In Over His Head Or Just Tired?

Paul Rahe ponders whether the President is tired or just dispirited by the dawning realization that he's simply not up to the demands of the office to which he was elected:

In a recent puff piece, The New York Times reports that our President is tired. This is not the first such report. Back in May, when he treated England's Gordon Brown so shabbily, the excuse given - according to The Daily Telegraph - was that wrestling with the economic crisis had left Barack Obama too exhausted to be able to focus on foreign affairs.

Barack Obama may be genuinely tired, and he may be depressed as well. He certainly has warrant. In public, he may claim that he deserves a B+ for his first year in office, but the polling data suggests that he has earned a failing mark, and he has to know better.

[I]f Barack Obama harbored any doubts as to whether he was leading his party off a cliff, William Daley - the brains behind the Chicago machine - put these doubts to rest in the op-ed that he published on Christmas Eve in The Washington Post, warning that, if the Democrats did not plot "a more centrist course," they would "risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come."

Rahe writes a very compelling piece, and I commend it to you.

There is much evidence which I think supports the conclusion that Mr. Obama needed a lot more time in government before assuming the responsibilities of the presidency, but, having said that, I think some of the criticism from his opponents on the right, particularly in terms of his prosecution of the war on terrorism, is a bit unfair. I don't think all of it is, a lot of it is warranted, but I do think some of it is petty and childish.

To take a case in point, I tuned in several times the other day to the Sean Hannity radio show, and every time I listened, Hannity, in his characteristic unpleasantly shrill manner, was raking President Obama over the coals because the boxer shorts bomber almost succeeded, and because Obama didn't respond to this would-be attack for several days. This criticism struck me as unfair, trite, and mean-spirited all at once.

People like Hannity sometimes justify hammering away at the President on such minor points by noting that President Bush was subjected to much worse treatment from the Left. Yes, of course he was, but just because the Left often acted like imbeciles for the eight years of the Bush presidency that's not a reason why the Right should do the same now.

When conservatives train their guns on every little slip - no matter how real or imaginary - they lose credibility with those who are not committed to their views (and even many who are). People like Hannity make it inevitable that legitimate criticisms of the Obama presidency will be shrugged off as just more petty "right-wing Obama bashing." Conservatives look hypocritical, for example, when they fume about the Obama administration trying the Nigerian terrorist in a civilian, rather than a military, court after they had said nothing about the Bush administration doing the same thing with the "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid.

Conservatives also make themselves look silly and unserious when they pummel Mr. Obama without extending to him the same benefit of the doubt they would have extended to Mr. Bush. They should avoid exhibiting the same tawdry, mindless behavior we saw from the Left for most of the last decade, and, instead of partisan nit-picking, conservatives should save their fire for things that really matter. It's not as if this presidency hasn't provided enough legitimate targets out there at which to aim.

RLC

Mind and Brains

One of the major objections to the notion that we possess an immaterial mind that somehow works in concert with our material brain is that interaction between two radically different substances is incomprehensible. We can comprehend how one material thing can interact with another because we see it all the time, the materialist says, but how can an immaterial thing like mind cause an effect in a material thing like a brain? Since the dualist cannot explain how this is possible their belief in mind/brain interactionism is thereby believed to be discredited.

As physicist Stephen Barr points out in a book review in the January First Things (subscription only), however, few who pose this objection to dualism stop to ask how it is that anything interacts with anything else. The materialist (one who believes that matter is all there is) assumes that matter can interact with matter, but if you ask a materialist to actually explain the interaction you draw a blank.

The same explanatory problem confronting the dualist confronts the materialist whenever he tries to understand how two material objects interact or how a force like magnetism interacts with matter, or how matter interacts with space. We simply don't know how these phenomena take place.

Barr writes:

Material bodies are made up of electrically charged particles that interact with each other through the mediation of electromagnetic fields: The charged particles affect the fields and the fields affect the particles. By what "means" or "mechanism" this happens physics does not say. It simply says that when electromagnetic fields are present, the charges are, in fact, affected as described by a certain equation; and when the charges are present the fields are affected as described by another equation. In other words, physics posits two types of entities and mathematically describes, but does not otherwise explain, their influence on each other.

Gravity poses the same problem. We have no idea how gravity "pulls" objects toward a massive body, or, for that matter, how a massive body produces gravity in the first place, or even what gravity is. If we fall back on the Einsteinian explanation that gravity is simply the bending of space around a material object then we've simply pushed the problem back a step. How, it can be asked, do material bodies bend space? If space is essentially "nothing" how is it affected by a "something" in its midst?

