Trey Jackson has links to video and audio of Ward Churchill, phony Indian, fraudulent scholar, and hero to Left-wingers everywhere, uttering these words:

Churchill denies any malevolent intent, of course, but its hard to interpret him in any fashion other than endorsing the murder of American officers. Here is an excerpt from the Denver Post story:

Now the man is advocating murder. How long will he continue to draw a paycheck from the University of Colorado and the taxpayers who help fund it?

If ever you've been inclined to think that no one deserves to be executed by the state or you have ever wondered whether evil really exists or is just an outdated religious concept, you should watch this.

Watch both parts and see if you can honestly say to yourself that this man does not deserve to die.

Buried on page A15 of the New York Times is this little tidbit:

Of course, it doesn't. The heart of the issue for Amnesty International is that Gitmo is part of a Republican initiated war on terror which the United States is fighting to win. If Bill Clinton were still president AI would be off searching for Israeli atrocities in Gaza or somewhere.

The heart of the issue, in our opinion, is why this story wasn't front page news in the NYT. After the firestorm Sen. Durbin created during last week's calumnies of the American military one would think that some contrary facts would be significant news. Evidently, though, the Times didn't think its readers would be too interested in the truth of the matter.

Speaking of Sen. Durbin, why wasn't he along on the trip to learn a little bit, ex post facto as it were, about what he was pontificating upon in his Gitmo speech. Indeed, we're surprised he didn't head up the mission. After all, it's better to be late in having facts in hand if you're going to libel your country, than to never know them at all.

Thanks for the tip to Instapundit.

It's hard to imagine, but apparently some Darwinians have been lying about their philosophical opponents, and the California Academy of Science admits it. You can read the particulars here.

For another fine illustration of the Darwinians' passionate commitment to free and open inquiry and the search for truth see here.

Meanwhile, someone, a magician we think, who calls himself The Amazing Randi was so concerned that the Smithsonian Institute was going to show the new video The Privileged Planet earlier this month that he offered them $20,000 not to do it. The Privileged Planet, based on a book of the same name, presents what's commonly known as the anthropic principle, the idea that the physical properties of both the cosmos and the earth seem astonishingly fine-tuned for life. Fearful that such information may incline impressionable viewers toward the conclusion that the universe is not just all an accident, Mr. Randi is willing to pay "hush money" to the Smithsonian to suppress these subversive ideas.

What a great argument for materialism! Why hasn't someone come up with this before: The universe is not designed because I've got more money than you do! It's bound to convince somebody, probably.

Anyway, David Berlinski, inspired by Mr. Randi's clever strategy for persuading people of the intellectual superiority of materialism, has decided to capitalize, as it were. He writes The Amazing Mr. Randi the following letter:

All this has got us to thinking. We wonder how much The Amazing Mr. Randi would pay us not to post anymore pieces on Viewpoint on the topic of Intelligent Design. Not that we can be bought or anything.

President Bush gives an important speech on the War on Terrorism and our local paper runs this headline over its front page story last night:

Dems: Bush Milks False Sept. 11 Link

For the editors at the York Dispatch the knee-jerkingly negative Democratic reaction is the most important aspect of the President's address. It's the key element of the story. Why not choose a headline like: Bush Vows to Stay the Course or Bush Stands Firm? Could it be they didn't run something like these because that would have made the president seem strong and resolved and, well, that's just not the image of GWB that our local paper wishes to project.

Indeed, the AP report that followed the headline was more about the Democrats' reaction to the speech than about the speech itself. It's another example of why people are just about at the end of their patience with the way the traditional news outlets package their product.

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and other highly acclaimed theatrical works is very much opposed to the Iraq War. She helped form the group New Yorkers Say No to War, joined the artists network of Refuse and Resist! a Maoist group, and lent her name to the Not in Our Name antiwar coalition, also organized by Maoists. In one interview, Ensler's hysterical response went like this:

No doubt she could. When one is not bound by the constraints imposed by reality one can expatiate indefinitely about anything. Where, we wonder, does this woman get her information about the comparative status of women under the Taliban and now? Were Afghan women better off when they could be beaten or killed for wearing cosmetics or going out in public without a male relative as an escort? Were they better off when they were considered to be their husband's property and had no political rights at all?

What makes Ms. Ensler think that women are worse off in Iraq now with the rape rooms gone, economic opportunities for women burgeoning, and political freedom and the vote available to women for the first time in their lives, than they were under Saddam when they had no protection from the depravity of Hussein's henchmen?

I wonder if Ms Ensler has taken a poll among Afghan or Iraqi women and asked them whether they thought they were better or worse off now than before 2002. I very much doubt it because I very much doubt that she's really interested in finding out the truth. It wouldn't fit with what she already knows.

A friend and former student is among those who is deeply troubled by what he sees as human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. He forwarded me a series of articles from which he draws the conclusion that Gitmo is comparable in its treatment of detainees to the Soviet Gulag. I suggested to him that he read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. He replied with an excerpt from Gulag that recounts some of the psychological methods employed by Soviet interrogators in the Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons under Stalin and argued that their similarity to what went on in Gitmo puts them on the same moral plane.

Here is my reply to that followed by my friend's rejoinder:

R,

Thanks for the article you recommended (http://reasonablereflection.net/meadesmaxim/99/), but I'm afraid I don't see how the excerpt from the Gulag Archipelago supports the point you wish to make which is that American detention camps are comparable to the Soviet Gulag of the thirties and forties.

In the excerpt, Solzenhitsyn details methods that interrogators employed against Soviet prisoners. They are evil, to be sure, but their heinousness lies (for the most part) not in what was done but rather in to whom it was done and why it was done. The victims of these interrogations were innocent clergy, ordinary believers, dissidents, and anyone else that Stalin deemed insufficiently eager to embrace his regime. Everyone, including the interrogators, knew these people were innocent of any real crime. They were subjected to being "cursed at" etc. because the interrogators were required to get "confessions" out of them to save appearances and therefore had to break their will to resist. What was done to them was wicked primarily insofar as the victims were innocent and the rationale was so unjust.

The detainees at Gitmo, on the other hand, were believed to have information that could prevent acts of murder of innocent people. It's hard to overstate the moral difference this makes. To the extent that the detainees had females "invade their space" or were deprived of sleep in order to get them to divulge this information, these treatments were of a different moral level altogether than similar tactics used at Lefortovo and Lubyanka. In Moscow these tactics were employed against simple peasants. At Gitmo these tactics were employed against mass murderers.

Have there been times at Gitmo when interrogations crossed the line? Possibly, but every allegation of such behavior is investigated and when appropriate the offenders are disciplined. How often do you think that happened in the Gulag of Solzhenitsyn's experience? Even if there have been some incidents of abuse, there are no doubt similar incidences in every prison in the United States. Is the entire American prison system comparable to the Soviet Gulag?

Remember, in the real Gulag prisoners subsisted on a daily diet of one piece of moldy bread and a bowl of watery gruel. The bread often had maggots and beetles in it for which the prisoners gave thanks since the bugs enabled them to get a few more traces of protein into their system. There were scarcely enough calories in this diet to keep people alive and so millions died horrible deaths from starvation and disease. Millions more were permanently damaged, physically and psychologically by their suffering. The survivors emerged from their hell emaciated wrecks.

In the real Gulag the prisoners worked every day digging at frozen soil with nothing on their bodies to defend against the cold except for a few tattered rags. Frostbite and gangrene were common. They couldn't sleep because they couldn't get warm on the freezing cement floors of their cells. They lived in squalor and constant numbness and hunger. If they hesitated or staggered under their load of pain and suffering they were often beaten by their guards for sport.

In Gitmo, by contrast, the prisoners eat better and live more comfortably than do our soldiers in the field. They have menus that include glazed chicken and rice pilaf. The diet is tailored to Islamic requirements. The average detainee has gained 10 to 15 lbs. since his internment.

The prisoners are clothed and shod. Laundry is done for them. They're called to prayer five times a day. Religious accoutrements like prayer rugs, beads, and Korans are provided by American taxpayers and delivered with gloved hands in deference to the Muslims' belief that their captors are "unclean."

Doctors are on hand to address medical complaints and they receive hospital care when they need it. No detainees have died at Gitmo.

To compare Gitmo to the Soviet Gulag is not only factually grotesque and a slander on American troops, but perhaps worst of all, it trivializes the horrific deaths and suffering of millions of kulaks who would have regarded Gitmo as a paradise and would have counted themselves blessed by God had they been transferred into such a place.

I'm sure that that's the last thing you want to do, R, but it is nevertheless implicit in your claim that Gitmo is in any significant way comparable to the chain of Siberian labor camps run by Stalin.

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

Mr. C,

You write:

I think this position is very morally problematic. The destruction of a man's mind is no passing matter, no matter whom it is done to or why. The question of who the victim is seems to me to be utterly irrelevant--it is no less immoral to rape a rapist for sport than it is to rape an innocent for sport. God loves all His children equally. Motivation, of course, does have moral weight, but if the action is truly brutal in nature, as is the destruction of the mind of a man and the robbing of his dignity, then I think the old saying that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" must be taken seriously. We are not justified in doing anything we please to mens' minds merely because our intentions are good--there lies the road to lynchings.

A principle of humane law is that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. Not a shred of evidence has been offered for the guilt of a single person detained as an unlawful combatant by the United States military. Furthermore, large numbers of detainees have been released without charge after years of detention and brutal interrogation. What right do interrogators have to brutalize these men? Why do we assume that the ones still in detention are guilty given the large number of admitted mistakes?

Do you think that Stalin employed no communist true-believers who thought priests and dissidents were a threat to the true and the good? Scores of documents suggest that detainees give false confessions to end their brutalizations. What, precisely, other than subjective judgments about the interrogators' mindsets, is the moral difference between the Soviet and American gulags?

Are we to believe that none of those detained at Lefortovo and Lubyanka were actually suspected of plotting violence to depose state socialism? (Terorists hate our freedoms...dissidents hated their equality, no?)

Can you provide a shred of evidence that a single person detained as an enemy combatant by the U.S. government is guilty of murder? Why do the hundreds released without charge not count as 'simple peasants'?

The vast majority of the tactics Solzhenitsyn describes are explicitly allowed by U.S. policy and used with impunity. Regardless of those that are counted as "crossing lines," the fact remains that even the approved tactics are capable of the utter destruction of the human mind. That is a great evil.

Furthermore, prisoners accused of a crime have recourse to the courts to dispute their reason for detention and their treatment while detained. Enemy combatants, especially those held in secret or kidnapped, have no such rights. They are entirely subject to the cruelty and sadism of their interrogators.

As long as the United States government continues to sanction 1) the holding of prisoners indefinitely without charge, 2) the holding of prisoners in secret without access to lawyers or courts, 3) mental torture which breaks the spirit, and 4) kidnapping, it remains the operator of a Gulag. When it stops sanctioning those war crimes, I will consider the Gulag closed.

If your point is merely that the United States government is not known to sanction forced starvation, I will agree. However, the United States has indeed condemned thousands of persons to physical and psychological agony for the remainder of their lives. An Afghan detainee was kicked several thousand times in the course of a few weeks, another was boiled alive. An Iraqi had lit cigarettes placed in his ears. And thousands undergo the daily mental torture, with full sanction, that Solzhenitsyn described as breaking mens' souls. Maher Arar will never fully recover from the horrors of his treatment at the behest of the United States.

Numerous detainees in Iraq have died of exposure. We routinely deny detainees the ability to sleep for periods of over a week. The intervention teams at Gitmo are described in the FBI memos as routinely beating detainees for sport.

Glazed chicken is an MRE option, eaten routinely by soldiers in the field. And being fed, even force fed, is little comfort when one faces daily physical and psychological torture which includes the denial of sleep, near drowning experiences, being chained to the ceiling by one's wrists, and being beaten for hours on end.

