonderful - electricity. More precisely, we're doomed by our failure to adequately protect our power grid against solar storms.

These excerpts will give you the gist of the report, but the whole thing makes fascinating reading - that is, if you're fascinated by reading about how civilization could come to an abrupt end and millions will die:

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

According to the NAS report, a severe space weather event in the US could induce ground currents that would knock out 300 key transformers within about 90 seconds, cutting off the power for more than 130 million people (see map). From that moment, the clock is ticking for America.

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

There is simply no electrically powered transport: no trains, underground or overground. Our just-in-time culture for delivery networks may represent the pinnacle of efficiency, but it means that supermarket shelves would empty very quickly - delivery trucks could only keep running until their tanks ran out of fuel, and there is no electricity to pump any more from the underground tanks at filling stations.

Back-up generators would run at pivotal sites - but only until their fuel ran out. For hospitals, that would mean about 72 hours of running a bare-bones, essential care only, service. After that, no more modern healthcare.

The truly shocking finding is that this whole situation would not improve for months, maybe years: melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. "From the surveys I've done, you might have a few spare transformers around, but installing a new one takes a well-trained crew a week or more," says Kappenman. "A major electrical utility might have one suitably trained crew, maybe two."

With no power for heating, cooling or refrigeration systems, people could begin to die within days. There is immediate danger for those who rely on medication. Lose power to New Jersey, for instance, and you have lost a major centre of production of pharmaceuticals for the entire US. Perishable medications such as insulin will soon be in short supply. "In the US alone there are a million people with diabetes," Kappenman says. "Shut down production, distribution and storage and you put all those lives at risk in very short order."

Actually the results of a severe solar storm are similar to the results from a single nuclear warhead detonated high over the continent to generate an electro-magnetic pulse (For more on EMP use our Search function and type in EMP). Anyway, check out the whole article sometime when you're feeling a sense that all's well with the world.

Now I have to go read some more about the global economic meltdown.

RLC

Political Orcs

Who does the left see as the biggest threat to their quest to keep their grip on government power and turn us into Sweden? The key to answering the question is to see at whom they've been aiming their fire and who is the target of their most despicable attacks. For a while it was Rush Limbaugh. Now it's Sarah Palin:

The people who are doing this to Governor Palin are shameless, unprincipled Machiavellian Leninists who are determined to destroy anyone who stands in their way. They don't care about the Constitution, they don't care about truth, they don't care about law, they care only about acquiring and keeping power. Here's what Lenin himself said in a speech in 1920:

"We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas that are outside class [socio-economic class] conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat."

The modern left and its tool the Democrat party have adopted Lenin's political pragmatism. For them whatever works is right. If it helps to neutralize a political threat to their power by hounding a good woman and her family with lawsuits, if it means ridiculing her because her daughter doesn't live by the values the mother does, if it means reporting every bit of embarrassing news about the family that can be dug up, then that's what they're going to do.

When power is your summum bonum you can justify almost any behavior, no matter how contemptible. Palin's persecutors are, in my opinion, the political equivalent of Tolkien's orcs in the film version of Lord of the Rings.

RLC

Overseas Contingencies

The Washington Post blog reports that the Pentagon has been advised that we must no longer refer to the global war on terror as the global war on terror:

The end of the Global War on Terror -- or at least the use of that phrase -- has been codified at the Pentagon. Reports that the phrase was being retired have been circulating for some time amongst senior administration officials, and this morning speechwriters and other staff were notified via this e-mail to use "Overseas Contingency Operation" instead.

"Overseas Contingency Operation" sounds like a project to deliver relief aid to some third world basketcase. And what, exactly, does the word "contingency" mean in this context, anyway? Why do bureaucrats feel the need to obfuscate everything they can until no one knows what the heck they're talking about? Pat Buchanan says the new bureaucratese reminds him of the old CIA term for killing the enemy. It was not called "killing," it was called "terminating with extreme prejudice." I don't know which formulation is a greater offense to intelligent people - the current Pentagon jargon or the old CIA construction.

Anyway, I was kind of getting used to calling the war on terror the Global War on Man-Caused Disasterists. I don't know why we can't just stick with that.

RLC

Happy Birthday, Flannery

If you're a cynic about human nature, if a wry smile flickers across your face when you're exposed to progressive flummery about the inherent goodness of man, if you think that life is indeed a tale told by an idiot and is mostly sad, if you have a deep appreciation for a writer who is able to paint word pictures with extraordinary artistry, and if you have a somewhat off-beat sense of humor, then Flannery O'Conner is your gal. I love her work, so you know what that says about me.