The materialist has no answer, but that doesn't stop him from believing it nor from disparaging the dualist for thinking that mind and brains interact. Pretty ironic, don't you think?

RLC

Hey, Let's Do Away With Science Class

What do people who are convinced that a just society is one in which there are no disparities between citizens do when faced with such disparities? Consider the plans of a public high school in Berkeley. Distraught over the fact that the achievement of the school's black students is low compared to that of other racial groups and dismayed by the fact that advanced science classes are populated mostly by whites, the Berkeley wiseheads have decided that the best solution is to eliminate challenging science classes.

I know this sounds like something you'd see in a Monty Python skit, but apparently it's true. Thomas Lifson fills us in via a piece at American Thinker:

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

According to the muddled thinking on display at the Berkeley school the best way to help blacks is to limit opportunities for everyone. If one group is performing above average and another below average well, then, there must be institutional racism afoot. Let's make everyone the same by eliminating those courses dominated by whites and in which blacks struggle. If some excel while others languish the righteous approach is to bring everyone down to the level of the least able.

Liberal egalitarianism is rarely so blunt or obvious. Lifson continues:

Aside from the repulsive racism of this move, the broader issue to be considered is whether society is better-served by cutting down the achievers and investing in the stragglers -- or whether everyone benefits from the achievements of those who apply themselves enough to excel. I have no hesitation in saying that I am in the latter camp. How does it benefit anyone to have an America made up of mediocre minds?

I wonder what's next. Are the Berkeley docents going to propose eliminating those sports teams dominated by blacks? Are they going to eliminate math classes in which whites and Asians excel relative to blacks? Are they going to cancel AP courses in general which tend to be disproportionately white and Asian? Perhaps they might carry the logic of their proposal to its conclusion and eliminate school altogether since statistics show black academic achievement in our society lagging well behind that of other groups no matter what the curriculum might be.

The argument might run thus: School just sets blacks up for failure; the failure of one group while others succeed is damaging to the unsuccessful group's self-esteem; therefore let's just do away with academics altogether. This chain of reasoning, would no doubt make perfect sense in certain progressive precincts.

Perhaps you are appalled by the sheer lunacy of what the Berkelians propose but, in fact, it's the sort of thing to which liberal assumptions about race and class frequently lead us.

RLC

Standing Against the Utopians

You may not have ever heard of Jean Francois Revel, but you would do well to make his posthumous acquaintance. Revel was (he died four years ago) a French intellectual who was perhaps the greatest French defender of American democracy and capitalism since Tocqueville.

In a century in which it was fashionable for French intellectuals like Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida to embrace socialism and disdain the bourgois capitalism of the United States, and indeed to disdain the United States itself, Revel stood stout against the wooly-headed utopianisms of his leftist peers. His books included How Democracies Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation, Anti-Americanism, Without Marx or Jesus, and The Last Exit to Utopia.

This last work, written in 1999, has recently been translated into English and is reviewed in City Journal by Guy Sorman. Sorman writes:

[Revel] could never solve the ultimate puzzle of the Left's blindness, however: why would educated scholars elevate utopian fantasy above reality? The failures of the Soviet Union, its mass cruelties, had been known in the West since the 1930s: Andr� Gide had denounced them in his book, Return from the USSR. Scholars and journalists in the West did not need to wait for Solzhenitsyn to learn about the existence of the Gulag. Yet these truths had little consequence. Leftist intellectuals rationalized any bad news by explaining that the Soviet Union did not practice "real socialism." After the Berlin Wall came down, many on the left took the event not as a rejection of socialism but as an opportunity at last to build true socialism, free of Russian perversion.

Revel tried to explain this utopian yearning through Rousseau's influential doctrine: man was inherently good, society bad. Therefore, as Rousseau had it, reforming society-starting with the suppression of private property-would allow man's fundamentally good nature to shine forth. Another source of the utopian fantasy, he believed, came from the European Catholic canon: good intentions count most. Even after learning that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich killed approximately the same number of their own citizens, leftist intellectuals rejected any comparison between the two regimes; after all, the Soviets' intentions were better than the Nazis', and intentions trump results. Revel could barely contain his ire at leftist scholars who refused to discuss the matter honestly.