Routinely detainees lose the privilege of time to pray if they do not cooperate with their interrogations. If they do cooperate, of course, they are given food, sex, time to pray, whatever they please. Doesn't that smack of forced confessions to you?

Over one hundred have died in deaths ruled homicide by military coroners in other detention facilities around the world.

How does facing up to the criminal conduct of the U.S. government, the CIA, and certain elements of military intelligence slander American troops? Whom does it slander? Those who are perpetrating criminal conduct and wish to plea-bargain down their offenses?

As Solzhenitsyn describes, prisoners often felt the same way about being transferred from one Gulag prison to another. That does not mean that those prisons in which the horrors were less totalizing were not an element of the same moral evil.

My claim is based explicitly on the four elements of similarity noted above. Any system of prisons which collects kidnapped persons and holds them indefinitely without trial or charge while destroying their minds for the purposes of the captors is a Gulag.

R

There'll be more to come, I'm sure.

Lest in watching the evening news you succumb to the doom and gloom about Iraq that is being purveyed there Arthur Chrenkoff has posted his 30th edition of Good News from Iraq. The picture coming out of that country from people who are actually there is completely different than what you hear from the senate Democrats and others who get their information from the New York Times and Washington Post.

Here's just one minor example of the way the MSM distorts the news from Iraq: Spec. Matthew Rosebaugh of the 82nd Airborne recalls a story wherein the media reported that only 40 percent of homes in a particular region have running water, giving the impression that the United States is doing little to undo the damage caused by the war. He points out, however, that before the war the figure was only 20 percent.

Why not report that the availability of water has doubled since OIF?

Strategy Page offers interesting insight into the difficulties with, and progress of, the development of an effective Iraqi police force. The courage of these men is truly astonishing:

They are risking everything because they trust that we won't abandon them. Thank God that the president at this moment in history is someone determined to stick by these brave men and help them save their country and their people from the savagery of the radical jihadis. Thank God the person making the decisions about our policy in Iraq is not one of those calling for withdrawal timetables or precipitous pullouts. Thank God he's not one of those prattling about "quagmires" and "chaotic conditions" and "no end in sight." Such is the rhetoric of timid men and nations who history either forgets or looks upon as losers. Thank God the president is a man who is doing what he believes is right and not what he thinks is politically expedient. It is such men who, despite their flaws, history esteems.

According to the Treasury department, the U.S. government took in a single-day record $61 billion in tax receipts on June 15. This surpassed the previous single-day high of $56 billion set on December 15, 2000. The recent surge in tax revenues is not just a one-day event. Fiscal year to date, total government receipts are up 15.5 percent, the fastest rate of increase on a comparable FYTD basis since 1981. The difference between the growth rate of tax revenues and the growth rate of government spending has widened to 8.4-percentage points, the largest since late 2000 when the budget was in surplus.

Economist Michael Darda argues that the Bush tax cuts are the reason.

This would be so sweet if it comes to pass:

PRESS RELEASE--

Justice for the little guy. What an extraordinary concept. We should all e-mail our support to Mr. Clements.

After Kelo we thought the Supreme Court couldn't look any more ridiculous than they did in that decision, but they proved us wrong yesterday when they ruled that the Ten Commandments could be displayed outside the state capitol of Texas but not inside the courthouses of Kentucky.

Read Justice Scalia's dissent here. On almost every case in which he is in the minority his opinions make the majority look like intellectual dwarves.

George Will says that the Supreme Court would look a lot less foolish if in cases like the two decided yesterday they only had the wit to say simply, "Because the display on public grounds does not do what the establishment clause was written to prevent -- does not impose a state-sponsored creed or significantly advantage or disadvantage one sect or sects -- the display is constitutional."

Unfortunately, this sensible approach will almost certainly escape the fumbling grasp of the jurists who dominate today's Court. Thank goodness they are now in recess and can't do any more harm until October.

This article from the Washington Post gives a good picture of the role of Syria in the transit of jihadis into Iraq. Some interesting insight here:

As American operations become more frequent in the west of Iraq, Syria is going to either have to clamp down hard on people like Abu Ibrahim or risk having American troops visit on a regular basis the Syrian towns and cities close to the Iraqi border. One way or another the infiltration of men and material into Iraq through Syria is going to have to stop.

For those like Senator Dick Durbin who need a lesson on the nature of prisoner abuse we recommend this account from The Independent:

We're trying to remember whether Amnesty International has issued a call to have Chinese officials arrested and tried for their crimes. Since they urged foreign nations to arrest Bush administration officials we're sure they must have done the same for the thugs and sadists who run China, but we just can't recall it.

I tried hard to work up enthusiasm for the flag-burning amendment passed last week by the House of Representatives on the theory that if the Left is against it, it must be a good thing. Nevertheless, I just can't get too excited about it. I tend instead to agree with Peter Schramm at No Left Turns who tells us:

Schramm's right. Allowing flag-burning serves a noble public purpose. It helps us to identify the morons in our midst and gives us ample justification for labeling them as such. Schramm links to a Mark Steyn column on the matter which eloquently expands upon the point. Steyn writes:

In short, the more opportunities we give the Left to vent their true sympathies, like Michael Moore did on 9/11, the more repulsive they appear to most Americans. That's a positive step for truth, one in whose way we shouldn't want to stand.

Liberals and Democrats everywhere must have been grinding their molars into dust during the second half of Meet the Press yesterday. Tim Russert was interviewing Bono who several times praised President Bush for what he's done in Africa to help rescue that continent from its misery. At one point he said that because of what Bush has done in the fight against AIDs 125,000 Africans are now on HIV medication. These people, Bono said, owed their lives to America and George Bush.

This, of course, does not mesh smoothly with the Leftist meme that Bush equals Hitler. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are reported to be meeting at this very moment to discuss how they can re-educate Mr. Bono on current political exigencies and assist him in avoiding such unacceptable lapses of judgment in the future.

Which political party today is doing the most to deny hope to poor people around the world? Which political ideology, liberalism or conservatism, is resisting efforts to raise poor people out of their misery? Hint: It's not the party that claims to care about the poor.

Charles Krauthammer writes that the Democrats have become the party of liberal reactionaries. Devoid of ideas, their only talent, like the guy in the Capital One commercials on tv, is to come up with ever more novel ways of saying "no" to change. This is especially ironic and pathetic, as Krauthammer explains, when it comes to aiding the poor in Central America:

They're not only a party bankrupt of ideas, they're a party bankrupt of virtue.

Dispatches From the Culture Wars says this about the Supreme Court's egregious Kelo decision:

Our Constitution is being progressively dismantled by the highest court in the land. The only realistic hope to salvage it is to get a couple or three more jurists on the court who believe that their mission is to discern what the framers intended when they wrote that document and rule accordingly.

We've had forty years of Justices who simply fly by the seat of their judicial pants, and they must now be put into the minority. Creating a conservative court is the main domestic reason many people voted for George Bush over Al Gore and John Kerry, and if the Republican party fails in this task, it will take at least a generation to recover from the disaffection it'll provoke among its rank and file.

In past posts Viewpoint has highlighted the catastrophic damage one nuclear air-burst could wreak on this nation just from the electro-magnetic pulse that it would produce (See here, for example). Now comes a report that discusses the calamity that would ensue from even a minor disruption in the flow of oil and how easily such a disruption could occur. It'd all be pretty depressing if you allowed yourself to dwell on it:

One thing this analysis doesn't seem to take into account is that were there to be such a crisis this nation would probably be placed under martial law or some other emergency governance. Political disagreements among cabinet secretaries would probably not be the impediments to dealing with the problem that this simulation suggests. Even so, the effects of an oil shortage on our economy and social fabric, not to mention world peace, would be extremely ugly. Sleep tight.

Americans are a kind and generous people who want very much to help those who suffer deprivation and oppression. On the other hand, no one wants to see his contributions toward world hunger and poverty going to line the pockets of corrupt officials. There has to be accountability for the money that Americans donate, there have to be strings attached, and there has to be American oversight. There also has to be the threat of dire consequences for those who would steal the money that Americans wish to channel to those in greatest need.

This disheartening article describes a theft of staggering proportions in Nigeria and makes it clear that without the safeguards just mentioned, we may as well be flushing our charity down the commode. The report comes at an inauspicious moment, just as Bob Geldof's Live 8 concerts to raise aid for African people languishing in abject poverty under corrupt regimes draw close (July 2nd):

Indeed. After having stolen £220 billion they want their £20 billion debt to be forgiven?

The United States must henceforth insist that the donors of our foreign aid be permitted to oversee its distribution to the people who need it or the aid will simply not be forthcoming. It must no longer be left up to a bunch of corrupt government officials to decide how our charity will be disbursed. Until we have such assurances the Bush/Blair initiative to rescue Africa from poverty should be put on hold.

Dennis Prager argues that Judeo-Christian religion is antithetical to nature worship but that secularism often leads to it. The core of his argument is this:

When man ceases to believe in a transcendent God he doesn't believe in no god at all, as Chesterton reminds us, he embraces all manner of substitutes. Man's innate religiosity drives him to find something beyond himself toward which to direct his life. In the twentieth century the dominant substitutes were socialisms (communism and nazism), evolutionary science, consumerism, and humanism. By devoting one's life to one of these, or a combination thereof, some people were able to mask the meaninglessness of a life which inevitably ends in death. These ersatz religions were spiritual anodynes that deadened the pain of life's utter emptiness and pointlessness.

Since all these gods have ultimately failed to provide fulfillment to the average man the twenty first century might well see, as Prager's column suggests, a return to paganism and nature worship. If so, the history of western civilization will have come full circle.

The archive of Prager's columns on Judeo-Christian values can be found here.

Here are a few highlights from the last few days of postings at Strategy Page:

These last few sentences are worth special attention. Isn't it the conventional wisdom that we are creating more sympathy for al Qaida by our presence in Iraq? Haven't we been repeatedly told by anti-war folk that the war has only increased support for the jihadis across the Arab world?

Of course, conventional wisdom is formed in conversations over coffee and donuts in the air conditioned newsrooms of the major media and over beer and brie in the salons of Georgetown. Out on the hot, dry frontiers of Iraq where few journalists have dared to venture the people that know what's going on are apparently seeing a rather different picture.

Burning Panda spoofs twenty eight arguments against Intelligent Design and in support of Darwinian evolution which he has gleaned from the media over the past several months. The material apparently is no longer on his site, which seems to have been dropped. This is too bad because some of the arguments are apparently persuasive enough to have convinced some journalists:

As if they wanted to deliberately ad their own contribution to the media's shameful record of ignorance of what Intelligent Design entails, both scientifically and philosophically, our local newspaper ran this editorial Friday night. It complains about debate in the state House of Representatives over a bill which would ensure that teaching ID was permitted in Pennsylvania's public schools and takes several risible swipes at ID along the way.

The editorial states, for instance that, ID is "a sideshow of creationism in which the fossil record and scientific evidence of millions of years gets tossed in favor of scripture," and refers to ID as "religious zealotry."

It's pretty clear from this column that whoever wrote it has either never read the ID literature or has chosen to willfully to misrepresent it. The writer is, in other words, either ignorant of what he writes about or he is dishonest.

Thanks for the Burning Pandas post to Telic Thoughts.

This is interesting. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has come up with the following numbers:

Karl Zinsmeister, editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise, concludes that the war in Iraq is essentially over and we've won.

Wretchard at Belmont Club explains why Zinsmeister, although perhaps not very prudent in making what many might see as an irresponsibly hasty claim at this juncture, is nevertheless correct.

It's good reading for those who follow developments in that theater closely.

In the wake of the firestorm over Dick Durbin's dunderheaded remarks comparing Club Gitmo to Auschwitz, Stalin's gulag, and Pol Pot's Killing Fields, the desperate Dems have tried to deflect the flak from Durbin by attacking Karl Rove's perfectly correct claim that in the wake of 9/11 conservatives prepared for war and liberals pleaded that we treat the attack as a police matter. His exact words were:

Liberals are now in profound dudgeon at Rove's impertinent truth-telling. They're demanding apologies. They're deeply offended that Mr. Rove has called their patriotism into question (Imagine!). Well, Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the RNC, has now released a statement that thoroughly documents Rove's assertion. Hugh Hewitt has the Mehlman documentation here.

