Values and Duties

Frans de Waal has a follow up at The Opinionator to his post last month titled Morals Without God about which we commented here. Apparently de Waal has received a lot of angry emails from atheists taking him to task for being insufficiently hostile to religion.

His response affords an occasion to emphasize more explicitly than I perhaps did in the earlier post what I think is an important distinction in the discussion of whether God is necessary for morality.

Atheists will often insist that they can be, and often are, just as morally good as anyone else and that God is not necessary for them to be so. What they mean by this, I take it, is that they can hold the same values as does any believer without the concomitant belief in God. An atheist can be just as kind, generous, peaceful, gentle, loving, etc. as anyone else.

My argument is that this is certainly true, but it's entirely beside the point. The debate is not over whether an atheist can hold a particular set of moral values, the debate is over whether an atheist is constrained by any moral obligation to abide by one set of values rather than another. In other words, if atheism is true can there be moral duty?

The answer to that, it seems to me, is no. If there is no transcendent moral authority to impose an obligation on us to, say, care for the poor, then there is no such obligation. It might be objected that the individual himself can impose the obligation, but a self-imposed obligation is an illusion. If someone sets himself up as his own moral authority and imposes an obligation upon himself then he surely has the authority to rescind the obligation whenever it suits him. An obligation that can be repudiated whenever the person who is under the obligation chooses to cast it off is no obligation at all.

An atheist can choose to be kind and generous, but if he's right about God his choice simply reflects an arbitrary preference. Had he chosen to be cruel and selfish he would not be wrong. His values could not be said to be morally inferior, they're just different values.

An irony in all this is that the atheist lives by a superstition. She believes that something called moral right exists when in fact, on atheism, it not only doesn't exist, it cannot exist. But this means that an atheist should logically be a nihilist and most atheists cannot live with that conclusion even though its where their reason leads them. Instead they deny what reason dictates and live instead by their feelings. In order to believe that moral values matter, that some values are better than others, they must leave reason behind and make an irrational leap based upon their own personal moral tastes.

A further irony is that certain of their number (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris et al.) then scoff at Christians and other theists for holding what they allege is an irrational belief in God. They claim that the Christian is irrational despite the fact that a Christian can live perfectly consistently within his basic assumptions about God, whereas most atheists cannot live at all consistently with theirs.

It'd be funny were it not so tragic.

Reducing the Deficit

It looks like we're at least getting some movement on reducing spending and trimming entitlements. The two co-chairs of a presidential commission established to come up with ideas for reducing our government's enormous appetite for spending have produced a series of proposals that has in it something to antagonize pretty much everyone, but at least it should give us something to build upon:

A presidential commission’s leaders proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit-cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks including the mortgage-interest deduction.

The plan would throw out hundreds of tax breaks for items such as capital gains and child care. It would raise the gas tax, slash defense spending and bring down health-care costs by clamping down on medical malpractice suits. The Social Security retirement age would rise to 68 in about 2050 and 69 in about 2075.

None of the proposals would take effect next year to avoid disrupting the economic recovery. Under one option, income-tax rates would be reduced to three levels: 8 percent, 14 percent and 23 percent. Currently there are six tax levels ranging from 10 percent to 35 percent. The corporate income-tax rate would be cut to 26 percent from 35 percent.

Wiping out all tax breaks, including the home mortgage deduction, while lowering rates would cost taxpayers $100 billion a year under the plan.

Increasing taxes and cutting defense spending will not be popular with conservatives, although the simplified tax rates will be, and Nancy Pelosi has already voiced her objection to tinkering with Medicare and Social Security:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called the plan “simply unacceptable,” saying older Americans “are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare.”

This seems an odd objection since as far as I can tell from the article, few of today's "older Americans" will still be around when the new retirement age goes into effect.

Anyway, a detailed list of proposals can be found here. Something has to be done soon as one of the chairmen said when the proposals were released:

“This country’s out of money and we better start thinking,” said Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of the panel created by President Barack Obama. Without “tough choices,” Bowles said, “we’re on the most predictable path toward an economic crisis that I can imagine.”

Indeed. If we don't do something to reign in entitlements and reduce the deficit the country our children and grandchildren inhabit will look very much different, and very much poorer, than the country we live in today.

