The Frankfurt School

I've recently come across an article in Catholic Insight by Timothy Matthews on something called the Frankfurt School. I had never heard of it before, that I can remember, but reading Matthews' column sure explains a lot about what the Left has been up to in the culture wars for the last seventy years or so. Here's Matthews:

What was the Frankfurt School? Well, in the days following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, it was believed that workers' revolution would sweep into Europe and, eventually, into the United States. But it did not do so. Towards the end of 1922 the Communist International (Comintern) began to consider what were the reasons....

Basically, the Frankfurt School believed that as long as an individual had the belief - or even the hope of belief - that his divine gift of reason could solve the problems facing society, then that society would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation that they considered necessary to provoke socialist revolution. Their task, therefore, was as swiftly as possible to undermine the Judaeo-Christian legacy. To do this they called for the most negative destructive criticism possible of every sphere of life which would be designed to de-stabilize society and bring down what they saw as the 'oppressive' order. Their policies, they hoped, would spread like a virus-'continuing the work of the Western Marxists by other means' as one of their members noted.

To further the advance of their 'quiet' cultural revolution - but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future - the School recommended (among other things):

• The creation of racism offences.
• Continual change to create confusion.
• The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
• The undermining of schools' and teachers' authority.
• Huge immigration to destroy identity.
• The promotion of excessive drinking.
• Emptying of churches.
• An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
• Dependency on the state or state benefits.
• Control and dumbing down of media.
• Encouraging the breakdown of the family.

One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud's idea of 'pansexualism' - the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims they would:

• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children.
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls.
• abolish all forms of male dominance - hence the presence of women in the armed forces.
• declare women to be an 'oppressed class' and men to be 'oppressors.'

Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School's long-term operation thus: 'We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.'

The School believed there were two types of revolution: (a) political and (b) cultural. Cultural revolution demolishes from within. 'Modern forms of subjection are marked by mildness'. They saw it as a long-term project and kept their sights clearly focused on the family, education, media, sex and popular culture.

Matthews goes on to discuss specific strategies of the Left's campaign to undermine each of the institutions of our society in order to bring about their cultural revolution. Given the current ulcerated state of much of our culture the Left must feel that success is finally within reach.

At any rate, the essay is worth reading in it's entirety although it has to be taken with a bit of skepticism since Matthews uses no citations. Even so, unless he's just making the whole thing up, which seems unlikely since much of it is simply an elaboration upon Marx's Communist Manifesto, it appears that the Left has for at least three generations been purposefully waging a war of lies and deceit to destroy our nation from within.

Of course, conservatives have been sounding the tocsin for at least that long, but mainstream liberalism has been been deaf to the alarm, preferring instead to remain pretty much in a state of complacent denial. Hopefully, the more the disinfectant of sunlight is shed upon such cabals the better our chances are of blocking their success.

RLC

Welcome to L.A.

Maybe this is just a piece of photo-shopped humor, but if in fact it's a real billboard, it's an amusing response to L.A.'s threatened boycott of Arizona:

RLC

The Bishop's Letter

The Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Rev. Mark Hanson, has written an epistle expressing his "deep sadness regarding events surrounding the flotilla seeking to deliver humanitarian goods to Gaza." The letter reads in part:

While we condemn all violence in the resolution of political disputes, this incident raises a number of questions related to the just use of force. It is not clear that, in this incident, all alternatives were explored prior to the use of military force. One tenet of the just use of force is proportionality, a principle I raised during my meeting with the chief rabbis of the State of Israel during Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli incursion into Gaza which lasted from December 2008 to January 2009. This incident provides an example of how proportionality is an ongoing concern related to Israeli military action against civilians, both Palestinians and internationals.

Bishop Hanson must be the only person in the U.S. who has not been apprised of what actually happened aboard the lead ship in the flotilla. The Israeli soldiers did not use force as they boarded the ship, but they were immediately mobbed, had their equipment taken from them, were beaten with iron rods, kicked, thrown off the deck, stabbed with knives and shot at. They returned fire with paint ball guns, until the ship's crew ignored the paint balls and continued to threaten the lives of the commandos.

In desperation, unarmed, or disarmed, Israeli commandos jumped off the ship into the water to escape the Muslim crew which had clearly planned to instigate a violent confrontation. At length the commandos were given permission to use their sidearms to protect themselves. I don't know what other measures the good Bishop thinks they might have employed.

Nor do I understand the Bishop's reference to proportionality. He seems to think that it was somehow disproportionate for the Israelis to use pistols when the ship's crew was bringing only knives and iron bars to bear against them. This is, however, a ludicrous application of the Just War proportionality principle which is intended to limit the use of force to what is necessary to defeat one's enemy and to protect one's life. The Bishop's understanding of proportionality seems to entail that since the crew was attacking them with fists, knives, and iron bars the Israelis should have limited their response to similar weapons. This belies both a misunderstanding of "proportionality" and an almost cartoonish understanding of the horrific nature of what the Israelis confronted on board the ship.

