Cooler heads seem to have prevailed in the Democratic caucus and the leadership is pulling the extremists, who are a substantial portion of the party, back from the brink of a debacle:

This is all so disingenuous. One minute they're telling us that the 2006 election was a mandate to end the war, which Congress could do by simply cutting off funding, the next minute they're trying to rationalize their refusal to do what's necessary to bring the war to a conclusion.

The leadership has come to realize, of course, that had they pushed the Murtha plan through the House and the Biden/Levin bill in the Senate they would have unintentionally placed themselves in a political no-win situation. If the U.S. were forced by the Murtha plan to withdraw from Iraq then the American people would have rightly blamed the humiliation on the Democrats. On the other hand, if, despite the Democrats' efforts to prevent it, we manage to achieve a noticeable measure of success in that miserable land, the credit will all go to George Bush and the Republicans. This would politically marginalize the Democrats for the next twenty years. It would've been a heads they win, tails we lose proposition for the Dems and luckily for them Pelosi and Reid recognized where they were headed in time to avert the catastrophe.

The Democrats' best strategy - for their party, not for the country - is to play along with Bush, to keep nipping at his heels, and hope that he fails to establish a stable and secure democracy in Iraq. If he does fail without the Democrats interfering with his policy then the Democrats will be well positioned to blame the defeat on the Republicans and reap the political harvest.

Even so, there's something very wrong with having half of our government heavily invested in the defeat of our forces and the failure of an attempt to bring some measure of peace and safety to millions of people.

RLC

Uncommon Descent links to a couple of interesting videos which illustrate how the cellular machinery which produces proteins does what it does. Protein synthesis really is astonishing, all the more so if one believes that all the machinery and coordination of reactions just evolved by chance. After all, the DNA and RNA which code for proteins can only work when they're manipulated by proteins, but proteins did not become available until DNA and RNA were able to produce them. So which came first, the proteins or the nucleic acids?

Never mind, we're told. Such conundrums are minor puzzles which will be solved eventually. Darwinism is like a magic wand. When we encounter problems like the above we simply wave the wand and solemnly recite the incantation "genetic mutation and natural selection plus time and chance" and, presto! the problem goes away.

RLC

There was a time when conservatives were reviled everywhere for being "haters" and "mean-spirited." Then came Bill Buckley's magazine The National Review and a series of books by conservative authors the tone and quality of which gave the lie to the allegations of their opponents. It turned out that it was very difficult to find an actual conservative who fit the stereotype of a frothing Joe McCarthy out to lynch everyone to his ideological left.

Nevertheless, by the late 1960s the damage had been done. Conservatives, in the public's mind, had been stuck with a reputation for biliousness and the media was only too pleased to reinforce the image in whatever way they could. Conservative ideas had a hard time gaining a hearing because they'd been stereotyped as insensitive, fat cat businessmen who loathed both minorities and commies in equal measure.

In the 1980s, however, the emergence on the national scene of charismatic, irenic conservative personalities like Ronald Reagan made it even more difficult for liberals to sustain the specter of the fire-breathing conservative, and in the last twenty years that misconception has been greatly diminished.

The irony is that as the public has come to realize that conservatives are not the monsters they had been led to believe they were the left has ratcheted up the propaganda, trying to portray George Bush as a demoniac on the level of Adolf Hitler. In their desperation to show that conservatives really are the incarnation of Lucifer the left has infused our political rhetoric with far more hate, spite, cruelty and viciousness than anything their predecessors of a generation ago imputed to conservatives.

Nothing in our political past, for example, compares to the vituperation and sheer ugliness of the sort of thing that fills the left's blogs in the wake of the attempted assasination of Vice-president Cheney. Michelle documents some of the sick commentary here although I understand that some of the blogs she quotes from have now expunged the more disgusting comments.

There are several words that come to mind to describe people who think like these people do, but rather than indulge in trying to pin an appropriate adjective on them, as satisfying as such an exercise might be, I wish to simply wonder out loud if there isn't a connection between the ideology the secular left embraces and the kind of people that it seems to attract.

RLC

Federal agents in Virginia have arrested a man named Charles Rust-Tierney for possessing child pornography. Some of the material this man was viewing consisted of video of young, prepubescent girls screaming and crying as they were tied up and forcibly raped. What sort of man would want to watch this kind of thing?

Well, it turns out that Rust-Tierney is a past president of the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, not that that explains everything. He also coached youth sports in his Arlington neighborhood. In other words, he's a man of some means and accomplishment who could be anyone's neighbor. The fact that he rose to such prominence in the ACLU seems like it should be significant, perhaps because of facts like this:

One wonders, in light of Mr. Rust-Tierney's arrest, if the ACLU's commitment to defending the pornography industry isn't at least partly due to self-interest.

Anyway, there's more on this sordid affair at the link and also some discussion on Bill O'Reilley's show, a video clip of which can be accessed at Hot Air.

It turns out that Rust-Tierney's wife is a leader in an organization which has fought to abolish the death penalty. We suspect that after this development she might be having second thoughts.

RLC

More left-wing hilarity comes to our attention courtesy of Yahoo:

Ho, ho. Whether it's humor or art those lefties sure are a caution, aren't they? Their sense of the comic is so uproariously sophisticated, so endearing that it makes one want to be a liberal just for the laughs.

RLC

Those with a little background in cell biology might find this animation interesting.

Everyone else will find it stunning that so much coordinated, machine-like activity is going on in the tiny cells of our body all the time. How does brute matter produce such complex machinery and exquisite coordination?

RLC

GilDodgen at Uncommon Descent has an interesting meditation triggered by a reading of Michael Denton's classic work titled Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.

GilDodgen considers just one tiny aspect of the laws of physics, the physics of sound, and contemplates the amazing fact that the laws of physics are precisely suited to allowing us to experience music:

Everything we learn about the world seems to confirm this assertion, which is why statements like that made by Steven Weinberg at the end of his book The First Three Minutes: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless," appear more and more ludicrous with every new discovery.

RLC

One of the many beautiful photos taken by the Hubble telescope is this one of a triple-ringed supernova:

How these rings were formed has long puzzled scientists, but it seems now that a pair of astronomers at Oxford may have figured it out. See this article at New Scientist for the details.

RLC

The trial of Lewis Libby has been a farce from the beginning. A man's life is being devastated by a fanatical prosecutor who evidently shares some of the same genes as Mike Nifong, the contemporary Torquemada who prosecuted (persecuted?)the Duke lacrosse players who were accused of rape.

For a quick overview of the case and an indictment of the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, we recommend Mona Charen's column on the subject. It's brief and tells you everything you need to know to bring you up to speed in case, like most people, you haven't been paying much attention.

Viewpoint likes the word being bandied about to describe what happens to people who fall afoul of prosecutors like Nifong and Fitzgerald who mistake themselves for Medieval inquisitors. Such hapless souls are said to have been Fitzfonged. We think it'll stick.

RLC

I invite those of you who appreciate beauty in nature to check out this visitor to a backyard near Mechanicsburg, PA this past week. It was captured on film by photographer Bob Moul.

The bird is a Scott's oriole, a species indigenous to the American southwest which usually winters in Mexico and Central America. Indeed, the Mechanicsburg bird, which I had the pleasure of viewing on Thursday, is the first one ever recorded in the northeastern U.S.