Microfinance in China

Yesterday we talked about microfinance as a great way to help the world's poor improve their condition. I received this email in response, and I thought some of our readers might be interested in it:

To Viewpoint,

My name is Brendan Rigby, and I am a volunteer representative of Wokai a microfinance organisation dedicated to poverty alleviation in China. We are currently raising awareness of poverty and microfinance in China and how everyone can now get involved.

Essentially, Wokai is a peer-to-peer approach to microfinance that was created by two young social entrepreneurs. It is an innovative, contributor-driven microfinance website that connects contributors in the international community with borrowers in China. Contributors can choose borrowers to support, watch repayments, and pick who to fund next. Unlike much of the global sector, the impact of a contributor's donation is visible and apparent through Wokai.

Wokai has also built a community of contributors through the website, in which users can access user-rated and user-generated content on microfinance in China. We also encourage other social entrepreneurs to establish Wokai Chapters in their city to mobilise support and encourage others to get involved. Through information and capital exchange, Wokai aims to grow the microfinance sector in China and correspondingly increase opportunities for the poor to generate a sustainable livelihood and access education and healthcare services.

We are currently reaching out to bloggers such as yourself to help us build this community of contributors. We would be very appreciative your support in our effort to raise awareness build community support.

Microfinance in China is an extremely underdeveloped and overlooked issue that deserves more attention. Poverty in China is often overlooked and overshadowed. According to World Bank and UN statistics, around 200 million Chinese live on less than US$1.25 a day. China's financial and banking system makes it difficult for entrepreneurs and small business owners to access loan credit, especially in rural areas.

Since the website launch in November 2008, Wokai has raised over US$374.000 in loan capital, attracted 6,700 contributors, and empowered 491 borrowers. Wokai works closely with two Chinese microfinance institutions (MFI) in Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, achieving a 99.5% on-time repayment rate. By the end of 2011, Wokai is aiming to raise US$1 million in loan captial to expand its partnerships with Chinese MFIs. This is an achieveable goal, but not without more support from individuals passionate about empowering families to lift themselves from poverty.

Thank you for your time, love reading the blog and I look forward to speaking further about microfinance in China and Wokai.

I encourage readers to check out Wokai's webpage here.

Calling for a Violent Revolution

What is going on here? A mainstream cable talk show on MSNBC is apparently providing a platform for a guy who's advocating violent revolution in the U.S. Dylan Ratigan is one of the fairer voices on the lefty cable network MSNBC, but why he would have a guest like this on, and why his producers allowed him to have this guest on, is beyond me. Indeed, in a more sensible era the man's ideas would be considered seditious. I believe in free speech, but it's patently irresponsible to give someone an opportunity on national television to call for killing the leaders of our country, which is certainly implicit in any call to violent revolution.

Imagine that instead of a politically progressive cartoonist of minimal talent this had been a member of the Tea Party voicing similar opinions on, say, Glenn Beck's show. There'd be a national clamor for the sponsors of the show to yank their sponsorship and for FOX to fire Beck. Yet Ted Rall, a man who once implied in a cartoon that Pat Tillman was an "idiot" and a "sap" for passing up a pro football career to join the military after 9/11, can call for the violent overthrow of the government - which would certainly entail a huge loss of life and be cataclysmic for this country and the world - and the outrage seems to be exclusively on the right:

Am I overreacting or is this as sick as it sounds?

Helping the Poor Through Microfinance

Yesterday we did a piece on how conservatives and liberals differ in their views of the best way to help the poor. Here's an example of the sort of assistance that conservatives applaud.

In the past it was felt that what we needed to do was just send money to those languishing in grinding poverty in places like Chad and Haiti. It was eventually realized, however, that sending aid to foreign governments was, for a host of reasons, counterproductive. Moreover, unless people are working, unless they're struggling to make it on their own without having to rely on an indefinite stream of handouts, we might as well just burn the cash we give them for all the good it does those who receive it.

The lessons learned from our bad experience with aid led to the emergence of a number of private organizations that employed the principles of microfinance to help the poor in the third world. Microfinance groups cut out the bureaucratic government middle-man and encourage and reward entrepreneuership and self-reliance. One such organization is named Kiva.