Perhaps the Bishop would be better advised in the future to confine his letters to ecclesiastical matters, like how to hold his Lutheran congregations together in the wake of the ELCA's decision to ordain practicing homosexuals, and avoid commenting on things he has taken so little trouble to learn about. He might also go here to educate himself about who these "humanitarians" were and what they were trying to accomplish.

Thanks to Byron for calling our attention to the Bishop's letter.

RLC

Re: Defender of the Faith (Pt. I)

Byron shares some thoughts and criticisms of the first part of our critique of Jim Wallis on the Feedback page. Check it out.

RLC

Defender of the Faith (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis up on his challenge to consider whether the Tea-Party is compatible with Christian principles. Wallis says it isn't but, in my opinion, at least, he failed to make a convincing case. We return today to examine the rest of his argument.

We begin with Wallis' claim that an anti-government ideology just isn't biblical.

To disparage government per se -- to see government as the central problem in society -- is simply not a biblical position.

This is true, but it's irrelevant since the Tea Party is not anti-government. Wallis wants his readers to associate Tea Party opposition to big, bloated government with opposition to government itself, but, as we pointed out yesterday, there's a significant difference between the two, and it's at best misleading for him to repeatedly ignore the distinction.

Wallis' next claim is almost humorous in its irony. He writes that:

The Libertarians' supreme confidence in the market is not consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin.

True enough, but neither is Wallis' supreme confidence in government consistent with a biblical view of human nature and sin. A just state is one in which the market is given the freedom to do what it does best, i.e. create a flourishing economy, and in which the state limits itself to ensuring that the market does not abuse its freedom. What Tea-Partiers object to is a state that actually controls, regulates, and owns a huge sector of the market. When that happens who will oversee the state? Wallis, like socialists of all stripes, doesn't seem to be worried about that problem, but he should be.

He goes on:

Libertarians seem to believe in the myth of the sinless market and that the self-interest of business owners or corporations will serve the interests of society; and if they don't, it's not government's role to correct it.

This is not just wrong, it's a deliberate falsehood. Wallis knows very well that not even libertarians believe in a "sinless market" any more than Wallis himself believes in a sinless government. He also knows that, whatever the case might be with libertarians, few in the Tea Party think that government has no role in correcting the market. To suggest that they do is to cast into question his commitment to the truth.

But he's not done:

The Libertarian preference for the strong over the weak is decidedly un-Christian. "Leave me alone to make my own choices and spend my own money" is a political philosophy that puts those who need help at a real disadvantage....To anticipate the Libertarian response, let me just say that private charity is simply not enough to satisfy the demands of either fairness or justice, let alone compassion. When the system is designed to protect the privileges of the already strong and make the weak even more defenseless and vulnerable, something is wrong with the system.

What is unChristian is to coerce people into helping others. Wallis suggests that if there are people who lack what you have the Christian thing to do is for government, essentially at the point of a gun, to seize your property in order to give it to those who don't have their own. He also assumes that everyone agrees that the (capitalist) system is designed to protect the privileges of the strong and to punish the weak, but if any system is designed to protect the privileged it's our government. Consider the perks and privileges that go with being a government employee or being a CEO of a favored bank or industry under the current administration. Consider the power government bureaucrats can bring to bear against the rest of us, and then consider that Wallis wants to make government even bigger, stronger, and more coercive.

Up until this point in his essay Wallis has merely, in my view, been wrong, deceptive, or tendentious, but now he makes himself sound eye-rollingly ridiculous. Perhaps sensing that he has failed to mount a convincing case against the Tea-Party folk he reaches up his sleeve for the old threadbare liberal hole card and avers that because the Tea Party is mostly white there just has to be the odor of racism clinging to it:

Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not. But is an undercurrent of white resentment part of the Tea Party ethos, and would there even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren't the first black man to occupy that office? It's time we had some honest answers to that question. And as far as I can tell, Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism -- overt, implied, or even subtle -- is not a Christian virtue.

Allegations of racism are often acts of desperation on the part of those who know they have a distressingly weak argument. In this case the allegation has the further liability of being so simple-minded as to make one feel almost embarrassed for Wallis. He seems intellectually unable to imagine that anyone could plausibly object to Obama's radicalism, his reckless spending, his disdainful treatment of our allies, or that he brings to the White House an historically unAmerican set of attitudes and beliefs. For Wallis it's apparently incomprehensible that a significant number of people could sincerely be opposed to a government take-over of the national economy.