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever" (John Keats).

RLC

Saner elements in the Democratic party seem to have prevailed over the Pelosi/Murtha wing, and the idea of slow-bleeding the troops in Iraq appears to have itself bled itself to death:

The anti-war Democrats, however, are nothing if not determined to achieve failure in Iraq, and thus a couple of leading Democratic lights in the Senate, Joseph Biden and Carl Levin, are crafting legislation that would:

This is rich. Under the senators' proposal the American military will be limited to combat only against al Qaeda in Iraq. I wonder if the legislation will require the al Qaeda cadres to identify themselves to American troops so that our forces will know whether or not they can proceed to shoot them. I wonder, too, if august worthies like Joe "Obama's the cleanest black ever to run for president" Biden have considered that, in the unlikely event their legislation passes, al Qaeda will just change its name. What are our troops supposed to do then? I guess I'm too much of a worry wort. Surely Messers. Levin and Biden have it all figured out.

For the Democrats victory is defeat and success is failure. George Orwell must be smiling.

RLC

Al Gore once famously accused President Bush of deceiving the American people by screaming these words: "He betrayed this country. He played on our fears."

Well, we are now well on our way to having a national panic attack over global warming due largely to the efforts of Mr. Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Even small children are reportedly being frightened into sleeplessness by fears of global warming and world-wide catastrophe.

One wonders whether Mr. Gore would agree that An Inconvenient Truth plays on our fears. Probably not. Only Republicans do that.

RLC

You've probably heard about the dust-up between the Clinton camp and the Obama people over remarks made by Hollywood producer David Geffen at a fund-raiser for Obama. What hasn't been speculated upon much in the media is why Geffen has turned away from the Clintons, with whom he was once very close, and thrown his Hollywood heft behind Obama.

Here's why:

Geffen was apparently angered by the fact that a man he believed to be innocent of any crime was left unpardoned but this parade of corrupt and criminal cronies and others were released by the president. Especially galling was the pardon of Marc Rich whose beautiful wife apparently bought his release through political contributions of one sort or another. Geffen saw this as something of a betrayal by the Clintons and has consequently joined the swelling ranks of Democrats who've come to despise the Clintons for the cavalier way in which they use and discard people according to how useful they are to them.

It's beginning to look as though Hillary will have to fight hard for her party's nomination and, if she gets it, enthusiasm for her candidacy will be subdued among those Democrats who know her.

RLC

One of the finest videos on intelligent design is one titled Unlocking the Mystery of Life. It lays out some of the early history of the ID movement and addresses two major points of conflict with Darwinian naturalism: The origin of life and the origin of specified complexity. The theoretical stuff is interesting and the computer animations are breathtaking.

For a sample of the latter take a look at this clip which illustrates just a few of the processes involved in the cell's manufacture of proteins. It's nothing short of astounding.

RLC

For those too young to remember the Abscam scandal that resulted in six Democrats and one Republican going to jail, Ann Coulter offers a quick summary. Her purpose, of course, is to highlight the venality of a young congressman named John Murtha, who was caught on tape discussing bribes with an undercover FBI agent.

This is the man who is leading the Democrats, and our nation, up Surrender Hill. It's ironic that the Democrats would feature a congressman with one of the most questionable ethical reputations in Washington as a key leader in what they purport to be a kind of moral quest, the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.

Read Coulter's piece to learn a little bit about the kind of man it is who is scheming to deny the president the ability to reinforce the troops in Iraq.

RLC

Randall Hoven at The American Thinker offers a salutary, and fairly brief, history lesson for those who wonder about the claim that the United States is a dangerous, perhaps evil, force on the world stage. Hoven shows that such a claim can only be made by those who either have no idea what has transpired around the world in the last seventy years or who are being deliberately dishonest.

Students who sit in classrooms where this meme is regularly trotted out by leftist instructors will especially benefit from reading the piece.

RLC

This is yet another illustration of why we must win the war against Islamo-fascism. If we lose heart, as some already have, what happened to Zilla Usman will eventually happen to women throughout the West.

A culture which gives a slap on the wrist to rapists, which turns a blind eye to "honor" killings, which punishes children by driving automobiles over their arms,

which hangs teenagers for being homosexual,

and which produces people who believe they're doing God's will by killing women who don't "know their place", is not just retrograde and dysfunctional. It's diseased.

Yet it is just such a culture as this which the Islamo-fascists wish to impose on the whole world, and they are prepared to use whatever means necessary to do it.

RLC

As if we didn't have enough to worry about:

If you like to worry about things you can do nothing about you can read the rest of the article here.

RLC

This month's edition of First Things has a very interesting pair of essays by Joseph Bottum and Michael Novak, both of whom are conservative Republicans (I'm surmising), on the competency of George W. Bush. Bottum takes the view that W. is in over his head, Novak is much more lenient in his judgment.

FT is offering the article for free here, and it's well worth a read whether one is a supporter or a foe of the president.

RLC

In yet another tribute to the skill displayed by blind mechanistic processes in constructing what anyone but a Darwinian true-believer would recognize as an engineered machine, Telic Thoughts offers a simulation of the operation of the enzyme that synthesizes ATP in the body's cells.

RLC

The BBC reports on the American plan of attack should Iran persist in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Here's part of the BBC story:

It should be of concern to everyone. One of the interesting things about these plans is that they have been somehow made available to the BBC at the same time that the Bush administration is adamant in its denials that any attack on Iran is being planned. We appear to be playing mind games with the Iranians. Let's hope it works.

RLC

Something called the "Rational Response Squad" is soliciting people, mostly young people, to make a commitment to condemn themselves to eternal damnation by videotaping themselves denying the existence of the Holy Spirit.

Set aside the callowness of the project and the dubious theology that underlies their interpretation of blaspheming the Holy Spirit and explore for a moment the psychology of what these kids are doing. They are proclaiming that they don't believe that God exists, but for what purpose? Someone may believe that space aliens don't exist but most people would hardly bother to send in videos to You Tube declaring the fact. If one doesn't believe that God exists why go to the trouble of videotaping an affirmation of one's doubt? What is it about denying the existence of something that is a source of such pride in the denier?

For some of these kids, moreover, it seems that they're not so much denying God's existence but rather banishing the God they suspect exists from any role in their lives. In other words, it's not an intellectual or philosophical position they're voicing, but an act of defiance or rebellion against the concept of God that they've come to hold. In the very act of denying God's existence they seem to be admitting that they know He's there, but that they resent that He is.

If this is a correct interpretation of what at least some of these kids are doing, then, for all of their pretense at intellectual sophistication, they're making themselves look silly. It's foolish, after all, to deny the existence of what deep down you know to be real. It's foolish to despise what deep down you believe to be the source of all that's good and right in the world. In their attempt to be "rational" they make themselves irrational. In their attempt to be "cool" they make themselves dumb. It's very sad.

RLC

Michael Ramirez sums up what the Democrats in congress mean when they say that they "support the troops":

RLC

We're expecting Softball's Chris Matthews to feature this news report when next he blasts the Bush administration for allegedly hyping intelligence that points to Iran as the source of weapons being used in Iraq to kill Americans:

Unconfirmed reports coming out of Washington indicate that Ahmadinejad's claims were well-received by congressional Democrats who considered them to be perfectly plausible.