For those who may not be familiar with Kiva and other similar groups, they work like this:

Entrepreneurs in need of funds to expand or start a business in the third world apply for a loan with a field representative who works with Kiva. Usually the loans are for a couple of hundred or a few thousand dollars. The representative assesses the credibility of the applicant, and if they are approved, their name, photo, and a brief bio are posted on the Kiva website.

People all over the world then view the request and make an online contribution (minimum of $25). Once the loan amount has been raised the loan is granted and the entrepreneuer then has about a year or so to repay it. When the lenders have been repaid they are notified and can then apply the funds to other loans if they wish.

It's an excellent way to help people without having to work through an inefficient, wasteful government bureaucracy and without just throwing money at people without demanding anything of them in return, as many welfare programs do.

Kiva affords donors an opportunity to help people who are working hard to help themselves, and one of the best aspects of the microfinance plan is that the donations can accumulate and be recycled among a series of recipients. It's a great idea all around.

Check it out.

How Can We Best Help the Poor?

People have asked how one might square conservative political philosophy with a Christian duty to help the poor. The question puzzles me a little because I don't know why anyone should think the two are in tension in the first place.

Of course, there might be some still in thrall to archaic stereotypes who believe that liberals care about the poor whereas conservatives care only about making money and protecting their wealth. That's simply not true, however. Conservatives and liberals, at least many of them, both agree that we have a moral obligation to help the poor. The debate between them is not about whether we should help but how we should help. It's about finding the best way to accomplish the goal of lifting people out of poverty.

Conservatives reject policies which are wasteful, inefficient and ineffective, which is how they view most government programs. Waste and inefficiency are unjust and immoral, but they are inevitable in government. The government initiates some anti-poverty program, and a bureaucracy is then erected to manage it. Your tax dollar wends its way through the bureaucratic sausage machine and everyone who touches it along the way takes a cut. By the time the money gets to the recipient for whom it is intended she may see only a fraction of the original dollar. That's wasteful and inefficient.

For six decades we've tried to solve the problem of the poor by essentially taking money from those who have, and giving it, often with no strings attached, to those who don't. For example, perhaps you work hard, maybe two jobs, to save for your children's education and to pay your mortgage. Your neighbor buys a house next door which he can't afford and is subsequently foreclosed upon. The government solution is to take money from you and give it to him to stave off foreclosure. That's unjust.

After six decades of these sorts of policies we are burdened with as much, if not more, poverty as ever. We have spent trillions of dollars since the 1960s on combating poverty and have very little to show for it. That's ineffective.

The best way to lift people out of penury is not by giving them a handout. It's by making sure there are jobs available for those who are willing to work. If people don't have to work for what they receive they'll never develop the virtues and disciplines necessary to rise above their circumstances.

So the question becomes, what's the best way to create jobs? Here again the liberal solution is to raise taxes, run up debt, and provide money in the form of stimulus to get the economy going. That may help a little, like a band aid might help a little, but the long term cost is very high. Not only do the jobs disappear when the stimulus runs out but the debt that the government incurs when they borrow the money to pay for it is an albatross around the necks of future generations.

A better approach is to create a private-sector business environment in which employers have the fiscal resources to expand their business and market their product. When consumers have more money in their pocket they'll buy more. When employers are making a significant profit and consumers are buying their product people will be hired. What's the best way to get more money into the pockets of businesses and customers? Conservatives argue that it's by removing onerous and costly regulations on businesses, keeping their taxes low and also reducing the taxes that consumers pay.

Right now businesses aren't hiring because they don't know how much Obamacare is going to cost them, they don't know how much their fuel costs will go up with the onset of inflation and the possibility that cap and trade gets passed next year, and they don't know what their tax rates will be after January 1st. The administration wants to allow the current lower tax rates to lapse, at least on those making over $250,000, which includes a lot of businesses. This will automatically kick in massive tax increases on these businesses unless legislation is passed to keep the current rates in place. All this uncertainty is like a tourniquet squeezing an arm. It just shuts off the flow of commerce.