He believed, with excessive optimism, that reasoning could eventually persuade socialists that they were wrong. His philosophical superiority was rooted in this commitment to reason, but his political weakness was to underestimate the power of myths, ideologies, and religions in shaping (and hardening) people's views.

Revel's books are thus deeply relevant to the current American debate on the future role of government: should good intentions (like "health care for all") take precedence over the predictable bad results of such measures? Should political myths (the benevolent state) be fought with facts, or by promoting counter-myths (like the libertarian utopia)? America's loud and disgruntled demonstrators, from universal health-care activists to Tea Partiers, would benefit from an encounter with this great defender of the free society.

The utopian impulse is very much alive in the contemporary edition of the Democratic party, but we must not forget that such impulses have invariably led to the loss of freedom and not infrequently to oppression. It was Revel's great contribution to western civilization that he would not allow the Left to promote their collectivist, dehumanizing schemes unchallenged.

RLC

Good Advice, Mostly

Brit Hume offers some good advice to Tiger Woods on Fox News Sunday, but I have one reservation:

My concern is with Brit's assertion that Tiger can make a complete recovery by turning his life over to Christ. I'm not sure what he means by "complete recovery," but if he means that Tiger can eventually work his way back to the top of the golf world and recover his family as if nothing ever happened, I don't think that's how things work. Our choices, our conduct, have consequences that cannot be erased just because we have turned our life around. Even if Woods followed Hume's advice he'll still have to live with the hurt and devastation he's caused his family and admirers. He still has to live with the fact that it will be very hard for anyone close to him ever to trust him again. He still has to live with the fact that he's become a butt of jokes which will be around for a decade or more. He still has to live with the damage he's done to his reputation.

There is redemption in Christianity to be sure, but many who have all but wrecked their lives and subsequently found forgiveness in Christ have also found their lives reoriented in directions they never would have anticipated. Chuck Colson comes to mind. It may be that part of Tiger's redemption is that he never golfs competitively again, but that, like Colson, he finds himself moving on a path of service rather than a path of personal financial success.

In other words, Hume is right that Woods' best hope is in the life-changing power of the Gospel, but no one should think that just because one has been rescued from a burning building that their own burns will be miraculously healed. Instead, we often have to learn to live with their pain even as we are filled with gratitude that we were rescued before we were completely destroyed.

RLC

Let's All Grow Up

In the company of friends on New Year's Eve I asked if I was wrong to think that our national media was acting reprehensibly in reporting on Tiger Woods' personal life. What business is it of anyone's what he does, I asked? He's not paid by tax dollars, he's not accountable to the people, what right does the media have to humiliate him by reporting on the sordid details of his dalliances with women other than his wife? What right do they have to humiliate Woods' wife and children by exposing their husband and father as a sex-addicted philanderer?

Someone in the group replied that that's just what those people do, they see it as their mission in life to destroy people's reputations and lives by publicizing personal details about them to a public which is only too eager to revel in the scandal and to make them the butt of jokes and mockery. The media feeds our, and their, basest instincts, and we lap it up like a cat at the milk bowl. It makes some in the media, and many of their subscribers, feel better to know that other people are no better, and maybe a lot worse, than they are. It confers a feeling of moral superiority on the viewer and reader to see the famous and the popular brought low.

Woods' behavior, as awful as it was, is none of the media's business and none of our business. Eliot Spitzer's was. Mark Sanford's was. Max Baucus' was. John Edwards' was. Bill Clinton's was. These are people who were, in one way or another, misbehaving on the public's dime. Woods wasn't. The media have no more right to probe into his life than they had the right to malign Joe the Plumber or embarrass Sarah Palin's daughter.

There are so many stories that need to be reported, but the media, at least the left-leaning media, ignores them in favor of satisfying their fixation on trying to uncover dirt on whoever they think they may be able to destroy. Compared to the reporting on Tiger Woods how many stories have appeared on the nightly news explaining exactly what's in the health care bills? How many accounts have been written in newspapers about President Obama's "safe schools czar," the execrable Kevin Jennings? How much reporting has there been in the dominant media on the fraudulent manipulation of data, and the attempt to silence opposition, by global warming climatologists?

When did journalists abandon the idea that their profession, their calling, was to inform and edify the American public about things that really matter? When did news media professionals begin to think that their responsibility was not to educate but to titillate and gossip? It seems that many journalists no longer aspire to expose corruption in high places. Rather they give the impression that their dream story would be to report that Tiger Woods' latest mistress was Sarah Palin's daughter and that their tryst took place at Dick Cheney's ranch.