I'm not alone, though. Millions of others do, too, among whom is Ralph Wood of Baylor University. His brief essay on O'Conner on the anniversary of her birth (3/25/1925) is worth reading. He begins with this improbable opening:

Flannery O'Connor is an offensive writer. Readers who haven't dipped into her stories and books sometimes don't know where to begin with this author, who was born on this day in 1925.

It is almost impossible to read O'Connor without revulsion - so frequent are the deaths, so maniacal the characters, so uninviting the fictional world. There we encounter, for example, a club-footed delinquent who lies and steals because, he says, he's good at it; a little rich boy who drowns himself in search of the salvation his parents hold in contempt; a baptizing backwoods prophet who has spent time in an insane asylum and who deafened his own nephew with a shotgun blast; a failed white liberal writer who contracts a lifelong disease while seeking to celebrate a secular communion with black dairy workers; a mass-murdering misfit who guns down a complacent grandmother while complaining that Jesus has "thown" everything off balance; and a self-satisfied farm wife who thanks Jesus daily for making her both white and prosperous - until she is slugged in the head with a psychology textbook thrown by a Wellesley student.

All true, all true, and yet she's the best short story writer I've ever read. Happy birthday, Flannery. I'm sure the angels are amused by your wit and amazed at your wisdom.

RLC

The Coming Death Match

Strategy Page offers this assessment of the situation existing between Israel and Gaza:

The deadlock continues, with Hamas refusing to compromise on its goals of destroying Israel and driving Jews from the region. Even though nearly three billion dollars in aid is being offered if Hamas will make peace, Hamas refuses to do so. Hamas is on a Mission From God, and acts the part. Negotiations over the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for three years, also broke down (over the issue of how many senior terrorists would be released, and how many would be released outside if Gaza or the West Bank). In response to this, Israel arrested ten Hamas leaders in the West Bank, and restricted visitors and packages for 11,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel has also continued its operations against terrorist group leaders in Gaza (where they are killed by missiles) and the West Bank (where they are taken alive, if possible.)

Israeli military and intelligence officials talk openly of "finishing" the military operations against Hamas. The January 18 ceasefire is considered just that, and it's expected that Hamas intransigence during any negotiations will result in a deadlock and the resumption of fighting. The second round is expected to be a death match, with no end until the Hamas leadership is captured or killed, and Hamas weapons (especially the thousands of rockets) captured or destroyed.

Israel now believes that Hezbollah and Hamas have over 50,000 rockets in place, to fire on Israel. Most of these rockets are small (under 100 pounds, with a range of under ten kilometers). Most of the rockets are controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and can only reach largely Arab communities in northern Israel.

Eliminating Hamas is what the Israelis should have done the first time around, and why they didn't is a mystery. Their dilatory policy has only dragged out the inevitable and increased the suffering of the Palestinian people.

RLC

Begins With H

Democrats are so angry with AIG for awarding large bonuses to its executives that they passed a law that taxes those bonuses at a rate of 90% unless the recipients voluntarily return them. Wouldn't it set a better example and send a positive message to beleaguered taxpayers if the politicians who received contributions from AIG also returned those contributions?

For starters how about if President Obama returned the $110,332 in campaign contributions he received from AIG. Senator Dodd, who first amended the stimulus bill to allow for those executive bonuses and then launched a tirade against AIG for granting them, has himself collected $281,038 in campaign contributions from AIG. Senator Chuck Schumer, another Democrat outraged by the bonuses, was the recipient of $111,875.

While these and others of our political class pontificate on the wickedness of accepting multi-million dollar bonuses when the company needs all the help it can get and is receiving taxpayer-funded bailouts to keep them afloat, they nevertheless seem to have no intention of returning their own "bonuses."

There's a word for this that begins with "h" and ends in "y," and it's not "happy."

RLC

Runaway Train

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tells an audience comprised in part of illegal aliens that they are patriots and those who want immigration laws enforced are "unAmerican." If you think this sounds perverse you're not alone:

Now no one will ever mistake Ms Pelosi for either a deep thinker or a stateswoman, but her shameless pandering and blithe acceptance of a flood of illegals pouring into the country, imposing enormous burdens on communities and sucking up jobs while many Americans are losing theirs, reveals what I think is a secret among the political cognoscenti that no one is really talking about.

Why do so few in government care to stop illegal immigration despite the violence, crime and economic stress it's imposing on many of our cities and towns? Perhaps it has to do with the parlous future of social security and medicare. Quite simply, neither of these programs is sustainable. They're ponzi schemes built on the assumption that the workforce and economy will continue to grow, but that assumption is very doubtful. The economy looks to be entering a period of stagnation that could last well into the foreseeable future while at the same time boomers are moving into their retirement years, and the population of taxpayers paying into these systems is diminishing. This confluence makes the collapse of social security and medicare seem inevitable. Without an influx of workers both systems will be bankrupt within a decade or so, and that was before the Obama administration piled trillions of dollars of debt on the backs of a dwindling number of taxpayers.