No. For Wallis and others like him, opposition to the President is fully explained by this simple syllogism: Obama is black, Tea-Partiers oppose him, therefore their opposition must be because he's black. It's just as silly as arguing that Lincoln was from Illinois, the Confederacy hated him, therefore southern hatred must be because the President was from Illinois.

If Wallis is really interested in learning why the Tea Party is mostly white, if he really wants to prospect for racism, all he need do is look at the President's support among African-Americans. Much of that support has nothing to do with Mr. Obama's policies and everything to with the fact that Mr. Obama is black.

The Tea Party is largely white for the same reason that it's largely comprised of conservatives, Republicans, and Independents - because it opposes leftist Democratic policies. African-Americans are mostly Democrats so they're no more likely to feel comfortable in the midst of people who stand in opposition to Democrat policies than are Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.

Surely Wallis understands this, it's not a difficult concept, after all, but then why does he want to leave us with the impression that there's something racially odious about anyone who opposes the President?

RLC

Preacher of the House

Like expert wine tasters, liberals evidently have a highly refined ability to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate insertions of religion into politics. The litmus test is, it seems, that when a liberal does it, breaching the wall of church/state separation is just hunky dory, but when a conservative does it it's a threat to the fabric of our Constitution. It was inspiring, for example, when Martin Luther King did it, but not when Jerry Falwell did it. It's uplifting when Barack Obama does it, but not when George Bush did it, and it's charming when Nancy Pelosi does it, but not when your local congressperson does it:

It's ironic that the woman who voted against banning partial birth abortion can caution us with a straight face that we must be prepared to give an account to God for how we have "measured up" in this life. Whatever one thinks of abortion, surely partial birth abortion is hard to square with the tenets of the teaching of Christ. I should think that anyone who defends infanticide will, indeed, have someday a lot of 'splainin' to do.

RLC

BP

Well, the Justice Department has opened civil and criminal investigations into the events that led to the continuing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday.

I have a suggestion for the oil company if they wish to get Mr. Holder off their back: Just tell him that BP stands for Black Panthers and neither Mr. Holder nor his Justice Department will give them any more trouble.

RLC

Defender of the Faith (Pt. I)

Somehow Jim Wallis of Sojourner's has become the media's chief arbiter of what it means to be a Christian. Some time ago he wrote a book titled God's Politics in which it turned out that God was an uber Democrat, and ever since then whenever Christian conservatives start feeling a little feisty Wallis shows up on MSNBC or HuffPo to set us all straight as to why these benighted rubes don't really represent the true Gospel. Now he has a piece in the Huffington Post wherein he argues that the Tea Party movement, because it embraces a libertarian political philosophy, is unbiblical.

There are two major shortcomings to his argument: First, Wallis fails to give a fair picture of libertarianism. Second, the Tea-Party is comprised mostly of conservatives, not libertarians.

Wallis writes:

Since the Tea Party is getting such national attention, our God's Politics blog is going to begin a dialogue on this question: Just how Christian is the Tea Party Movement -- and the Libertarian political philosophy that lies behind it?

Libertarians are social and economic minimalists when it comes to government. They want the maximum individual freedom in both spheres that's consistent with an orderly society. They believe that government has certain limited constitutional roles and that our modern government has far exceeded those bounds. The difference between conservatives and libertarians is complex, but basically conservatives would assign a stronger role to government in regulating our social life (unlike libertarians, they would not oppose, and would even favor, government regulation of pornography, obscenity, drug use, and abortion on demand. Libertarians would be indifferent to gay marriage whereas conservatives generally oppose it.).

On economic matters the differences are generally matters of degree. Libertarians are laissez faire with regard to the marketplace whereas most conservatives think government does have some role to play in protecting the consumer and the environment from abuses and unscrupulous business practices.

Tea-partiers are, by and large, social and economic conservatives. Surely there are libertarians among them, but libertarianism is not the official philosophy of the movement. The people in the Tea Party are simply citizens who are fed up with a government that is spending recklessly and unsustainably and which aspires to total control of every aspect of our economic life. One need not be a libertarian to object to the irresponsible spending of the last two administrations.

Wallis pronounces Rand Paul's views on the Civil Rights Act, and the administration's criticisms of BP, to be unChristian, but he fails to do Rand the courtesy of elaborating on Rand's reasons for saying what he said. Then, having blurred the distinction between Tea Party conservatism and Rand Paul's libertarianism, he tries to discredit the former by impugning the latter.

Wallis writes:

The Libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue. Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition. The Christian answer to the question "Are we our brother's keeper?" is decidedly "Yes." Jesus tells us that the greatest commandment is to love God and love our neighbor. Loving your neighbor is a better Christian response than telling your neighbor to leave you alone. Both compassion and social justice are fundamental Christian commitments, and while the Christian community is responsible for living out both, government is also held accountable to the requirements of justice and mercy.

