California Senator Barbara Boxer, according to this article, is being touted on liberal blogs as the Democrats' best hope for the presidency in 2008. We don't know whether this is simply evidence of the woeful state of the Democratic party, or evidence that God looks out for Republicans, or a premonition that God has decided to punish America, or all three.

Meanwhile, George Soros, 74 year-old billionaire money bags of the Democratic party, who spent $26 million in last year's campaign against George Bush, said his effort was undermined by the candidate he supported.

In other words, in Mr. Soros' opinion, Kerry lost because he wasn't far enough to the Left. He should've portrayed himself as more of a radical anti-war protestor. He should've hugged Michael Moore more often. That would've swung those red state voters into his column, yessiree.

Maybe in 2008 Mr. Soros can persuade George McGovern to run, or Barbara Boxer.

Actually, rank and file Democrats probably would like to tell Mr. Soros to just shut up, but unfortunately for them you can't easily shut up a $26 million dollar sugar daddy.

RLC

The following is excerpted from a National Geographic article which discusses research being done to blend human traits with those of other animals:

Well, why not. They've evidently already put mouse brains in humans. At least that seems to be the most plausible explanation for the demands (see here and here) emanating from the political Left that we pull out now from Iraq.

RLC

Expressions of joy from a sampling of Iraqi bloggers: See here, here, here, here, and here.

Today has been a historic day not only for Iraq but also for the United States. No one knows what the future holds, of course, and things could certainly turn bad, but days like this make one awfully proud to be an American. What our country has done in Iraq is the sort of thing many Americans grew up believing was typical of the American people. This might be the grandest day in our history since the Marshall Plan era c.1950. If someone can think of a day that beats it, let us know because we can't think of one.

UPDATE: Ok. Maybe the day the Berlin wall was torn down has to be pretty high up on the list as well.

RLC

Today's WINNERS:

1) The Iraqi people

2) All who desire peace and freedom in the Middle East

3) George W. Bush

4) Neo-Conservatives

Today's LOSERS:

1) Islamo-fascist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere

2) Tyrants in Syria and Iran

3) The Michael Moore/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democratic party

FoxNews.com has a story about the Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the actual burial cloth of Christ. Radiocarbon dating tests run in the 1980s seemed to place the cloth in the medieval period, but more recently that analysis has been questioned. Now a chemist who worked on testing of the Shroud of Turin says new tests on the fiber indicates the cloth could be as much as 3,000 years old:

Apparently, however there's no chance of resolving the age discrepancy since secret alterations were made to the shroud which make it unsuitable for further analysis. You can read all about it at the link to FoxNews.com.

RLC

Quick: Who is the man most responsible for having developed the World Wide Web? If you said Al Gore you get demerits.

Captain Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters has this very interesting piece of modern computer history. Ed writes:

Morrisey quotes from the Telegraph article:

Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Important People Of The Century and tells us this about him, according to Captain Ed:

According to Morrisey:

The part that we found most intriguing, although it's commonplace in the history of science, especially in the computer field, is that Berners-Lee realized this world-changing achievement while still in his mid-thirties, and that he accomplished it essentially by himself. Amazing.

RLC

Bill came across this withering attack on Euro-appeasers by Matthias Döpfner, Chief Executive of German publisher Axel Springer AG. The article was posted by Tom Heard at Heard Here. The post is a translation and so the style may in places seem just a bit uneven. The sentiments, however, translate with pellucid clarity:

It's nice to know that not all the opinion-makers in Europe are waving the white flag of surrender to the Islamo-fascists with one hand while giving Bush the finger with the other.

RLC

This article suggests that things are not going well for the orcs, Urukai and other minions of Sauron in Iraq:

This is typical thug logic. If we kill you for exercising your right to vote then you can only blame yourself. You placed yourself in the spot where we just innocently happened to have a bomb. Very careless of you.

Despite their fears, millions of Iraqis will take to the polls in a few hours in what will be a historic election. Nothing like this has ever happened in the Arab world before. The terrorists among the Sunnis are doing everything they can to suppress the vote, knowing that a successful election will demonstrate the utter illegitimacy of their cause, and be a crucial nail in their coffin.

In what should be a lesson to the nay-sayers and Chicken Littles of the effete Euro-Left and the Michael Moore/Ted Kennedy wing of the Democrat party, many Sunnis are so hopeful and so trustful of American determination to persevere that they are prepared to brave threats to their lives in order to vote. It is only because they trust us to see things through until they can defend themselves that they are willing to risk everything to install democracy and freedom in this most uncongenial soil.

This is why demands to establish timetables for withdrawal or to start pulling out immediately are so nefarious. The Iraqi people are placing their lives and those of their children in our hands and saying that they are counting on us to continue the fight against the murderous butchers who would kill them all if we left. To betray them now as The Nation and Ted Kennedy and others on the Left have insisted we do would be a crime against humanity that would earn us the world's eternal opprobrium and contempt.

There are many brave people in Iraq. They need our prayers this weekend, and they need our resolve in the months and years ahead.

RLC

According to an article in the Rocky Mountain News, Colorado University professor Ward Churchill displays an intellectual and moral obtuseness remarkable even by Left-wing professorial standards:

This essay is so sophomoric that we're reluctant to take it seriously. Surely, one suspects, the professor is baiting us, enticing us to think him a complete imbecile at which point he'll startle us with some surprising turnabout. Or, maybe, he just really is a complete imbecile.

In defiance of appearances, however, let's assume that he intends to be taken seriously. Where does he get the figure of 500,000 children killed in a U.S. bombing raid against Iraq in 1991? That's almost five times the total number of people killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Perhaps he's including in this figure the number of children who died during sanctions imposed by the United Nations. But if so, these were deaths caused by Saddam Hussein who used the money with which he was supposed to feed and care for his people to build palaces and to buy off the French and Kojo Anan. Why does Professor Churchill lay these tragic victims at America's feet? Churchill seems to think that it is America's fault that Hussein abused his people. This is typical of the Left to blame America for whatever evil there is in the world. It is also positively goofy.

We also wonder why the victims of the 9/11 attack deserve the epithet "little Eichmanns"? What was their crime? Being Americans? Being capitalist business men and women? Many of the victims, of course, were neither, but even if they all were American capitalists how does that make them legitimate targets of terrorism? This sort of slander against perfectly innocent and decent people is the toxic effluent of a mind that's been too often marinated in hallucinogenic cocktails at campus colloquies.

Maybe the looniest part of Professor Churchill's essay is his claim that 9/11 was a retaliation for American offenses against Iraq. We have been told ever since we began preparations for war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 that there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq. We had been told that al Qaida despised the secular regime Hussein had established and didn't want anything to do with it. Now Professor Churchill wants us to believe that there is a direct link between U.S. (actually U.N.) policy in Iraq and the Saudis and other Arabs who made up the al Qaida hijacking teams.

We would be interested to see the evidence he has for this allegation, but we don't expect him to offer any. It is the Left's modus operandi to fervently assert whatever fits their view of how things are and not worry about whether there is actually any support for the assertion. In Leftist epistemology any claim that serves to dishonor the United States and its people is self-validating.

For more on Professor Churchill, including a charming photo, go here.

RLC

A study published last August by a team of researchers from Harvard claimed that consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. The problem with the study is that it contradicts a 2003 study which found no link at all between sugared soft drink consumption and diabetes. Oddly enough one researcher helped author both studies.

So do soda drinkers have an elevated risk of diabetes or don't they? Steve Milloy at Fox News.com is on the case. He concludes his article with these reassuring words for all the soda addicts out there:

Read the whole column at the link and be careful not to spill any of that coca cola on your keyboard.

RLC

In a speech today before the Johns' Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, Senator Edward M. Kennedy laid out what TruthOut.org unsurprisingly calls a realistic and responsible course for America's future in Iraq. The plan consists of five points:

Of course disengagement is exactly what is occurring in Iraq as we have transitioned from a military government to a civilian interim government to a freely elected Iraqi government to be chosen this weekend. Senator Kennedy is simply saying that we should do what we are doing.

His insistence that the United Nations should take over, however, is a prescription for disaster. The U.N. has never successfully brokered or protected a peace unless it was backed by American arms. The U.N. is deeply mistrusted by those Iraqis who saw their oil wealth diverted into the pockets of it's officials and who remember how the U.N. pulled up stakes and ran when their headquarters were bombed in 2003. If the U.N. had its way Saddam would still be in power. It's not likely that the blue helmets would have the resolve to stand up to Zarqawi and his thugs for very long.

This is so vague as to be meaningless. What does the Senator mean by "long-term presence"? Five years? Fifty years? Does leaving Iraq preclude maintaining military bases or depots there? What if the new Iraqi government wants such bases? We are still in Europe and South Korea fifty years after the wars that brought us there. Our presence around the globe has kept the peace where war would have otherwise been likely. Why should we pull our military completely out of Iraq if our presence there can prevent civil conflict or foreign invasion. Why not let the Iraqis decide what our long term relationship will be?

This is another foolish proposal. We should not leave Iraq until Iraqis can provide for their own security. To do otherwise would be to condemn the Iraqi people to the vengeance of the Islamist terrorists and the avarice of its neighbors. It would betray Iraq and utterly destroy respect for America around the world.

This is not only foolish, it is a fantasy. Does Senator Kennedy really believe that the Arab League would lift a finger to stop Iran, Syria, or Turkey from invading Iraq? Where was the Arab League when Iraq invaded Kuwait? What forces can the Arab League deliver to Iraq should any of its neighbors choose to invade? How will the Arab League prevent al Qaida or Zarqawi from carrying out large scale revenge killings? Was anyone laughing when the Senator delivered this line in his speech?

Again, the Senator is simply saying that we need to do what the Bush administration is already doing and trying to make it sound as if he's proposing something novel.

Actually, the Senator's plan, if acted upon by the U.S. would result in nothing but chaos and war. It would be an unmitigated calamity for the U.S. and the world. Kennedy's plan, to the extent that it does not simply restate Bush policy, consists of rhetorical bubbles, pretty to look at, perhaps, but fragile, insubstantial and doomed to burst. They are ungrounded in the realities of the Iraqi situation. Perhaps the Senator should stick to strategizing about how to take best advantage of the many fine restaurants and watering holes in Georgetown and leave international affairs to more qualified and thoughtful people.

RLC

Jonathan Schell over at The Nation vents his moral outrage at the application of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's disgusted by the purely pragmatic objections to torture voiced by some senators at the confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzalez and strives for moral clarity on the issue:

Let's set aside the question of whether the allegations of torture are true, or whether torture is ever justified, and under what circumstances, and focus on Schell's indignation.

The pragmatic approach to ethical considerations that he here deplores is largely a consequence of Left-wing assaults on the notion of objective truth abetted over the years in no small part by his own magazine. The Left has assiduously gnawed away at the concept of moral absolutes for decades now, placing in its stead a relativism that ultimately means that each state has the right to decide what is right or wrong for itself. Mr. Schell is evidently unhappy with the decision that he sees the United States as having made, but as a man of the Left he can hardly make claims like "torture is wrong" because it abuses someone who is in a position of inequality and is therefore a "radical denial of common humanity." Why, after all, is denying someone's "common humanity" wrong?