RLC

Go to Telic Thoughts and watch the video of a crow trying to get food out of a container with a wire. The bird can't manage it so it bends the wire into a hook. It's astonishing.

TT also links to a fascinating article at Neurophilosophy on how birds navigate. There are evidently at least two separate mechanisms employed, one for measuring the strength of the earth's magnetic field and one for assessing its direction. These mechanisms are incredibly "engineered" and certainly suggest intelligent input. But maybe not. Maybe they arose by blind forces acting by trial and error over millions of years, just like your computer might have if nobody had ever designed one.

RLC

According to this report Britain is the worst place in the developed world for a child to grow up. Perhaps it's because of all that evangelical religion afflicting England.

RLC

NASA has a graphic which shows the global temperature deviations from seasonal averages for every month since 1979 through 2003. The most striking thing about the graphic is that although it seems like some places are consistently warmer than the seasonal average other places are consistently cooler. In other words, to the extent that warming is occuring it appears to be occuring locally or regionally and not uniformly around the globe.

Canada and the arctic seem to be warming while the southern states, Central, and South America seem to be cooling.

The bottom graph is the average global deviation from the long-term mean. You can select any month by moving the cursor across the graph. It appears that the average global temperature fluctuates around the mean spending as much time below it as above it (except for a bit of a spike in May of 1998).

So what's it all mean? I'm not sure, but it certainly suggests that the situation is more complex than the global warming people are letting on. The ambiguity of the data causes us to wonder what motivates those like The Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen who are so eager to have everyone believe that the earth is getting warmer that they want to forcibly silence all dissent from that opinion by having dissenters stripped of their scientific credentials.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

WorldNet Daily has a very disturbing report on how hate speech legislation is being used in Australia and Europe to muzzle and intimidate anyone who would criticize minority individuals or groups:

There's much more on this proposed legislation at the link and all of it is frightening.

Here's a question: If the legislation passes and it becomes illegal to use any language that communicates hate or even mere disapproval, will we be putting liberals in jail for expressing their feelings about George Bush and Dick Cheney? Just wondering.

RLC

The more astute political pundits are beginning to discern a dark horse in the Republican race that few in the media have been discussing. In fairness to the pundits they haven't been discussing him because he is not yet a declared candidate. Nevertheless, he polls consistently high in almost every survey of Republican voters and for good reason. He is probably the most conservative of the viable candidates and certainly the deepest thinker of any candidate of either major party.

Dick Morris has taken note and writes about him at The Hill.

RLC

There's an ancient Greek myth about a man named Sisyphus who, having offended the gods, was punished by being condemned to push a heavy stone up a hill. When he finally reached the summit the boulder would roll back down to the bottom. Sisyphus would then have to push it back up again only to have the same thing happen every time he got to the top. This was this poor man's fate - to push that stone up the hill over and over again for eternity.

The Greeks thought this to be a wonderful metaphor for absolutely pointless, mind-numbing absurdity. If they were alive today they'd have an even better metaphor. Sisyphus, in the modern version, would be strapped into a chair in front of a television and given a remote, but no matter which of the 100 channels he selected there would be somebody talking about Anna Nicole Smith. Forever.

I can't imagine how empty must be the lives of those celebrities who live like Ms Smith lived, but even worse, I can't imagine how shallow must be the people who devote their days to reporting on the lives of such as Ms Smith. At the end of the day what exactly have they done to make the world a better place? What have they accomplished? How is going to their job in the morning any different than Sisyphus leaning his shoulder against the rock one more time?

Equally as inane, if not moreso, are the lives of those who actually find such talk to be interesting.

It's no wonder radical Muslims believe that our culture is corrupting the whole world. A lot of it is.

RLC

Victor Davis Hanson offers a prescription for Iran that sounds very much like what the Bush administration, insofar as we can tell, is already doing, except for his last suggestion. The last suggestion, lowering the price of oil through conservation, is critical to impoverishing Iran, but there doesn't seem to be much encouragement from the White House on this front. Be that as it may, what VDH recommends is a means to bring about the collapse of Iran's nutty leadership without having to resort to war, or at least an invasion. Here's the heart of it:

As we have said in the past, anything would be preferable to war with Iran. Anything except allowing Iran to gain access to nuclear weapons.

RLC

Michael Linton offers a review of Alexandra Pelosi's documentary on evangelical christians called Friends of God about which we've written here. Linton points out that Pelosi seems very sympathetic to evangelical Christianity and that her documentary is mostly a fair presentation.

Maybe it is fair, but I have to wonder what sort of message it sends to the secular world about Christians. After reading her discussion with pastor Ted Haggard, for instance, one is left flabbergasted that someone who had risen to such a high position of responsibility and visibility in the church turns out to be such a ... well, a jerk. And this was taped before the news of his sordid homosexual sex life became public.

Read Linton's piece to see what I mean.

RLC

Rumors are circulating that Osama bin Laden has died earlier this month of typhoid. This site has the details in an article by Robert Fox. The conclusion of his piece is a little strange, though. He claims that bin Laden's death would be a blow to neo-conservatives and would require a re-thinking of the global war on terror. Why this should be the case Fox does not explain, and so we're left to ponder the odd logic of asserting that bin Laden's demise will be a setback for those people who have for a decade wanted to see him dead.

At any rate, the reports are unconfirmed at this point.

RLC

Well. Bill Roggio reports that a bus carrying Iranian Revolutionary Guards soldiers was blown up by a car bomb which killed 18 Iranian troops. Roggio is suspicious that this might be payback for Iranian complicity in the deaths of American soldiers although there's no evidence of American involvement.

In the same post he notes a few more developments in the war against Mookie al-Sadr's Mahdi army in Baghdad. It's interesting reading.

RLC

John Murtha, whose willingness to accept a bribe was documented on tape in the Abscam scandal of the early eighties, is, as chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Sub-Committee, working with anti-war groups to make it almost impossible for the White House to win in Iraq. Realizing that an American victory would be a devastating blow to Democrats for years to come, and believing that the American people would punish the Democrats if they overtly used congressional power to cut off funds for the war, Murtha, Pelosi and others seem to have chosen subterfuge over principle. Rather than hold a straight up or down vote on cutting off funding for the war, they have opted for a more furtive, more obscure way of accomplishing the same thing. Their ploy will enable them to conceal their handiwork from the voters behind a faux concern for the troops:

There's more on the Dems strategy at the link. It certainly looks like a strategy born of political cowardice. It also looks like their plan is almost certain to result in increased American casualties since it will be difficult for the military to send reinforcements to aid those troops already in the field. Perhaps I and others misunderstand what the Democrats are doing with this proposal, but if not, the details of it are as cynical as they are despicable.

One wonders how fat Murtha's wallet has grown on this one.

RLC

The successor to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is a man named Abu al-Masri. Breitbart has a report that al-Masri was wounded in fighting with Iraqi forces:

If this report is confirmed it should have a chilling effect on those waiting in line to fill the role of leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Who wants to take a position that offers such lousy retirement benefits and such poor job security.

RLC

Paul Nowak puts the Dixie Chicks in perspective and, with a single drawing, manages to make them appear whiny, self-absorbed, and historically oblivious, which, of course, they are:

I wonder if any of them have ever even heard of Solzhenitsyn.