Presumably, the libs will now be beside themselves with outrage that Republicans would resort to the tawdriest tactic in the playbook of dirty politics -- the use of FACTS. This is exactly what people mean when they say that Republicans are divisive, mean-spirited, and don't play fair.

Doug Ireland, author of the frantic call to arms against the coming "Christers" which we commented upon last week, responds to his critics:

Why on earth does an atheist object to someone imposing his values on others? There really seems to be no reason for someone who lacks a belief in God to join the oft-heard chorus of voices claiming that no one, particularly a Christian, has the right to impose his/her morality on another person. Indeed, the notion is patently silly, especially in the mouth of an atheist.

First, it's difficult to name legislation which does not impose somebody's morality upon the rest of society. Everything from desegregation to affirmative action to welfare regulations to environmental regulations to laws prohibiting gambling, prostitution, public lewdness, drug use, capital punishment, bribery, and so on all presuppose moral values that might not be shared by many of those who are subject to the pertinent laws. Should these laws never have been enacted? Should they be rescinded?

Beyond this objection, however, there are a couple of other difficulties with the concern about saddling others with one's moral values or one's religious views. It's a concern, oddly enough, that only theists can logically express. If an atheist like Mr. Ireland were to object to a theist that he should not impose his beliefs on others the appropriate reply would be to ask "Why not?"

If the atheist is correct in believing that we live in a world without God then a man has a "right" to try to do whatever he wishes to do. In a world without God, might makes right, so anything one is able to do, one has a "right" to do.

If the atheist objects to this, he might be asked what it is, exactly, upon which he bases his conviction that I have no right to impose my values. Is it the law? If I have the power to change or shape the law to conform to my desires then that objection fails. Is it that a right to impose one's will upon others robs the other of his worth and dignity as a human being? So what?

In a world without God human worth and dignity are arbitrary and chimerical. They're grounded in nothing except the subjective sentiments of a few human beings and have no real, objective existence. Even if worth and dignity did somehow actually attach to human beings, why would it be wrong, on the atheist's assumptions, to deprive someone of them?

The fact is that the only constraint upon anyone's "right" to do whatever he is able to do is God's proscription, but for the atheist that limit does not exist and for the secularist it is illicit to invoke it. In a Godless universe, or in the naked public square, we are all morally autonomous, free to do whatever we have the power to accomplish, including imposing our will upon others if we're able.

A second problem with the affirmation that it's improper to seek to impose our beliefs upon others is that the claim itself is a moral assertion. The person who makes it believes that it is wrong to engage in the particular behavior he is condemning. But the irony of this is that he is himself seeking to impose upon others his moral conviction that it is unjust to impose one's moral convictions upon others. In other words, he's violating his own principle in the very act of voicing it. He's attempting to inflict his morality on the rest of us.

The truth of the matter is that few people who argue that it transgresses some moral standard to impose one's beliefs upon others really believe it deep down. What they believe is that it's wrong to have others foist upon them convictions and values of which they disapprove. Their conscience is untroubled, however, by having others burdened with their own values, which is precisely what Mr. Ireland tacitly admits he wishes to see happen through the sexual subversion of American culture.

Thanks for the tip on Ireland's piece to No Left Turns.

Michelle Malkin directs us to this obituary of an unfortunate man who sounds a lot more troubled than even those of his family who wrote the obituary indicate:

Mr. Zimbleman could, of course, have moved a few miles south into Mexico to relieve his stress, but chose not to. Instead, at least according to those who wrote the obituary, he evidently allowed a pathological anger and hatred to ruin his health and ultimately claim his life.

When politics is what puts meaning into one's life, when ideology becomes an ersatz religion, then defeats in the political sphere become more than mere disappointments. They become life-crushing blows which bring out the very worst in people.

This is, indeed, a major difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives don't make ideology their religion because most of them already have a traditional faith in a God which transcends the world of politics. Liberals, on the other hand, often have no transcendent faith. They immanantize their religion and make their ideology their supreme value. An electoral defeat for them is a pill so bitter that their lives are devastated by it.

Mr. Zimbleman is perhaps an extreme example of the phenomenon, but judging by the venom that has poured forth onto the political stage since last November, his bitterness was by no means unique.

If there were any lingering doubts in the minds of sensible people that the Supreme Court needs a major ideological makeover the Kelo v. New London case decided today should remove them. Throwing the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution in the trash can, five liberals decided that a municipal government can simply compel homeowners to relinquish their homes and property to authorities who may then award it to other private citizens, such as, for example, corporate businesses.

In other words, if a consortium wants to build a shopping mall on land you currently own, your land can be taken from you and given to the consortium. If a corporation wishes to build an office building where your church now stands they can simply convince the local government to seize the church and sell it to the corporate deep pockets.

Governments have always had the right to exercise eminent domain, of course, but under that principle the seizure of the property had to be for a public purpose. The Supreme Court has now said that wealthy corporations can take ownership of your property if they can persuade the local commissioners that it's in their economic interest to do so.

Voting in favor of this assault on personal property rights were all the usual suspects: John Paul Stevens, who wrote the majority opinion, such as it was, as well as Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a rebuke of the intellectual and constitutional flimsiness of the majority's reasoning, and was joined in her opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

We need more Justices like the latter and fewer like the former.

Bill Kristol evidently has some inside word on the Bush administration's plans for the Supreme Court:

A Gonzales nomination would also, it seems to us, almost force a Democratic filibuster. After all of the accusations that have been made against him concerning human rights abuses it's hard to see how Democratic senators could allow him a free pass onto the Court in the face of such strong opposition among their supporters on the Left. We'll see how the Democrats will respond to this scenario soon enough, apparently, at least we will if Kristol's speculation is correct.

No doubt this explains why Americans remain the most religious people in the Western world while the Europeans have "lost interest." Americans remain embarrassingly religious because they, by and large, adhere to a faith, Christianity, that enjoins the infliction of humiliation and pain upon those who don't believe. Anyone who has read the Sermon on the Mount or the lives of the saints, Mother Teresa or St. Francis come to mind, can see this plainly. Moreover, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the story of Jesus' life and death has been profoundly struck by the encouragement he offers to those who yearn to give expression to their sadistic predilections.

It is wisdom like this that has made Richard Rorty one of the most esteemed philosophers of our time.

This Washington Times story should be cut out and posted wherever young women gather:

Mr. Wilcox's book throws sand in the gears of the Left's anti-Christian propaganda machine. They will, however, remain undeterred by, and unimpressed with, Wilcox's research. For them it doesn't matter whether religiously serious Christians make better husbands and fathers than, well, than secular Leftists do. Since religiously serious Christians often oppose gay marriage and abortion and, worst of all, tend to vote Republican, they are ipso facto, in the eyes of the secular Left, malevolent or ignorant or both.

The Fourth Rail offers an excellent analysis of two critical questions facing the United States in the GWOT. The questions are:

The answer given to the first question is that destructiveness always increases in a conflict as the combatants pour more of their resources into the battle in order to keep from losing it. It will continue to increase until one side has exhausted their ability to keep up the fight.

The answer to the second is that the "insurgents" have one hope for victory. They can hope that they manage to tear Iraqi society apart and throw it into civil war. Their current tactics seem to be geared to attempting just that.

The interested reader will want to check out the entire analysis, but here's a particularly interesting aspect of it:

In other words, the worst, most foolish thing we could do would be to follow the advice of those who urge us to pull out of the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular. It would almost guarantee that the war between Western civilization and Islamic Wahhabism would shift to our homeland.

Here's an oddity of modern life that perhaps someone might be able to explain. It seems that whenever people talk on their cell phones they speak much louder than they would to people who are physically with them.

I don't know why this is, but it's especially noticeable, and bothersome, in restaurants where a diner who gets a call will share the conversation with everyone in the establishment. As soon as he, or she, hangs up, however, you can't hear a word he says to the others at his table.

Why is it that people think their phone conversations interest the rest of us?

Jim Pinkerton writes an essay on Intelligent Design and manages to get much of it wrong. For example, he states that:

This is an odd argument even if we ignore the inapt comparison to a magic show. Consider four reasons why:

1) Behe isn't saying that the bacterial flagellum is designed simply because no one can figure out how it works or how it evolved. He's saying that it shows evidence of having been designed because it has the property of irreducible complexity which is a typical characteristic of intelligent, intentional manufacture.

2) The problem isn't just that no one can produce a reasonable account of how a flagellum could have evolved by purely natural processes. The problem is that Darwinian theory itself provides no plausible developmental pathway for the gradual accumulation of parts necessary to have a functional flagellum. To offer hope, as Pinkerton does, that the explanation will be forthcoming at some time in the future is an intellectual cop-out. If the mechanisms posited by a theory do not allow for a plausible schema for the evolution of certain systems and structures then that should be allowed to count as evidence against the theory. If at some later date the difficulty is resolved then the theory will be rescued, but to posit future contingencies as justification for ignoring present difficulties is lousy philosophy of science.

3) Pinkerton undercuts one of the chief arguments against ID with his suggestion that we should just be patient and that someday we'll find out how nature accomplished its wonders. The undermined argument is that no one has proposed how the designer could have accomplished its work. In lieu of such an explanation, we're told, ID is insufficient as an account of biological complexity, but if Pinkerton's assurance that an explanation for the evolution of structures like the flagellum is a legitimate response to the difficulty of accounting for irreducible complexity, then it should be equally legitimate for the ID theorist to invoke the same reply about the mechanisms employed by the designer of living things. If ID theorists ever replied to the complaint about the lack of a creative mechanism in their theory with the retort that someday we might find out how the designer did it, they'd be justly hooted out of town.

4) Pinkerton's dodge also undercuts those who wish to argue that Darwinism is science and ID is philosophy. If biological phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of the theory are nevertheless to be accepted essentially on faith, that is, if no evidence is allowed to count against the theory, then Darwinism is not falsifiable and is outside the realm of science.

Having urged us to abandon empirical science and just trust that an explanation for how the flagellum could have evolved through purely mechanistic forces will someday be found, Pinkerton then makes this astonishing pronouncement:

This is another dodge. Pinkerton and Dawkins seek to deflect attention away from the manifest design of biological systems and structures and focus our scrutiny instead on the identity of the designer. ID theorists, however, need not accept the bait. To be successful they merely have to demonstrate that at least some biological systems and structures show evidence of intelligent input, and that it's more plausible that intelligence was at work in their creation than that they resulted from merely mechanistic forces and chance. If they succeed in that enterprise they will have effected a revolution in the science of biology which, we suppose, would be a good day's work regardless of whether they can identify the source of the intelligent input or explain how this agent accomplished its task.

Dawkins and Pinkerton are simply wrong when they assert that unless we can "explain" the original designer we have accomplished nothing in demonstrating that biological structures are designed. We need not understand the cause of something in order to study the effect. We don't have to be able to explain what causes gravity in order to study the consequences of it. We need know nothing about the causes of the Big Bang in order to examine the effects of those causes.

If it turns out that we find irrefragable evidence that man has been intentionally designed that would be an enormous discovery in itself whether we were ever able to identify the designer or not. The task of the ID theorist is to determine whether certain structures in the biosphere resulted from intelligent agency or whether they can be adequately explained mechanistically. To declare ID null and void simply because it cannot identify the source of the intelligence or the means by which the intelligence did its work is absurd.

If opponents of ID should have learned any lesson over the last ten years it is that it's not very helpful to their cause to rely on the arguments of Richard Dawkins.