One is compelled to ask of Mr. Schell exactly what he bases his moral outrage upon. Is he just informing us in vivid prose that he happens to find torture personally distasteful? Is he simply emoting? If so why does he bother? Would he take up his pen to complain that some people enjoy eating dog food, or paint their house black and pink? How are moral judgments any different than judgments about other matters of taste?

Perhaps he does indeed believe, if only subliminally, that torture violates some objective moral standard to which we should all be subject, but if so, what is that standard? Where does it come from? Does Mr. Schell believe in a Divine moral law? Perhaps, although it's not likely given that he's a writer for The Nation. But if he holds no such belief then all his ranting against the use of torture is just so much juvenile foot-stamping. He has no grounds whatsoever for his complaint beyond the fact that his sensibilities are offended by seeing one man inflict pain upon another.

Mr. Schell assumes we have a moral obligation (to whom?) to treat others with dignity. Very well, but where does the obligation reside? Where does it come from? What is it based upon? What precisely is the reason why one who has power over another should not cause pain and suffering to the other? What does it mean to say that such behavior is "wrong"? What reason does Mr. Schell give us for why the United States should not adopt a "might makes right" ethic? He can't say that torture is wrong, whatever that means, because it doesn't work or that it might be used against us, etc, because that would imply that if it did work or won't be used against us it would be morally acceptable, and he's already argued that pragmatic justifications for torture are inadequate.

In other words, unless Mr. Schell embraces the Divine moral law, he has no grounds for his tantrum other than the fact that, like a child being forced to eat food he doesn't care for, Mr. Schell is being forced to witness behavior he doesn't find palatable. But if that's all that's going on here why should anyone pay any attention?

RLC

Jonathan Gurwitz, a writer for the San Antonio Express News, wonders whether those whose superabundant compassion for the poor and oppressed of Iraq led them to that country in 2003 to stand in solidarity with Iraqis threatened by American bombs will be doing the same thing on Sunday.

Will these valiant human shields, Gurwitz asks, be positioning themselves around polling places to guard innocent Iraqi voters from the attacks that are sure to come?

This is an excellent question. Will these intrepid advocates for peace be taking the shrapnel in their own bodies on Sunday, sacrificing their lives for the sake of the Iraqi people, or do they only care about Iraqis insofar as they are useful in propagandizing against the U.S.? Is their courage and compassion universal or reserved only for victims of American violence? Will they defy the terrorists as they so boldly did the American military, at least until the shooting started? Are they really concerned with protecting lives or are they just Leftist hypocrites? We'll know Sunday. Well, actually, I think we already know.

RLC

So begins a piece by Andrew Stuttaford commemorating the centennial of Ayn Rand's birth in the New York Sun.

As implausible as it may seem to many readers a case can be made that Rand was the most influential American of the twentieth century, and I think it entirely likely that she was the most influential female American of the last century. This is not entirely a good thing because many of Rand's ideas, idiosyncrasies, and infidelities were hardly worth being influenced by. Yet no one made the case for freedom, individualism, and capitalism as compellingly as she did. This is no doubt why her novel Atlas Shrugged, written in 1957, was rated by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress as the most influential book of the twentieth century (other than the Bible).

Readers not familiar with this eccentric, complicated, and brilliant woman will gain some insight by reading Stuttaford's column.

RLC

Minneapolis' Star Tribune recaps the Democrats' unseemly assault on Condaleeza Rice's integrity, and from their story it would appear that the most egregious thug in the present round of character muggings was Minnesota's own senator, Mark Dayton:

Well, Senator, we don't like to impugn anyone's intelligence, but there is a vast difference, of which you are apparently unaware, between saying what you mistakenly believe to be the truth in order to persuade, and saying what you clearly know to be false in order to deceive. The latter is lying, the former is not.

If the honorable gentleman from Minnesota has proof that Ms Rice was lying in 2003 then he should produce it. If he does not have such proof, then he's ripping someone's character and reputation to shreds for nothing more than cheap political points with Democratic voters back home. Either that or perhaps he's just a simpleton and doesn't understand the distinction elucidated in the previous paragraph, in which case we should just politely avert our eyes from his embarrassing performance.

The distinction between believing what is an almost universal consensus and telling the president and the public what you know is not true is not lost on all Democrats in the senate.

Dianne Feinstein, for example, said that Rice "should not be blamed for wrong and bad" intelligence that influenced the administration in deciding to go to war and convinced 78 senators to vote in favor of military action.

Unfortunately, Senator Dayton was probably playing video games on his cell phone during Senator Feinstein's remarks.

RLC

Lawrence Summers is an outspoken former Treasury secretary and current president of Harvard University who made news recently at an economics conference for having ventured the heretical opinion that women are not generally found in the top tier of the mathematical sciences because the female genome simply doesn't churn out mathematical geniuses at the rate that the male genome does.

Well, this was a completely uncontroversial comment as far as the yokels out here in JesusLand were concerned, but in the Northeast, where there are certain taboos which cultured liberals simply do not violate, one might have thought that the Harvard president had called for the establishment of a campus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. One of his listeners, a faint-hearted MIT biology professor by the name of Nancy Hopkins, reported that she had to leave the room, so close was she to collapsing in a swoon, an admission that probably didn't earn her any style points with feminists.

President Summers, like Galileo, was hauled before an Inquisition of "Progressive Opinion" and forced to abjectly recant his heresy and to promise never, ever to transgress the bounds of acceptable liberal opinion again. If he had said that women were smarter than men, a male eyebrow or two might have been raised, but the world would scarcely have taken notice. As it was, he didn't get the catechism quite right and was forced to meekly offer profuse and ignominious apologies for having violated the orthodoxies of political correctness. And this at a premier American university, no less, where one might presume that unpopular minority opinions might be cherished.

Caught up in the mob hysteria surrounding the event, few media commentators could be bothered to wonder whether Summers was, in fact, right about what he said, but then truth does not occupy a very lofty perch on the liberal totem pole. Thankfully, however, Judith Kleinfeld has come forward with the pertinent scholarship which, it turns out, supports what everybody knew but no one, least of all president Summers, would say, which is that he was essentially correct.

Viewpoint sides with Stephen Pinker on this one. When Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that significant innate differences exist between men and women, was asked by The Harvard Crimson whether Mr. Summers's remarks were within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, he said, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of academic rigor?"

RLC

Political activists on the secular Left have a systemic problem. In order to remain Progressive they must constantly push all social and moral boundaries back and overturn whatever traditions they may encounter in their quest for perpetual change. Like early 19th century pioneers who, when they stopped moving westward, ceased to be pioneers and became settlers, Progressives must continually drive Leftward lest they cease to be Progressives and be absorbed into the status quo.

What this means in practice is that no achievement, no amount of change, can ever satisfy them. For example:

Once abortion on demand was securely entrenched as the law of the land, the Left turned its guns on preserving the right to have a partial birth abortion. Once the right to partial birth abortion is secured, the struggle will then focus on legalizing infanticide and euthanasia for the elderly.

Once prayer was removed from public schools the next step was to banish Christmas as well. As soon as that is accomplished the very mention of the word God will be proscribed from our schools, unless used as an imprecation or expletive, in which case it'll be okay.

Once obscene language restrictions were relaxed on television broadcasts then the struggle began to get them abolished altogether.

As soon as society began to show tolerance and acceptance for gays as people the movement to redefine marriage so that gays can marry was initiated. Once gays win the right to marry, prohibitions against polygamy and other forms of polyamory will come under assault.

As environmental pollution was reduced to minimal levels by legislation a push began to eliminate it altogether, regardless of the enormous cost and the relatively marginal benefits.

If people are paying 50% of their income in taxes Progressives insist they be required to pay 60%. Once the tax rates are raised to 60%, the Left will demand that they be raised to 70%. Likewise with the minimum wage.

If implied sexuality in movies has yielded to more explicit scenes, then the filmmaker should be free to make those scenes as sexually vivid as he wishes.

If the voting franchise is extended to all citizens, then it needs to be extended to non-citizens and illegal aliens as well.

If the voting franchise is lowered to age 18, then it should be lowered to age 16.

If 18 is the age of legal majority, then it should be lowered further so that sex with minors violates no laws.

If the U.S. defeats Iraq in a few weeks worth of combat, it's not to be considered a victory as long as there's looting and economic chaos. Once looting and disorder are placed under control there still is no success until there's an interim government. Once there's an interim government in place, the American effort is still not to regarded as successful until there democratic elections. But elections will be said to be meaningless as long as there's an active insurgency in the Sunni triangle.

The appetite for change is voracious and insatiable. The horizon is always receding. No achievement is ever sufficient. There is no goal or end-point to which we can strive. Once one objective is achieved the ultimate goal is pushed further back in a never-ending dystopic quest for the Progressive paradise. Government must grow ever larger and control ever more of our individual lives. Personal freedom, except insofar as it is freedom to indulge our appetites, must be hemmed in and constrained by a crushing mountain of rules, laws, and regulations.

The Left can never stop and say we've come far enough. Like locusts, they must keep devouring everything in their path, they must keep pressing on in search of new fields to ruin. Like bicyclists, to halt is to lose their balance. To stop is to lose their grip on the meaning of their existence. The animating force of the Left, at least the secular Left, is a neurotic impulse to destroy what has been built by others.

This is why so much of twentieth century Leftism devolved into nihilism, and it is why so many contemporary Leftists offer nothing constructive as solutions to the problems we face today. Their only answer is to tear down or wear away the principles, institutions, and beliefs of earlier generations.

George Santayana once said that "When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement; and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual." It is distressing that perpetual infancy is so appealing to so many in Europe and the U.S.

RLC

An Iranian blog posts this tidbit of news. Apparently the President's speech was boffo, if not in some sectors of the American media and the salons of effete Europe, then at least everywhere that matters:

It appears that the sourpuss mullahs of Iran are sitting atop a boiling pot trying to keep the lid on. Our President didn't do much to make their task easier. God bless him.

RLC

A popular teacher at Villanova University, a professor of Islamic studies, dies in 2003 and the University seeks to memorialize her life by dedicating a new section of their library to her. Nothing odd about that except that Villanova is putatively a Catholic University. And the teacher, one Mine Ener, died in jail. By her own hand. She was in jail because she'd killed her daughter by slashing her throat with a knife. The daughter was a Down's Syndrome child.

Even so, the University officials say, Dr. Ener made many valuable contributions to the life of the school and was much loved by her students. She was suffering from post-partum depression, which, as everyone knows, makes women want to kill their babies, and so her tragic end shouldn't detract from the good that she did.

Well, perhaps not, but we thought infanticide and suicide were frowned on by Catholics, and so we were a little surprised that Villanova had chosen to honor this woman by naming part of the library after her, as opposed, say, to establishing some sort of endowment for troubled mothers.

It's too bad that the guy who tried a couple of decades ago to assassinate the pope wasn't on the Villanova faculty. They would've named the football stadium after him.

RLC

American troops are charged with committing yet another savage atrocity against the Iraqi people. This one will turn your stomach as you read the Washington Post's dramatic telling of American cruelty and brutality. Many more instances of this sort of thing and Americans will be ashamed to show their faces anywhere in the world, at least that's what the Post presumably thinks. Why else would they print it?

See Tim Blair for line by line deconstruction of the Post's article. In fact, you can read the Post's whole piece just by going to Blair's site and reading his analysis.