RLC

It seems now that there has been yet another rape allegation in Durham, North Carolina. A woman alleges that she was assaulted at a house party, a circumstance similar to the case in which the Duke lacrosse players were accused, falsely, of having raped an "exotic" dancer.

The second case even has another similarity to the first in that it is an interracial incident. Nevertheless, despite the media obsession with the Duke case, and its similarities with this second case, you probably haven't heard about the recent incident. Why do you suppose that is? Does not our media salivate like Pavlov's dogs at the thought of writing about white on black crime? Then why hasn't it jumped on the second case? One guess.

Some crimes evidently don't matter as much to the folks who report our news as do others.

RLC

One often hears, despite numerous attempts to disabuse people of the notion, that Intelligent Design is religious because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the designer must be the God of the Bible. This is nonsense, of course, but the objection persists because were it ever to be given up it would open the door for ID to be taught in public schools and once that happened Darwinism would go the way of Marxism and Freudianism.

Telic Thoughts has a post on a 1982 speech given by Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. Hoyle was an atheist but, as impossible as it might seem to some of ID's opponents, he believed in the intelligent design of life on earth.

Read the article to see what Hoyle advocated. The point is that ID, to the disappointment of theists and atheists alike, does not necessarily entail the God of the Bible and is, ironically, compatible with both. What it's not compatible with is the materialist interpretation of Darwin which says that physical processes like the laws of chemistry and physics, plus time and chance, are all that's required to explain life and the cosmos.

Hoyle believes that the designer is part of this universe. It is possible, though, that the designer transcends this universe, but is still not the God that Christians worship. Physicists talk of the possibility of other universes existing beyond our own. If there are such worlds out there it's possible that an inhabitant of one of them designed our world. If speculations about the existence of other worlds is a legitimate topic of scientific discourse then so must be the possibility of an intelligence in such a world being capable of designing other worlds. Again, the point is that whether ID is a scientific theory or not, it is clearly not religious. It does, however, have religious implications, just as does materialistic Darwinism.

RLC

Here's a great song written and sung, I believe, by a soldier in Iraq. It's titled If I Die Before You Wake. Give it a listen.

RLC

While Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha prophesy that Bush's new policy in Iraq will be a dismal failure and seek to cut off funding for the troop surge, ABC pulls the rug out from under them with this report:

In other words the chief trouble-maker in Baghdad has hightailed it to Iran, which, of course is being falsely accused by the Bush administration for supporting the insurgency.

Why did the Mookster get out of town? Obviously he wasn't buying the Democrats' rhetoric that the surge would do no good. Apparently his patron in the government, prime minister al-Maliki, had finally grown impatient with Mookie's antics and withdrew his protection. Consequently, the dentally challenged sheik, like his ancestors in Babylon four thousand years ago, read the hand-writing on the wall and decided to take his lieutenants and run.

The question now arises as to how effective he will be as an absentee jihadi. How much street cred has he lost among the rank and file for absconding and leaving them to face the American troops and their firepower alone. If, in fact, al Sadr, far removed from the action, has lost his influence among the faithful then Bush's plan scored at least one major success before it was even implemented.

Don't expect Keith Olberman or Chris Matthews to place much emphasis on the point, though. They're too busy trying to make a big deal out of pentagon sources backing off from earlier claims that the Iranian government must know about the supplies of Iranian weapons being smuggled into Iraq.

RLC

Captain's Quarters offers an opportunity to participate in a GOP straw poll if you wish. Go here and cast your vote for whom you'd like to see representing the Republicans in '08. You can also follow the links to view the overall results of the poll thus far.

RLC

This is the final post in our series on the Ten Myths About Atheism that atheist Sam Harris seeks to refute in an article he wrote for Edge.

The 10th "myth" is one that Viewpoint readers might be forgiven for thinking that we have addressed almost every other day since we started this blog over three years ago, but it is such an important matter, and it seems to pop up so often, that it bears constant attention. Mr. Harris claims it to be a myth that:

Harris simply misses the point in the first paragraph above and manages to elicit a host of questions in the reader's mind that he himself leaves unasked and unanswered. Why, for example, does he believe that cruelty is wrong? What makes it wrong? Is it wrong because evolution has hard-wired us to have certain intuitions that cause us to consider it wrong? What if someone (there have been many, many examples) doesn't have such intuitions, would cruelty not be wrong for them? And if our moral intuitions are the products of evolution what could possibly obligate us to abide by them?

He suggests that these moral intuitions have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about how best to promote human happiness, but he does not answer the question why it should be a duty to promote the happiness of others rather than just his own happiness. In other words, an atheistic worldview such as Harris espouses offers no grounds for saying that egoism or selfishness is wrong and more altruistic ethical behaviors are right. Why should I not promote my own happiness even if it comes at the expense of the welfare of others?

Indeed, the only way we can determine that it is better to care about others than to care only for oneself is to hold both views up to a higher ethical standard, a moral dictionary, so to speak, and ask which conforms best to this higher standard. The problem is that for the atheist there is no higher standard. The choice between egoism and altruism reduces to nothing more than personal preference. It's a purely arbitrary selection not binding upon anyone, not even the person who holds the preference.

Harris' secondary claim that our moral progress hasn't come from reading the Bible is historically dubious, as is the assertion that the Bible condones slavery. But be that as it may, his claim that every civilized person now recognizes that slavery is an abomination is an obfuscation. It is only those people whose morality is based on the will of God as revealed through the scripture who have any basis for making such a judgment. Slavery is an abomination for only one reason: All human beings are made in the image of God and are loved by Him. We belong to Him and He has endowed us all with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus no man has the right to treat another as his own property. It is interesting in this regard that the abolitionist movement in both England and the United States was lead by Christians and nourished by the church. Had it been left to secularists and secular institutions slavery would probnably still be with us today.

If there is no God then any man has the "right" to do whatever he has the power to do. In a world without God slavery is not an abomination, it is simply one man exercising power over another. Such an exercise is neither good nor bad, it just is. This is why, when a nation becomes officially atheistic, as did communist nations during the twentieth century, one of the first casualties is invariably the concept of human rights.

Previous posts in this series may be accessed by clicking on the following links: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V and VI, Part VII, Part VIII, and Part IX.

RLC

The sweet, demure Amanda Marcotte has regrettably resigned her post as blogmaster for the John Edwards campaign. I'm sure the entire campaign staff breathed a sigh of relief when Amanda chose to decamp depriving the ambulance-chaser of her legendary charm and wit. Here's a sample of what the Edwards folks got when they hired Ms Marcotte. One has to wonder what kind of people John Edwards has put in charge of his campaign that they would have thought this sort of thing appropriate to represent a man who aspires to be president of the United States.

Caution: this is most definitely not for children.

In a way it's too bad Marcotte resigned. She would have provided all of us with many mirthful moments during the primaries.

RLC

Joe Carter skewers Jesus Camp, a documentary supposedly about Evangelicals but, according to Carter, really about Pentacostals. Jesus Camp has been nominated for an Academy Award (although as PC as Jesus Camp may be, it probably has no chance of winning against Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth), but I haven't seen it so I can't comment on Carter's review. If you've seen the film, you might want to check Carter's post out for yourself.