That, it too often seems, is too many journalists' idea of a blockbuster story.

RLC

Another Blow to the Global Warmists

One of the arguments that has been used to support the claim that humans are causing the earth's climate to change goes something like this:

The earth is warming as evidenced by retreating glaciers. Increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by humans, could account for that warming. We know that gases like carbon dioxide have been produced in greater quantities in the last two centuries by human activity. Therefore, human activity must be causing the earth to warm.

A study reported in Science News, however, kicks the props out from under this argument. The study shows that, despite increases in CO2 production since the industrial revolution, the accumulated CO2 in the earth's atmosphere has not changed in the last 160 years and thus cannot be the cause of whatever climate change there has been over that span:

To assess whether the airborne fraction [of CO2] is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data. In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

The CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere is reabsorbed by green plants, particularly algae in the oceans. If Knorr's findings are correct it seems that the earth has a far greater capacity to handle the carbon dioxide load than had previously been thought. Before we spend trillions of dollars to fix a problem that doesn't exist, i.e. overloading the atmosphere with CO2, perhaps we should look elsewhere for the cause of our retreating glaciers.

RLC

Robin Goes to Mass

We mentioned in a post the other day the experience of Robin of Berkeley who tried to find a church at which to worship on Christmas eve. Well, after her disappointing experience with liberal Episcopalians, Robin, who's a middle-aged psychotherapist and former atheistic, socialist, Jewish woman, finally found what she was looking for.

It's a good story and funny.

RLC

How Can This Be?

One liberal shibboleth often accepted without much analysis is that in order to reduce violent crime we have to limit the sales of firearms to citizens. This may seem to make sense in some superficial way, but whenever one looks at the data, as John Lott does in More Guns, Less Crime, it turns out that violent crime actually diminishes in environments in which citizens are armed.

This is completely counterintuitive to those who believe that the solution to every problem is to limit the freedoms of those who act responsibly, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Criminals do a subliminal risk/benefit analysis when they pick their prey. By raising the uncertainty level in the criminal's mind as to whether a potential victim may be armed, he may decide that the risk outweighs the potential benefit and think better of attacking his victim. If the criminal misjudges the risk and does attempt the crime his chances of success are diminished when the victim is armed - a fact which could deter other thugs who hear of the misfortunes suffered by their acquaintances who picked on the wrong target.

As evidence that this is not just speculative theorizing I adduce this interesting data from an article on an NRA website:

Last week, the FBI issued its preliminary 2009 crime report, showing that the number of murders in the first half of 2009 decreased 10 percent compared to the first half of 2008. If the trend holds for the remainder of 2009, it will be the single greatest one-year decrease in the number of murders since at least 1960, the earliest year for which national data are available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Also, the per capita murder rate for 2009 will be 51 percent lower than the all-time high recorded in 1991, and it will be the lowest rate since 1963-a 46-year low. Final figures for 2009 will be released by the FBI next year.

According to gun control supporter dogma-"more guns means more crime"-the number of privately owned firearms must have decreased 10 percent in 2009. To the contrary, however, the number rose between 1.5 and 2 percent, to an all-time high. For the better part of the last 15 months, firearms, ammunition, and "large" ammunition magazines have been sold in what appear to be record quantities. And, the firearms that were most commonly purchased in 2009 are those that gun control supporters most want to be banned-AR-15s, similar semi-automatic rifles, and handguns designed for defense.

Whether or not there really is an inverse correlation between gun purchases and violent crime, the fact is that the statistics simply do not support the belief that there's a direct correlation between them.

Parenthetically, a gun dealer of my acquaintance told me a few months after the 2008 election that sales of firearms were booming. People were afraid that the Obama administration would seek to make gun purchases either difficult or impossible, and they wanted to make sure they didn't wait until it was too late to buy their weapons. He went on to say that had he known what a boon Obama's election would have been to his business he would have voted for him himself.

RLC

A Better Way to Do Health Care Reform

Ronald Bailey at Reason offers an outline of what market-based health care might look like. Here's part of it:

The typical American might purchase high-deductible insurance policies that cover expensive treatments for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, AIDS, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis, as well as the catastrophic consequences of accidents. Coverage would also include expensive treatments such as heart surgery, organ transplants, dialysis, and radiation therapy. In addition, we'd be able to buy health status insurance that would guarantee that we could purchase insurance at reasonable prices in the future.