Thanks to Power Line for the tip. As Hindrocket at Power Line says, if this story is true, American troops must be about the best behaved occupation troops in history. They're certainly better behaved than the Iraqi whose home they entered.

UPDATE: Little Green Footballs has uncovered more material on this story that the WaPo columnist, for reasons that aren't clear, chose not to use. Perhaps she felt that although unmasking American soldiers' barbarism is a desideratum of liberal journalism, one can have too much of a good thing. In any event, as a public service, LGF is publicizing this sordid evidence. The stories of how American troops have turned young Iraqi men into radical jihadis is tragic, but our readers are urged to read it for their edification nonetheless.

RLC

The premier journal of far-left opinion in this country, The Nation, offers insight into the Left's current strategy to ambush a president and extinguish American influence in the world. They urge that:

This is a solution that could only be advanced for the purposes of discrediting the president, destroying American credibility around the world, and devastating American morale here at home.

As soon as the United States announced an intent to withdraw, the Left would raise deafening howls of derision at the American failure to defeat a rag-tag band of insurgents, and excoriate the president for getting us involved there in the first place. If George Bush were to follow The Nation's advice he would succeed in humiliating both himself and the country, and no one would participate in that humiliation more gleefully than the good folks at The Nation.

If we were to begin to withdraw now, the al Zarqawis of the region would commence a nightmarish purge of all those who collaborated with the coalition that would result in the brutal murders of many thousands of Iraqis. Our withdrawal would constitute an unconscionable betrayal of trust that disturbs the editors of The Nation not at all.

Moreover, Iraq would be plunged into civil war as the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds all vied to fill the power vacuum left by our withdrawal. Such a war would result in the deaths of tens of thousands more from violence and pestilence. Iran, Turkey, and perhaps Syria which have all long lusted after the Iraqi oil-wealth and the sweeter pleasures of revenge for the Iran/Iraq war of the eighties would doubtless seize the opportunity to grab what they can while a weak, debilitated Iraq thrashes about in the throes of civil strife.

As the conflict widened, even more carnage would result. Any more hopeful view is naive, and The Nation's cavalier remark that "the best long-term outcome is for Iraqis to regain control of their own country and sort out their own future," is simply reprehensible. The best way to regain control of their own country and sort out their own future is at the ballot box and in democratic debate. This may not happen if we stay, but it will surely not happen if we leave.

Once we withdrew Americans and Iraqis alike would ask what was the point of the sacrifice made by our troops and their people? A withdrawal would shatter our confidence in ourselves, and destroy the confidence of the world in our resolve. It would be generations before Americans would ever be able to muster the will to help anyone in any way. Withdrawal would vindicate Osama bin Laden who attacked us on 9/11 because he was convinced that as soon as the fight got tough we'd pull out just like we did in Lebanon and just like we did in Somalia. Not only would bin Laden be seen as an infallible prophet of Islamo-fascism, but radical Islamists all over the world would redouble their efforts to destroy us, convinced that we were low-hanging fruit delivered into their hands by a vengeful Allah.

Further, an American retreat from Iraq would make an attack on Israel virtually inevitable. The Arab world would be rightly convinced that we had lost our appetite for conflict. They would sense weakness and exploit it, assured that we would betray Israel like we betrayed the Iraqis. And what of Taiwan and South Korea? A withdrawal from Iraq would be an invitation for China to invade Taiwan and for North Korea to attack the South. An irresolute, defeated, humiliated America would be expected to do little more than complain in the U.N.

The United States abandoned the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs, we abandoned the Vietnamese in the 1970s, we abandoned the Kurds in the early '90s, we stood by and did nothing while a million or so Africans were slaughtered in Rwanda, and now The Nation urges us to add to this record of shame with yet another ignominious act of treachery.

Their proposal is a recipe, in effect, for Europeanizing the United States. We need to keep in mind that the first consideration of any Leftist when he or she offers a policy proposal is not whether it is the right thing, or the best thing, to do, but rather whether it is the course of action most likely to disgrace the United States. The paramount goal of the Left is to emasculate and cripple America. Seen through this interpretive lens their proposal makes perfect sense.

RLC

Free Republic has this report from Canada on what happens when a Catholic bishop stands up for the traditional teaching of the Church on matters of sexuality:

Much of the anti-Christian bigotry in evidence in the last election campaign is due to the fact that Christians, in the main, oppose both abortion on demand and gay marriage. Proponents of these practices realize that Christians are the only serious political threat they face. Except for politically insignificant Orthodox Jews and Muslims, no one else who opposes the right to kill unborn babies, or to marry members of the same sex, can adduce any substantive reason for their opposition other than that it offends them somehow.

Offended sensibilities, however, invariably collapse like wheat in a wind storm in arguments between antagonists who assume, as a point of departure, the value of individual rights. It is only those who believe that the behaviors in question offend the will of God who have any non-subjective grounds for resisting them, and their resistance frequently incurs the hatred of those who embrace the behavior. Let's hope that it does not get worse.

RLC

A reader writes to correct us on an error we made in a January 17th post titled Reply to a Muslim. I wrote there that the opinion among Muslims that we are trying to colonize the Arab world is misguided:

To which our reader replies:

BP

BP is right, of course, and I thank him for the clarification (His e-mail can be read in its entirety at the Feedback Forum). What I should have said was that we didn't stay to colonize those countries; that our presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is similar to our presence in England, Germany, and South Korea. We have military bases there, but it would be difficult to make the case that these nations are colonies of the U.S.

RLC

A lot of blogs (I don't think I'll ever get comfortable with that word) specialize on a single theme while some seek a more eclectic audience. A good example of the latter is Loren Kohl's Almanac of the Mundane which has a lot of good reading on a lot of different topics. It takes a very bright guy to do the work he does on his site, and we recommend that our readers check him out.

RLC

A friend passes along this selection of opinions, culled from newspapers and commentators across the country, of George Bush's Second Inaugural Address:

RLC

Bill Roggio cites an Arthur Chrenkoff tally that shows that on a single day, January 19th, the world's media ran 10,938 negative stories on Iraq, 123 which were neutral, and 407 which were positive. This despite the fact that as Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq series has chronicled, the amount of positive news being generated in Iraq is enormous.

The reprehensible element of this is that, to the extent the American media have contributed to the lop-sidedness of this reporting, they are deliberately trying to sabotage the reconstruction effort in Iraq. And to this end they are willing to sacrifice Iraqi lives, to render American casualties vain, to thwart an historic opportunity to liberate millions of suffering people, and to alter the political dynamic of the Middle East for perhaps decades, even centuries to come, all because they don't want to see a Republican get the credit for whatever success Iraq enjoys. It is the basest of motives producing the most contemptible journalism.

RLC

MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) has a video clip of an ad carried on Al Arabiya tv out of Iraq that is as poignant and powerful as it is brief. Go here and click on "view clip".

To see links to other such ads go here.

RLC

Viewpoint has argued since our inception last May that legalizing same sex marriage will ultimately destroy marriage as an institution because it will remove any rationale for proscribing unions of any or all conceivable permutations. Once marriage is no longer limited to one man and one woman there is no logical basis for placing any limits on the number or gender composition of any union. When marriage can be anything at all it will cease to exist in any meaningful sense.

Now comes this story. from the Ottawa Citizen essentially placing an exclamation point at the end of the previous paragraph:

Mr. Hogg elides the real point. The issue is not whether bigamy is currently a crime or how the majority of people feel about marriage, it is rather whether there is or can be any legal or philosophical basis more solid than simply arbitrary preference for preventing groups of people of whatever gender combinations from marrying. The fact is that once marriage is separated from its Biblical definition and two thousand years of tradition there is nothing left to rest it upon. Any law against it will be overturned just as laws against sodomy have been overturned. The whole society may believe marriage should be limited to two people, but they have no grounds for imposing what is a mere personal preference upon others who decide that they are sexually oriented toward polyamory and want the right to marry for themselves.

RLC

A friend recommends to us the web site of the devotees of a religion which calls itself Universism. On their Main page the Universists ask a series of provocative questions:

We don't have the space to say everything about this that we would like, so we'll just pick out a few items to critique. The Universists ask:

What if there was a religion announcing no universal religious truth exists? The meaning of your existence is yours to determine.

The Universists are off to an inauspicious start with this question. In addition to having selected for their name an exceedingly difficult word to pronounce, the implied answer to the question they pose is self-refuting. The claim that there are no universal truths about religion purports to be itself a universal truth about religion. So, if it's true then it's false.

Beyond that, if each of us is the sole author of the meaning of our existence then there really is no meaning, not in any but the most ephemeral sense. We live, we suffer, we die and when we die whatever we did in life makes no difference whatsoever. Eventually, the human race will die out, as will the earth and the sun, and no one's existence will have mattered at all. A human life has no more "meaning" or significance in a universe without God than does the life of an ant. Billions of years of time and an unimaginably vast cosmos render our lives and our achievements vanishingly quick and paltry.

What if there was a religion generating respect among all humanity by making us equals in the most important questions we will ever face?

Well, actually there is such a religion. It's called Christianity. Christianity has been virtually the sole engine for human equality throughout the last two thousand years of history. Racial and gender equality may have been slow in coming, but they have only come at all because of the convictions of Christian people in predominantly Christian nations. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the American ideal of political and legal equality derived from the Christian notion that all men are equal in the eyes of God. People who believed that we are all equal in the eyes of God, he wrote, could hardly deny equality to some in the eyes of the state.

What if there was a religion announcing no moral authority exists, religious or secular?

If there is no moral authority beyond ourselves then each of us is free to construct our own idea of right and wrong. Thus, whatever I decide to be right, no one else can say is wrong. Morality is purely subjective. All the great criminals and tyrants of history believed this very idea, of course, and it is a prescription for chaos and oppression.

We celebrate faith in reason, inspiration in nature, and hope in progress.

It is unclear what their faith in reason leads them to conclude about the world. Universists place their trust in reason to do what, exactly? To lead them to truth? What do they base this trust upon? If all of our cognitive functions are reducible, as the universist no doubt believes they are, to non-rational chemical reactions in the brain, what warrant does he have for believing that these non-rational processes reliably produce truth?

In order to justify his faith in reason the universist has to construct some sort of argument to show that reason is trustworthy, but arguments rely upon reason. Thus he has to use reason to demonstrate the trustworthiness of reason. He has to assume that reason is reliable which is the very thing he's trying to demonstrate. this, unfortunately, is irrational. In other words, faith in reason is no more rational, and perhaps less so, than faith in God.

In what sense, moreover, does nature inspire? Everything about nature that fills one with awe points away from the universist belief that nature is all there is. To be inspired is to be moved to express some feeling or sentiment. What feeling or sentiment is a universist moved to express? Awe? Wonder? At what, exactly? Our insignificance? The incredible complexity, intricacy, and order of the world? The beauty of the world? The first of these pretty much cancels out any hope for meaning to life, and the others point to a creative Mind behind nature.

The inspiration Universists experience as they contemplate the glories of the world and of life is fundamentally at odds with their basic assumption that the world is just the product of mindless, purposeless forces which, purely by accident and random coincidence, somehow brought it into being. This may be astonishing, but it's hardly inspiring.