Mark Steyn has two great columns on Gitmo. Here's an excerpt from the first:

In the second he writes that:

Steyn's point here is well-taken. Why are our troops required to debase themselves by acceding to the Muslims' belief that they are unclean? It's even more absurd that taxpayers must purchase the gloves to cover the "unclean" hands of their infidel sons and daughters. Our troops should not deliberately mistreat the Koran but neither should they be required to abase themselves in order to avoid giving offense to a bunch of semi-literate savages.

Nor should taxpayers be required to pay for the humiliation of their young men and women. Tax dollars buy the Korans, the prayer rugs, beads, Koranically-approved meals and all the rest. If American troops insisted that taxpayers cater to their religious preferences in such a fashion they'd be pounced upon by the ACLU and hectored about their need to develop a greater sensitivity to the doctrine of separation of church and state. Why does the same doctrine not apply to Muslim terrorists?

Recently, in Knoxville Tennessee, a Karns Elementary School principal named Cathy Summa prevented several ten year-old students from reading their Bibles at recess. They were told to put their Bibles away and not bring them back to school. Reading at recess is permitted in tax funded schools, of course, but evidently reading the Bible is not. Yet American taxpayers are required to subsidize five daily calls to prayer at Gitmo as well as all the other religious observances the killers are permitted. The terrorists have more religious rights than American school children do.

Steyn writes:

Viewpoint has come to agree with those who think Gitmo should be shut down and the detainees either charged or released. We suggest that these 520 killers, each of whom would praise Allah for the opportunity to slay an American politician, all be shipped to the Capitol building in Washington D.C., marched out onto the floor of the House and the Senate while these bodies are in session, and set loose. Perhaps this will assist some of our esteemed leaders to perceive the shortcomings of their recommendations.

Historian Paul Johnson cites three reasons for Europe's current malaise and apparent decline. First are the resentments it harbors to the United States, second is its refusal to jettison socialist economic policies and the onerous welfare systems it has evolved, and third is its rejection of its own historic past.

Europe, Johnson writes, was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both. There was no mention of Europe's Christian origins in the ill-fated Constitution, and Europe's Strasbourg Parliament has insisted that a practicing Catholic cannot hold office as the EU Justice Commissioner. He goes on to say that:

Well, of course. Secular socialism fails everywhere it's tried. It offers its citizens no lofty purpose. It possesses nothing with which to inspire. It offers people no meaning, no rationale for shared sacrifice, no justification for striving for greatness. Indeed, it cannot even define what national greatness would consist in. Most of all it ignores a fundamental truth about human nature captured in a statement of Jesus (Mat. 4:4):

Secular socialism seeks to manage the masses of people like zookeepers manage animals in a zoo. Feed and shelter them and they'll remain docile, pliable, and live out their lives in relative passivity. But men are more than animals. Render achievement and individual greatness impossible, as socialism does, and you deaden the human spirit. Rip the spiritual out of a nation, as secularism does, and you may as well tear its heart out also. Bereft of an animating faith in transcendence, men have nothing left to make all their strivings worthwhile. They have nothing left to make their lives satisfying and purposeful. Nations filled with such men find their collective will to survive oozing out of them like blood from an open wound.

Of liberal nuttiness there apparently is no end. A bunch of anti-Bush folks met Thursday in a basement in the Capitol building to make-believe that they were having a hearing to impeach the President. Not all went well at the "hearings," however:

The slide of the conspiracy theorists over the edge of sanity was evinced at Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the "hearing" on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

Great fun, we're sure. Word has it that when they were done pretending to impeach the president they all repaired to the Capitol rotunda where they spent the afternoon playing cowboys and indians.

If this were happening in South Africa twenty years ago the international Left would be shrieking in outrage, but because it's being perpetrated by a black government neither the Left, nor too many others, for that matter, seem to care. It's as if blacks are not expected to be able to attain the same standards of civilized behavior as whites are held to.

Reduced expectations for blacks is an expression of racism of which both Left and Right are guilty. It's a way of saying that blacks just aren't capable of achieving the same understandings of human rights and free institutions that whites are. The odd thing about it is that blacks seem as prone to it as are whites.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

An unfortunate sign of the times:

Anyone who has spent any time at the front of a classroom has had similar experiences. I have often wondered what background some of my college students had in high school that they could possibly entertain the expectations they do regarding what they are entitled to as students.

Good thing this wasn't Trent Lott or else the sensitive, caring folks would've really been upset. Since it was a Democrat, well, then, that's different:

One irony in this is that Byrd's Democratic colleagues were declaiming a year ago about George Bush's unfitness for high office because of dubious allegations about missing some National Guard meetings as a young man, yet the Democratic party didn't see any reason not to elevate Byrd to Senate majority leader twice.

Why are blacks so loyal to this party?

This is the fate that the get-out-now crowd would impose on all Iraqis if their calls to pull out of Iraq were to be listened to:

No word yet on whether his captors played loud rap music or turned the air conditioning way up like they do in real torture houses.

Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must read about Col. Nick Rowe. Rowe is a hero, but even more than Rowe, this account is about the kind of people who cooperated with the Communists during the Vietnam war. It would be interesting to know who, exactly, the people are who betrayed our POW's during the early seventies. It would also be interesting to know if Nick Rowe has any friends from his Special Forces days that might be waiting for Danilo Continente to be released from prison. Read the story at Belmont Club to find out why.

The case of the Downing Street memos that have Left-wing hearts everywhere all aflutter is beginning to sound strangely familiar. Even if the memos are legitimate they do very little to implicate Bush/Blair in some nefarious doings in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. We're not saying the memos are frauds, but they certainly are peculiar. Check out Captain's Quarters to find out why it seems we've been down this road before.

The U.S. led coalition in Iraq has launched a second operation downriver from Operation Spear. This second maneuver, code-named Operation Dagger, comes just a day after Spear and raises the question of how we are able to ramp up operations to such a rapid pace given the shortage of American fighting men in theater.Belmont Club offers this explanation:

History seems to be repeating itself. Americans impatient with the pace of prosecuting the war are growing increasingly disenchanted. The inability of Americans to persist in a difficult enterprise over the long haul was the great hope of Ho Chi Min. It is also being counted upon by Osama bin Laden and his acolytes.

The North Vietnamese were able to outlast the American will because Americans eventually came to believe there was not enough at stake in Vietnam to justify the carnage. They were largely correct. It's not clear that they will come to the same conclusion about Iraq, but if they do they will be greatly mistaken. Moreover, if they ever do reach that unfortunate conclusion, it will be largely because the Bush administration has for the most part abandoned attempts to press upon the American people the significance of the conflict.

Al Sharpton admonishes Ralph Nader to remember that there are words that whites like him are not allowed to use. Viewpoint wonders if there are any words prohibited to blacks or Hispanics, or whether racial and sociological taboos only go one way.

Never mind. We know the answer.

Operation Spear has commenced in western Iraq:

This is apparently what the buildup on the Syrian border to which Viewpoint alluded a couple of days ago was for.

Meanwhile, Arthur Chrenkoff has two versions of how the Australian hostage Douglas Wood was found. Wood's first words were "God bless America. You don't know how pleased I am to see you." Chrenkoff closes his post by observing that there is no word yet as to whether Wood's captors mishandled his Bible.

It's interesting that a struggle is currently underway by various entities to establish a one-world currency. Up until recently, the US dollar has been winning the war as most important things have been denominated in dollars.

Then the euro came on the scene and challenged the dollar hegemony and was doing quite well until a negative vote on the EU charter by the French and Dutch vote. Small wonder as the charter, as presented, steals national sovereignty from said countries.

On one hand, I am quite surprised as I expected the euro to do much better given the problems plaguing the dollar i.e. US trade and budget deficits, inflation, etc., yet the euro may rebound from all of this eventually. On the other hand, I have always agreed with a quote from Murray Rothbard that "fiat currency by any other name smells just as sour". And it appears that a general consensus is forming that agrees with him. The big investors who have lost confidence in the US dollar (with good reason) are now loosing confidence in the euro as well.

The article at the link above indicates that some of these players are choosing a third alternative as their "play of choice" and that is gold. Currently, gold is rising against both the dollar and the euro. A de-coupling is taking place whereby previously, as the dollar went up against other currencies, the cost of gold went down. That relationship is clearly demonstrated in these two graphs.

However, these graphs also show that, in the last several months, both the value of the dollar and gold are going up. The dollar is rising due to a lack of confidence in the euro and the price of gold is going up as a result of a bigger lack of confidence in the dollar.

It's ironic that all of this is happening since, as I mentioned above, there is an effort under way for a one-world currency yet the ideal one world currency has existed for the last 5000 years...gold. The problem is that gold represents an honest measure of exchange. The powers that be aren't interested in that. They want a measure of exchange they can manipulate and inflate. Remember that inflation is simply a tool that a government uses to transfer wealth from those that have it to those that want it.

Perhaps these thoughts will be influential if you're thinking about the best place to put your money where it will represent and sustain your true wealth as it is protected from a government's proclivity to steal it from you.

Also, if you're not thoroughly bored from my droning on endlessly, a response to RLC's Pirhanas in the Blogosphere below can be found at the Feedback Page.

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PowerLine's readers work over a recent column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman like piranha stripping clean a side of beef.

Krugman's article was erected around the claim that "Working families have seen little, if any, progress over the past 30 years." This assertion seems silly on the face of it, and a number of bloggers, including PowerLine, offered rebuttals. These posts elicited, in turn, comments from readers, many of which were quite thoughtful. One response in particular deserves special note. Responding to Hindrocket of PowerLine Dafydd ab Hugh replied:

We had a couple of additional thoughts on this question of middle class progress. For example, although it was around in the 70s, relatively few middle class families had central air conditioning back then. In our opinion, the air conditioning of America has done more to improve the quality of middle (and lower) class life than most of the items on Dafydd's tally. We might also add to his list access to health information like the hazards of tobacco and high fat diets which has made life better for those who avail themselves of it and act upon it. Moreover, anti-inflammatory and cholesterol lowering drugs like Ibuprofen and statins have greatly enhanced the quality of life of many middle class families in the last couple of decades. Nor should we neglect the emergence of cable television and VHS and DVD formats of entertainment.

We're confident that our readers can come up with more examples of how life is better for middle class citizens today than it was thirty years ago.

People like Krugman don't see all these developments as progress because they only consider economic advancement in terms relative to the wealthy. In other words, if the lives of middle class families are improving in numerous ways, that progress is negated by the fact that the middle class still doesn't make as much money as the upper classes. How else to explain a claim so clearly counter to the facts as Krugman's that the middle class has seen little, if any, progress over the last thirty years?

At any rate another good reply to Mr. Krugman's claim can be found here.

One of the beauties of blogs is that five years ago the only way to expose nonsense like the sort that Paul Krugman dispenses was to fire off a letter to the editor which would probably never get published or would be so severely edited as to render it ineffectual. No longer. Now when someone like Krugman writes something ridiculous, which seems to happen with astonishing regularity, it's immediately amplified and rebutted by the pirhanas in the blogosphere. We're all better off for it.

One can only wonder where the Bush administration is taking us.

First, there seems to be a bizarre reluctance on the part of the Bush administration to protect our borders. Case in point, the individual in this article is about as bizarre as the reluctance of the Bush administration to do something about the situation.

The full story can be read here.

I'm reminded of the pun that went: if the terrorists want to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the US all they have to do is hide it in a bail of marijuana.

Then on the fiscal responsibility front, things are getting equally bizarre.

As I've said before, if a group of conspirators gathered together to plot the destruction of America, they could not design a better master plan than what is currently taking place in this country today.

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The use of multiple intelligence sources has led to the apprehension in Mosul of another top aide to Abu al-Zarqawi, a man named Abu Talha. The report suggests that questioning of underlings who had been arrested earlier led to information about the whereabouts of Talha.

Rumor has it that the information on Talha was extracted from these sources by subjecting them to round the clock recitations of the lyrics to early Beatles songs. Amnesty International is believed to be looking into the charges.

There's been a lot of talk about torture by American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and less well-known venues in Afghanistan. To the extent that real abuses have occurred they should, and doubtless will, be prosecuted, but the key word is "real."