To get an idea of the magnitude of the debt problem, by the way, see this.

At any rate, a growing population is thought by many to be our only hope of deferring calamity for a couple of generations, and the only way our population is going to grow is to let in millions of immigrants. Our irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies have put us on a runaway train that's hurtling downhill. About all we can do to slow it down a little is drag our heels by opening our borders and essentially stretching Mexico's boundary northward to Canada.

Great solution. I guess we better hope that those illegal immigrants are indeed patriots because if Washington has its way we're going to have a lot of them.

RLC

Model Railroaders

So maybe you like model trains and even built a layout of your own. If so, you'll find this pretty amazing:

There's more explanation of this display here.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

RLC

Brief History of the Politicization of Iraq

David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at FrontPage Mag want to insure that the American people don't forget the history of the Democratic party's opposition to the Iraq War over the past five years. Their essay is worth quoting at length:

On this sixth anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq, there is finally a consensus among supporters and opponents that we've won the war. The surge that Bush launched and Democrats opposed has been successful and, as a result, Iraq has become a Middle Eastern democracy, an anti-terrorist regime, and an American ally.

It would be hard to imagine a more remarkable turnabout or a more comprehensive repudiation of conventional political wisdom. Yet this has not led to a comparable reappraisal by critics of the war of their previous attacks, or to any mea culpas by Democrats who launched a scorched earth campaign against the president who led it, and continued it for five years while the war dragged on.

The Democratic attacks on the war described America's commander-in-chief as a liar who misled his country and sent American soldiers to die in a conflict that was unnecessary, illegal and unjust. This made prosecution of the war incalculably harder while strengthening the resolve of our enemies to defeat us. It is time to re-evaluate the words and actions of the war's opponents in the stark light of a history that proved them wrong.

In the fall of 2002, a majority of Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in voting to authorize President Bush to use force to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein. In July 2003, only three months after Saddam had been removed, the Democratic National Committee launched a national campaign which accused President Bush of lying in order to trick Democrats into voting for the war. It was the beginning of a five-year campaign designed to paint the president as the liar-in-chief and America as a criminal aggressor, and the military occupier of a poor country that had not attacked us.

What had changed in the intervening three months to turn Democrats so vehemently against the war they had authorized? The answer can only be found in domestic politics. In those three months, an unknown antiwar candidate named Howard Dean had taken the lead in the primary polls and was looking like a shoe-in for the Democratic presidential nomination. As a result rival candidates who had voted for the war, including eventual nominees Kerry and Edwards, changed their positions 180 degrees and joined the attacks on President Bush.

Naturally, the Democrats couldn't admit their attacks were motivated by crass political calculations. Instead, they claimed that they had been deceived by the White House which had manipulated the intelligence on Iraq, persuading them to support the war on false premises.

This allegation was in fact the biggest lie of the war, since Democrats had full access to all U.S. intelligence on Iraq through their seats on the congressional intelligence committees. This intelligence was available to them, in advance of their vote to authorize the use of force. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats added other false charges -- that troops "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," were "terrorizing kids and...women," and had committed atrocities comparable to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime."

They rejoiced when news reporters leaked information about national security programs designed to combat the terrorists - and thus destroyed them. They held up funding for American soldiers on the battlefield, attempted to cut off all funding, and when that failed, tried to tie funding to a timeline that would ensure America's defeat. They openly accused uniformed officers like General David Petraeus of lying about conditions on the ground and hoped against hope that "this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything."

It's interesting to me that the Democrats' modus operandi seems to be to approve something and then, when it becomes politically expedient, to act as if they were opposed and outraged all along. This is what they did with corporate bonuses, for example, and its what they did with Bush and the Iraq war. No one will ever mistake these guys for profiles in political courage.

It's also interesting to me that ever since it became clear that the war was essentially over, that we had won, and that Bush had largely been vindicated, we've heard next to nothing about Iraq in our media. They don't want to remind people, I guess, how terribly wrong they were about it.

RLC

Inching Toward the Exits

When Frank Rich of the New York Times is casting nervous glances toward the lifeboat you know the USS Obama is in serious trouble. Rich thinks that Obama may well be having his "Katrina Moment," the moment when Bush's alleged dithering started his approval ratings on a long downward trajectory.