What ground, finally, does the Universist have for hope in progress. Whatever moral progress man has made in his history has been largely the result of Judeo-Christian belief. It has likewise been frequently argued that our technological progress was also the fruit of the Christian worldview which prevailed in Europe and which saw creation as the product of a rational God. The physical and biological worlds were seen, therefore, as not only worthy of study but also spheres of mystery whose secrets would yield to rational inquiry.

But setting that aside, technological progress in a world where everyone determines their own morality and no one has any basis for choosing one moral opinion over another except their own preferences and biases means that technological achievements, if they can be sustained, will fall into the hands of the most ruthless, egoistic, and powerful among us. We can be assured that such men will not use the fruits of progress to benefit mankind. There's not much reason to exult in a "hope in progress" in such a world.

RLC

Commentators could be heard yesterday and today claiming that Social Security reform is the most important item on the President's domestic agenda. We don't know how the President sees it, but we don't think Social Security reform is as important right now as are some other much-needed reforms. We would argue that the most important item on the President's domestic agenda should be getting conservative judicial appointees approved. He has an excellent window of opportunity to accomplish this now, and he may not have it again after 2006.

After stocking the federal and Supreme courts with men and women who see their role as interpreting the law and the constitution and not as making law and amending the constitution, we hope the President tackles immigration, tort, and perhaps tax reform, along with reducing runaway health care costs.

Social Security reform, as important as it is, is not as critical in the near term as are these other matters, and it would be very unfortunate if these reforms were overlooked in the political hurley-burley of a fight to mend Social Security.

RLC

Some commentators heard echoes of Natan Sharansky in yesterday's Inaugural Address. Others, like Fraters Libertas, discerned the source of much of the Left's hatred for George W. Bush. Their remarks are worth reading in their entirety:

Despite being marred by what seemed at times an awkward delivery, the content of today's speech was historic. Not just because of the principles the President articulated, although they were truly inspiring, but because unlike most speeches delivered by politicians, the world knows now that what George Bush says, he means.

The Left will object, as Jeannene Garafolo did tonight on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, that Bush's rhetoric about freedom rings hollow because he opposes a woman's right to kill her unborn child or because he opposes granting gays the freedom to marry, or because the Patriot act imposes onerous restrictions on Americans, or because the incarceration of radical Islamists in Guantanamo shows that Bush doesn't really care about freedom at all.

These cavils give further evidence, if any were needed, of the Left's increasing self-imposed irrelevance. People like Ms Garafolo would have us believe that unless one advocates letting everyone do anything they please one doesn't really favor liberty and justice at all. Americans, we are to assume, are toiling under the lash of oppression because we are denied gay marriage and other freedoms that truly liberated people enjoy. Perhaps Ms Garafolo might ask twenty five million Afghans, especially Afghan women, if they have a greater degree of liberty now, even though they don't have gay marriage and abortion on demand, or whether they were freer under the Taliban. Perhaps she might ask twenty five million Iraqis, particularly the Shi'ia and the Kurds, if they are freer now, even though some of them were wrongfully abused at Abu Ghraib, than they were under Saddam Hussein. We suspect that many of them would regard the inquiry as the question of a hopeless naif, and refrain from laughing in Ms Garafolo's face only out of courtesy and pity.

George Bush's speech yesterday raised the anxiety level of oppressors everywhere and gave hope to millions of people who still groan under the weight of tyranny. It was a speech for the ages.

RLC

Not many Democrats understand that America is still largely a Christian nation and that explicitly secularist agendas will not play well with the majority of voters. Hillary Clinton is one of the few who does, however, and she evidently intends to play her understanding to advantage over the next few years as she seeks to position herself for a run at the presidency in 2008. The following excerpt is from a Boston Globe story:

Whether Senator Clinton is sincere or not is another question. Right now she seems to be at least saying the things which will distinguish her from the Michael Moore/Ted Kennedy wing of the party. We look for Hillary to continue to define herself well to the right of the Democratic mainstream. It really will be ironic if, two years from now, her political opponents in her own party start hinting that Hillary Clinton is a fringe candidate and an extremist.

RLC

The Barna Group has the results of a survey that asks Christian pastors to name the individuals who have the greatest influence on the Church in the U.S., and who they regard to be the most trustworthy spokespersons for Christianity. Here's a summary of just part of their findings:

Billy Graham has had an enormous impact on Christianity in this country and around the world over the last half century and his legacy will ripple and reverberate throughout this century and doubtless into the next. Indeed, it may be that no one since St.Paul will have had a greater impact for the Gospel than has Graham.

Even so, it seems that at the present moment the nod for most influential has to go to Rick Warren. No one has done more to energize the Church in the last few years than has Warren. His influence is different than Graham's because his ministry is different, but millions of people have been inspired by his books and their participation in the small fellowship groups that use them to reorient and recommit their lives to Christ.

We would not be at all surprised to learn that Rick Warren is not only one of the most influential leaders in Christianity right now, but that he has also been one of the most influential people in our society as a whole for the last three or four years.

RLC

Tomorrow is "Not One Damned Dime Day" in America. It's being promoted as a way to protest the war in Iraq and the inauguration of war-monger Bush:

Having been caught up in the spirit of Leftist protest we here at Viewpoint stalwartly intend to join millions of others in spending no money tomorrow in order to "shut the retail economy down." Of course, if we are successful we will inflict the most grievous financial hurt on the little folk who staff the Wal-Marts, pump the gas, drive the busses and cabs, etc.

If those single moms and beleaguered dads struggling to feed and clothe their kids are not harmed by our boycott, well, then that would tell us, unfortunately, that our protest was a failure. So, either we inflict pain upon the little people, or we don't. If we do, we can celebrate our success in bringing increased economic misery to tens of millions of low-income workers. If, however, they regrettably survive our efforts unscathed then we can at least take comfort in knowing that we tried hard to make their lives tougher and their kids hungrier.

This Left-wing logic is really pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

RLC

The service which sends us the Daily Philosophical Quotation the other day offered this one by the late Carl Sagan:

Actually, Sagan was not quite right about this. Once Big Bang cosmology came to be understood, at least in its major outlines, many Christians began to realize that the age and vastness of space had marvelous theological implications. For one thing, the extravagance of creation which people like Sagan think argues against conceiving of man as somehow significant and certainly against the view that man is central to creation, actually does the opposite.

According to the Big Bang hypothesis, the universe began in a primordial explosion of space-time and enormously hot energy, which cooled as it expanded, and from which the first generation of stars precipitated. The theory has it that those stars "lived" for billions of years, compressing protons in their cores into heavier and heavier elements and eventually dying and exploding themselves, creating even heavier elements in their death throes, and spewing this chemical debris into space where millions or billions of years later it would be captured by the gravitational tug of younger stars and condense into planets.

If God did indeed choose to form galaxies and solar systems in some fashion such as this then there are remarkable implications. It took, on this model, thirteen billion years, for the universe to produce the conditions necessary for life to exist on this singular "pale blue dot", to borrow from the title of one of Sagan's books, and all that while the universe was expanding. In other words, the process of preparing a world suitable for human habitation took thirteen billion years of cosmic evolution and all that time the cosmos was growing at unimaginable speed.

Thus for us to be here at all, given the means God employed to create us, the universe has to be just about as old as it is and consequently just about as large as it is. Its age and its size are consequent upon the choices that God made in fashioning it. We, then, really are at the center of the universe. Not geographically, of course, as the ancients thought, but ontologically. It exists as it does so that we could exist as we do.

Just as ecosystems, in order to sustain certain species of animals and plants, has to transition through many stages of development and has to encompass a certain minimum size, so, too, does the universe have to be at a certain stage of development and of a certain dimension in order for life to emerge and thrive anywhere in it.

When looked at this way, the vastness and scope of the universe astonish us even more than they would otherwise. We are left speechless at the fact that God did all of this just so that we could inhabit a tiny speck of it, just so that we could be.

RLC

As the Presidential Inauguration draws nigh we thought our readers might enjoy this amusing piece of political humor sent along to us by Dick F.

RLC

Mark Pinsky writing for the Columbia Journalism Review talks about his experiences as a religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel in getting to know that exotic life-form known as the Christian evangelical. Some excerpts:

Kudos to Mr. Pinsky for his willingness to immerse himself in the culture he's reporting on and for exhibiting so much security in his own convictions that he doesn't feel threatened by those of others. Would that every journalist who writes on Christianity be as equally conscientious in their wish to get the story right rather than just reinforce Hollywood stereotypes.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

Lest anyone think that the Left is comprised of highly caring, highly educated, exemplars of reasoned discourse check out Michelle Malkin's column from the other day in which she shares some of her e-mail. Michelle is a conservative who sometimes takes controversial positions, but the sheer loathesomeness of the hate that she elicits is beyond all rational explanation. There are a lot of demented, embittered people out there on the Left, people in an advanced stage of spiritual and moral putrefaction, and she and Ann Coulter seem to draw them like sicko-magnets.

We suppose there are people just as bad on the Right, but the point is that ever since the sixties we've been told that hatred was the monopoly of the Right and that the Left was the party of peace, love, compassion, and justice. If you still believe that after the recent election campaign go to Malkin's site to be deprogrammed.

Meanwhile, as long as you're reading Malkin, check this story out. It's chilling. We wonder: Did the authorities interrogate the cleaning crew? What did they learn? We also wonder why we haven't heard about this through MSM news outlets.

RLC

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail directs our attention to a piece written by Amir Taheri in Arab News which offers striking parallels between what we see happening in Iraq today and what happened in the early '90s in Algeria. Part of Taheri's column follows:

The similarities between the two situations are indeed striking, but we have good reason to hope that the results in Iraq will surpass those in Algeria. Algeria did not have the amount of foreign assistance that Iraq has nor was it as wealthy a country nor was its population as well-educated.

The radical Islamists have a dream of creating Taliban-like states, first throughout the Muslim world, and ultimately across the globe. They tried in Algeria and lost. They've been thwarted in Pakistan. Libya seems to have lost interest. They succeeded for a time in Afghanistan and were deposed. They've succeeded in Iran and Syria for the time being. But failure in Iraq, coming so close to the loss of Afghanistan, would be devastating to their hopes.

Iraq is only one battle in this long war, and Islamist failure there won't mean the end of Islamo-fascism, but it will considerably diminish their prospects for ultimate success. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

RLC

Arthur Chrenkoff's fortnightly installment of Good News From Iraq is up. This is Chrenkoff's 19th edition and his work cannot be praised enough. Ranging from developments with the coming elections to the economy to security with lots of others in between, Chrenkoff gives us a massive amount of information that the MSM cannot be bothered to report since it doesn't fit their defeatist philosophy. Don't miss it.

RLC

Watching some of the tributes this evening to Martin Luther King I wondered: If King's I Have Dream speech and his Letter From a Birmingham City Jail were delivered/written today would someone without any prior knowledge of King think the principles he articulated in these were conservative or liberal (or neither)?

RLC

A friend passed our post A Moderate Muslim Perspective on to a Muslim friend of his and received this reply:

This is our response which we've edited just a little:

I have to say that I don't understand what your Muslim friend is getting at in the passage where he says:

Unfortunately, attacking them [Muslims] is only reinforcing their teachings. Namely, that the west is intent on reestablishing colonialism and are willing to use violence to do it (as they did before). Most of those people have heard all of the horror stories about western rule and have no desire to return to it. Anyone fighting against the west is going to be perceived as a hero, no matter how sketchy a human being he is. If we want them to stop attacking us, we have to stop attacking them. It seems pretty simple to me.