Conservatives also believe that spending must be reduced because the more government spends the more money they have to borrow. The more they borrow the more money they have to print to pay on the debt. The more money there is in circulation the less value it has, and the less it will buy. That's inflation, and it always hurts the poor more than anyone because they're living on the tightest economic margins. When $3 buys only one gallon of gas instead of two, most of us just pay the extra cost and cut back somewhere else, but the poor can't pay it. They walk instead.

Moreover, when gas costs more everything costs more, including food, because it takes gas to raise, harvest, process and transport the food. The poor often cannot afford to pay the higher cost so they just do without.

Conservatives believe that the best way to help the poor, which all Christians, liberal and conservative, believe we must do, is to lower taxes, reduce spending, ease regulations on business, and reduce health care and fuel costs on both businesses and consumers. This will enable consumers to buy more, businesses to hire more, and that means jobs for those who need them.

The liberal solution is to do the opposite: Raise taxes, borrow money to spend on infrastructure, etc., increase the regulatory burden to protect the environment and the consumer, increase health care costs to pay for care for those who can't afford it, and increase fuel costs so that we are forced to conserve more. These may all sound like good ideas, but each of them stifles job creation and are no help at all in the long run to the poor who need jobs more than they need a marginally better environment.

The question for the Christian, then, is do we want a solution that ultimately does not make the situation of the poor better and may make it worse, or do we want a solution that helps not only the wealth creators in society, but also more effectively ameliorates the plight of the poor?

The Olby Affair

Keith Olbermann is a difficult man to like. In my opinion he and Sean Hannity are the two most insufferable talk show hosts on the air today (well, not counting Michael Savage). Olbermann is often vulgar, vicious, vile and unfair. Even so, I don't understand why MSNBC suspended him indefinitely without pay, and I suspect there must be more to the story than meets the eye:

Keith Olbermann, the unabashedly liberal-leaning counterpart to cable television's conservative hosts, was suspended indefinitely without pay from MSNBC Friday afternoon for contributing a total of $7,200 to three Democratic candidates in late October, a violation of network ethics policies.

I understand that NBC has rules about their personnel not contributing to political campaigns, but I don't know why. They say it's because news people should not be invested in a political candidate because it reflects poorly on their ability to fairly comment on the issues of the day, but this explanation is difficult to credit. Anyone who has watched MSNBC's lineup knows that there's no impartiality there. The people at MSNBC are as deep into the tank for progressive Democrats as Sean Hannity over at FOX is in the tank for conservative Republicans (FOX, by the way, has a similar policy for its news staff but not for its commentators).

I think the NBC policy makes little sense and to punish Olbermann because he gave money to a couple of progressive candidates when for 24 hours a day MSNBC is pretty much campaigning for progressives and progressive policies anyway seems a little peculiar. Olbermann is, like everyone else at MSNBC and many of the people at FOX, an opinion-monger. He tries to promote his point of view and to persuade people to accept it. No one confuses these guys with objective news reporters. No one thinks they're ideologically unbiased or that they even should be.

To forbid them from financially supporting the candidates they promote on their shows seems very odd, but if the NBC execs feel they have to enforce their policy why not just dock him a day's pay or something? The reaction seems, on the face of it, disproportionate to the offense, and that's why I think there's more to the story than what we learn from the WaPo account. Maybe this is not the first problem the suits over at MSNBC have had with Keith, which is certainly not hard to imagine, and perhaps he has crossed the line one time too many.

At any rate, I wouldn't be sorry to see him be let go, which is what some are speculating is going to happen (if he does leave I wish he could take Hannity with him), but this is not how I'd like to see it happen. I'd prefer he be cashiered because his ratings are poor or because his level of civility falls short of MSNBC's standards, but these aren't the reasons that were given for his suspension. The guy's very hard to take, but he still should be treated fairly and reasonably, even if he doesn't treat others that way.

Widening the War

I haven't heard anything about this on the normal media channels, but if it's true it marks a widening of the war against terrorists. Never before, at least according to the article, have American forces targeted an al Qaeda operative in Gaza.

From the article:

A missile fired from an American warship in the Mediterranean hit the car in which Muhammad Jamal A-Namnam, 27, was driving in the heart of Gaza City Wednesday, Nov. 3 and killed him, debkafile's exclusive counter-terror sources report. Namnam was an operational commander of the Army of Islam, Al-Qaeda's Palestinian cell in the Gaza Strip. He was on a mission on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – AQAP to plan, organize and execute the next wave of terrorist attacks on US targets after last week's air package bomb plot.