This is what rhetoricians call a straw man argument. It consists in misrepresenting an opponent's argument, the more easily to discredit it.

First, Tea-Partiers are not philosophically opposed to government itself but rather to statist government, an all-encompassing, economically smothering state that seeks to transfer wealth from those who produce it to those who don't.

Second, conservatives do not wish to emphasize individual rights at the expense of the well-being of other people (Indeed, this is actually a trait of the Left which perpetually fights against obscenity and pornography restrictions on the basis of individual rights). What Tea-Partiers want is a government that will not trample individual rights, particularly property rights.

Wallis seems to think, absurdly, that because I don't want the government taking money out of my pocket to give to others whom it thinks deserve it more than I do that I'm being unChristian. In fact, the major objection among Tea-Partiers to government welfare does not arise from a lack of concern for the poor but rather from the obvious fact that government only exacerbates the problems of the poor, perpetuates their poverty, and wastes our money.

Thirdly, the commandment to love our neighbor is not one that Jesus enjoins upon government. It's given to us as individuals. I don't want Barack Obama or Jim Wallis telling me how best to love my neighbor or who, exactly, I should be helping. The government should provide a minimum safety net for the helpless, but beyond that it should let the people decide for themselves how and who they will assist.

Wallis goes on to defend his view that government should be deeply involved in social welfare by citing a number of Old Testament passages which really don't support his case:

Just look at the biblical prophets in their condemnation of injustice to the poor, and how they frequently follow those statements by requiring the king (the government) to act justly (these requirements applied both to the kings of Israel and to foreign potentates). Jeremiah, speaking of King Josiah, said, "He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well."(Jeremiah 22:16). Amos instructs the courts (the government) to "Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts" (Amos 5:15). The prophets hold kings, rulers, judges, and employers accountable to the demands of justice and mercy.

Of course any government should act justly, but that doesn't mean, necessarily, that the government should confiscate your property and give it to others, or, as candidate Obama put it, "spread the wealth around." What it means is that the laws of the state should protect the poor from being victimized, exploited and harmed by the rich and powerful. The meaning of these justice passages seems so obvious, and so incompatible with what Wallis wants them to say, that one wonders why he cites them.

We'll look at the rest of Wallis' essay tomorrow.

RLC

Why the Outrage Against Israel?

In the aftermath of Israel's completely understandable resort to deadly force in response to the beatings of their soldiers by Turkish Muslims Victor Davis Hanson wonders what explains the irrational reaction of so much of the world to what the Israelis did (For those who need to get caught up go here and here):

What explains this preexisting hatred, which ensures denunciation of Israel in the most rabid - or, to use the politically correct parlance, "disproportionate," terms? It is not about "occupied land," given the millions of square miles worldwide that are presently occupied, from Georgia to Cyprus to Tibet. It is not a divided capital - Nicosia is walled off. It is not an overreaction in the use of force per se - the Russians flattened Grozny and killed tens of thousands while the world snoozed. And it cannot be the scale of violence, given what we see hourly in Pakistan, Darfur, and the Congo. And, given the Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish histories (and reactions to them), the currently outraged Turkish government is surely not a credible referent on the topic of disproportionate violence.

Perhaps the outrage reflects simple realpolitik - 350 million Arab Muslims versus 7 million Israelis. Perhaps it is oil: half the world's reserves versus Israel's nada. Perhaps it is the fear of terror: draw a cartoon or write a novel offending Islam, and you must go into hiding; defame Jews and earn accolades. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism, which is as fashionable on the academic Left as it used to be among the neanderthal Right.

Perhaps there is also a new sense that the United States at last has fallen into line with the Western consensus, and so is hardly likely to play the old lone-wolf supporter of Israel in the press or at the U.N.

The world condemns the Israelis for defending themselves, as if it were a crime against humanity for Jews to preserve their own lives, but the world has been almost completely silent about the North Koreans sinking a South Korean vessel killing a dozen or so South Korean sailors. Nor has the world condemned the Palestinians for their incessant attempts to kill Israelis nor for their attempts to procure more rockets with which to blow up Israeli children. About these atrocities the world is silent.

For Muslims, and increasingly for the western Left, the very existence of Israel is a crime and nothing anyone who hates Israel says or does is beyond the pale. Israel blockades Gaza to keep weapons such as rockets out of the hands of vicious thugs and the world condemns them for it, even though they allow humanitarian goods to pass. The world doesn't condemn Hamas for using the weapons, mind you, they condemn Israel for trying to keep them from getting them. The Israelis seek to turn back ships, leased to a known terrorist organization, trying to run the blockade and the crew set upon the commandos with guns, iron bars, knives and other weapons. The Israelis reluctantly draw their sidearms to defend themselves, and the Left everywhere condemns whom? The crew? No, the Israelis.