This is very difficult for me to make any sense of. The U.S. has come to the defense of Muslims far more often than it has attacked them. In Kuwait, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Somalia, Americans died to defend Muslims, sometimes against putative Christians. In none but the first of these was there any real national interest at stake.

The Islamists expressed their gratitude by attacking the U.S.S. Cole, the WTT, Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and various other targets around the world until they succeeded in murdering 3000 of our citizens on September 11th, 2001. Following 9/11 Americans fought and died in liberating fifty million Muslims from crushing oppression in Afghanistan and Iraq and did far more than anyone else in the world, when all charitable and military aid is factored in, to relieve the suffering of Muslims in the Indian Ocean basin in the wake of the tsunami. All the oil-besotted Muslim nations put together didn't contribute as much to disaster relief as did the U.S. And still the radical Muslims hate us.

Your friend says that they hate us because we're trying to colonize them, but where is the evidence of that? Did we stay in Kuwait? Did we not leave Saudi Arabia when the Saudis insisted? Did we colonize Afghanistan? If all we wanted was oil why didn't we invade the U.A.E. or Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq? It would have been much easier.

Their hatred, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the fact that we're "attacking" them. It has everything to do with the fact that we are "infidels", our values are not their values, and, to their enormous chagrin, the infidels are a lot more powerful and successful than they are. It has also to do with the fact that we are all that stands in their way of realizing their dream of destroying Israel and Islamicizing the globe. As long as these facts remain they will continue to seek to destroy us. Their religion and their pride demand it.

RLC

Seymour Hersh, who's reputation as an investigative reporter has had its ups and downs, has a new revelation in New Yorker magazine. Truthout.org., whose own reputation for accurate and balanced reporting has had its ups and downs as well, gives us the report from which the following is excerpted:

Let's hope that this, like a rare planetary conjunction, is a remarkable instance of both Hersh and Truthout being simultaneously correct and that matters are as this report states. It is somewhat reassuring to think that this president is as serious about fighting the war against terrorists as they are about fighting their war against us.

RLC

It's a little late, but we wanted to bring this column by Dennis Prager to your attention. Prager lists seven wishes he has for the new year, and we agree with all of them. Especially wishes 2 and 6:

Quick. Name one organization begun specifically by atheists, and which incorporates atheism into its mission, that's doing any good anywhere in the world ....We couldn't either.

Why do people do this? Why do they pull into the left lane and then drive at the same speed as the traffic in the right lane? It's very irritating, and there needs to be a study done on it. We suspect that being on the left dulls one's ability to think about what one is doing, but all we have is anecdotal evidence, culled mostly from blue states.

RLC

This chilling news from the New York Post reminds us of the savage nature of Islamic fanaticism.

It may be that this horrific crime was not committed by the people who issued threats against Armanious, but if it was indeed the product of Islamic fanaticism then we are given another tragic glimpse into the future these psychopaths have in store for us unless they are defeated.

RLC

As a footnote to RLC's excellent article on Where Was God?, I'd just like to add the question, what does one expect of God? Those who blame God for the bad that happens and then question his love and omnipotence simply fail to acknowledge his position.

It's made very clear in the book of Genesis, chapter 3 vs. 17 where God said:



Well, that can't be good. I think that the phrase: "cursed is the ground for thy sake" is the take home message here and it appears that the price for all of humanity of original sin against God is death. Whether it's a still-born baby, one who lives to be 100 years old, or for anyone anywhere in between. We all will die.

Given this, it's not surprising to me that 120,000 people die in a tsunami, a nuclear blast over Hiroshima, the massive genocide that takes place today, or less dramatic events.

I find it ironic and another example of man's hubris that he would blame God for the "evil" that happens rather than draw closer to Jesus in the hope of an eternal life with Him as it was originally intended to be.

While it is noble to lament the tragedy that befalls others, I also submit that we should contemplate the fate that awaits each of us...death, the return to dust, and why. One shouldn't ask why all of the victims of a fallen world have had to die, rather ask what awaits them after they die. The bigger question for me is, why are any of us alive?

That these events happen only serves to emphasize man's total inability to circumvent the declaration of an Almighty God. Yes, if one is so inclined, they can raise their fist in outrage at Jehovah, and curse Him for being uncaring and unsympathetic, and I have. But in the final analysis, I'm left with the realization that it's simply all the more reason to believe in and trust in Him because this fallen world is not where it's at.

Have a great New Year...

WSC

Casual observers of the Dover, PA Intelligent Design controversy, which has occupied the op/ed pages of our local newspapers for some months now, may be forgiven for thinking that the conflict is one between science and creationism (i.e. religion).

This is the way that the controversy has been framed by adversaries on both sides, and both sides are wrong. Here's why:

1] The debate is not between science and religion. It's between two disparate ways of explaining or interpreting scientific data. The findings of scientists are not in question. What's in question is the philosophical framework upon which those findings are hung.

Darwinians argue that the data are best interpreted in terms of purposeless, unguided physical processes. ID proponents say that whatever role physical processes may have played in the development of life they are inadequate by themselves to account for biological information. Information, as far as we've been able to ascertain, is the product of minds. The debate is thus a philosophical debate about whether the evidence suggests that purposeful intelligence should be included as one of the congeries of factors responsible for the apparent design of biological structures, or not.

Thus claims like the following from a group of biologists at the University of Pennsylvania, writing to the Dover, PA school board to urge that they change their minds about introducing ID into the curriculum, are really irrelevant:

It doesn't matter, however, how much evidence there is for evolution, that evidence doesn't begin to address the question at issue, which is whether life could have emerged as it has apart from intelligent input.

2] ID is accused of not being scientific because it can't be tested and therefore has no legitimate place in a science classroom. Scientific theories are capable of being refuted, at least in principle, and, objectors assert, there is no imaginable way that the claim that biological structures are the product of an intelligent mind can be refuted.

In the strict sense this is no doubt true, but what needs to be mentioned is that Darwinism falls victim to the same flaw. There is no test which would confirm or deny that blind forces and random chance can produce complex biological structures.

Any experiment conducted by a scientist that seeks to show that bio-machines and processes either could, or could not, have arisen apart from intelligent input is ipso facto inconclusive. The very fact that the experiment is set up, conducted, and monitored by an intelligent agent renders it so. This is not to say that there aren't ways to test both theories, it is only to say that neither can be falsified.

This, parenthetically, is ironic in light of claims by ID opponents that ID has been shown to be false. Indeed, to believe that ID has been refuted is to tacitly admit that it meets the falsifiability criterion of good science. For a Darwinian to argue that ID has been falsified when his own view is not capable of being falsified is to inadvertently acknowledge that ID is scientific (even if wrong) and that Darwinism is not.

ID proponents, of course, do not allege that mutation and natural selection aren't scientific mechanisms. What they say is that the claim that these processes act solely by themselves apart from any telic input can't be tested. The insistence that that claim is nevertheless true is an expression of a metaphysical preference that Darwinians want to be free to promote in public schools without having to tolerate competition from any contrary view.

Neither of the two competing views are science in the strict sense, but they are legitimate hypotheses in the philosophy of science. As such there is no reason why they can't both be discussed in an appropriate science class, just as it is proper to address many other matters from the philosophy of science in certain science classes (e.g. the definition of science, the nature of the scientific method, the assumptions of uniformity, sufficient cause, parsimony, other universes, etc.). To allow one to masquerade as science while banishing the other as religion is as unfair to students as it is to truth.

RLC

More cognitively-challenged chuckleheads masquerading as educational administrators have turned up at a Florida Community College:

This episode had nothing to do with R-rated movies, of course, and everything to do with censoring a movie on the basis of its religious content.

How is it that people who have evidently never heard of, much less read, the first amendment of the constitution of the United States can be elevated to positions of bureaucratic authority over college students?

Here's a little thought experiment. Imagine that this wasn't a Christian group, but an African-American organization that wanted to show, say, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing or imagine that this was a gay/lesbian group that wanted to show Oliver Stone's Alexander. Everybody who thinks the school administrators would have banned the movie and imposed such stringent restrictions on the student organization, raise your hand.

RLC

This will surprise you. Larry Kudlow, indulging his penchant, perhaps, for economic optimism, tells us the following:

The rest of the column explains why the deficit is shrinking and why Kudlow thinks it will shrink even further. Hint: Liberals will not like the reason.

When the Left reads these numbers there will be much teeth-grinding. Perhaps now would be a good time to invest in the company that manufactures those dental night guards.

RLC

Baylor president Robert Sloan is under the gun because he's trying to make his school into an academically top-notch Christian university. Apparently, he is encountering resistance from those who are perfectly satisfied with Baylor being a Baptist university. There's no need, as they see it, to convert the school to Christianity.

RLC

This week a scary report was issued linking colon cancer to the consumption of red meat. According to Steven Milloy , however, the study this report was based on wouldn't even win first prize in a junior high school science fair:

Indeed. And please make ours medium-rare.

RLC

Davi Bernstein of Commentary magazine writes to PowerLine.com to announce an article by Norman Podhoretz entitled The War Against World War IV:

Podhoretz's essay is indeed a masterful tour de force. We highly recommend it to anyone interested in the greatest struggle of our time, the struggle to prevail against an implacable enemy determined to destroy us. But the article is also more than that. With concision and wisdom Podhoretz lays out the foreign policy challenges which face, not only George Bush, but the American people in the years ahead and makes the case that an irresolute America would be a calamity for the world. It is truly a remarkable piece of writing and analysis.

RLC

A Lutheran study group reminds us of the old Boy George lyric from Karma Chameleon to the effect, roughly, that he's a man without conviction who doesn't know how to spot a contradiction. The task force has come up with an interesting solution to the problem of how to appease everyone in the controversy over whether the Church should ordain gay pastors and celebrate gay unions.

This major study on human sexuality by the nation's largest Lutheran denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) recommends that no change be made in the church policy that precludes the ordination of gay or lesbian people in same-sex relationships. It also recommends that no official church ceremony be adopted to bless same-gender unions.

But on both of these hotly divisive issues, the landmark task force report suggests discretion be granted to local congregations acting in "good conscience" to "make judgments appropriate to each situation." It also suggests the church refrain from disciplining those congregations who may approve partnered gay or lesbian candidates for ministry, out of respect for "the deep divisions among us."

In other words, the ELCA should not change the rules governing homosexuality in ministry, but local congregations don't have to follow them if they don't want to. The ELCA can thus stand four-square against homosexual ordination while at the same time allowing gay pastors to serve in its pulpits and blessing gay unions among its congregants. This is a positively brilliant and fittingly post-modern demarche, and we wonder why it hasn't been thought of before.

Unfortunately, the task force's recommendations will have to be voted on in the Church-wide convention in August in order to become Church policy (whatever that means in view of the recommendations), and here we may expect that more rational heads will prevail.

RLC

Now it turns out that a couple of big time blogs were in the bag for Howard Dean last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that The Daily Kos, the ninth biggest blog in the blogosphere, was paid $12,000 to serve as "technical consultant" to the Dean campaign.

In their defense the two popular bloggers insist they breached no ethical boundaries:

Be that as it may, Viewpoint wishes its readers to know that we are not for sale. We have never accepted any money from anyone in return for our support. Of course, we have never been offered any either.