According to our sources, the Palestinian cell members were planning to infiltrate northern Sinai from the Gaza strip over the coming weekend and strike American personnel serving with the Multinational Force and Observers Organization – MFO, which is under American command and is stationed at North Camp, El Gorah, 37 kilometers southeast of El-Arish. In a coordinated operation, Al Qaeda fighters hiding up in the mountains of central Sinai were to have attacked US Marines and Air Force troops stationed at the South Camp in Naama Bay, Sharm el Sheikh.

Meanwhile, American and allied forces are quietly continuing to mass in the seas near Iran. Whether this is merely an attempt to intimidate Iran or a prelude to taking out their nuclear weapons facilities is hard to tell, but I imagine we'll find out soon enough.

The Package Bombers

The package bombs found on planes bound for the United States originated in Yemen and U.S. intelligence agencies know where the bad guys are. They want to launch a special forces operation against them, but the Yemeni president Abdullah Ali Saleh, despite U.S. and Saudi pressure, has been very uncooperative. Ultimately, the decision to go after these terrorists may be taken out of his hands.

Here's the story.

Tuesday's Significance

A friend writes to ask how significant I thought Tuesday's election was for Republicans, especially since Democrats still control the Presidency and the Senate. From what I've read the election results are very significant. Here are several reasons why:

1. Since they no longer enjoy the perquisites of power some House Democrats can be expected to retire (Nancy Pelosi's name has been prominently mentioned in this regard). This would give the GOP an even greater plurality than did Tuesday's election.
2. The Republicans are now poised to take the Senate in 2012. Twenty one Democrat senators are up for reelection in 2012 plus two independents. Only ten Republicans will stand for reelection. Unless the economy improves dramatically, and the President's approval ratings go up, more Democrat seats will be vulnerable than Republican. If the President's popularity and the economy are both in the doldrums the Republicans could wind up with over 60 senate seats which would make veto overrides a serious possibility.
3. The number of big states whose governments are now controlled by the GOP has shot up from 15 to 26. This is very significant for legislation like Obamacare and immigration policy which states can pressure the federal government to change or improve.
4. GOP control of the statehouses will also be very important this year because congressional districts will be redrawn as a result of the 2010 census. The party in power in the state gets to redraw these boundaries and they always do so to protect their own political interests.
5. The fact that the Republicans now have 46 senate seats (two races are still undecided) means it will be much more difficult for the Democrats to break a Republican filibuster. This means that Obama's legislative agenda is probably finished. All they can do is fight to keep what he already has from being repealed or try to circumvent the legislature by imposing policy through his executive agencies and czars.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of Tuesday's election was the number of governorships and state legislatures that swung toward the Republicans and the number of young, rising Democrat pols who got wiped out in the process. These two calamities for the Democrat party are going to be very difficult to overcome anytime soon.

Shrinking from the Challenge

Michael Egnor poses a series of penetrating questions to a militantly atheistic materialist named P.Z. Myers. Myers' replies to the questions suggest that he hasn't even thought about several of them. His answers and Egnor's response to those answers can be found here. Here are the questions Egnor asks Myers to answer:

• Why is there anything?
• What caused the Universe?

• Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
• Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real?
• Do final causes exist?

• Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
• Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
• Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
• Why is there evil?

When you read Myers' flippant and superficial answers and compare them to Egnor's replies it becomes very tempting to believe that atheism is little more than an expression of an anti-intellectual hope that there really is no God. Atheists seem unable, or at least Myers and others to whom Egnor has posed these same questions seem unable, to muster any persuasive counter to a serious intellectual challenge.

Read their exchange at the link and see what you think.

Letter to a Young Girl

I was reading an email from a young student recently, and what she said reminded me of a letter I had written about three years ago to my youngest daughter when she was a junior in high school. I had posted the letter on Viewpoint at the time, and after reading my student's email I thought I'd repost it in hope that someone finds it helpful.

Here it is:

Hi Honey,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

Can't We All Just Get Along?