Such policies are available already. The online clearinghouse eHealthInsurance pulls a quote of $131 per month from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield for a single 55-year-old male with a $3,000 annual deductible, no co-payment after the deductible, reasonable pharmaceutical benefits, and lifetime maximum benefits of $7 million, with an option for health savings accounts. (With such accounts, consumers make annual tax-deductible contributions, then take tax-free withdrawals to pay for uninsured medical costs.) That was the cheapest plan, but more than 80 other insurance policies were available. As deductibles went down, of course, the prices went up.

A lot of routine care could be handled through retail health clinics located in shopping malls, drug store chains, and megastores. Such centers would be staffed not with physicians but with nurse practitioners or other qualified personnel. Consumers generally would pay for routine, everyday transactions directly out of their health savings accounts.

As has been suggested by others, perhaps health insurance should be more like auto insurance. We expect our health insurance to cover everything from prescription drugs to doctor visits for the flu, but we don't expect such routine maintenance for our car to be covered by our auto insurance. We buy auto insurance in the case that we have a catastrophic accident, not to cover state inspections or to have a fuel pump replaced.

By placing the responsibility for purchasing insurance on the individual consumer rather than on employers the employee could be given the cost of their insurance otherwise withheld in their pay check, they would have portability since they wouldn't lose coverage if they switched jobs or lost their job, and employers would benefit by having more money available to them to hire more employees.

Ideas like this are at least worth looking into, but they're not going to be popular in Washington because they wouldn't allow the government camel to get its nose inside the tent of our health care.

RLC

The New Year

As 2010 gets under way we urge all of our readers to pray for our country and our leaders throughout the year.

Pundits are fond of declaring a particular time or election to be the most crucial in decades. After a while such claims sound a bit exaggerated, but without wishing to overstate matters I do think 2010 may well be a very critical year for our nation.

Decisions will be made by our leaders that could alter this country forever. Unless there's a change in philosophy and direction in 2010 we and our children will be saddled with enormous debt and crushing taxes. As our debts come due, the government is going to have to print more money to pay our creditors thus inflating the currency and making everyone poorer.

If either of the health care reform bills currently in Congress eventually become law we will, if the experience of other countries is any guide, witness the beginning of a deterioration in the quality and availability of our health care.

If cap and trade legislation becomes policy many observers believe energy costs and unemployment will both go up.

If immigration reform results in an amnesty for illegal aliens we'll almost certainly get more of them. Fewer jobs will be available to Americans looking for work, and states like Arizona and California, already groaning under the burden of trying to accommodate millions of poor immigrants, will be crushed by the demands placed upon schools, hospitals, social agencies, and police forces by the influx.

Whether 2010 is the most critical year in our history or not I would not even venture to speculate, but it certainly has the potential to be a watershed in the American experiment.

Let us pray that our leaders in Washington make wise decisions and that American citizens make wise decisions when they go to the ballot box in November.

May you and those you love have a healthy, safe, and fulfilling 2010.

Dick and Bill

2009 Booklist

My reading this year was broadened by my participation in a book club that consists of a group of eight men whose ages range from late twenties to early sixties. Such a group is bound to represent a diversity of reading interests and tastes, and so I found myself reading works I probably never would have picked up on my own (and some I probably wouldn't pick up again).

At any rate, here's a list of books that I managed to complete in 2009. I list them without giving an evaluation because I don't like to give a blanket recommendation of books. Even more than movies, a book requires a considerable investment in time and effort, and more than with films, I think, the reader usually has to have an interest in the topic to find a book worthwhile. This is especially so if the book is non-fiction, as are many of the entries on this list.

So here without comment is my reading list for 2009:

• In Hovering Flight - Joyce Hinnefeld
• Faith and Culture Devotional - Kullberg and Arrington, eds.
• A Thousand Splendid Suns - Kaled Hosseini
• Quantum Enigma - Rosenbloom and Kuttner
• The Showdown - Ted Dekker
• Celebrate Liberty - Dan Burton
• Ten Big Lies about America - Michael Medved
• Divine Hiddenness - Howard-Snyder and Moser, eds.
• 1984 (reread) - George Orwell
• Reasonable Faith - Wm. Lane Craig
• Questioning Evangelism - Randy Newman
• Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky
• Unchristian - Kinnaman and Lyons
• Signature in the Cell - Stephen Meyer
• Galileo Goes to Jail - Ronald Numbers, ed
• God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs - Stephen Davis
• Faust (Pt. I) - Goethe
• Seeking God in Science - Brad Monton
• Indefensible - David Feige
• Creation Regained - Al Wolters
• Atheist Delusions - David B. Hart
• Agents Under Fire (reread) - Angus Menuge
• End of Secularism - Hunter Baker
• The Hole in Our Gospel - Richard Stearns
• C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea (reread) - Victor Reppert
• Dead Aid - Dambisa Moyo
• How We Decide - Jonah Lerner
• Letter Concerning Toleration - John Locke
• Bondage of the Will - Martin Luther