RLC

A week or so ago I invited comment on reports that the Israelis had assassinated a key Iranian physicist working on their nuclear weapons program. I asked if killing this man averted a wider war and possibly a nuclear explosion in an American city would it be the morally right thing to do. Here are several of the responses we received. The following opinions should not be assumed to be consonant with our own views:

--------------

-------------

------------

-------------

All of these comments came from college students.

RLC

Check the Feedback page for some comments about recent posts.

RLC

My friend Jason sends along this article in The New Yorker about Joel Surnow, the co-creator of the television hit 24. The article is a little long, but it makes for interesting reading, especially when the author, Jane Mayer, talks about Surnow's youth.

Her main point in the essay, though, seems to be to challenge Surnow's use, and evident approval, of torture in the series. Lots of interrogation experts are trotted out to tut tut about the harmful effects the show is having on the attitudes of American youth and to offer their arguments for absolutizing a ban on torture.

Surnow is given the last word, however, and in the last paragraph I think he blows his critics' arguments right out of the water.

Torture for the purpose of amusing the torturer or punishing the victim is an absolute evil, but if there's a chance that innocent lives may be saved through the application of painful coercion to someone who withholds information that could save them, such coercion is morally justified, if not obligatory.

Anyone who finds this view offensive should put themselves in the place of a parent or spouse whose loved one is threatened with death. We've discussed this problem several times over the last couple of years and the interested reader might wish to check out some of our previous posts on the matter. This one is probably the best one to start with, but others here, here, and here might be helpful in making our position clear.

RLC

I was invited to join a number of non-journalists in the York area who will be submitting columns to the local Sunday paper over the next year. My first contribution is on the Iraq war and borrowed from a post I had written some time ago for Viewpoint. It appeared in yesterday's paper:

There is an opportunity to comment at the link.

RLC

Those readers of a certain vintage will remember how the left vilified Ronald Reagan as a trigger happy cowboy who was, they insisted, the greatest threat to the world's existence ever to serve as a head of state. His resolve in refusing to bend to the Soviets' attempt to achieve military dominance in Europe, and his refusal to back down from his plan to place medium range Pershing missiles in Europe within striking distance of Moscow, drove the left into apoplexy.

So it is that those of us who thought his determination to gain peace through strength was the correct course and that his plan to drive the Soviet Union to collapse was absolutely necessary read this article at Breitbart.com with particular satisfaction:

I was reminded the other day that while Reagan was working to dismantle the "evil empire," Sen. Ted Kennedy was trying to arrange a meeting with Soviet premier Yuri Andropov to discuss ways that Reagan could be undermined. Some things never change. One of them is the complete unwillingness of the left to stand up to any tyranny that is not allied to the United States.

Anyway, maybe a couple of decades from now Iraqis will be erecting statues of George Bush in Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. Wouldn't that just drive the Bush-haters completely bonkers.

RLC

One liberal at Daily Kos comes right out and says what a lot of them seem to think:

For the left it's always about what they hate. Very unhappy people, leftists.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The Guardian thinks that a strike against Iran, administration denials notwithstanding, will come this spring. The ostensible reason is Iran's nuclear weapons program and their repeated intention to use those weapons once they have them.

The bad guys in The Guardian scenario are the neo-cons at The American Enterprise Institute and in the Vice-President's office, including the Great Satan himself:

If another reason were needed surely this would qualify:

Perhaps the picture is not complete because in recent weeks four American helicopters have been shot down in Iraq with missiles believed to have been supplied by Iran.

Iran is making it clear that they will nor desist from building nuclear bombs and they are doing all they can to kill Americans in Iraq. If diplomacy fails, which it often does, to persuade Iran to give up it's maniacal obsession with triggering Armageddon, what exactly do Bush's critics on the left suggest we do?

The question is important and must be answered now by every person who cares about this country and the world, so that we don't have any ex post facto Kerryesque declamations of having been against the action before one was for it.

The question boils down to this: Should we allow Iran to continue to do what they're doing or should we stop them? Those are the alternatives. Let's not have any flummery about "involving the world community," and other such evasions favored by politicians. Assume we explore every diplomatic strategy and Iran remains obdurate. Should we then resort to force?

Anyone who refuses to go on the record with a forthright answer to this question forfeits, in my mind, his or her right to be taken seriously in the coming debates.

RLC

This video is a shocker, at least to me. Not because the discussion was particularly compelling - it wasn't, in fact it was disappointing - but because of the makeup of the panel, which consisted of three Christians in the media, and most of all because it was on CNN.

This segment was actually the second part of a feature the first part of which presented two atheist couples who alleged having been persecuted because they were atheists, a charge I find a little hard to believe, actually.

Again, neither segment was very enlightening, both were, in fact, pretty shallow, but the fact that CNN would even air the second segment is noteworthy.

RLC

This must keep Hillary Clinton awake at night:

Now, if Republicans would persuade Newt Gingrich to join the fray we'd have a real contest between ideologies and ideas. Neither man is seen by their respective parties as perfect, but Al Gore is not a Kerryesque flip-flopper with his finger to the wind as Senator Clinton is. He has been nothing if not consistent in his left-wing positions. Hillary seems willing to say whatever she thinks she must to get the nomination and get elected.

Newt, on the other hand, has probably the brightest, most fertile, mind of any of the candidates in the race. He also has the virtue of being a fairly consistent conservative, a trait of which neither Rudy Guiliani nor John McCain can boast. Guiliani is a social liberal or libertarian and McCain is completely unpredictable.

A race between Gore and Gingrich would offer the voter a battle of ideas as classic as it is rare in our politics. It wouldn't be a test of who could fool the most people into thinking that they are what they're not. Gore tried that in 2000 and got burned, and it's doubtful that he'd make the same mistake again. It's too bad that neither man has indicated as yet that he will be a candidate.

RLC

Two galaxies similar to our own Milky Way collide in space. The collision would be catastrophic for any inhabitants of either of these galaxies:

Fortunately, contrary to popular conceptions about the existence of life in space and even the opinions of many scientists, there is reason to believe that of all the billions of galaxies in the universe and all the trillions of stars in those galaxies, sentient life probably exists near only one - our sun.

Some scoff at this notion. The universe is so incredibly vast and there are so many stars that some of them have to have planets like earth, they reason. But books like Ward and Brownlee's Rare Earth make a good case for the absolute uniqueness of earth as a suitable environment for higher life forms.

It may well be that no other galaxy, no other star, no other planet possesses the characteristics necessary to permit life to emerge and perdure. The entire universe in all of it's vastness may exist just so that we, the inhabitants of this tiny speck orbiting an average star, can. In other words, it's possible that the universe has to be as big as it is and as full of matter as it is in order for life to exist anywhere in it.

Assume that the conventional figure of about 14 billion years for the age of the universe is correct, and assume, too, that scientists pretty much correct about how stars are formed. Suppose further that the universe did, in fact, originate in a Big Bang.

Following this initial creation event the universe would have expanded rapidly. During that expansion stars were formed, lived for millions or billions of years, and then exploded like this star did:

While it lived the star was producing in its core many of the elements necessary for life. When it finally exploded many other elements were formed as well and all of them were spewed into space. Eventually, about 4.5 billion years ago, a small portion of this debris coalesced to form the earth and the rest of the planets in our solar system.