A group of supporters of GOP candidate Robert Hurt, running for congress in Virginia's 5th district, are sitting outside minding their own business when a supporter of Hurt's Democrat opponent, Tom Perriello, happens by to engage the Republicans in some polite political dialogue over the issues. Much of the man's political wisdom was directed at a black woman who was among the Hurt supporters.

Warning - some of the technical jargon the Democrat employs may not be appropriate for mixed company:

Apparently, this gentleman did not receive the memo from Jim Wallis calling upon citizens to engage in civil dialogue this election season. Or maybe he thought this was pretty civil for a Democrat. Anyway, if a tea partier had launched this sort of racist, vile, and bigoted screed it would be all over the evening news, but since it was a Democrat, well, maybe the media just figures that that's really not news.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com

Yes, They're Angry

Throughout this campaign season the liberal media and the Democrats have been portraying Tea Partiers and other conservatives as "angry". Well, yes, they're angry writes Moe Lane at RedState.com. Who wouldn't be angry given what has been said about them and the people they respect and support during the last year.

Lane writes:

• These people (liberals) told their clients (i.e. their readers and listeners) to say that:
• you hate African-Americans.
• you hate Latinos.
• you hate gays.
• you hate women.
• you hate Jews.
• you hate Muslims.
• you hate the poor.
• you hate America.
• you were fascists.
• you were theocrats.
• you were stupid.
• you were uneducated.
• you were hatemongers.
• you were insane.
• you were violent extremists.
• These people told their clients to call you unpatriotic.
• to call you cowards.
• These people told their clients to mock you at every opportunity.
• to deliberately use a sexual slur when referring to you.
• to trivialize and dismiss your concerns at every opportunity.

It's true that every one of the epithets and slanders Lane lists has been employed by liberals, either in the Democratic party, the main-stream media, or cable talk - or all three - against the Tea Party as a whole or against individual Tea Party-supported candidates at one point or another over the last year. If Tea Partiers are angry maybe they have a right to be.

If the "Tea-nami" that has been forecast actually materializes at the polls today the Left will have nothing and no one to blame for stirring up these hornets but their own policies and their own execrable, disgusting, rhetoric.

Profiling

I know Juan Williams got fired from NPR for admitting this sort of thing, and I don't want anyone to think that I'm profiling or anything, but I have to say that from now on it's going to make me very nervous if I see Yemenis carrying toner cartridges onto an airplane.

Please don't think less of me.

Restoring Sanity, Or Not

Reason TV attended the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert Restore Sanity rally last Saturday and tried to get a sense of what was on the minds of the attendees. The results were pretty funny:

Even funnier are the interviews of attendees who were asked whether President Obama is a Keynesian. John Maynard Keynes, of course, was an economist who endorsed lots of government spending during times of recession in order to stimulate the economy. This is the President's view as well. Apparently, though, some of the attendees at the Restore Sanity rally couldn't tell the difference between being a Keynesian and being a Kenyan.

It's not often that something I see on the computer makes me laugh out loud, but this did. Watch:

And liberals are out there calling Tea Partiers simple-minded? These are the people that comprise the Democrats' electoral base? Lord help us.

Video courtesy of TheBlaze.com.

Truth Coming Back to Bite Him

Jerry Brown is running for the office of governor of California against Meg Whitman who has dug up an old interview Brown did on CNN fifteen years ago, some years after his first stint as governor. In a fit of candor uncharacteristic of politicians Mr. Brown admits that his whole campaign for the office was a tissue of lies. Whitman is now clobbering him with it:

If this video costs Brown the election it will certainly be a lesson for politicians: Under no circumstances should you ever tell the truth. On the other hand, that's a lesson they seem not to need to be taught.

Five Reasons to Vote Democratic Tomorrow

Tomorrow is the big day, the day that political junkies have been looking forward to for a long time - the midterm elections. In the spirit of bipartisanship I herewith offer five reasons to cast your vote for the Democrats when you go to the polls:

1. You think the government lets you keep too much of your paycheck.
2. You'd rather not have to work for a paycheck.
3. You think the best way to create jobs is to create more government bureaucracies.
4. You believe the best way to solve our immigration problem is to enact the same economic policies here that the immigrants are fleeing from.
5. You think the best way to gain independence from foreign oil suppliers is to build windmills.

Remember to vote.