If you watched a movie or read a book that you found particularly good this past year write and tell us about it.

RLC

Second-Hand Hate

It's sometimes hard to avoid thinking that liberals are masters of Freudian projection. They peer into their own minds and project whatever unseemliness they find there onto their political opponents. That's essentially the message of a pair of essays, one by Noemie Emery and the other by Robin of Berkeley.

Emery's is the better of the two, but Robin's is interesting because it's based on her personal experience as a leftist atheist turned conservative believer. Emery's essay includes example after example of how liberals in the media simply assume that any opposition to Obama is ipso facto rooted in a profound racism. She writes:

For years now, those on the left have conflated resistance to any item of their agenda--high taxes, extravagant spending, laxity on crime, what have you--with motives of a dark nature: racism, nativism, fear of "the other," and various species of "hate." Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, a reaction to overregulation, stagflation, and the foreign policy failures and weakness of one James Earl Carter, was described as the bigots' revenge for the civil rights era. The midterm elections of 1994, a reaction against Hillarycare and the Clintons' malfeasance, were seen as a Confederate renaissance. After Bill Clinton was impeached for lies under oath (and terminal tackiness), his allies floated the theory that some of the votes against him came from Southern conservatives, because he was friendly to blacks. (As the "first black president"--vide Toni Morrison--Clinton was fond of this sort of rhetorical legerdemain until 2008, when his wife ran against a real black for president, and these tactics were turned against him.)

But it was the appearance in 2009 of the real first black president that lifted this theme to a whole new level: The left, which invented first "hate speech" (opinions they didn't like) and then "hate crimes" (crimes judged less on the criminal's actions than on what he was presumed to be thinking), has now gone on to its epiphany, which is "hate" defined not by your words or deeds but by what other people have decided you really think. "Hate" is no longer what you do or say, but what a liberal says that you think and projects on to you. You are punished for what someone else claims you were thinking. It hardly makes sense, but it does serve a political purpose. You could call it Secondhand Hate.

Case number one was New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who was listening to Barack Obama's September 9 health care speech before Congress, when Congressman Joe Wilson burst out "You lie!" at the president. Everyone, starting with the congressman himself, agreed this was a breach of manners. But Dowd heard something more--a voice shouting, "You lie, boy!" This voice, of course, was in Dowd's head, not Wilson's, but she managed to convince a number of people that it had popped from his brain into hers. -MSNBC's Chris Matthews was one of those who seemed to believe this had happened: "She sort of heard the word, almost sub-audibly, that word we don't like."

Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic also believed this, and added his own voice, which was very long-winded: "This voice tells me [Obama's opponents are] motivated by tremendous anxiety about the direction of history, and how it seems to be moving away from them--white, traditional, bounded--and toward something else--global, multicolored, unbounded, experimental. This is the Silent Majority, the neo-Bircherite majority, the reactionary id that resents affirmative action, ethnic integration, and gays."

At Salon, Joan Walsh said, "Wilson's shriek [it was more like a mutter] served as an exclamation point on an undeniable trend: Obama steadily lost support among white voters during this long, hot summer of hate."

There are many more examples of this sort of liberal mind reading at the link.

Robin talks about her personal search for God after she had left the Left and her desire to find a synagogue/church where she could worship on Christmas:

I have been looking for God my whole life. I first recognized Him in the black foster parents I worked with who manifested Christ-consciousness.

I then found him four years ago, when my parents died three weeks apart and I was carried by a force stronger than myself. And more recently, as I've gone from left to right, I have discovered him in the many conservatives guiding me, such as AT (American Thinker) readers.

Given my spiritual longing, I decided it was time to explore places of worship. Being a secular Jew, my first step should have been a temple. However, the synagogues around here are practically recruitment stations for Obama (aside from the Orthodox ones, but I don't speak a word of Hebrew). So I decided to experience church on Christmas Eve.