RLC

This UPI article gives some details about possibly imminent Coalition strikes against Syria.

The article goes on to talk about the dilemma faced by Bashar Assad and the difficulties he confronts in trying to avoid Coalition assaults on Syrian territory. Perhaps making these plans public is an attempt to intimidate Syria into cooperating, or perhaps it is a signal that such attacks against targets in Syria have already begun. If not then we're left wondering why, if we are going to undertake such missions in the future, we would telegraph that warning ahead of time and afford the targets the opportunity to evade us.

At any rate, it's hard to see how Syria can escape when Bush clearly announced in his initial "Bush doctrine" speeches that nations which harbor terrorists would not be spared. It would seem that both Syria and Iran are daring him to back up his threat.

RLC

Whether or not it is illegal for a government agency (the Department of Education) to pay talk radio hosts to promote their programs (in this case, No Child Left Behind), it certainly seems unethical for the radio host to accept a government check, promote the program, and not explain to his audience that his endorsement has been purchased. Armstrong Williams is a good guy and he's on the right side of most issues, but he showed poor judgment on this one. He has forever diminished his credibility with his listeners, and that is a shame.

Conservatives have been rightly clamoring for thirty years for disbanding the Department of Education. If what the Department did in paying Williams $240,000 to promote NCLB is in fact illegal then the DOE has just reinforced the case against maintaining this useless bureaucracy.

RLC

To read the first part of this paper by Quentin Smith one might not guess that professor Smith is an atheist. Smith calls upon his fellow atheists to recognize that Christian philosophers have, over the past thirty five years, done brilliant work in the field of philosophy and have become a significant minority of the practitioners of the discipline and have virtually taken over the sub-discipline of philosophy of religion. Here are a few highlights:

These are remarkable admissions. Smith goes on in the rest of the article, which grows rather technical, to describe what he thinks needs to be done in order to take philosophy back from the theist interlopers.

RLC

We came across the following remarkable article by Mustafa Akyol from the December issue of The American Enterprise at the The Road to Emmaus. Akyol says so many important things that we've decided to post his entire essay. We're sure our readers will find it well worth reading:

There is a rich irony implied in this excellent article. The decadent, secular left, both at home and in Europe, hates America because they see us as being too Christian, and the Islamic radicals in the Arab world hate us because they see us as being too decadent and secular.

Another irony is that as much as we believe that Islamism is a curse on the world and needs to be defeated, as much as we find Shari'a a ghastly distortion of God's will, as much as we oppose Islamic irredentism, we can't help but agree with Akyol's Muslim critique that there is much in American culture to despise. Indeed, we know no one who is a Christian who wouldn't agree with almost everything Akyol writes.

RLC

We respect Andrew Sullivan's political independence and often admire his opinions, but this one must have been written while still groggy from a mid-afternoon nap:

The president merely said that he doesn't know how presidents can serve in such a difficult job without being able to turn to God. He didn't say that they shouldn't be allowed to so serve. The difference between the two is so obvious that one wonders what motivated Sullivan to make an issue of it, and, even more, to demand a retraction.

RLC

Victor David Hanson argues that Americans are growing world-weary. It is certainly true that we see ourselves as doing so much good, as being so essential for the peace of the world, of making so many sacrifices so that others may enjoy the fruits of freedom, and yet we're hated and despised by so many of the world's people who couldn't care less about the help and welfare we bring.

We are, moreover, growing increasingly apprehensive that the world is determined to destroy itself. It doesn't want what we offer, either materially or spiritually. Nor does it want peace. The world has gone mad and the feeling is that there isn't anything much we can do about it. Here are a few highlights from Hanson's take on the situation:

In an earlier post Viewpoint recalled the theme of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which Rand imagines a world in which those who produce wealth, ideas, and benefits for all the rest of us finally weary of all the obstacles put in their way by those jealous of their greatness and resentful of their success. At length these Nietzschean supermen decide they've had enough and they all retire from the affairs of the world, leaving the paltry parasitic classes to fend for themselves. Perhaps, Hanson is correct and Americans are beginning to see themselves as the characters in Rand's novel. If so, if we do turn inward and embrace an isolationist foreign policy, the consequences for the world would be catastrophic.

In a post last June we wrote the following:

The only thing that's changed in the last six months, Hanson tells us, is that some Americans feel a little more like maybe we should just let nature take its course.

RLC

Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard offers a succinct critique of CBS's investigation into the Dan Rather affair. He concludes, for compelling reasons, that the report was a whitewash that failed to answer the most important questions.

RLC

Here's an interesting indication of the depths of desperation that liberals are beginning to feel. The following is an article from the New York Daily News:

Since it seems clear that the marketers of this product are at pains to prevent children from watching Fox News (adults can be presumed to be able to select their viewing fare unsupervised), it's interesting that their implicit comparison is of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, et al. to sleazy, pornographic television content. Here's an irony and a difference between the way liberals and conservatives see the world. In the conservative world-view obscenity is a perversion of the intimacy, privacy, and marital context of sex. In the liberal world-view obscenity is the expression of conservative political ideas. Let the tots see as much illicit coitus on screen as they wish, let them hear as much scatological language as they want, let them see the love which dare not speak its name proclaim itself from the rooftops, but conservative political notions must be concealed from the children with programming blockers lest the little ones secretly view Hannity, Hume, O'Reilley, et. al. and be seduced by conservative thinking. If we don't act now to prevent this, the liberals fear, our children will surely grow up to be degenerates.

Thanks to Evangelical Outpost for the tip.

No Left Turns discusses an article by Benjamin Wittes in The Atlantic who argues that the time has come for the Democratic Party to stop defending Roe v. Wade. Wittes gives two reasons why this makes sense for Democrats. The original article is subscription only so the following is from No Left Turns' post:

Three things should be mentioned here. First, when Wittes says that Conservatives have not been entirely wrong about the lack of constitutional support for the 1973 Roe decision what he's really trying to say is that Conservatives have been completely correct. Everything he says in that paragraph confirms this. He just doesn't want to state it that baldly for fear of incurring the censure of his liberal associates.

Second, it's not at all clear that the statistics are as Wittes sees them. There is reason to believe that the nation is much more sympathetic to placing restrictions on abortion than pro-choicers would have us think. This is why Kerry tended to downplay and waffle on the issue during the campaign and George Bush didn't.

Third, whether an overturn of Roe would create a political problem for Republicans depends upon how they react to it. If they point out that remanding the matter to the states gives the people greater say in formulating their state's abortion policy, it may well work to Republicans' benefit. Removing abortion from the judiciary and giving it to state legislatures empowers people to decide for themselves where to draw lines on this issue and should be presented that way by Republicans.

It is also not irrelevant that if the pro-choice throng is as numerous as Wittes' suggests it is, then they should have nothing to fear from having state legislatures, which are much more responsive to the will of the people than is the Supreme Court, establish the law. The fact that Pro-choicers are generally loath to have abortion law handled by the states gives the lie to their proclamations of substantial majorities in support of their position. We strongly suspect that they resist throwing the issue back into state houses because they fear that the majority of citizens in most states favor restrictions which they oppose.

RLC

We confess to savoring a bit of schadenfreude at the fallout from the RatherGate affair at CBS. It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch. Well, perhaps that's not quite true. Maybe the New York Times deserves it just as much. At any rate, CBS and the cashiered foursome is getting what it, and they, deserve. They wanted with all their might for this story to be true. They wanted so badly to discredit George Bush that they convinced themselves that the forged memos were genuine. They were blinded by their own wish-fulfillment and threw all professional standards and caution to the winds, chancing their careers on this one throw of the dice.

At least that's the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that they knew going in that the documents were suspect, but didn't care. They thought they could damage the president with fabrications, and no one would be the wiser. They may well have done it before and thought they could do it again. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the blogosphere they doubtless would've gotten away with it.

The difference between the two interpretations is the difference between being reckless, careless, and gullible because of ignoble political motives and being overtly malicious and vicious because of ignoble political motives.

Some bloggers are a little miffed that the CBS report didn't come down harder on what they perceive to be the obvious political motivations of the principal players in this farce, but motivation is much easier to discern than it is to prove. Even so, in this case there can be little doubt, whether the report makes it clear or not, that the impelling force was a desire to destroy the Bush presidency.

Here's what Bernard Goldberg, former CBS reporter and author of the expose Biased, said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

We hate to sound like Madame DeFarge, but we're satisfied that the job-ending guillotine at CBS is doing condign work. The only injustice is that Dan Rather is allowed to walk away with his dignity and dubious reputation somewhat intact while underlings suffer a season of public humiliation. Rather's head should have rolled with the rest of them, metaphorically speaking of course. The good news is that everyone knows it.

RLC

In Dover, PA the school district is being sued for allegedly trying to smuggle religion into the school curriculum under the guise of Intelligent Design. Meanwhile, in Toledo, OH a school is being sued for trying to keep religion out.

Superintendent Luci Gernot prohibited a Christian Rock Band, comprised of both students and graduates from the school, from performing in what would have been an optional anti-drug assembly. Now the band's parents and others are planning to sue the school for abridging students' freedom of speech.

Why are school administrators so afraid of an optional assembly that might present a Christian-oriented anti-drug message? Students would only attend if they wanted to. They would not be a "captive audience". What, exactly, is wrong with that? The only plausible answer we can think of is that administrators like Ms Gernot believe that Christianity is somehow deleterious to student welfare. They must believe that the harm of exposing students to Christian themes outweighs the good of exposing them to the anti-drug lesson.

It is rather astonishing that such bigotry exists and is tolerated in our educational system. We hope the parents follow through with their suit.

RLC

Here's interesting news just released by Central Command about progress in the terror war in Iraq:

Hmmm. Wonder what they mean by that last sentence. And who is the unnamed terrorist leader who was captured? We wonder if he isn't the gentleman whose capture was bruited about the Arab press last week as being that of abu Zarqawi himself.

Thanks to Adventures of Chester for the tip.

RLC

Strategy Page gives us a look at a new development in the war in Iraq. A couple of brief extracts:

The reports from both January 7th and January 9th at the Strategy Page will interest anyone following the war against the Iraqi Baathists.

RLC

Jonah Goldberg on the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearings:

For excellent insight into how our military interrogators actually handle their job, as opposed to how the Democrats imagine them to be handling it, this outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal is a must read. Mac Donald gives us the most thorough and interesting account of the American use (or non-use) of torture in the WOT. It's a lengthy piece, but well-worth the read.

For our part it is astonishing that we claim to be engaged in a life and death struggle against terrorists, but act as if we're playing a child's game, punctiliously observing rules designed to insure that we lose. The article will make you wonder how serious the paper-pushers in the Pentagon really are about protecting American lives.

RLC

Even the thoroughgoing secularists at Dispatches From the Culture Wars are weary of Michael Newdow's jejune attempts to banish any and all traces of religious expression from our public life:

Precisely. Perhaps Newdow should read David Gelernter's essay in Commentary that Viewpoint featured on Saturday. For that matter, so should Dispatches From the Culture Wars.

RLC

Whether reforming the Social Security system results in improving it or not, one thing is pretty certain and that is that Republicans are going to do their best to change it. It won't be an easy process, however, since Democrats will fight them every step of the way.