Many of the accusations that have been leveled by such as Senator Durbin have involved things that, though they may make someone uncomfortable, hardly seem like torture. To call them that risks trivializing a word which should evoke horror. To put matters in some perspective, if the reader isn't too squeamish, he or she might go here to see the terrifying and gruesome face of real torture, real cruelty. It's something much worse than having to listen to loud rap music, or being kept in a hot or cold room, or having one's Koran handled without gloves.

Perhaps someone might pass on the link to Senators Leahy and Durbin.

Apparently the Democrats have decided that the best way to discredit the current administration is to talk as if they, the Dems, are all raving lunatics. Indeed, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont illustrates the point while at the same time aptly describing the Left-wing of the contemporary Democratic party when he said of Guantanamo Bay that it's "an international embarrassment to our nation, to our ideals, and it remains a festering threat to our security."

Another fine example of the madness which seems to have seized the Democrats is Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat. Durbin essentially equated Guantanamo Bay with the Nazi death camps in which about 9 million people lost their lives, Stalin's prisons in which 2.7 million persons died, and Pol Pot's reign of terror in which 1.7 million Cambodians were systematically murdered.

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II:

Perhaps one of his aides will help the Senator to understand the difference between interning innocent American citizens simply because of their ethnicity, and interning terrorists captured while trying to murder innocent American citizens. The distinction is not a difficult one to grasp, and we're confident that Sen. Durbin, if it's explained to him slowly, will get the gist of it.

What was the treatment that elicited the Senator's fatuities? An FBI agent reported to higher-ups that he witnessed one al Qaeda suspect at Gitmo who was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating the complaint sort of like the Soviets and the Nazis did when allegations of abuse in their death camps came to light.

There were no details given about the prisoner in question. Why was this one terrorist deprived of the considerable amenities enjoyed by his co-detainees? The Senator apparently isn't interested in telling us. Perhaps context would spoil the effect he was trying to create which is to extrapolate from a single case of possible mistreatment to the conclusion that Gitmo is another Dachau and American troops are as bad as the German SS.

Meanwhile, the Senator is blithely indifferent to the fact that, whereas the death camps to which he has compared Gitmo killed millions and subjected millions more to years of starvation, pain, and inexpressible misery, not a single one of the five hundred or so Gitmo detainees have died and only a handful have made credible claims of poor treatment. The most significant allegations of abuse, in fact, have been five charges of irreverence toward the Koran.

Somebody should explain all this to Senator Durbin before he makes an even bigger fool of himself with his next round of pronouncements.

A friend passes along this short article which holds out hope that Muslims will find in their tradition and holy book a rationale for peace-making:

Let's hope that their desire to be peace-makers catches on among their co-religionists.

Anyone tempted to think that the autopsy of Terri Schiavo has settled the matter of the circumstances surrounding her condition should read Michelle Malkin's discussion of the coroner's report and the related links.

LaShawn Barber offers her opinion of the Senate's debate on its failure to pass anti-lynching laws 60 to 100 years ago. In short, she thinks it's dumb:

Pretty eloquent stuff. Parenthetically, we should mention that many observers have noted that the reason such legislation failed in the past is because it was filibustered, mostly by southern Democrats. You would think that the party that employed the filibuster to block anti-lynching legislation would have been a bit ashamed to employ it to block a vote on a black nominee to the Federal bench. Such a thought, however, assumes a certain sensitivity to historical irony among Democrats that is apparently well-suppressed.

African Anglicans are paying a steep price for adhering to principle:

What choices are these? The Bishops of Africa have decided that they will not accept money, as desperate as is the need, from those Episcopal bodies which support the ordination of gay priests and the marriage of gay couples. The amount of money declined totals in the millions of dollars.

Leave it to an American Bishop to be clueless about what fidelity to a principle means to those who truly believe in it.

Doug Ireland is beside himself with angst at the success of organizations of "Christers," as he calls them, in mobilizing their troops to boycott sponsors of entertainment which promotes sexual license.

He detects a whiff of fascism emanating from the offices of the gentle folks at the American Family Association and Focus on the Family, Ireland calls them "religious primitives," and grabs his readers by the lapels to scream in their face that theocracy is just around the corner, can't you see. Quick, hide the children.

It's all very comical. Here are a couple of examples:

Ireland quotes Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, who calls the new "Christer" offensive a drive toward "theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism has never been as troubling as it is now in this country."

Ireland and Kaplan fear that our government agencies are actually responsive to the people's wishes. This ugly recrudescence of dreaded democracy can only lead to trouble. Once the government starts listening to its citizens where does it stop? Auschwitz?

Imagine the chutzpah of these "Christers" who think they have the same rights as every other American citizen. Where do they get such an impertinent idea? Haven't they learned that religious people, unless they're liberals, are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves, and let the Left alone to run things and impose its values on the rest of the country?

What this frantic statement lacks in honesty it makes up for in humor. It's dishonest because what Christian organizations are doing is not censorship and, even if it were, there's nothing illicit about censorship unless it's imposed by the government, and even then it's not necessarily unconstitutional. If corporations are persuaded not to subsidize the dissemination of certain ideas on television networks, that's not censorship. They're making a business decision based on the customer's wishes. If the government, through the FCC, chooses to regulate the content of what's going out over public airwaves, that's not necessarily bad either. It's similar to a public school administrator prohibiting the school library from placing pornographic magazines on its shelves.

Ireland's paragraph is humorous because the overwrought author, in his excitement, tacitly acknowledges what I'm sure he didn't intend to admit: that what Hollywood is engaged in is an attempt to sexually subvert the culture. Mr Ireland is obviously distraught that this noble cause is encountering resistance from people who don't want the culture subverted. Resistance to sexual subversion is an evil, in Mr. Ireland's mind, equivalent to being a fascist.

Or worse, a "Christer."

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

A United Arab Emirates daily, citing unnamed sources, reported Wednesday the United States was massing troops on the Syrian-Iraqi border:

If this is true Bashar Assad has probably had to change his underwear a couple of times.

The Washington Post tells us that:

One wonders what, exactly, the other options are.

Michael Fumento's two most recent columns at National Review On-Line offer excellent glimpses into what our troops are experiencing in Iraq. They can be read here and here.

We've heard much nonsense about the Gitmo Gulag from Amnesty International and others eager to tar the Bush administration with anything which they can transform into a scandal. Babalu Blog has a piece in which he describes what's going on as regular practice in those prisons on the Cuban island controlled by the Left-wing icon Fidel Castro. It should be read by anyone who thinks what Americans have done to suspected terrorists on Gitmo is unconscionable.

This is not to say that because conditions are worse elsewhere whatever offenses Americans commit are thereby excused. It is to say, though, that our prisoners are treated with incredible mildness compared to what prisoners in the real Gulag of the Soviet Union experienced up until the 1980s and what Castro is doing to people even today. It is to say, too, that many of those who are so vocal in their criticism of the United States' relatively benign treatment of their detainees are people who for decades have been tolerant of, sympathetic toward, or even adulatory of both the Soviets and Castro.

The cries of outrage we hear over Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, except those of a very small minority of Christian pacifists, are not really about abuse of prisoners. That is only the pretext. Alleged abuses are merely an opportunity which his opponents have seized upon to discredit George Bush. If these people really cared about horrific treatment of prisoners they would have been screaming for Castro's resignation for the last forty years, but so far from raising their voices against this tyrant's cruelties, they've spent their energies denying them instead and apologizing for the man himself. Their indignation and demands should not be granted any credibility now.

Christianity Today has this story on the progress of Intelligent Design in the Kansas public school system:

Wells is correct that ID is not yet a fully developed scientific theory, but that's no reason not to present in the classroom the reasons why many people accept it. Neither the Big Bang nor String theory are completely understood, but we don't hesitate to teach their main points in the appropriate science classes. Nor is the incompleteness of ID a reason why students should not be taught the difficulties with Darwinism as well as its strengths. Indeed, Darwinism itself is a theory that has been mutating continuously since Charles Darwin first published Origin of Species in 1859, and, it could be argued, is itself still not fully worked out.

Viewpoint recommends that both ID and Darwinism be taught in high school biology classrooms as competing theories in the philosophy of biology. Teach students the difference between empirical investigation and the philosophy that undergirds it and show them how philosophical assumptions permeate all that scientists do and why science cannot be practiced or taught without bringing those philosophical assumptions into play. Students will find the controversy between the two explanations of origins fascinating, and they'll learn a lot of science and philosophy along the way. So will their teachers.

The long-awaited and strangely tardy autopsy report on Terri Schiavo will be released tomorrow, Wednesday, June 15th, according to the Washington Post.

We'll be surprised if there's anything in it that settles any of the big questions in dispute, chiefly the question whether Michael, her husband, abused her and perhaps caused the heart attack which led to her subsequent brain damage. Even so, we'll be interested to see what the coroner reports.

The Reverend Dr. N. Graham Standish offers a sterling illustration of how not to try to make your case. Along the way he employs several dubious tactics taken, no doubt, from Liberalism's manual on how to engage in political argumentation. He writes:

This last sentence is disingenuous. It was Catholic bishops who determined that Kerry's position on abortion was outside the teaching of the Church and should therefore disqualify him to receive the sacrament. Does the Reverend Standish hold that the bishops should not be making such determinations? Moreover, to conclude from the fact that Kerry's pro-choice stance is not Catholic that therefore only Republicans can be Christians is a non-sequitur unless the Reverend believes that only Republicans can be pro-life and that only pro-lifers can be Christian.

These are charges frequently made but rarely supported. Exactly how have Republicans been involved in the type of campaigning where they "attack, denigrate, eviscerate and even falsely accuse" their opponents. Can the Reverend give us some examples?

Note that he doesn't balk at joining the Democrats because they, too, engage in dirty politics. The Democratic slanders of Bush's judicial nominees, the complete smearing of their characters, apparently doesn't faze the good parson.

The "Christianity of the Republican Party"? Does the party have an official religion? The claim that Christians who are Republicans don't care for the poor, or sacrifice for others, and are not humble or compassionate is just plain stupid. Where is the evidence for such an incredibly arrogant and malicious claim? Were Republican Christians hesitant to give to tsunami relief last December? Has President Bush been niggardly in his commitments to solving the problems of the poor in Africa and the Middle East? How have the Democrats shown significantly greater levels of compassion and sacrifice than Republicans have? Dr. Standish declines to tell us.

Listen to Howard Dean the Chairman of the Democratic party: "I hate the Republican party and everything it stands for." Has anyone ever heard a Republican of high office ever say anything remotely close to something like this about his political opposition. Dean also claimed that the Republican party is the party of white Christians so presumably among the objects of his loathing are white Christians. He has also called Republicans "liars", "evil", "corrupt", and "brain-dead."

Hillary Clinton asserts that Republicans are "intent on abusing power, destroying the United states senate, and undermining our constitution." She didn't say that this would be the inadvertent consequence of Republican policies. No, that would have been too temperate. She said that Republicans were intent upon these goals. I.e. they deliberately intended to accomplish them.

Al Gore accused George Bush of having "betrayed this country", of having deliberately mislead us into a war that has claimed thousands of lives. This is an incredibly irresponsible and mean-spirited allegation unless Mr. Gore has some proof which, of course, he does not.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, while addressing an assembly of schoolchildren, called their president "a loser".

About these examples of Liberal rhetoric, which are probably fewer than a tenth of the examples which could be cited, the Reverend has nothing to say. He's either deaf to them or he's willfully unconcerned about them. Neither possibility is very flattering.

What does the Reverend Standish mean when he states that these men are seeking to make the United States a Christian nation? He doesn't say. How does he know there'd be little room for Christians like him in such a nation if he doesn't even know what sort of nation it is that these men envision? Is it Christian to just throw out an accusation like this and not support it?