To get an idea of the twisted thinking of those on the Left when it comes to Israel listen to Helen Thomas assuming that Israel "deliberately" massacred the jihadis on the ship:

It's beginning to smell like the 1930s all over again.

RLC

Stealth Socialism

Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN insider, talks about ACORN's strategy for imposing socialism on our country by stealth through the Obama presidency.

Moncrief quotes Graham L. Strachan by way of explaining what she means by "stealth socialism:"

"Why did the Western media persist in calling the social system in the Communist bloc 'Communism' instead of Socialism? They did it to manufacture a false reality: to protect the reputation of another form of Socialism which existed in the West....so-called 'Democratic Socialism', socialism by stealth, socialism achieved through the 'permeation' of existing political institutions by members of organisation such as the Fabian Society, in order to influence the policies adopted by those institutions towards socialism.

"Democratic Socialism itself was based on a lie: that Socialism could be implemented peacefully through the ballot box. The implication was that if the voters didn't like it they could vote it out again. That was a hoax. Since Socialism does not permit private ownership of property, it cannot be 'democratic' in the sense of allowing a choice of political Parties. This is not a matter of ideology, but of logistics. It would be impossible to have a two Party system of genuine democracy, for example, under which the state nationalised all property including business when the Socialists were voted into power, then sold it all back to the people again when they were voted out. The intention of Democratic Socialism was (and still is) to be democratic just long enough to gain power. Then it will declare the 'end of history' and entrench itself forever, enforcing its politically correct speech and thought on everybody, and being just as tyrannical as its Marxist revolutionary counterparts."

The article is a little long but it's an eye-opener, especially for those who think that ACORN is just some innocent, community based organization trying to help poor people make it through the day.

RLC

Sin Nombre

With the debate over illegal immigration once again heating up let me recommend a movie, with reservations, that gives an idea of what it must be like for many who seek to enter this country illegally. The film is Sin Nombre, and I qualify my recommendation because it's brutal, raw and certainly not suitable for children. Nevertheless, mature viewers will find it riveting.

The film recounts the story of a member of the Salva Maratrucha gang in Mexico by the name of Casper, who wishes to break away from his past and start over in America. His flight from Mexico and the psychopaths bent on killing him is harrowing and the secondary narratives are fascinating. It's very troubling to ponder that this gang, also known as MS-13, has thousands of members in cities across the U.S.

If you're interested in seeing what a lot of people south of the border have gone through to get here, add Sin Nombre to your Netflix queue.

RLC

Supposed to be Competent

Columnist Peggy Noonan has given President Obama a great deal of slack in the first year and a half of his presidency, but with this essay titled "He Was Supposed to be Competent" she seems to be reaching the end of her patience. She writes:

I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008. But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

Noonan has joined James Carville, Maureen Dowd, and a host of other erstwhile Obama supporters who wished to see him do well but who are coming to the conclusion that he's out of his depth.

It's a bit surprising, actually, that Mr. Obama's lack of competence is a surprise. Mr. Obama was elected to the presidency largely on the strength of his support among the least educated and least mature members of the electorate: minorities and students. He brought no qualifications whatsoever to the office, he had no accomplishments to speak of, but rather than focus on his dearth of practical experience, a delinquent media chose instead to obsess over Sarah Palin's short-comings. As Rush Limbaugh never tires of pointing out, President Obama is the least qualified person in any room he enters.

Perhaps the nation has learned an important lesson: The presidency is too important to entrust to someone simply because his election would make sociological history, or because, despite a paucity of reasons to believe him, he promises to turn America into the new Jerusalem. One hopes that we've matured beyond electing people on the basis of style rather than substance. One hopes.

RLC

Memorial Day Family History

Someone once said that when an old person dies it's as if an entire library disappears. Many of us have relatives or acquaintances who may not have many years left, but who still have a library full of history stored in their minds. Many of them are vets who served in WWII, Korea, or Vietnam, and many of them are spouses of vets who remember what it was like at home during the war years.

If tomorrow you spend time with a veteran, or a spouse of a veteran, do yourself a big favor and ask him or her about their experiences. Some of them may not want to talk much about it, of course, but if you can persuade them to open up the history you will learn is precious.

When that person passes that history will pass with them, and that will be a shame. Far better that you seek to learn it, write it down, and pass it on to your children.