David Brooks lays out some of the political difficulties facing reform and then discusses what the president's role in getting reform enacted might look like. He writes:

Brooks' outline of the political obstacles to reforming the system are also interesting. Follow the above link to the whole column to read what he says.

RLC

David Gelernter has a remarkable essay in Commentary which examines what he calls the religion of Americanism. Gelernter scrutinizes its origins and attributes and the reasons for the hatred much of the world has for America. Some main points follow, but it should be borne in mind that Gelernter elaborates on each of these at some length. We encourage you to follow the link and read the essay in its entirety.

It has become commonplace in some Christian circles to reject the notion of American exceptionalism, and for good reasons. If unchecked, it tends to foster an attitude of national infallibility and arrogance. Even so, Gelernter prods us to consider that in our commendable desire to remain nationally humble we tend to go too far in the other direction and ignore, or forget, the fact that America really is in many ways a special land.

Specialness, however, comes at a price. As Europe has become increasingly secular, and the Muslim world grows rich from the oil beneath its feet and less isolated from the West, expressions of jealousy and rage directed at nations which retain at least a simulacrum of their Christian or Jewish heritage grow increasingly frequent and virulent. Hatred for Jews has always been with us, but hatred for Christians and for America is a relatively recent phenomenon. Gelernter's point is that Christianity is an extension of Judaism and Americanism is an extension of Christianity. Together the combination is an irresistible target for the roiling animosities and resentments of secularists and Islamists everywhere, including here. Gelernter says in a footnote that, "It has been many centuries since Christians in the West have been routine objects of organized hatred; they do not even have a word for it. But they had better find one."

We should mention, too, that Gelernter is exactly right when he ascribes the creed or values of Americanism to the fundamental theism of the Founders and their successors. The emphasis in America on freedom, equality, human rights, and so, derive from only one possible source. These are not the deliverances of Enlightenment Reason, nor are they grounded in human biology or evolutionary history. They are grounded in the fact that we are created in the image of God and that we are loved by Him. Take God out of the picture, secularize the nation, scrub the public square clean of all religious residue, and freedom, equality, and human rights will, like a plane out of fuel, glide along at ever decreasing altitude until they crash to the ground. We refer you to an earlier discussion of this topic on Viewpoint here.

Evangelical Outpost has made this essay the focus of a blog symposium so one can find much more commentary and, no doubt, much more insightful analysis of it there than we're able to offer here.

RLC

Derek at Weapons of Mass Distraction links us to an article in the Telegraph on fossils and human evolution. The article mentions that in the past "fossil-hunters" were quick to place new fossil finds into different species so that today,

In other words, all those charts we saw in high school showing man evolving through several progressive stages until finally arriving at his present exalted state as Homo sapiens are now lining canary cages.

Notice here the subtle bit of professional CYA the good professor is indulging in. He claims on the one hand that all the fossils of early hominids are really H. sapiens, but not wanting to give succor to the creationists who have been saying precisely this for the last fifty years he notes that they nevertheless show "clear evidence of evolution." He uses the word evolution here to mean simple variability (microevolution), but the general reader will perhaps assume that he means that the fossils show clear evidence of having evolved from one basic form of life into a radically different form (macroevolution). By this locution he manages to undo a century and a half of Darwinian orthodoxy without exposing himself to the charge of heresy.

Henneberg's findings suggest that disputes among scientists as to the evolutionary relationships among the various types of fossil hominids are meaningless, as they ignore the possibility of huge differences within the same species.

In discussing the relationship of Neanderthals and humans, for instance, he states that "What evidence there is...is consistent with Neanderthals being from the same species as modern humans."

It's impossible to say how many of his colleagues agree with him although evidently some do:

Skeptics, of course, have long thought the evidence for numerous hominid species was tenuous. It was, after all, based upon purely structural differences. If the bones of various breeds of dogs were pried from different rock strata they'd doubtless be classified as different species based on morphological considerations, but, in fact, every dog from Great Danes to Daschunds are members of the same species. The problem is that the concept of species is slippery. Scientists define it as a reproductively isolated population of organisms, which means that if two members of a population can produce fertile offspring then they are members of the same species. There is, however, no way to tell by looking at a few bones whether or not members of the populations from which the bones came were capable of producing fertile offspring.

Perhaps one reason why scientists were so confident that the bones they had unearthed over the years were from different species of hominids is that they were absolutely convinced that man has evolved from an ape-like ancestor. If there is no question that species evolve over time, then bones taken from rock strata separated by millions of years just must be from different species. In other words, the reproductive isolation of the hominids was assumed, based on the theory of human evolution, and then the assumption that the hominids were different species was employed as evidence to reinforce the theory that humans have evolved from ape-like ancestors.

It's a nice, tight little circle.

RLC

Strategy Page has an interesting fact about the Iraqi police:

If you read the whole post you'll come away with a much different picture of the Iraqi military and national guard than what you get from watching the evening news. As the above quote suggests, they are growing in strength and competence. The process is slow, and there are problems finding good leadership, but there is good reason for cautious optimism.

This is especially important inasmuch as our own military is being stretched. The more troops the Iraqis can field to provide for their own security, the more pressure it will take off the United States to come up with adequate manpower to keep the peace.

RLC

The ethics of torture are back in the news, and again the question first from our lips should be how the word torture is being defined. It's difficult to say whether or not torture is justified when we don't know what it is we're talking about.

Part I, Article I of the Geneva Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

The problem with this definition is twofold. First, the word "severe" is frustratingly imprecise. Second, the signatories to this agreement did not envision the kind of world in which we live today. World-wide terrorism and weapons of mass destruction have rendered the Geneva definition anachronistic.

Viewpoint has discussed this matter before, particularly here and here, and we don't wish to cover too much of the same ground now, but there are some things that bear elaboration. One is the problem with the use of the word "severe."

A pair of articles by Steve Weissman at TruthOut.org. illustrate the difficulty. In the first essay Weissman decries the military's resort to "torture" in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Weissman evidently lumps all of these acts together under the rubric of "torture", but should he? Is it torture to put a hood over someone, to limit their food or sleep, to make them stand for hours at a time? In other words, when does discomfort become severe pain? And is inflicting severe pain always wrong? If so, why so? Is there anyone reading this who would balk at inflicting severe pain upon someone if that was the only way to save the life of their child?

Imagine that terrorists have been apprehended, and the military has reason to think that their associates are planning to attack an elementary school, as happened in Beslan, Russia. The authorities don't know where or when, but they have good reason to believe that the captured men know. By putting them under stress, duress, and even some pain they might be able to get the information from them, but, heeding the advice of such as Mr. Weissman, they decline to do this. The attack takes place, it turns out to be the school to which you send your children, several hundred terrified youngsters are murdered, your child among them. Would you feel that the military had made the correct decision? If you answer yes, then the question you should then answer is: Why is the comfort of a terrorist killer more important and valuable to you than the life of your and other people's children?

Weissman seeks in Part II to reply to examples such as this. He writes:

Well, of course, one never knows whether one is getting the truth, but this is a ludicrous argument. The principle Weissman articulates here is that nothing should ever be chanced unless it is guaranteed of success. Because the "torture" may not work, we are to believe, therefore it should not be used. We can imagine the reaction of people across the land after having witnessed New York City be vaporized in a mushroom cloud if they discover that the NYPD had apprehended the terrorist who had planted the nuclear bomb hours before it was set to go off. They perhaps could have prevented the blast, but they had accepted Mr. Weissman's reasoning that they shouldn't torture the recalcitrant mass murderer to learn the bomb's location because, after all, he just might lie to them. Better to try to entice the bomb's location from him with bon homie and free tickets to Radio City Music Hall.

We agree that torture should not be used indiscriminately, but there is no moral case against using it upon those there is probable cause to think are willfully withholding information which could save human lives. Moreover, it should only be used when it is necessary to prevent harm to others, it should never be employed simply to hurt or punish someone. This leaves a lot of room for gray areas and judgment calls, but that's the way life is.

We also think that some distinction needs to be made between depriving a person of certain comforts and doing them lasting harm. Playing loud rock music should not be considered torture. It is unpleasant, to be sure, but unpleasantness should not be a criterion of illicit torture. Nor should making terrorists stand for several hours be considered beyond the pale. If stress and discomfort constitute torture then confining criminals to jail cells would be a violation of the Geneva Convention since it certainly is both stressful and uncomfortable for most people.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this debate is the assumption that torture, however we define it, is ipso facto immoral. We need a vigorous debate in this country of the grounds for that assumption.

RLC

Books and Culture has an interview of Christian Smith conducted by Michael Cromartie in which Smith assesses the spiritual state of American youth with wonderfully impressive precision. The interview should be an absolute must read for every parent, teacher, and religious leader in America. It's an extensive piece and is filled with wisdom and insight. Indeed, Smith says things that many parents and teachers have intuitively believed to be true but seldom saw endorsed by any cultural authority and rarely so cogently. Smith is such an authority. Here's the introduction B&C gives him:

In the course of the interview Smith points out, among other things, the following:

There's much more at the link. One of the messages that comes through in this piece is that parents should not be reluctant to talk to their children about the fundamentals of their religious faith, and they should be very willing to put up with whatever resistance some kids might offer to attending religious services. The benefits to the child in the long run are, of course, immeasurable.

On the other hand, parents also should ensure that the services they take their kids to offer more than just babysitting and social interaction. Teenagers both want and need to talk about their deepest convictions. They want and need to learn what it is their religion is all about, what it's based upon, and how it answers the most profound questions of life. Even if they reject it down the road, as Smith says, they need to know that they're rejecting something substantial and consequential. If they do the chances that they'll eventually come back to it are far better than if they perceive shedding their faith to be on a par with discarding a threadbare, ill-fitting, unfashionable coat.

RLC

Reader Ryan H. links us to Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles who relays a notice from the journal of the American Family Association. The gist of it is that four people were arrested last October in Philadelphia for protesting at a homosexual rally:

If the facts are as they are related here this is an outrage. When has anyone ever been arrested for protesting at a Christian rally or event? The charges are so absurd that they could only have been concocted by a lawyer. Since when, for example, are homosexuals an ethnic group?

If these four protestors are convicted the courts will have in effect ruled that public objection to homosexuality is a hate crime, and it will be just a matter of time until opposing homosexuality from the pulpit will be ruled illegal. On that day the entire first amendment will lay in tatters.

This case represents a powerful and insidious assault on both the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion in America. We're therefore anxiously awaiting word that the ACLU has entered the fray on behalf of the protestors. In the meantime, the AFA has vowed to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. If the protestors win, let's hope they sue the city officials responsible for this travesty for every penny of the graft they've doubtless managed to stash away over the years.

More details of the whole sordid affair can be found here.

The French can always be depended upon to sink to the occasion. The Belgravia Dispatch has some commentary on a piece which appeared recently in the French newspaper Le Monde snidely venting its jealousy of the ability of the U.S. to mount a massive rescue effort in Indonesia while the French, a third-rate power whose only consolation is a much undeserved seat on the U.N. Security Council, stands by in relative impotence.