This is bad? I thought he wanted politicos to be conciliatory and gentle in their disputes. Doesn't the Reverend think it a good thing that disputants soften their rhetoric? Apparently not. The only good thing the other side can do, in his way of thinking, is abandon the principles they hold with which he disagrees.

This is another libel. The moral and upright Rev. Doctor Standish has no grounds for his allegation that Intelligent Design supporters want to get evolution banned from schools. Everything they've said on the matter indicates otherwise. Perhaps, though, this is Standish's reasoning: Conservative Christians are liars. Conservative Christians deny any intent to ban evolution. Therefore, conservative Christians will ban evolution. How perspicuous of Rev. Standish to discern the subtle and insidious malice in conservative rhetoric. Of course, he can't come out and make his case this explicitly because then he'd be guilty of the kind of politics which employs the tactics of "attack, denigrate, eviscerate and even falsely accuse" that he condemns above. So he couches the whole smear in innuendo and implication.

Well, the Reverend is a master of the "unsubstantiated allegation" so he probably knows one when he sees one, but even so, the allegations against Michael Schiavo were hardly unsubstantiated. They were borne out by several eyewitnesses to his attitude toward his wife. It is odd, too, that the Reverend chose this example. Saving Terri Schiavo was hardly a cause championed solely by "fundamentalists". It was embraced by most of the Roman Catholic Church, including the Pope, Jesse Jackson, and atheist libertarians Nat Hentoff and Christopher Hitchens. Perhaps Standish just wasn't paying very close attention.

This is sappy nonsense. The Schindler family wasn't divided. They were firmly united against the machinations of Terri's husband to have her life ended for what they believed were self-interested reasons. If they were right, then it was indeed an issue of good versus evil. Does Standish have some sort of inside knowledge into the matter that proves that the Schindlers were wrong? If so, he should state it. If not, then he sounds every bit as judgmental of those who felt that this was an unjust taking of a human life as the fundamentalists he's so fond of deprecating.

Isn't it odd, by the way, that Standish, after having criticized the Republicans earlier for not caring enough about the weak and the helpless, for not having enough compassion, now criticizes them for having too much? He seems to be a very confused man.

Reverend Standish says something sensible here. Now we shall look forward to his protests when Democrats start showing up in black churches, as they always do, to preach the political gospel of good Democrats versus evil Republicans next campaign season. We're sure he'll have a sharp eye out for these illicit marriages of politics to religion.

Of course Republicans never claimed to be the Christian party. It is their opponents, like Howard Dean, who keep making that claim in an attempt to somehow discredit Republicans among secular-minded people.

Liberals like Standish have a test for whether the behaviour of politicians conduces to "unity rather than division." It is this: If politicians hold to principle and refuse to yield to the demands of their opposition then they are divisive. If they fail to come around to the way of thinking approved by such luminaries as Reverend Standish then they are divisive. If they believe that there is good and there is evil, and that evil should be opposed, then they are divisive. And, above all, if they are conservative, then they are divisive.

Even for Terri Schiavo?

The Reverend Doctor N. Graham Standish nicely illustrates the Left's favored mode of political polemic: Make accusations but offer no supporting evidence. Accuse your target of heinous behavior but give no examples. Misrepresent them whenever possible. Claim the moral high ground but offer no justification for placing yourself there.

Perhaps, to quote the Reverend, it is time to "expect more from our [clergy], demanding that if they proclaim a Christian mantle, they begin acting with Christian regard for others, even their enemies, even each other."

The United States isn't the only country afflicted with history professors on leave from the local asylum. Read this interview with Egyptian History professor Zaynab Abd Al-Aziz on Saudi television to get a sense for how detached some people are from any semblance of reality:

Abd Al-Aziz: "The decision to impose one religion over the entire world was made in the Second Vatican Council in 1965."

Host: "Huh?"

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes. A long time ago."

Host: "They decided to Christianize the world?"

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes. The decisions of the 1965 Vatican Council included, first of all, absolving the Jews of the blood of Christ. This decision is well known and was the basis for the recognition of the occupying Zionist entity - Israel. The second decision was to eradicate the left in the eighties. I believe we've all witnessed this. The third decision was to eradicate Islam, so that the world would be Christianized by the third millennium."

Host: "Why is America hostile to Islam, although we never had and never will have the same conflict with them we had with Europe?"

Abd Al-Aziz: "Well, do you remember what we just said about the Second Vatican Council in 1965 and about Christianizing the world? It was agreed upon and pre-arranged. John Paul II prepared a five-year plan, on the eve of the third millennium, Christianize the world. His address in 1995 was based on the assumption that by the year 2000, the entire world would be Christianized. Since the plan was not accomplished, the World Council of Churches assigned this mission to the US in January 2001, since the US is the world's unrivaled military power. They named the decade between 2001-2010 "the age of eradicating evil" - "evil" referring to Islam and Muslims.

"The Crusader war is ongoing, because it has been a religious war since the dawn of Islam. Later, colonialism, missionaries, and Christianization were introduced. The Crusader war is ongoing. The Inquisition courts exist to this day. As I told you, the pope who was appointed a few days ago, headed the Inquisition Court, which is now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

"When in January 2001, the World Council of Churches delegated this mission to the US - what did the US do? It fabricated the show of... is it September 9 or 11?"

Host: "11. Please explain this to me."

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes, of course..."

Host: "You mean to say that the World Council of Churches delegated the mission of Christianizing of the world to the US."

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes. And how could the US win legitimacy for this without anyone saying that they are perpetrating massacres and waging a Crusader war? It fabricated the 9/11 show. I call it a fabrication because much has been written on this. We are also to blame. Why do we accept a single perspective? Countless books were written, some of which were even translated into Arabic, like Thierry Meyssan's 9/11 - The Appalling Fraud [2] and Pentagate. "Pentagate" like Watergate... He brings documents to prove that the method used in destroying the three (sic) towers was "controlled demolition.

"This is an architectural engineering theory, which was invented by the Americans. They teach it in their universities. They make movies and documentaries about it. They incorporated it in movie scenarios and then carried it out in real life. Why do we accept this?"

Host: "My God, doctor. This is unbelievable! You're saying that this destruction..."

Abd Al-Aziz: "...was a controlled demolition. The building collapsed in its place, without hitting a single building to its left or right. The three towers fell in place."

Host: "In the same method they use in movies and plays?"

Abd Al-Aziz: "Yes, Exactly like that. That is how the US won international legitimacy. You could sense the (9/11) operation was pre-planned because many things were revealed in the days that followed. For example 4,000 Jews caught influenza on that exact day. They set a timer, and all 4,000..."

Host: "By God, you crack me up! They all set a timer and got influenza on the same day. So the building was completely empty of Jews."

Abd Al-Aziz: "Much has been written about this. 150 Congressmen demanded an inquiry."

We have to give credit to the host of this show for not taking his guest seriously. Let's hope that there's no fatwah issued against him by the mullahs to punish him for his insolence.

The host's obvious amusement causes us to try to imagine how much fun it would be to be able to sit in on an international conclave of history professors with speakers like this guy, Ward Churchill, and other inmates from the state hospital for the psychologically dysfunctional holding forth. It'd be a real hoot.

TIME Magazine has blown the lid off the secret horrors that transpire everyday at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba with the publication of an interrogation log detailing the military's treatment of the "20th hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani. Those who accuse the military of systematic atrocities will have new ammunition with the release of this log:

Brutal. Absolutely brutal, what they're doing to this poor boy down there in Cuba. What al-Qahtani underwent was as horrible as, well, as what most of us went through at the hands of our Phys-ed teachers back in the insensitive sixties.

Okay. I admit the Christina Aguilera music might be a bit hard to defend. It certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Conventions.

A Puppet Show! Do they have no mercy? It makes one ashamed to be an American. I wonder if they had some of the puppets in black hoods cut off the head of another terrified puppet who confessed to being an infidel.

Then the ultimate humiliation. They make him stand for the national anthem. I feel faint.

Being physically close to a woman he couldn't beat up or shoot was evidently very stressful for the young man. Should we be putting detainees into such unaccustomed positions? What if the woman had bad breath? How would you like it?

And what was that about air conditioning? Air conditioning? For terrorists?

A dog is present. Uh oh. Was the dog used to make the terrorist uneasy? To frighten him, perhaps? Those interrogators are sure big on irony, aren't they?

Well, after reading this article we agree with Jimmy Carter and others who are calling for Gitmo to be shut down. We have enough country club prisons paid for by American taxpayers.

TIME's scoop can be read in its entirety here.

This is a great story. Don't miss it.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.

Evangelical Outpost recently featured a discussion of consequentialist ethics, the view that the rightness of an act is a function of the consequences it produces and not the motive behind the act. A specific example of this type of ethics is utilitarianianism, the view that an act is right if it maximizes happiness. That is, if it produces the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. Utilitarianism is one of the dominant schools of thought in our universities and law schools today. Even so, it is seriously flawed.

Imago Dei features a post which illustrates the failure of utilitarianism:

There are other reasons for rejecting consequentialism as well. For example, how do we determine which consequences are to be aimed for? Should we pursue happiness, pleasure or justice? What standard enables us to choose between them? The classic utilitarians opted for the first two, but consider this true story:

Some years ago four young men in L.A. were arrested and charged with homicide. Their crime was that they would travel into the areas of the city where they could find some homeless derelict and they would take him up on a tenement roof, play music, drink, tell stories and in general show the poor man a great time until he was thoroughly besotted and oblivious to what was happening. The young men would then culminate the evening by pushing the fellow off the roof and watching him fall to his death on the pavement below.

Assume these guys never got caught. Assume that no one was made unhappy by their act (the victim, remember, was so inebriated that he didn't know what was happening to him), and that they were made happy by carrying out their executions. How does a consequentialist avoid the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with what they did?

Here's another problem. This story is taken from Lewis Smedes' Mere Morality. In the wake of WWII a German woman, innocent of any crime, was nevertheless interned in a Soviet detention camp. As time went on she realized there was little chance of her being released. She took a chance, however, and seduced a guard, got pregnant, and petitioned for release on the basis of her pregnancy. Release was indeed granted and she was reunited with her family which was delirious with joy to have her back. They raised the child whom they loved and called their freedom child. Did the woman do the right thing? The utilitarian would have to say yes. No one was hurt and everyone's happiness was increased.

But suppose she had done what she did and gotten pregnant but was then denied release from the camp. Suppose further that she had contracted syphilis from the guard which she then passed on to her child who suffered terribly from the disease. Suppose both mother and child lived a miserable existence in the prison camp until they died. Now the utilitarian has to say that she did the wrong thing because no one, except perhaps the guard, is happier and everyone involved is unhappier. But how does she know whether her act is right or wrong when she does it? She can't because she can't know all the consequences before they occur. Shakespeare built a considerable reputation writing plays which illustrate just this difficulty.

The consequentialist can give us no reason for choosing the particular consequence we aim for. He can, if he's a utilitarian, offer no reason why someone is wrong to do a grave injustice if it makes more people happy, and he can offer no way of evaluating the rightness of the act until all the consequences are known, something which may take generations to ascertain.

Finally, utilitarianism suffers from an even more fundamental flaw, one which afflicts every non-egoistic system of ethics based on human reason. It can give no explanation why we should seek to promote the happiness of others rather than simply promote our own happiness. In other words, it can give no answer to the question, why should I care about other people? Utilitarians just assume that all thoughtful people will agree that we should care about other people's welfare, but when pressed to give a reason why we should they simply cannot produce one that makes any sense.

The decision to treat other people in a fashion likely to increase their happiness is a purely arbitrary choice on the part of the agent, grounded in nothing more than irrational or non-rational preferences and biases. If someone makes the choice to be a complete egoist the utilitarian has no grounds for claiming him to be wrong. The most the utilitarian can say is that he's simply made a different choice, one which the utilitarian personally dislikes.

None of this is to say that consequences are not important in deciding matters of moral import. Of course they are. But they are not all that matters. It is perhaps as incorrect to say that consequences don't matter at all as it is to say that they are all that matters.