The whole time this process was going on the cosmos was expanding. Thus, life could arise on earth only after the necessary elements had been formed and only after billions of years of cosmic history had elapsed. The universe then, if this scenario is correct, has to be as old as it is, and thus as big as it is, in order for us to be here at all.

God could, of course, have created the universe complete in an instant, but if He chose to do it the way scientists think He did, what an extraordinarily extravagant act of creation He undertook just to eventually produce a world suitable for us to live in.

And what astonishing power and brilliance it must have taken.

RLC

Much is being made of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's request for access to a military jet to fly her, her staff and family to California on the weekends. The cost of the plane to taxpayers would be $300,000 round trip, and the plane she has requested would dump thousands of pounds more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the plane used by her predecessor, Dennis Hastert. It has also been pointed out that her ostensible reason for wanting the larger jet, the ability to fly non-stop without having to refuel and risk terrorist attacks in airports, makes no sense since any military jet would be refueling at air force bases.

To compound the embarrassment, her colleague in the House, John "offer me the bribe later" Murtha, reportedly threatened the Pentagon with budget cuts if Pelosi doesn't get her plane. Whatever the facts of the matter, this is not the first time Pelosi's claims to be a champion of the working class and the environment are out of phase with what she actually does.

For example, News Max offers some snippets from a book by Peter Schweizer titled Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. One of the excerpts says this about Ms. Pelosi:

Perhaps, some of what she's upbraided for in this article is beyond her control, but I recall how the media crucified Newt Gingrich because he had asked to be able to deplane Air Force One at the front of the craft, but the Clinton people forced him to leave at the back. Newt felt he had been deliberately dissed by the Clinton staff and was reportedly a little miffed. Whether he really was or not, I don't know, but the media savaged him for days for what they said was childish pique and arrogant vanity. So what is the media saying about Nancy Pelosi's "arrogance"?

RLC

Hillary Clinton doesn't need a weatherman to tell her which way the wind's blowing, just a couple of pollsters. NewsMax cites Thursday's lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal which chronicles Senator Clinton's shift on the war in Iraq. There's nothing wrong with changing one's mind as events unfold, of course, but Senator Clinton would have us all believe that her current position has been her position all along when, of course, it hasn't:

Ms. Clinton went from the view that we have no option but to stay involved and committed in Iraq to the view that we have to get out as soon as possible. That's an odd way to remain committed. Her position on the war seems to track the opinion of the American people. Like someone floating down the river in an inner tube, she goes where the currents of popular opinion take her. That may be good politics, but it's lousy leadership.

RLC

UPDATE: The John Edwards presidential campaign has apparently chosen to deflect the inevitable firestorm of criticism headed their way by firing the foul-mouthed blogger Amanda Marcotte and another equally vile colleague, Melissa McEwan. This is not earning them points with the Democratic base who are evidently outraged (aren't they always) that Edwards would dismiss these exemplars of liberal values, but to have kept these two on would have been to subject the campaign to constant distractions and criticism to which it would have been difficult to effectively respond.

The question we have is why on earth did Edwards' people hire them in the first place? Is the Edwards campaign so tone-deaf to decency that they didn't see Marcotte and McEwan as a problem until people in the blogosphere started quoting them?

For an example of Marcotte's general disposition go here and scroll down. Caution: Not for children.

UPDATE on the UPDATE: It appears that reports that Mr. Edwards was going to relieve himself, so to speak, of the execrable blogger duo were a bit premature:

Here's a sample of what appears on Ms. Marcotte's blog, Pandagon in one of her screeds against pro-life Christians:

That Ms. Marcotte would claim to have not intended to offend anyone's religious faith with this remark tells us something about the sort of cesspools she likes to swim in, I suppose. That Mr. Edwards would take her at her word when she claims to have not intended to malign anyone's faith with remarks like this tells us that he is afraid to alienate the left-wing bloggers who find this sort of sleaze perfectly compatible with their own standards of decency, and who would have his political scalp were he to toss overboard two of their own.

HT: Captain's Quarters.

RLC

Here's one way, perhaps, to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program. Question for the ethicists among our readers: Are such measures, assuming they successfully avert a war, moral?

RLC

There's no more skillful writer, or effective advocate of the struggle in Iraq, than Christopher Hitchens. Nor is there anyone an opponent of the war would want reviewing his book less than he would want Mr. Hitchens to critique it. So, the New York Times' culture critic, Frank Rich, who churned out an apparently shallow screed against the conduct of the Bush administration since 9/11, must have winced when he saw that Hitchens was reviewing his effort for The Claremont Institute's Review of Books.

After having read the review Rich probably felt that he had been mugged, which indeed he had. Here's some of the drubbing Hitchens metes out to the hapless Mr. Rich:

Here's another important passage, though it's not directed specifically at Rich's book:

It is astonishing how those who scoff at Bush for believing Saddam had WMD and was interested in developing nuclear weapons, never seem to think to mention this. Nor do they ever seem to contemplate that had we not invaded Saddam would certasinly have developed nuclear weapons at the first opportunity in order to offset the Iranian nuclear program. Such details are easily set aside, however, when there are political points to be made by beating up George Bush for "lying" to us about Iraq's WMD.

RLC

The Daily Mail shows us this picture of polar bears on an ice floe

and runs this story:

The story gives the impression that these bears are stranded far from land, clinging desperately to the ice lest they fall into the sea and drown, all because of global warming. What they don't tell us is where the photographers were perched who took the photo. Were they standing on a pier or were they on a boat hundreds of miles out? They also don't tell us that polar bears often cavort on ice floes, and that these two, being excellent swimmers, are in no danger at all. The story is a good example of how the media has lost all sense of an obligation to be objective and unbiased in reporting the news.

Nevertheless, there is solid evidence that polar bear populations are in decline, but though the story strongly suggests the decline is due to global warming it never really makes the connection clear. The reader is left wondering exactly how the bears' sagging population numbers are related to climate change, but there's not much doubt that the writers of the story want us to think they are.

Anyway, it doesn't appear that there's much that can be done about it since a study on climate change released Friday observes that even if we stopped pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere today the earth will continue to warm for centuries more. The best we can hope for is that we can minimize the damage. Pretty depressing.

It's a nice picture, though.

RLC

In this installment in our series on anti-theist Sam Harris' debunking of ten myths about atheism we'll consider "myth" number 9. Harris writes that this myth states that:

Among other shortcomings in Harris' reply is the fact that he has a much too pinched view of the this-world benefits of Christianity, thinking them to be limited solely to the moral sphere. Many scholars agree, however, that Christianity provided far more benefit than just a moral basis, as important as that is, to Western civilization and eventually to the world. For example, Christianity provided the only cultural milieu in which modern science could and did develop. It also gave rise to a rich tradition in the arts, especially music, unmatched by any other culture. It fostered a high view of women and of the value of education, and was the motivating force behind the development of the university system in Europe and the United States.

None of these things ever really emerged in any other cultural setting. They only arose among people who believed that God was personal, rational, and that He had laid down certain standards for the treatment of other people. The appearance of these benefits also required that it be widely believed that individuals are created in the image of God and are loved by Him. Only this conviction, as John Locke reminds us, can support and sustain a belief in human dignity and worth.