Checking out churches online, I found almost none that offered political neutrality. Most heralded their progressive credentials, welcoming the transgendered, but not conservatives.

I was pleased to find an Episcopal church whose website focused on religion, not ObamaCare. I left a message for the priest that I was looking for a church that didn't press a political agenda because I wasn't a liberal.

I received an icy reply from the priest, the Reverend Lucy, who said with barely-contained disgust, "I don't think you should check us out."

Her response left me shaken and angry. I understand that leftists despise conservatives. I have seen that creepy look of pure hatred when I na�vely told a leftist friend about my political conversion.

But an Episcopal priest rejecting me during the holiest time of year? Isn't anything or anyone sacred?

In shunning me, the Reverend Lucy exposed not only her own hypocrisy, but the duplicity of the left itself. She unveiled the left's dirty little secret -- that their doctrines are as bogus as global warming.

I used to believe it all. But when I removed one piece -- that the left protects women -- the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

Some may think the rest of Robin's piece a bit overstated, and perhaps it is, but she touches on a fascinating irony. Churches which preach tolerance of all God's children are often very intolerant of conservative (either political or theological) opinion. Among "progressives" who make a fetish of tolerance it often turns out that it's only for those who already agree with them.

RLC

Films (2009)

I didn't have much time in 2009 to watch movies, but I did get to squeeze in a few. Some of them were excellent, some were good, some were okay, and some were awful. Here's a list with an asterisk denoting my opinion of them. No asterisk means I don't recommend it:

Minority Report**, Dark Knight*** (again), War Dance**, Wall-E***, Traitor**, Secondhand Lions*, Lions for Lambs*, Arranged***, The Counterfeiters***, American Carol, Doubt***, Tell No One**, Quantum of Solace*, Slumdog Millionaire***, Sense and Sensibility***, Unbreakable*, Signs*, Taken***, Gran Torino***, Ray***, John Q. Public**, Equilibrium**, Namesake**, Boondock Saints, State of Play**

RLC

Giving Jobs Away

Pat Buchanan wonders why, if we're really serious about improving job prospects for the unemployed, we allow immigrants to continue flowing into the country at a rate of 125,000 a month:

In the last year, 1.5 million new immigrants have come to take up residence and been issued work permits. Probably twice as many jobs have been taken by these folks as the 650,000 the Obamaites claim were saved or created by their $787 billion stimulus package. How do Democrats justify this?

How can they justify bringing in another 1.5 million immigrants in 2010 and another 1.5 million in 2011, when 25 million Americans that they're supposed to represent are unemployed or underemployed?

As for illegal aliens, it is estimated that 8 million still hold jobs in the United States. Endlessly we are told that these hardworking folks are just doing jobs that Americans refuse to do.

But Middle American News has taken a look at the Census Bureau data. In almost all the occupations to which unskilled and semi-skilled illegal aliens gravitate, native-born Americans hold most of the jobs.

U.S. citizens account for well over half of all housekeepers, maids, taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the U.S., almost two-thirds of all the butchers, meat processors and ground maintenance and construction workers, and three-fourths of all porters, bellhops and janitors.

We are told that many if not most of these are "dead-end jobs" Americans do not want or will not take. Yet, how can that be true when American citizens are already doing most of these jobs?

USA Today found that, invariably, when U.S. authorities raid a plant site where hundreds of illegals are working, and send them packing, hundreds of Americans show up and apply for the jobs. Is this not as it should be, if we are looking out for our own people first? And isn't that what a family does, or should do?

Why, then, is the Obama administration cutting back on jobsite raids and inspections? Why is the administration talking of moving in 2010 to legalize the status of the 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens in the United States?

Two weeks ago, The Washington Post, focusing on unemployment among young African-American males, wrote, "Joblessness for 16- to 24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions - 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population."

More than one-third of all young black males are unemployed.

Nor is it only working-class Americans who are being shouldered aside by the annual flood tide of immigrants.

As Jerry Woodruff, editor of Middle American News, writes: "Immigrants are taking good, high-paying jobs from highly skilled Americans. The Census Bureau found that 34 percent of all software engineers ... are immigrants. Yet, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers reports that 48,000 U.S. software engineers are unemployed."