Rich is terrified that the same thing might be happening to Obama because of the mess at AIG and CitiGroup:

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country's surge of populist rage could devour the president's best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn't get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public's revulsion at the moneyed insiders' culture illuminated by Daschle's post-Senate career. Yet last week's events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

The rest of his column is a plea for the administration to get its act together - which it clearly hasn't - because if they don't not only will we suffer the economic consequences but, worse than that, we'll find ourselves delivered into the hands of the evil Republicans:

As the nation's anger rose last week, the president took responsibility for what's happening on his watch - more than he needed to, given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words. To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republican opposition whose only known economic program is to reject job-creating stimulus spending and root for Obama and, by extension, the country to fail. With all due deference to Ponzi schemers from Madoff to A.I.G., this would be the biggest outrage of them all.

This is vintage Rich. He can never resist deliberately misrepresenting the political opposition in order to make rhetorical hay. But never mind. The news in this column is that even Obama's most steadfast supporters are, barely two months into the administration, inching toward the exits. That is not a good sign.

RLC

No Place to Hide

According to the LA Times the Obama administration is continuing the Bush policy of attacking al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. The Bush policy underwent an important revision last summer and since then has been very successful in severely weakening al Qaeda.

Here are some excerpts from the Times' article:

An intense, six-month campaign of Predator strikes in Pakistan has taken such a toll on Al Qaeda that militants have begun turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust, U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials say.

The pace of the Predator attacks has accelerated dramatically since August, when the Bush administration made a previously undisclosed decision to abandon the practice of obtaining permission from the Pakistani government before launching missiles from the unmanned aircraft.

Because of its success, the Obama administration is set to continue the accelerated campaign despite civilian casualties that have fueled anti-U.S. sentiment and prompted protests from the Pakistani government.

"This last year has been a very hard year for them," a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said of al Qaeda militants, whose operations he tracks in northwest Pakistan. "They're losing a bunch of their better leaders. But more importantly, at this point they're wondering who's next."

U.S. intelligence officials said they see clear signs that the Predator strikes are sowing distrust within Al Qaeda. "They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible" for security breaches, the senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said, discussing intelligence assessments on condition of anonymity. "People are showing up dead or disappearing."

But the Predator campaign has depleted the organization's operational tier. Many of the dead are longtime loyalists who had worked alongside Bin Laden and were part of the network's hasty migration into Pakistan in 2001 after U.S.-led forces invaded neighboring Afghanistan. They are being replaced by less experienced recruits who have had little, if any, history with Bin Laden and Zawahiri.

The offensive has been aided by technological advances and an expansion of the CIA's Predator fleet. The drones take off and land at military airstrips in Pakistan, but are operated by CIA pilots in the United States. Some of the pilots -- who also pull the triggers on missiles -- are contractors hired by the agency, former officials said.

The Bush administration had been constrained by its close ties with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who argued against aggressive U.S. action. But by last summer, after a series of disrupted terrorist plots in Europe had been traced to Pakistan, there were calls for a new approach.

The breaking point came when Musharraf was forced to resign mid-August, officials said. Within days, President Bush had approved the new rules: Rather than requiring Pakistan's permission to order a Predator strike, the agency was allowed to shoot first.

The success of the Predator campaign has prompted some counter-terrorism officials to speak of a post-Al Qaeda era in which its regional affiliates -- in North Africa and elsewhere -- are all that remain after the center collapses.

"You can imagine a horizon in which Al Qaeda proper no longer exists," said Juan Zarate, former counter-terrorism advisor to Bush. "If you were to continue on this pace, and get No. 1 and No. 2, Al Qaeda is dead. You can't resuscitate that organization as we know it without its senior leadership."

There are more details at the link. I believe President Obama is doing the right thing by pursuing this course of action, but I have to wonder - is this what the pacifist left had in mind when they cast their troth with the young Senator from Chicago?

RLC

Bailing Out the Rich

Thomas Sowell notes that the administration's mortgage bailout plan would rescue people defaulting on mortgages valued upwards of $729,000. Think about that.

Compassion is helping those less fortunate, but for the President compassion means you helping those much more fortunate, or irresponsible, than you. How many of us would even think of buying a house for three quarters of a million dollars?

Maybe you live in a modest home or in an apartment because you can't afford a home. No matter. You're required to help those who purchased a $730 thousand dollar house, but who defaulted on their payments, stay in their home. This is evidently the current administration's idea of sharing the burden.

Bush was severely criticized for giving tax cuts to people who pay taxes, i.e. the top 60% or so of wage earners. We were told that this amounted to a transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the rich. This was, of course, false. No wealth was transferred. People were simply allowed to keep more of what they earned.