Here's a sip of French whine:

Note the sarcastic implication. The U.S. is only doing what it is because it's preparing for some military adventure against Muslims. The French, in an act of moral projection, cannot imagine any nation, least of all the U.S., doing something simply because it's the right thing to do. Viewing the rest of the world through the lens of their own cynicism and corruption, they assume there must be insidious motivation behind our willingness to amass such an effort. In the process they defame and insult the U.S. government and the American people who are funding and conducting the relief effort underway in the Indian Ocean. This is the sort of sniping one engages in, we suppose, when one bitterly resents that fact that his own nation's accomplishments are as insignificant as those of the modern French.

There's more on Le Monde's whimpering at the Dispatch.

RLC

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost directs us to a website called Edge which asks 120 well-known intellectuals "What do you believe even though you can't prove it?"

As Carter says, some of the answers are intriguing, many are banal, and others just plain absurd. Here are some samples:

We would have thought that the answer to the question would have been "almost everything that we believe" since very little in life can really be proved, but then we're not intellectuals and we lack the wit to say things like "time does not exist" or that "nothing is true if it cannot be proved." With regard to this last, one of the comments to the post at EO pointed out that:

And Joe Carter reflects upon Daniel Dennett's contribution which says in part that "I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness". Carter asks whether Dennett would tell Helen Keller that she wasn't conscious until she had learned a language.

What makes reading the pontifications of intellectuals so much fun is that they are often so unconsciously loopy.

RLC

John Leo gives us a taste of life on one American college campus:

And how much are you paying to send your child to college this year?

RLC

Poll results at BeliefNet are discouraging.

Thirty eight percent of those who participated in the online poll said they believed that God caused the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Eleven percent of those said that God was either testing us or punishing us. This isn't a big number, to be sure, but the fact that anyone intelligent enough to regularly access Belief Net would think that God deliberately triggered the earthquake in order to kill so many, including so many children, is depressing. What crime were those thousands of children guilty of that God decided to destroy them? What sin had their parents committed that parents all over the world haven't committed that God chose to visit this grief upon them? To think that this horror was somehow a Divine punishment is complete nonsense.

We don't presume to possess exhaustive understanding of God's ways, of course, but nevertheless we find it most unlikely that God deliberately visits suffering and grief upon people. God has created a world that, for whatever reason, is subject to natural laws, and those laws are blind to the moral goodness of the people affected by them.

Good people sometimes suffer painful illnesses and experience horrible grief. Bad people often live opulently and die seemingly happy at a ripe age. God doesn't bring this injustice about. He may permit it to happen for reasons that have mystified believers for thousands of years, but He doesn't cause it. He may "use" it when it happens, but He doesn't make it happen.

God, we suspect, intervenes less frequently in the world than some apparently believe, and we doubt that He ever intervenes to deliberately cause innocent people harm. To think otherwise is to imagine Him to be a cruel and vindictive deity, and that is not the God of Christian belief.

RLC

Strategy Page has predictions for 2005 in Iraq:

Go to the link and read their post for December 31st which gives an analysis of the state of the insurgency. They write:

Let's hope they're right.

RLC

Imago Dei has an interesting series of posts on the matter of whether Intelligent Design is a scientific or a metaphysical theory. The difference hinges on whether or not ID is falsifiable.

A theory is falsifiable, in the philosophical sense, if there is some conceivable set of observations which, if they occurred, would disconfirm the theory. If there is no imaginable observation which would ever count against the theory, then it is not falsifiable. This doesn't mean that one would ever make the observation, only that such an observation could be imagined. For example, the claim that there are an infinite number of other universes is unfalsifiable since there's no conceivable observation we could make which would prove it wrong. It may be true or it may be false, but it's not a scientific claim. Falsifiability is one of the criteria which distinguish scientific assertions from metaphysical claims.

As Imago Dei points out, ID's critics must think it falsifiable because many of them are trying hard to convince us that it's false. I had an amusing experience with this myself not long ago.

ID is falsifiable at least to the same extent as is the Darwinian assertion that natural selection is an unguided, purposeless process that is totally efficacious in itself to produce the grand diversity of life. Thus, if the latter claim is legitimately permitted in high school science classes, for example, then ID should likewise be permitted.

In a recent column for the local paper in which I supported the idea that ID was a legitimate topic for high school science classes, I made the point that if it could be demonstrated that a molecular machine like Michael Behe's bacterial flagellum could be shown to be constructed through mechanical means without intelligent input then, although ID might not be falsified in the strict sense (since it could still be argued that God had designed the mechanisms that led to the development of the structure), it would certainly be de facto discredited.

Someone wrote in to the paper and stated in rather snarky accents that in fact this had already been done and cited the web site to prove it.

Well, the writer's grandiose assurances were not justified by the information at the web site that he had commended to the paper's readers, but that wasn't the most important aspect of his reply. People who oppose having ID taught in science classes often do so on the premise that it's not science, and they buttress the opinion that it's not science by claiming that it's not testable, i.e. not falsifiable. My critic didn't seem to be aware that by asserting (wrongly) that a major ID claim had been shown to be false he was tacitly acknowledging that ID meets a crucial criterion of scientific theories. Without realizing it he was sawing off the branch upon which he sat.

Critics of ID are in a tough spot. They can't allege that ID is false without admitting that it's falsifiable, and they can't acknowledge that it's falsifiable without admitting that it's a valid topic for a science class.

The links at Imago Dei have much more on this controversy.

RLC

Since 9/11 there has been a flood of books on the nature of Islamo-fascism and the crisis in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Readers interested in this subject, and we think everyone should be, need to sit down with Ken Timmerman's Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America.

Actually the title is a little misleading because Timmerman's main topic is the resurgence of anti-semitism in the Arab world, Europe, and in certain precincts in the United States. Unlike the twentieth century outbreak of this irrational and virulent disease, the more recent renascence is not confined to the uneducated, marginal, skinhead right. The real danger today is that in Europe and America it is a contagion infecting primarily the sophisticated and influential elites on the ideological Left.

The depth and intensity of anti-Jewish hatred that exists in the Arab world and elsewhere is stunning, and Timmerman presents us with all the evidence. He also does a masterful job of exposing the murders and corruption of Yasser Arafat (The book came out before Arafat's death) who had stolen millions of dollars from the Palestinian people and been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis. He explains, too, the genesis of al Qaida and Osama bin Laden's rise to influence and the motivations behind his ascendancy.

Along the way he unmasks some of the Islamo-fascist's American and European sympathizers, most notably Noam Chomsky on the Left and Grover Norquist on the Right. It may seem odd that the Left is so sympathetic to a fascist movement, but as Timmerman reminds us, Left and Right meet at the bottom, and the bottom is their mutual hatred for Jews in general and Israel in particular.

Despite being densely packed with facts and difficult Arab names the book is quite readable and in some places it's riveting. His description of a suicide bombing at a wedding reception in Israel is almost as fascinating as it is heart-rending.

The message that Timmerman illustrates and documents throughout the book is that modern radical Islam is not just at war with Israel. It is at war with the entire Western world. It is a war fueled by hatred for our values, our freedoms, our view of social justice, our belief in tolerance, our separation of church and state. It is a war that the Islamists will fight until Israel is destroyed, all Jews are dead, and all Americans and Europeans are either dead or converts to Islam. If you think this is too strong an indictment then you really must read Preachers of Hate.

Copies can be ordered through our favorite bookseller Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

RLC

Jollyblogger urges us to reflect upon the fact that, "Leaders are readers and readers are leaders."

He then goes on to quote from Hugh Hewitt's book In But Not Of, wherein Hewitt writes that:

Leadership, Hewitt goes on to say later, "is not a specific talent. It is a package of skills and disciplines, one of which is intellectual curiosity. This curiosity is the first ingredient of leadership."

One of the reasons for the tepidness of so many Christian churches is the fact that many Pastors either have no time, or no inclination, or both, to read. With little of the best of what has been thought or written going into their minds during the week there is little that the Pastor can offer to his parishioners from the pulpit on Sunday morning. Consequently, a lot of sermons are insipid, uninteresting and uninspiring.

The same is true of public school administrators. It is astonishing how few of them read even fiction let alone non-fiction. Lacking engagement with the ideas of the culture they are often ill-positioned to lead a faculty, particularly those faculty who teach academic disciplines like literature, history, sociology, and science. This is perhaps the main reason that administrators are managers rather than educators.Or perhaps it is because they are managers rather than educators that they don't read.

In any event, it is as unfortunate for our schools as it is for our churches when the leadership does not take the trouble to immerse themselves in good books.

RLC

David Horowitz's Front Page Mag bestows its Man of the Year award on John O'Neill, the Swift Boat vet who led the fight to expose John Kerry as the poseur he is. In our opinion, if they weren't going to give the honor to George Bush then O'Neill is the next best choice. You can read their rationale for it here.

RLC

Iran claims that all its forces are committed to defending their nuclear facilities from an attack by the Israelis or the Americans:

Hmmm. Looks like an attack on their nuclear weapons production facilities could pretty much take out their military capability as well. We're not military strategists, but we wonder why Iran would offer its enemies such a tempting opportunity for a "two fer".

RLC

It looks like nothing much has changed for the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is just Yasser Arafat writ small. FoxNews.com has this report:

Look for the carnage to continue until the Israelis finally get tired of burying their children's body parts and either pull up stakes and leave or decide to eradicate the PLO and it's terrorist affiliates. Those are the only two realistic options for Israel. Peace with the Palestinians is achievable only through mass evacuation, total conquest, or total surrender. Nothing less will appease the Palestinians and anyone who thinks otherwise is not living in the real world. Unfortunately, the world is full of people who are not living in the real world.

RLC

Maybe we could trade Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, and a whiner to be named later for this kid. It certainly wouldn't be a fair trade, but we'd sure be better off. Read the story to find out why.

RLC

Andrew Sullivan.com directs us to this op-ed by Will Wilkinson who argues against the conservative philosophy that cutting revenues (taxes) will result in lower spending. He refers to this as the "starve-the-beast" strategy for reducing spending and hence the size of government, and he concludes that it doesn't work:

It's an interesting argument that Wilkinson makes and readers should peruse the entire piece at the link.

RLC

Here's an interesting link to a story about Richard Dawkins' integrity, or lack thereof, that will interest anyone familiar with Dawkins and the Intelligent Design/Naturalism debates.

One frequently hear's charges of dishonesty levelled at ID proponents. Whether or not those charges are sometimes true, and most of them turn out to be bogus, it's worth pointing out that some Darwinians find deliberate falsehood an agreeable tactic when it suits their purpose.

Kudos to the pro-Darwinian Dispatches From the Culture Wars for being willing to expose the dishonesty of a famous ally. The author of the blog, whose name is unknown to me, writes:

Follow the link above for a full explanation of what exactly Dawkins did.

RLC

This 2003 speech to the Commoonwealth Club by science novelist Michael Crichton is a real stem-winder. Crichton argues that environmentalism is a religion and a very harmful one at that. Anyone interested in the environmental movement will find Crichton's remarks either very welcome or very disturbing, depending upon where your sympathies lie. Here are a few excerpts from Crichton's talk:

There's much more. Crichton gainsays the conventional wisdom about everything from DDT, population growth, Greenhouse emissions, oil depletion, and second hand smoke.

We're skeptical about some of his claims, although we confess that we're not in a position to assess them, and it probably isn't fair to expect that he would cite sources in a speech, but if he's right then an awful lot of what we've always known to be true, just isn't.

Thanks to Dick F. for passing the link along to us.

RLC