Buchanan's metaphor of a family taking care of its own is apt. By continuing to allow immigration, especially illegal immigration, into this country during a time of high joblessness we are like a parent who takes food and medicine from his own child to give it to others. That is arguably compassionate if one's own children have enough, but it's perverse in an economy in which so many of one's own children are facing destitution.

Buchanan suggests renewed legal pressure on those who employ illegal aliens and an immediate moratorium on all immigration until unemployment drops to under 6%. Until the Obama administration takes steps like these, Buchanan avers, they can not persuasively argue that they're really concerned about Americans out of work.

It's a good column.

RLC

Best Science Videos of 2009

New Scientist has a reprise of the best science videos of 2009. They include video of robotic insects and penguins, plasma ejections from the sun and a simulation of what it would be like to fall into a black hole. Pretty cool:

RLC

Cause and Effect

Rasmussen shows that President Obama's approval numbers are almost as bad today as they were good eleven months ago:

Perhaps the following chart at least partially accounts for the disparity:

We were told that the stimulus was necessary to keep joblessness at around 8%, but as the red line shows joblessness is much higher than it was projected to be had there been no stimulus at all. In other words, part of the President's problem is that his policies are exactly the opposite of what are needed to create lasting jobs.

By confronting businesses with looming tax hikes, environmental regulations, and higher employee insurance costs, the President has guaranteed that employers will choose not to risk taking on workers that they'll not be able to afford.

What can the policy makers and shapers in the White House possibly be thinking?

RLC

Intoxicating Rhetoric

All I can say is that it's a good thing for Senator Baucus that they don't administer breathalyzer tests to U.S. senators before they speak on the Senate floor, but perhaps they should:

Let's see. Senator Baucus is criticizing Republicans for not defying their leadership and voting for a bill that the American people don't want, even though no Democrats defied their leadership by voting against the bill that Americans don't want. Apparently, a strict party line vote is bad when Republicans do it and good when Democrats do it.

Maybe you have to be inebriated to think this way. Maybe inebriation explains why the Democrats are so insistent upon foisting this bill on the American people in the first place.

Thanks to Hot Air for the video.

RLC

The Obsolete Man

A student recommended this old half hour Twilight Zone episode as having a certain relevance to events we see unfolding today. It's pretty good.

To those who think it a bit far-fetched to suggest that we are threatened with the sort of Orwellian world depicted in this episode in which religion and books have been abolished needs, well, to read Orwell. Or a history of the twentieth century.

The totalitarian temptation is evidently fixed in the human genome, and there will always be men who seek to exert power and control over others, to strip away their freedom, and to rob them of that which is most precious to them. Such men, when they acquire the power, cannot forbear that others have the freedom to think in ways contrary to how they themselves think. They cannot tolerate any opposition to their vision of how society should be ordered. For such men those who defy their dreams must be crushed, and contrary ideas must be eliminated. Total uniformity must be imposed. This is and has been the goal of the left for 150 years, and, as the Chancellor says in the episode, the error of men like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao wasn't that they went too far but that they didn't go far enough. They failed to purge their societies of all of the undesirables and to rid themselves of the "obsolete men."

Thanks to Ashley for the link.

RLC

What Harm Could it Do?

Megan McCardle writes at Asymmetrical Information under the pseudonym "Jane Galt." She's a libertarian and has posted a marvelous meditation on how the Law of Unintended Consequences has haunted liberal "reforms" of the last fifty years and is likely to haunt others in the years ahead. Her main point is that attempts by liberals (and libertarians) to tinker with traditional marriage by expanding it to include same-sex couples could well have deeply regrettable consequences. It's happened before.

She writes:

Unlike most libertarians, I don't have an opinion on gay marriage, and I'm not going to have an opinion no matter how much you bait me. However, I had an interesting discussion last night with another libertarian about it, which devolved into an argument about a certain kind of liberal/libertarian argument about gay marriage that I find really unconvincing.

Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. "Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual?"

To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one's masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.

To which, again, the other side replies "That's ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!"

Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you--highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you--may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn't mean that the institution of marriage won't be weakened in America just the same.

I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted."

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

Let me take three major legal innovations, one of them general, two specific to marriage.

What follows should daunt the enthusiasm of the most reckless liberal bent on reforming something or another in our polity, but you'll need to read it for yourself.

Society is like a delicate explosive and reformers are often like those who tinker with them in their basements without knowing exactly what they're doing. Sometimes they succeed only in blowing up themselves and everything around them.

RLC