Slime and Violence

ABC's Jonathan Karl laments the incivility and mendacity of the political ads with which we've been barraged this election cycle and puts the blame squarely where it belongs:

In one typical example, Democratic ads have transformed Kentucky Republican House candidate Andy Barr into "a convicted criminal" -- complete with images yellow police tape and fuzzy video of crime scenes. Not mentioned is his crime: As a college student 19 years ago, he was caught using a fake ID during spring break.

As you watch this year's ads -- and I've been watching all too many lately -- you'll notice a striking difference between Democratic and Republican attack ads: Democrats are attacking over personal issues, Republicans are attacking over policy.

A recent study by the Wesleyan Media Project actually quantifies this. They looked at 900,000 airing of political ads this year and concluded: "Democrats are using personal attacks at much higher rates than Republicans and a much higher rate than Democrats in 2008."

Karl's report gives lots of examples of how the Democrats have resorted repeatedly to personal insult and slander in a desperate attempt to discredit their opponents in the eyes of the voters.

With so many to choose from, of course, Karl couldn't list them all. Daily Beast columnist Howard Kurtz has videos of several more. Neither ABC nor The Daily Beast, it should be noted, can be said to be Republican media organs.

Sliming one's opponent is the sort of thing that sixth graders do in a student council election. It's done because they have no issues to discuss, or, as in the case of the Democrats, they have no desire to discuss the issues nor their record on them.

Somewhat related to the Democrats' use of personal attack is the absolutely appalling performance of MSNBC's Chris Matthews on his Hardball show the other night. Matthews is either one of the most uninformed cable talk show hosts or he's one of the most dishonest, and his guests seem no better informed, or truthful, than he is. Here's the segment from his program a couple of nights ago. The relevant discussion starts at about the 9:30 mark:

Since neither Matthews nor his interlocutors can recall anything on the liberal side remotely similar to a man pressing his boot onto a disruptive protestor's shoulder - since Matthews believes we'd have to go back 60 years to find a commensurate example of such violent behavior on the Left - let us at Viewpoint remind him of just a few episodes that have occurred in the last year or so, each of which is at least as bad, and some much worse, than the incident that has him worrying that the Tea Party is on the brink of Kristallknacht.

First there was the sad case of Kevin Gladney, a black man who was beaten and kicked by SEIU thugs outside a Town Hall meeting held by a Democrat congressman. Gladney was attacked because he was selling Tea Party paraphenalia.

Then there was the incident last summer of North Carolina congressman Bob Ethridge who physically assaulted a student who was questioning him on a Washington D.C. street. The video of this encounter is at the link.

And we can't forget the poor guy who had his finger bitten off at a health care rally about a year ago. The victim was a 65 year old man who was peacefully protesting health care reform when he was attacked by a MoveOn.org supporter.

And just the other day another MoveOn.org thug grabbed a man around the throat and choked him. The video can be seen here. Finally, if it's uniforms that has Matthews in a swivet as he frets for our future perhaps someone should remind him of these fine citizens who were charged and found guilty of intimidating white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, until the Obama Justice department decided that since they were black the charges would be dropped:

Maybe Matthews and his two guests, both of whom are putative journalists, don't keep up on the news and are merely professionally incompetent. That's always a possibility. On the other hand, maybe they're just dishonest.

Great Books

What makes a great book great? At Biola College they offer an honors program in which students read, by the time they graduate, about one hundred of the books considered to be among the very best ever written, but how do they determine which works should be included? Fred Sanders, at The Scriptorium, lists and discusses eight characteristics or criteria of a great book. I've listed the eight, but to read his discussion of them you'll have to visit his article:

1. A great book speaks from an important original setting.
2. A great book is written in a way that is relevant for readers today.
3. A great book is well-crafted.
4. A great book is one that provokes excellent discussion.
5. A great book is inexhaustible, so no reading of it is the final reading, and no discussion ever runs it dry.
6. A great book is time-tested. People from multiple generations have had their hands on it, and have judged it to be worth passing along.
7. A great book is weird. It’s got angles, edges, textures, and stuff sticking out that you wouldn’t have predicted.
8. A great book is smarter than the best teacher, but within reach of the average student.

How many books have you read that meet these criteria? Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series doesn't count.