For more on the contribution to human progress and well-being made by a Christian worldview see Rodney Stark's Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism and Western Success, or Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization by Alvin Schmidt

Moreover, Christian theism satisfies human yearnings that non-theistic peoples have no hope of satisfying. For example, if Harris is correct and there is no God then there's also no meaning to life, no ground for morality, no basis for human dignity or worth, and no real justice. Nor is there any basis for believing that we are a coherent self, that love is anything more than a chemical reaction in the brain, that there is such a thing as objective truth, or that we have any real basis for trusting our reason to lead us to that truth. In other words, the belief that there is a God gives us an existential hope that our deepest yearnings will not go unsatisfied forever. Atheism can only shrug its shoulders and admonish us to get over it.

Since Harris asks us to consider which is more moral - to help the poor out of concern for their suffering or because God wants us to do it, let's turn to that question.

We can begin by pointing out that the question is mis-framed. It should be stated thusly: What obligates us to be concerned about another person's suffering in the first place? Why would it be wrong to be indifferent to another man's pain? Mr. Harris may wish to help the man who suffers, but if he did not wish to help him, even if indeed he wished to cause the suffering, why would that be immoral? Where does an obligation to help those who suffer come from if there is no God? Surely Mr. Harris doesn't think that nature or evolution can impose obligations upon us, but then, if not, what does?

The desire to help another is, if atheism is true, nothing more than an arbitrary preference some people have and others lack. Those who have it are no more "moral" than those who don't. They're just different in the same way that those who have color vision are different from those who are color-blind.

So, the answer to Mr. Harris' question is that if he's right about God, neither concern for another's suffering nor a mistaken duty to obey a non-existent God is more moral because there simply is no moral right or wrong. There are just things that people, like other animals, do. To pose the question of which is more moral is like asking whether starfish are more emotional than clams. The question is nonsense because, on the assumption of atheism, moral right and wrong is not a property of human behavior any more than emotion is a property of starfish and clam behavior.

For the rest of our replies to Harris' Ten Myths go here for #8. The rest can be found by going here and following the links at the end of the post.

RLC

The Democratic presidential candidates certainly are fun to watch. First John Kerry put the kibosh on any hopes he had of reprising his 2004 run for the presidency by inadvertantly calling the troops in Iraq academic underachievers.

Then Joe Biden managed to insult the entire African-American community while trying to compliment Barack Obama, and now John Edwards, the man who demonstrates his deep concern for the poor by living in the most ostentatiously palatial digs in North Carolina, paid for by the obscene settlements he obtained chasing ambulances, has hired himself a spokesperson guaranteed to cause him to wonder what he could possibly have been thinking.

By itself, hiring a spokesperson would be of no moment, but this one, a "blogmaster," is Amanda Marcotte, one of the craziest, and vilest, of the left-wing crazies in the blogosphere. Her role as Edwards' internet presence can only eventuate in multiple embarrassments for the candidate. While Biden spends his days trying to explain to every black person he encounters on the street what he really meant, and Edwards spends his trying to explain why he would hire such a sleaze as Ms Marcotte to represent his campaign, Hillary and Obama float serenely above the fray.

To get a taste of Ms Marcotte's style check out Michelle Malkin's site, but be forewarned, it's neither pretty nor pleasant.

RLC

Victor David Hanson explains why the Democrats will have almost nothing helpful to say or do about the war in Iraq for the next several months. He gives four reasons altogether. Here's his first:

Read the rest. It's very good.

RLC

Many of us know people who have had, or who are presently struggling with, cancer. There appears now to be hope that a simple, inexpensive chemical compound might hold the key to a cure. Here are a couple of excerpts from a story that's appearing in almost every major news outlet:

Read the rest of the details here.

RLC

Dick Morris explains how to defeat Iran without firing a shot:

Two decades ago the left was demanding that American universities and corporations disinvest from South Africa because they practiced apartheid. Iran is a threat to the entire world. We're waiting for the left to rouse themselves from their slumbering indifference and campaign as vigorously for the economic punishment of this enemy of the United States as they once did against an ally.

RLC

Jennifer Hart Weed has a fine essay on being in love with philosophy at Comment. She stresses that when we love philosophy it loves us in return:

Read the whole thing, especially the titles of the four works she recommends at the end. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is short and filled with wonderful insights. She also lists her four favorite philosophers among whom is Eleanore Stump. Dr. Stump, coincidentally for those of you living in the Lancaster Co. area of Pennsylvania, will be speaking at F&M College on February 9th at 4:30 in Spahr auditorium. Her theme is "Love By All Accounts."

RLC

In what appears to be an instant society that expects instant solutions, instant answers, and instant gratification, we find a very different message throughout the Old Testament and particularly from the Psalms. It's a message of patience and persistence, of waiting on God. Here's just a few references:

It might help to read the text that leads up to these next two references to get the context of the events about to unfold. These are interesting because the people are beside themselves and with apparent good reason. They're about to be consumed by the enemy in both cases and they don't appear to be taking comfort in the Psalms. Any chance for survival appears dim and total destruction seems imminent. And then the explicit commands to "stand still"...

Waiting on God and standing still...very difficult things to do. It may seem that we have the option of waiting on God. We can choose to or not. The circumstances that elicit a "stand still" seem to have more of a sense of urgency about them. I wonder how many times we've been admonished to "stand still" and experience the salvation of God but were too busy in our own devices to hear.

WSC

Dr. Terry Tommyrot has written a book titled The Dawkins Delusion, and is interviewed about the book here. Apparently Tommyrot doesn't think Dawkins really exists and finds arguments to the contrary woefully inane.

Dr. Tommyrot actually sounds exactly like Dawkins himself, or what Dawkins would sound like if he really existed. Anyone familiar with Dawkins' writings, or at least those writings attributed to him, especially The God Delusion, will find the interview pretty funny.

HT: Uncommon Descent.

RLC

According to the latest Fox News Opinion Dynamics Poll at this point in the contest it looks like Hillary vs. Rudy in 2008:

13. If the 2008 Democratic presidential primary were held today, for whom would you vote if the candidates were:

14. If the 2008 Republican presidential primary were held today, for whom would you vote if the candidates were:

I really don't think McCain has much of a chance of getting the Republican nomination. Too many conservatives just don't trust him and don't appreciate his shenanigans with the "gang of 14." Gingrich is probably the best of the candidates in terms of ideas and intellect, but he has too much personal baggage. Of course, so does Rudy. Moreover, Rudy is liberal on social issues like abortion, so it's a surprise that he ranks so high among Republicans. Perhaps it's because he's more likeable than McCain and has more charisma than Newt.

Hillary has the Democratic field to herself right now, but that would change if Gore mounted a serious effort. I think the left would dump Hillary in a nanosecond if Gore were to jump in, and I think he'd be harder for the Republicans to beat in November than Hillary would. The base of the Democratic party finds him more genuinely left than Hillary who they view as an unreliable opportunist.

We'll see.

RLC

I was listening to NPR the other morning as they aired a feature on a struggling public school in Baltimore. They had their tape recorders in a biology class as the teacher tried to reconcile the upcoming lesson on Darwinian evolution with the Creationist convictions of some of her students. The lecture included this:

This is not a good approach. It sets up a false dichotomy between faith and fact, religion and science. In reality, it is a matter of faith, not fact, to believe that life could have arisen by purely material processes. and it is a matter of fact, not faith, that no one has been able to figure out how life could have ever originated as a consequence of the action of chance and physical forces.