Kenneth Nathaniel Taylor, who founded Tyndale House Publishers after he had been unable to find a company willing to publish his Bible paraphrases, died at age 88 on Friday. Tyndale House is now a leading publisher of Christian books and resources. Taylor's biblical paraphrase, which became The Living Bible, sold more than 40 million copes in North America alone.

In 1950, Taylor also founded the Christian Booksellers Association, a trade association of Christian stores, publishers, and other retail companies now known simply as CBA. He also created the missions organizations Evangelical Literature Overseas and Short Terms Abroad (which merged with Seattle-based Intercristo in 1976).

A brief account of Taylor's life can be found at the link.

There is a struggle going on for the soul of the Democratic Party. One way this struggle reveals itself is in the conflict over who, exactly, Howard Dean should be.

On the one hand there are left-wing zealots like TruthOut.org's John Corey who proclaims that he loves Howard Dean just as he is, especially as he has been exhibiting himself over the past few weeks. The Howard Dean who has declared that he hates Republicans, who alleges that Republicans haven't worked an honest day in their lives, who derides the Republican party for being a bunch of white Christians, is the Dean who was elected Chairman of the DNC, and it's who he should remain.

Corey is exasperated that his fellow Democrats seem to be disavowing Dean's attacks upon Republicans. He writes:

On the other hand there are the mainstream liberal Democrats who themselves have to stand up for election. They don't disagree with what Dean says, of course, they'd just rather he not say it. It's unnecessarily distracting and counterproductive since they find themselves constantly having to defend Dean's remarks to the press. A recent L.A. Times piece said this:

So the question is, whose advice will Dean heed? Who will Howard Dean be for the next three years? Will he be the moderate, reasonable, sagacious leader the mainstream Democratic politicos want him to be, or will he be the down and dirty, punch 'em below the belt brawler that the far left foot soldiers want him to remain? Dean's reply to this question is going to make one faction or the other very unhappy, and could precipitate an enervating and self-destructive internecine conflict among Democrats. That'd be too bad.

Regarding the Ten Most Harmful Books list to which we alluded a few days ago, Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost writes that the most harmful book ever written wasn't in the top ten and didn't even make honorable mention. Check out his argument here.

Strategy Page explains how the war against the Sunni terrorists in Iraq is proceeding. Apparently Iraqi government representatives are offering the Sunnis in town after town a choice which many are finding difficult to refuse:

Read the rest at the link. Also check out the post for June 7th.

The state of Vermont has joined forces with those seeking to stifle and suppress any and all expressions of religion, no matter how subtle, in the public square. In what is a particularly funny example of bureaucratic dull-wittedness the keen-eyed authorities in Vermont have descried a nefarious threat to American democracy and a possible plot to establish a Christian theocracy in their fair state:

The taxpayers of Vermont should be pleased with the vigilance of Assistant Attorney General Golubock who, at some expense to the public treasury, no doubt, tirelessly labors to ensure that the state of Vermont will not on his watch be infected by anything Christian. Evidently, real crime is so low in Vermont that Mr. Golubock has plenty of time to spend on these more insidious matters. He's certainly earning his six figure salary.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

A recent Gallup poll shows public confidence in both the news media and in public officials plummeting:

Part of the reason for the drop, we suspect, is that since cynicism and skepticism convey an air of sophistication, many people who haven't read anything in a newspaper but the comics and sports pages in the last ten years will nevertheless answer a poll question about their confidence in the media with supercilious disdain. It makes them feel vaguely superior.

The same goes for political figures. It would be interesting to know how many of those who answered that they have little confidence in Congress, say, can even name their own senators.

Another part of the reason for the low esteem in which the fourth estate is held, of course, is that they deserve it. People who pay attention to the news are often dismayed at the tendentious reporting and blatant dishonesty of much of what they see and hear.

People want their news to be objective and they want editorial writers to be fair. With the rise of alternative media news consumers today are much more likely than their parents were to learn that they're being hoodwinked by the MSM, and consequently the media no longer enjoys the popularity or credibility that it once did.

Neil Postman has been gone for some time now but he once wrote a commencement speech which Joe Carter has posted at Evangelical Outpost. Joe says this:

Carter is right about the speech. Here it is:

Very good stuff.

World Net Daily has this story on a group of American Muslims who produced a video that shows its members on a New York City street corner declaring Islam's dominance over America as they tread on a U.S. flag and then rip it apart. Some excerpts:

We assume that the lack of publicity about this demonstration in the MSM is due to the fact that the Muslims didn't urinate on the flag while they were stomping on it so there's really no call, to their way of thinking, for outrage.

To those who don't work in the newsrooms of the liberal media, however, this demonstration is a sickening affront to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in the war on terror being waged by American forces. It tells us much about the mind-set of many American Muslims that the community would allow this sort of thing to be done in the name of Islam without distancing themselves from it.

The video itself has apparently been taken off the Islamic Thinkers web-site since we couldn't access it when we went to see for ourselves what the religion of peace is up to these days.

Some months ago we wrote about increasing fears in the defense community about this nation's vulnerability to EMP. EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse and refers to the powerful surge of radio waves produced by a nuclear detonation. These waves have the potential to overwhelm any electrical/electronic system within a line of sight of the blast so that a detonation about 300 miles over the center of the U.S. could conceivably shut down everything in the country that runs on electrical power. This would take months or years to repair and in the meantime the nation would probably be thrown into chaos.

Winds of Change has a piece by Frank Gaffney which describes the nature of the threat and discusses what must be done to prevent what would certainly be a national catastrophe should even a single nuclear weapon be detonated in space above the United States.

The Strategy Page has the results of an Al-Arabiya News poll taken throughout the Arab world that give grounds for hope that the struggle against Islamist tyranny is succeeding.

Let's hope.

Michelle Malkin has lots of information and some good links on the story coming out of Lodi, California about the arrest of a possible father/son terror threat.

One does not wish to see a repeat of WWII internment camps filled this time with Muslims instead of Japanese, but we also have to face the grim reality that many Muslims in this country do not see themselves as Americans. Nor do they want to be Americans. Many of them feel a solidarity with Islamist jihadis around the globe and see their situation here in the States as an opportunity to strike a blow for Allah against the infidels.

That being the case, it's hard to fault those who look upon Arabs and other Muslims in our midst with suspicion, PC abhorrence of "profiling" notwithstanding. We can only hope that law enforcement and the larger Arab/Muslim community are vigilant and able to preempt any act of terrorism which may be planned to take place on our soil.

If they're not, it will surely be difficult to dissuade enraged Americans from tragic and pointless reprisals against innocent Arabs.

Belmont Club has a vivid look at what is happening in Robert Mugabe's socialist paradise of Zimbabwe. It's a little too long to repost here, but it's a very important read.

Back when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia the Left was all aflutter over the prospect of the white government being replaced by black leadership. This would be good for the country the Left declaimed, and good for all of Africa. In the event, however, it has been, like so many of the Left's nostrums, a nightmare for the people, both white and black, who live there. Indeed, today's Zimbabwe sounds very much like the Cambodia and South Africa of the 1970s.

Don't miss the e-mail from Sister Patricia Walsh.

The first rule of warfare, political or otherwise, is Know your enemy. Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, simply doesn't. About Republicans he recently said this:

Set aside that this is from the man who was taken to the woodshed by Al Sharpton in the Democratic primaries for the fact that he had no minorities in his administration as governor of Vermont. Set aside that this is from the head of a party which has no record of having elevated minorities to positions of prominence, nevertheless criticizing a party which has made African Americans and Hispanic Americans the last two secretaries of State and an Attorney General and appointed numerous other minorities to less exalted positions.

Set aside that it is Republicans who are fighting to get Janice Rodgers Brown to the federal appeals court and Democrats who are fighting her nomination.

Set all that aside and ask, what on earth does he mean by suggesting that Republicans are "the white Christian party?" Since he is a man who has said that he hates Republicans and who has never had a kind word to say about the Republican party we may reasonably infer that he meant this as more than a simple statement of fact. He obviously intended it as a slur. So let's ask, is there something wrong with being a party that attracts many people who are both white and Christian, perhaps the majority of voting citizens in the country? What exactly is it that makes this something to be derogated? And are we to infer from Governor Dean's remark that the Democrats are the party of non-white non-Christians?

This is extremely divisive rhetoric that the Chairman is engaging in, but Democrats have been setting one group against another for decades in the politics of this country. The irony is that every chance they get they accuse GWB of being divisive and yet there is nothing they can point to in support of this allegation.

George Bush's "divisiveness" apparently lies in the fact that he takes a stand on policy matters, does what he says he's going to do, and doesn't ask the Democrats for permission. Since Democrats find that sort of behavior in a Republican president immensely impertinent and irritating, and since they consider any president who doesn't agree with them to be polarizing, they naturally see GWB as divisive.

Howard Dean, however, is just telling it like it is.

Christianity Today has an interview with Lee Strobel author of The Case For the Creator. Here's an excerpt:

Darwinism is as strongly held as it is in large part because it is an essential prop to atheism. If Darwinism should ever collapse biology and a few other related sciences will be changed, to be sure, but the most significant consequence will be the philosophical reverberations such a collapse would generate throughout the culture.

Anyway, you'll want to read the whole interview. It's a pretty good discussion.

Now will the Left stop insulting Bush's intelligence? Nah:

Liberals oohed and ahhed at John Kerry's superior intellectual gifts during the 2004 campaign, but aside from being more articulate there's not much evidence that Kerry was any brighter nor more motivated as a student than George Bush. What the infatuation with Kerry's vaunted cerebral skills illustrates is nothing more than a fondness for style over substance.

The Rocky Mountain News has been hard at work ferreting out the truth about Ward Churchill, the radical University of Colorado professor who became the object of national scrutiny when a piece came to light which he'd written on 9/11. In the essay he claimed that those who died that day were "little Eichmanns" and, by implication, deserved their fate.

The RMN investigation has uncovered much unsavory information about Mr. Churchill which, among other shortcomings, reveals him to be an academic fraud and ethnic poseur:

Read the details of the evidence against him at the link.

Steve Hayward at No Left Turns makes a salient point about the Mark Felt revelations:

Whether someone's act is heroic or not depends as much upon why one acts as upon what one does. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason, even if the act requires much courage, is not morally commendable and is certainly not heroic. A man who saves another man's life only because the man who is saved owes his rescuer a large sum of money is not a hero. Saving the man's life is the right thing to do, but the man who does it can claim no virtue in his act. If Mark Felt did indeed help to bring down the Nixon administration only because he was angry at having been passed over for the directorship of the FBI then whatever he is, he's not a hero.

For the Libs, though, whether you're a hero or not seems often to depend only upon whom you're trying to hurt.

Here's an article guaranteed to drive the politically correct into a frenzy. It raises the question of whether intelligence might be genetically based not just in individuals but in entire ethnic groups. If it is, the article suggests, might the history of the Jews allowed intelligence to be selected for to a greater extent than in the rest of us?

If social security is the third rail of politics this question is the third rail of academic careers. It takes enormous audacity to ask this question in the current socio-academic climate. Recall how Harvard's president Larry Summers was practically burned at the stake a few months ago for suggesting that the sexes differ in their intellectual aptitudes. Recall, too, how Charles Murray back in the late eighties was excoriated for pointing out that some racial groups fare more poorly on IQ tests than others and are probably cognitively less well-endowed.

Any hint that there may be a genetic component to intelligence that is a function of race or ethnicity is almost certain to bring down the wrath of a thousand furies upon the head of a hapless scholar. This is unfortunate because in a free society no intellectual question should be considered taboo, even if it may have unpleasant or unwanted consequences. Free people should not fear truth, nor should there be questions that one dare not ask, nor ideas one dare not discuss. Free men and women should not allow themselves to be shackled by the sociological orthodoxies of a dogmatic, closed-minded elite.

We'll watch with interest the trajectory of this story.