RLC

Police Profiling

The New York Times is indignant that the NYPD is using profiling to fight crime in the city, or at least that's how they choose to interpret the data on police "stops." For example, blacks made up 55 percent of all stops by police in 2009, though they're only 23 percent of the city's population; whites accounted for 10 percent of all stops, though they're 35 percent of the city's population; Hispanics made up 32 percent of all stops, though 28 percent of the population, and Asians, 3 percent of all stops and 12 percent of the population.

Pretty damning statistics, these, at least in the minds of those predisposed to see nefarious prejudices at play whenever the cops are at work. Heather MacDonald at City Journal refuses to settle for the simplistic analysis of the Times, however, and digs a little deeper. Here's what she comes up with:

Here are the crime data that the Times doesn't want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city's population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city's population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies.

The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator-a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times's lead, which stated that "Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped." These crime data are not some artifact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes-the vast majority of whom are minority themselves-report to the police.

You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime. Crime is what drives NYPD tactics; it is the basis of everything the department does. And crime, as reported by victims and witnesses, sends police overwhelmingly to minority neighborhoods, because that's where the vast majority of crime occurs-by minority criminals against minority victims.

The Times's analysis, by contrast, which follows in lock step with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, assumes that policing should mirror census data. The only numerical benchmark that the Times provides for the NYPD's stop data is the city's population ratios. According to this analysis, since whites are 35 percent of the city's population, they should be 35 percent of police stops, even though they commit only 5 percent of all violent crimes. But using census data as a benchmark for policing is as nonsensical as it would be to use census data for fire department activity. If a particular census tract has a disproportionate number of fires, and another census tract has none, no one expects the FDNY to send out fire trucks to non-existent fires in the fire-free census tract just for the sake of equal representation.

It requires very little thought to see the foolishness of trying to use police stops by themselves as evidence of racial bigotry, but it is precisely "very little thought" at which the left seems often to excel. Indeed, when it comes to matters of racial conflict, serious thinking is often the first casualty.

If the Times wishes to probe racial differences in a more fruitful fashion it might look at the disparity in the crime statistics and ask this question: What is wrong with minority communities that their members seem so incapable of living harmoniously with their fellows? An honest examination of that question might result in a story that would actually be both interesting and useful. I doubt, though, that we'll ever see it from the Times or any other mainstream media outlet. The findings might offend too many PC sensibilities and challenge too many liberal dogmas.

RLC

No Third Option

Edward Oakes over at First Things offers up some thoughts on the self-defeating nature of the New Atheists' project. Oakes takes Nietzsche as his foil and writes:

In his book On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche gives us this ultimate atheist scenario: "In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history'-yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die." He continued:

"One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. . . ."

[S]cience teaches that all stars eventually die out, and with them the planets that orbit them, and once those planets are consumed by the suns that gave them birth, so too will vanish the pathetic creatures that emerged from their respective planetary slimes. Sure, soon after their emergence, they began to invent such high-blown Platonic words like knowledge and truth during their brief strut upon the otherwise empty stage of the cosmos. But so what?

I am not trying to argue here against such a scenario, it being an option impervious to argument anyway .... But it is a scenario that can hardly be regarded as consequence-free. The battle is still between nihilism and theism. There is no third option.

When the intellectual history of the last fifty years is written I think it'll be a source of wonder that so few people who embraced an atheist worldview saw the nihilist implications of their unbelief. Christians have for two thousand years based their belief in moral obligation, meaning in life, and objective truth in the transcendent personal God of the Bible. Many atheists reject God but hold on to the Christian view of morality, meaning and truth without realizing that if atheism is true they have no grounds for these things. They are piggy-backing on a Christian tradition that they despise. They're like a man riding a horse while denying that horses exist. Yet they dare not abandon their Christian steed for as soon as they dismount they find they have no place to stand.

It's more than a little ironic that atheists avoid nihilism only by living vicariously and parasitically off the Christian worldview.

RLC

Greatest Humanitarian President

Which American president has the best record of helping the world's poor and oppressed? The chief contender may surprise you. According to the data in this BBC article George W. Bush has a record that I can't imagine any other president exceeding.

Here are the facts the BBC article lists:

• Bush pumped $18 billion into fighting HIV/Aids, much of it in Africa.
• He backed canceling $34 billion worth of debt for 27 African states.
• He launched initiative that has halved Malaria in 15 African countries.
• He led condemnation of Sudan's record in Darfur as genocide.
• He pressed for north-south peace deal in Sudan.
• He "saved millions of lives", according to aid activist Bob Geldof.
• He backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia to battle Islamists.

Add to these achievements the fact that Bush liberated 50 million people from tyranny in Afghanistan and Iraq, and you'd think he'd receive every humanitarian award there is, particularly the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, he may be the greatest humanitarian ever to lead a nation.

Unfortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize doesn't go to people who've advanced the cause of the poor and oppressed and "saved millions of lives." It goes rather to people who make videos on global warming and people of African ancestry who give nice speeches and get elected president.

Let no one say that the Nobel committee lacks a keen sensitivity to the winds of political fashion, even if they're completely oblivious to what constitutes great achievements on behalf of humanity.

RLC

Dirty Laundry

A pair of articles at NRO explain the miasma of legal scandal that is slowly enveloping the White House. The first is by Michelle Malkin and the second is by Robert Costa.

For those who may have been distracted from the news recently the Pennsylvania Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Joe Sestak, let it slip some months ago that he was offered a position in the Obama administration in exchange for not challenging Arlen Specter in the primary. No doubt Sestak rues having ever admitted this because it turns out that such offers are felonious and he has placed both himself and the White House in a very difficult spot.

If Joe Sestak is telling the truth then a law has clearly been broken and someone in the White House, perhaps even the President, is in deep legal doo-doo. Even David Axelrod admitted as much last Sunday. And if Sestak is lying, which seems extremely unlikely, he's finished in his race for the Pennsylvania Senate seat.

The media has been loath to press the matter and Sestak has refused to say who offered him the job (though it can only have been a top official and it's very unlikely the offer was made without the President's connivance) nor what the job was (Sestak is a retired admiral and speculation is that the job was probably Secretary of the Navy). Sestak's stone-walling, however, can't last. As November approaches, the Pennsylvania media is going to be interested in nothing else but pressing Sestak on this. If he continues his non-cooperation the public is going to see him as just another dishonest pol and his chance of defeating Republican Pat Toomey will evaporate. Sestak didn't accept the job offer, but he hasn't been acting very honorably in this affair. A law has been broken, he alleges, but he refuses to help bring the law-breaker to justice.

On the other hand, if he identifies the administration official who offered him the job, everyone is going to realize that a high-level cabinet job could not have been offered without clearing it with the President himself. If Mr. Obama winds up being implicated in a crime, he could well be impeached if Republicans gain control of the congress. Even if it doesn't come to that, his poll numbers will likely slip right over the political event horizon and into the black hole of political irrelevance and impotence.

The White House could essentially call Sestak delusional or mendacious, but either option will probably cost them a Democrat Senate vote in November. Both the administration and Sestak are in a no-win situation in this, and it'll be interesting to see how the Obama people deal with it. My prediction is that someone fairly high up will be required to fall on his sword and take full responsibility, swearing, implausibly, that no one above him knew anything about it. The hapless scapegoat may go to jail, but that'll be seen as the only way to preserve the Obama presidency from scandal and further erosion of public esteem.

Update: Just as I was about to post this I saw that the Obama administration has prevailed upon Bill Clinton to agree to say that he approached Sestak's brother and through him offered Joe Sestak a non-paying advisory position in the administration in exchange for not running against Specter. If this were true then no laws were broken, but is there anyone anywhere in the world so naive as to think this is true? How could Clinton offer a job in the Obama administration unless he was authorized to do so, and why would anyone think that Sestak would be persuaded to give up a Senate race to take a non-paying advisory job? This tactic is, in my opinion, tantamount to an admission by the Obama administration that they're guilty of something serious and they're desperate to find a way out.

For an excellent analysis of why the White House explanation doesn't add up read Dan Foster's piece at NRO.

RLC

Why We're Going Under

An article in The New York Times gives us a glimpse of why our economy, like economies around the world, is in increasing peril:

According to pension data collected by The New York Times from the city and state, about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes. The data belie official reports that the average state pension is a modest $18,000, or $38,000 for retired police officers and firefighters. (The average is low, in part, because it includes people who worked in government only part time, or just a few years, as well as surviving spouses getting partial benefits.)

Roughly one of every 250 retired public workers in New York is collecting a six-figure pension, and that group is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, based on the number of highly paid people in the pipeline.

Some will receive the big pensions for decades. Thirteen New York City police officers recently retired at age 40 with pensions above $100,000 a year; nine did so in their 30s. The plan's public information officer said that the very young retirees had qualified for special disability pensions, which are 50 percent larger than ordinary police pensions. He said several dozen of the highest-paid New York City police retirees had disabilities related to 9/11 and the rest of the disabilities resulted from injuries in the line of duty.

These entitlements are unsustainable. The beleaguered taxpayers of New York must pay people in their thirties and forties over $100,000 a year for the rest of their lives, and then when they're eligible for Social Security they'll get that, too.

New York is a synecdoche for the United States. Public pensions, welfare, health care and public spending of all kinds require an ever increasing tax burden on those who are still working, but this diminishing income pool can't bear this staggering load indefinitely. Almost half the people in the country are paying no income tax so half the population is essentially getting a free ride paid for by the other half. The socio-economic pyramid is beginning to look more like a flattened-out Hershey's kiss.