What the teacher should have said, if she wanted to avoid controversy, is that "what we are going to be studying in class is the consensus view among scientists about how life arose. There are problems with this view and there are some scientists who think it is wrong. What we will not do is take a formal position on the question of whether or not the origin of life and the diversification of life required the input of an intelligent agent. We leave that question open. Our focus wil instead be on the physical evidence, both in support of the consensus view and against it, and allow you to draw your own conclusions about the philosophical questions. If the philosophical questions interest you, and they should, feel free to share your thoughts with the class."

That would have piqued the interest of at least some of her students, but, unfortunately, too many teachers know too little about this controversy to address it fairly, accurately and interestingly with their students.

RLC

Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has put together a documentary on American evangelicalism to air on HBO throughout this month. Rebecca Cusey offers a critique of Pelosi's film at National Review Online. According to Cusey, the documentary could have been a lot worse than it is, and also a lot better. Nevertheless, Pelosi's film touches upon an interesting point. Here's Cusey's commentary:

Cusey notes that Evangelicals don't see themselves as the rest of the country sees them, but the fact is, most Evangelicals don't care how the rest of the country sees them. They should, though, and for the reason that Cusey gives. A group that strikes those it would like to win to the faith as "scary" is not likely to enjoy much success. Like Paul, Christians should be prepared to become all things to all men that some of those might be persuaded that Christianity is true. Making oneself "scary," or presenting an image that seems completely alien to those whom Christians wish to persuade, seems an unpromising way to accomplish this. This is not to say that Evangelicals should not be who they are. It is to say, though, that they should be more alert to how they are perceived by others and the effect that perception has on the attractiveness of the Gospel they offer.

RLC

Variety has a piece telling us that Walden Media and Ralph Winter Productions is going to release a movie based on C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters in 2008. Walden is the same outfit that did The Chronicles of Narnia, a sequel to which (Prince Caspian) is due out next year as well.

HT: Prosthesis

RLC

Steven Pinker closes his essay titled The Mystery of Consciousness at Time.com with this assertion:

Let us assume that he is correct that understanding that other people have the same experience I have when I experience pain. How does recognizing that fact impose an obligation upon me not to gratutitously cause another person to suffer this pain? Pinker assumes that just knowing that others suffer is enough to obligate me not to cause that suffering, but this is an unsupportable assumption. If there is no higher moral authority than my own conscience, or even the collective conscience of mankind, there's nothing immoral with hurting someone else.

Yes, no doubt others suffer the same way we would if exposed to the same stimuli, but what follows from that? Pinker's argument is missing a couple of premises. If these were supplied his argument would look something like this:

1. Other people suffer as we do.

2. We don't like to suffer.

3. So, we can assume others don't like it either.

4. We shouldn't cause what others don't like.

5. Therefore, we shouldn't cause others to suffer.

The argument fails because premise #4 needs to be demonstrated and Pinker simply assumes it, doubtless because, in fact, it can't be demonstrated.

He goes on to write this:

So far from devaluing life on earth, the doctrine of eternal life is the only thing that could possibly make life on earth meaningful or significant.

Pinker is evidently saying that it's better to believe in nothing so strongly that you're willing to die for it. Anything that a man is willing to die for necessarily is more important to him than is his own life, but if a man is willing to die for his friends, or for a cause, does that devalue his life? Why should being willing to die for God (setting aside the question of whether the 9/11 terrorists were really dying for God) devalue one's life on earth? Pinker doesn't say.

Well, he's right that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift, but a gift is something which is given. Who or what bestows this gift in Pinker's view? If no one bestows it then it's just there and there's no purpose to it. It's just a brute fact of existence which ultimately means nothing.

More to the point he's mistaken when he says that the realization that consciousness is a precious gift endows life with more purpose than anything else could. The realization that consciousness extends beyond the death of the body invests life with far more purpose than the realization that we will enjoy the "gift" for a moment and then it will be gone for eternity. If existence ends at death then everything we do gets erased. It amounts to nothing. Only if what we do lasts forever does it have any real worth or significance.

Pinker's arguments are those of a naturalistic materialist who knows deep down that the logic of his beliefs leads to despair, an end he devoutly wishes to avoid. The arguments he employs to stave off the bitter conclusion are all like the wild rearward shots of an army in full retreat: ineffectual, pointless, and desperate.

See our comments on the first part of his essay here.

RLC

The Brits recently arrested nine Muslims who had been plotting to kidnap a pair of their co-religionists who serve in Her Majesty's armed forces and then behead them, probably as a way of intimidating other Muslims who might otherwise cooperate with the infidels. The two servicemen who had been chosen for the kidnapping showed tremendous bravery in allowing themselves to be used as bait in the attempt to apprehend their would-be killers:

This is the sort of courage and resolve on display every day in Iraq in the lives of the people who willingly put their lives on the line to serve their fellow Iraqis even though they know it makes them targets for the jihadis. That some want us to abandon such amazing people to those who would slaughter them in an instant were we to pull out is incomprehensible to me.

RLC

Task Force 145, the special ops team tasked with hunting down al-Qaeda leaders around the world, appears, in Bill Roggio's opinion, to have taken down another bad guy:

Roggio has more at the link.

RLC

In the course of an otherwise astute analysis of his Democratic rivals for the presidential nomination, Senator Joseph Biden delivered himself of this head-scratcher about Barack Obama:

Either Senator Biden merely mangled the rules of syntax or he has let slip a racial faux pas that should elicits howls of outrage from a media that committed Trent Lott to a political immolation for allowing on the occasion of Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday that he'd have made a fine president back in 1948 and which pilloried George Allen for saying macaca until Allen eventually lost his senate seat. I'm reminded, too, of the brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh's assertion on ESPN that Donovan McNabb is treated more gently by the sports media because they're reluctant to criticize a black quarterback.

Now comes the maladroit Senator Biden seemingly suggesting, if words mean anything, that Barack Obama is the first mainstream black in history who is articulate (why is it that whites are rarely described as articulate?), bright, clean (!?) and "nice-looking." Could the senator from Delaware really have meant to imply that every other black who has appeared on the political stage was inarticulate, dumb, ugly and dirty?

The media have a test for answering such conundrums, of course. Their answer is "no," because, you see, Biden is a Democrat. Had he been a Republican the answer would have certainly been "yes," and the caterwauling over his racial bigotry and the demands for his political head would be even now coming to a boil. As it is we'll hear very little mention on the news of what is either boneheaded inarticulation or outright racism. We'll certainly not be reminded every night for weeks and months, as we were reminded for months that Senator Allen said macaca, that Biden's opinion was far uglier or, shining the best light on it, far more stupid than anything Allen said.

For what it's worth I don't think Senator Biden actually intended to give offense. That would have been incredibly dumb even for a man whose friends rarely mention mental acuity when praising his virtues. But that's the point. Neither did Trent Lott, George Allen, or Rush Limbaugh intend to give offense. Yet that didn't matter to a media which sees itself in a war of annihilation against its political enemies and which will do all it can to protect its friends and destroy its foes.

RLC