To see a real transfer of wealth from the middle class to the upper class one should look at Obama's mortgage bailout plan.

RLC

Atheism and the French Terror

We've sometimes argued here that a nation that spurns the Judeo-Christian God leaves itself no ground upon which to stand when making moral judgments. There may be the odd exception, of course, but a state whose moral pilings are not sunk into Divine law will sooner or later subside into dissolution and avarice and perhaps into violence and bloodthirstiness. Moreover, the more self-consciously secular or atheistic a nation becomes the deeper it will descend into this amoral mire. At least this has been the history of the twentieth century, but it's not just a phenomenon of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of the slide into degeneracy that results from a conscious rejection of a theistic foundation for morality is the terror that followed the French Revolution of 1789.

The revolutionaries were uncompromising atheists intent on fulfilling the hope attributed to the French philosopher Denis Diderot who was said to have exclaimed that he longed to see the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Inspired by men like Diderot and Rousseau the French set about trying to establish a state in which the influence of the Church was expunged and priests were executed. The horror that followed the Revolution of 1789 is hard to imagine. Lacking any transcendent constraint upon their hatreds and passions the French authorities wallowed in an orgy of horrific bloodshed.

In the course of nine months some 16,000 men, women, children, and even infants were sent to the guillotine. Some 40,000 more died as a result of being whipped, branded, broken on the wheel, mutilated, or otherwise abused. On one day 800 people were hacked to death, and on another 500 children were taken to a meadow where they were systematically clubbed to death. River barges were laden with people and pushed out into the river where they were sunk, drowning all on board.

The 20th century witnessed similar horrors perpetrated by communists who, in the name of state atheism, murdered over 100 million people, and atheistic or pantheistic Nazis who in the name of socialism and racial purity murdered another 6 million. The fruit of a consistent secularism is a "might-makes-right" ethic, which leads to the dehumanization of the other, which, in turn, leads to the guillotine and the abattoir.

Those who despise theism and the Church and wish to be rid of them need to give serious thought to exactly what would likely take their place.

RLC

Obamateur Hour

You'll recall, perhaps, that upon his recent visit to our shores British Prime Minister Gordon Brown presented President Obama and his family several gifts that fairly shimmered with historic significance and which evinced elaborate consideration and preparation. President Obama, for his part, presented the British Prime Minister with a set of classic movie DVDs that could have been purchased at Wal-Mart - and Brown doesn't even watch movies all that much.

Now we find out that the diplomatic gaffe is even worse than we thought. The DVDs, it happens, don't work in British machines.

Mark Steyn pokes a little fun at what he calls the "Obamateur Hour" crowd at the White House, and over at Powerline John Hinderaker asks the obvious question:

Can you imagine the Democrats' reaction if the Bush White House had given a European head of state a set of DVDs that can only be played on North American machines? It would have been conclusive proof of Bush's provincialism, lack of sensitivity to our allies' sensibilities, ignorance of the wider world, techno incompetence, failure to appreciate the superiority of European civilization, blah blah blah. That's how it would have been reported and editorialized on in every newspaper. So let's check tomorrow's papers and see whether that's how Obama's gaffe is covered. Or whether it's covered at all.

The media will doubtless downplay the blunder, just as they downplayed Secretary Clinton's embarrassing "reset" button blooper. This is, after all, no longer the Bush White House. No need, now that Bush is gone, to focus the country's attention on troubling signs of incompetence in the White House.

Actually, it's hard to fault the media for their inattention to the appalling lack of thought put into the Brown gift. The ongoing circus up the street on Capitol Hill is much too diverting to dwell on the administration's diplomatic lassitude. For sheer entertainment value it's hard to beat listening to the Democrats in Congress fulminating against corporate CEOs for handing out the bonuses the Democrats told them they could have in the first place. The "Obamateur Hour" is being played out at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, it appears, and lots of places in between.

Speaking of which, when is Treasury secretary Geithner going to get a staff?

RLC

Letter to the President

Somehow this letter to President Obama found its way into my mailbox:

Dear President Obama,

Thank you for helping my neighbors with their mortgage payments. You know the ones down the street, who in the good times refinanced their house several times and bought SUV's, ATV's, RV's, a pool, a big screen TV, two Wave Runners and a Harley. But I was wondering, since I am paying my mortgage and theirs, could you arrange for me to borrow the Harley now and then?

Richard Ford

Queen Creek, AZ

P.S. They also need help with their credit cards, when do you want me to start making those payments?

P.P.S. I almost forgot - they didn't file their income tax return this year. Should I go ahead and file for them or will you be appointing them to cabinet posts?

Pretty funny.

RLC