It might be possible to pay for our extravagance if the administration and Congress were enacting policies which stimulated business growth, but they're not. There's only one way out of the mess they've gotten us into and that's to decrease government spending and reduce the regulatory and tax burdens they've placed on businesses. Unfortunately, the current crowd in D.C. is ideologically averse to reducing taxes and cutting spending, and, in fact, they're eager to do just the opposite.

November can't come soon enough.

RLC

Very Superstitious<b>*</b>

A gentleman who occasionally writes letters to the local paper to criticize Christianity and extol atheism took the occasion in one recent epistle to trot out the tired old shibboleth that Christianity is a mere superstition. This is certainly an amusing claim coming from an atheist. The definition of a superstition is any belief unreasonably upheld by faith in magic, chance or dogma. Consider some of what an atheist must believe in order to believe atheism is true:

They have to believe firstly that something (the universe) can come from nothing. Then, in order to avoid the conclusion that the cosmos is purposefully designed for life, they have to believe, in the complete absence of evidence, the only other possibility: that there are a near infinite number of universes of which ours is just one.

Believing as they do in a naturalistic origin of life they have to also believe that the equivalent of a library full of information (the DNA molecule) was somehow assembled by random chance and then, despite the enormous improbability of it, DNA just by accident developed the highly complex process of self-replication. They have to believe, without any evidence, that human consciousness - the awareness of one's surroundings and the ability to reason, abstract, and experience sensations - somehow arose by chance from chemical reactions occurring in the brain.

They often also believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that atheism is superior to theism in terms of offering a reason to hope that justice will prevail, a meaning for human and individual existence, a ground for moral obligation, and a basis for thinking that human beings have dignity and should be accorded human rights. On atheism there's no absolutely no reason whatsoever to think that there's any real justice, any ultimate meaning to life, any ground for moral obligation or moral judgment, or any reason to think humans have dignity, worth or inherent rights. Yet many atheists believe in all of these things.

So who's being superstitious?

*Superstitious by Stevie Wonder

RLC

A Presidency of Firsts

Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online fears that the country is in the hands of people who care not either for the motherland or its traditions. He takes as symbolic the standing ovation given to Mexican president Felipe Calderon by congressional Democrats as Calderon criticized Arizona for its immigration law, a law, it needs be noted, that is positively innocuous compared to the laws of the country over which Mr. Calderon presides.

McCarthy was the district attorney who prosecuted the terrorists behind the first World Trade Tower bombings in the early 90s. He writes:

[A]s a New York lawyer who made no secret of having conservative views, I was a decided minority, even among my fellow prosecutors. But that only mattered in the occasional, friendly joust over a beer. Day to day, our politics had nothing to do with how we went about our jobs. At the office, I had friends across the ideological spectrum. Most of them were from the political left, but we liked and respected one another. The bond we shared, the sense that we were doing something good for the nation we all loved, was stronger than any ideological divisions.

Why does that matter now? Because, for the first time in our history, we have a president who would be much more comfortable sitting in a room with Bill Ayers than sitting in a room with me. We have a governing class that is too often comfortable with anti-American radicals, with rogue and dysfunctional governments that blame America for their problems, and with Muslim Brotherhood ideologues who abhor individual liberty, capitalism, freedom of conscience, and, in general, Western enlightenment. To this president and his government, I am the problem. Americans who champion life, liberty, and limited government are not just the loyal opposition; they are deemed potential terrorists, and are derided with considerably more intensity than the actual terrorists. Arizona - for criminalizing criminal activity, for defending its sovereignty and protecting its citizens' lives and property - is slandered as a human-rights violator.

Mr. McCarthy makes a telling point. For the first time in our history we have a president who never talks about America's greatness, who never talks about the blessing America has been to the world, who never praises its history or traditions. For the first time in our history we have a president who feels the need to apologize for America at every opportunity, who abases himself before third world tyrants, whose wife admits to having never been proud of her country. For the first time, at least in modern history, our president is more interested in pitting one group against another than in bringing people together, he's more interested in fueling class resentments than in working for unity.

I never thought that any of the men who served as president throughout my adult life, even those whose policies I thought were misguided, disdained the United States and what it stood for. I never thought any of them actually wanted to see the United States' power and influence diminished around the world. Nor did I ever think that any of them were deliberately trying to weaken the American economy in order to impose a socialist, corporatist, statism on the nation, but, rightly or wrongly, I'm afraid I have come to think that of this president.

I think McCarthy is correct. It says something about the president that from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama appears to feel more comfortable in the company of people who despise this country than in the company of those who love it.

I urge you to read the rest of McCarthy's NRO column at the link.

RLC