Here's an update on ongoing operations in Iraq. The bad guys continue to suffer grievous losses of men and resources. They also continue to see their leadership attrited:

Time is running out for the insurgency which has in fact taken on the flavor of a foreign invasion as more and more of the terrorists apprehended and killed turn out to be non-Iraqis.

For anyone interested in pursuing an education at home in political philosophy Dr. Greg Forster offers a wonderful annotated reading list of the most important works in the field. Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost hosts Dr. Forster's piece. Don't overlook the comments from readers at the end.

Afghanistan has come an astonishing distance since the spring of 2002. We don't hear about this part of George Bush's historic humanitarian mission on the evening news, of course, unless there's a setback to report, but the story that we're not told is truly a testament to the goodness of the American people, this administration, and the resilience of the Afghan people.

There are other nations chipping in to do good works, of course, but none of their efforts would have materialized, or even been possible, were it not for the work of the Bush administration and the efforts and sacrifice of the American military. The only historical analogy we can think of to what we've undertaken in Afghanistan and Iraq is the Marshall Plan in Europe after WWII. No other nation in history has a record like that compiled by the United States since 1945.

You can read about it here.

Viewpoint has stated that although we believe the media outrage over shabby treatment of the Koran in our detention camps amounts to unwarranted hysterics, nevertheless, our troops should show the Koran respect, not so much for the book itself, which many scholars have determined is probably a plagiarized Old Testament, but out of respect for people around the world who revere it.

Even so, we have to wonder why liberals are so beside themselves over this issue. As a caller to the Glenn Beck program pointed out this morning, when Andres Serrano placed a crucifix in a jar of urine and incensed many Christians, the Left yawned and called it art. When another "artist" defiled a picture of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung Christians who complained were called narrow-minded xenophobes.

Now we read of several dubious cases where there may have been irreverent treatment of a Koran and the Left is thrown into high dudgeon. Why is this? The Left, being predominately skeptics and atheists, don't give a fig about the Bible much less the Koran. Nor do they care about the sensibilities of religious believers whom they largely regard as rubes and dolts. At least they don't care about the sensibilities of Christians, why should they care about those of Muslims?

The only reason for their loud ululations over the fact that a Koran may have been "defiled" is that these allegations present themselves as a club with which to beat the administration over the head. They are so bereft of weapons with which to fight their ideological campaign against Bush and Co. that they'll grasp at anything that offers itself, no matter how flimsy the tool and no matter how cynical, hypocritical, and dishonest using it makes them look. And they think we should vote for them to run the country.

A friend passes along the "Best T-shirts of the summer":

So Many Men, So Few Who Can Afford Me

I Fought the Lawn and the Lawn Won

I Suffer Occasional Delusions of Adequacy

God Made Us Sisters, Prozac Made Us Friends

If They Don't Have Chocolate In Heaven, I Ain't Going

At My Age, I've Seen It All, Done It All, Heard It All. I Just Can't Remember It All

My Mother Is A Travel Agent For Guilt Trips

I Just Do What The Voices Inside My Head Tell Me To Do

If It's Called Tourist Season, Why Can't We Hunt 'em?

Princess, Having Had Sufficient Experience With Princes, Seeks Frog

No, It Doesn't Hurt (on a "well-tattooed gentleman")

(on the back of a passing motorcyclist) If You Can Read This, My Wife Fell Off

I Used To Be Schizophrenic, But We're OK Now

Veni, Vedi, Visa: I came. I Saw. I Did a Little Shopping

What If The Hokey Pokey Really Is What It's All About?

I Didn't Climb to the Top of the Food Chain to Be a Vegetarian

Human Events has surveyed a number of Conservative intellectuals and asked for their nominations for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. This is the result.

I can't say that I agree with all of the selections, and indeed I haven't read all of them myself, but I have to object to the inclusion among the honorable mentions of two of my very favorite works. The first is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. I'm surprised that Conservatives, who often have a libertarian streak in them, would find it offensive. The second is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring which probably did more to galvanize action to save from extinction species like the Peregrine Falcon, Osprey, Brown Pelican, and Bald Eagle than any other single piece of writing in the last fifty years.

Most of the rest of the selections with which I'm familiar, however, do indeed belong in this rogue's gallery, with the possible exception of Origin of Species which is for the most part unexceptional in its evolutionary claims. In Origin, Darwin pretty much limited himself to evidence for micro-evolutionary change which even most anti-Darwinians do not dispute. The harm done by Darwinism is, in my opinion, more a consequence of the subsequent development of the theory, especially its metaphysical aspects, than of what is put forth in Origin.

The only other change I might make is to put Nietzsche's works at the very top of the list.

The headline reads: Gitmo Koran Was Splashed With Urine.

That'll get the Muslims worked up into a frenzy, which is apparently what the media hope for. Why else run the headline or the story which follows?

The facts of the story reveal how absolutely ridiculous and trite both of them are.

It turns out that a guard went outside to relieve himself and urinated too close to an air vent. The air drew the urine into a shaft and sprayed a few drops of mist onto a prisoner and his Koran. There was no evidence of any intent on the part of the guard.

The MSM is so desperate to get something, anything, to vindicate Newsweek's egregious "flushing down the toilet" fiction, that they'll sink to any level to fabricate the sense that real abuse is widespread in our prisons. Maybe we should just start referring to the MSM as the North American Bureau of Al-Jazeera.

Democracy Project has a thorough and fairly ascerbic critique of Jim Wallis' book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. The review is too lengthy to reproduce in its entirety here, but it should be read by anyone who thinks that Jim Wallis is really seeking a "third way" in American politics. According to DP Wallis' position is that the Left is almost completely right except on abortion, and the Right is almost completely immoral and unChristian. In other words, Wallis' third way is for everyone to become Left-wing Democrats save with respect to abortion, but his prescriptions for actually ending abortion are apparently obscure:

DP hammers away at Wallis' fondness for driving in the far left lane of the ideological highway, a proclivity apparent in the tendentious wording of much of what he writes. For example:

There is much, much more to this review at the link and those likely to read Wallis' book or who are themselves interested in the mesh of politics and Christian faith would do well to give it a look.

If you would like a review which offers a more sympathetic treatment of God's Politics than Democracy Project does you can find a good one here.

Charles Krauthammer writes a fine essay in defense of certainty. The heart, but by no means all, of his piece is here:

Well put. Krauthammer might also have mentioned that it's not really certainty that contemporary skeptics disdain, for they themselves are filled to overflowing with it. They are so certain that they are in the right politically, for example, that they are willing to go to any lengths to defame, discredit, mock and ridicule those with whom they disagree in order to crush all opposition and to insure that their views prevail. This is not the behavior of people cognizant of their own fallibility and at pains to maintain a modicum of intellectual humility.

No, it isn't certainty to which our Leftist elites object. What they find deplorable is the substance of those matters about which religious conservatives are certain. The maddening offense of religious conservatives is that their certitudes are in conflict with the certitudes of the secular Left. This the elite finds quite insufferable. They cannot abide that anyone would have the temerity to entertain a sense of certainty about matters so out of harmony with what they themselves are certain about.

Yesterday we posted a meditation on forgiveness which was triggered by a few lines in a new book by Os Guinness on the problem of evil. The post wasn't intended to be a review, but if the reader would like one an excellent overview of the book can be found here.

Now we're really confused. First we were told that Saddam was working on WMD in Iraq, then we were told that, ha, ha, Bush lied, there's no evidence that Saddam was working on WMD. Now we're told that tons of stuff that could be used to make biological and chemical weapons and banned missiles have been moved out of the sites where they'd been located prior to OIF:

Now which is it? Did Iraq have material that could have been used for WMD, or didn't they? Will somebody please get the story straight.

Viewpoint has argued several times over the past year that any ultimate meaning to life is contingent upon there being a God. Now columnist Dennis Prager addresses himself to the same theme in his series on Judeo-Christian values:

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus compares human existence to the everlasting punishment imposed by the gods on the mythological Sisyphus whose sentence for rebellion against the deities was to push a stone up a hill only to have it roll back down. He had to do this over and over, forever. Camus says that human existence is every bit as futile, meaningless, and mind-crushingly absurd. And yet, he writes, "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy."

Actually, it is extremely difficult to imagine Sisyphus happy in such circumstances. Indeed, it is easier to imagine him on the verge of total insanity. A man suffering life without significance, without meaning, without hope for eventual release is a man teetering on the brink of madness.

Camus is right in his comparison of life without God to the existence Sisyphus was made to endure. If there is no God then life surely is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Shakespeare put it.

Camus is wrong, however, when he urges us to imagine Sisyphus as happy. To the extent that the modern Sisyphus is content it is because he has not allowed himself to consider the full implications of his naturalistic worldview. He refuses to permit the consequences of his atheism to obtrude into his thoughts lest he be forced to confront the sheer senselessness of his being and that of all humanity. To face honestly the fact that in the final analysis nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters is to weave dizzyingly on the precipice of a spiritual and psychological abyss that only the most intrepid, or nihilistic, atheists dare approach.

Our country has lost a fine leader. Ilario Pantano has chosen to resign from the Marine Corps. After the hell he and his family were put through over the last year for defending himself in a stressful situation in Iraq, who can blame him?

There's lots of background on Pantano and his story here.

Kit Jarrell indicts both the military and the media for having grossly mishandled the Pantano case. She writes:

She concludes with this:

The rest of her essay is a blistering indictment of Pantano's accusers and the way the whole thing was dealt with by the Marines. Its worth reading.

Adnkronos International has this report on Abu Al-Zarqawi:

How reliable this report is is hard to say, but as Bill Roggio at Winds of Change points out there is no doubt that right now forensics experts are examining the alleged remains to determine whether Zarqawi has indeed passed on to be with his 72 virgins, whom, we expect, will all be fat, ugly, and covered with pustules.

Os Guinness has written a fine book on the problem that evil poses to both believers and unbelievers and the responses to evil offered by each of the three families of faith: eastern, naturalistic, and Judeo-Christian. The book is titled Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.

Guinness touches a lot of bases and says many worthwhile things about the topic that anyone can read with profit, but one thing in particular puzzled me. Guinness holds to the view that one person may forgive another of a serious offense even though the other neither seeks nor desires that forgiveness. It is possible, in other words, to have forgiveness without reconciliation. Guinness suggests that as long as the "forgiver" doesn't seek redress for the offense, as long as he doesn't hold a "grudge", then he has forgiven the offender.

I guess my problem is that I'm not sure what "forgiveness" means given Guinness' view of the matter. Let me illustrate the difficulty: John does Dave a grave injustice. John is unrepentant and is not interested in Dave's forgiveness. Dave nevertheless says that he forgives John. He treats him with a modicum of courtesy, even behind his back, and seeks no revenge or redress for the hurt. Even so, he no longer respects nor likes John. Their friendship has been irreparably sundered, and Dave doesn't wish to have anything to do with John in the future. Whenever he thinks about the situation he cannot help but think that John is guilty of an offense even though he doesn't insist that John make any compensation. They go their separate ways.

In what sense, then, has Dave actually forgiven John? In other words, can there be any meaning to forgiveness if the forgiveness is not accepted and if there is no reconciliation?

If one man forgives another man's debt then all record of the debt is wiped away, but if Dave forgives John, in Guinness' understanding of the word, then there is no wiping away of guilt, only a decision not to press for retribution. So, is forgiveness just a refusal to seek recompense, which is what Guinness seems to say, or is it something more than that? If it's more, then exactly what is it?

It seems to me that forgiveness entails the restoration of a relationship to at least some semblance of the status quo ante, just as in the case of debt forgiveness, but I don't see how this is possible apart from some measure of reconciliation.

I've always thought of forgiveness as a transaction. One party offers it, and the other accepts it. Until it has been accepted there is no transaction even if the offer still holds. God, for example, holds out forgiveness to everyone, but only those who accept it can receive it. If this is not the way God's forgiveness works then classical Christianity has an interesting problem: People God has forgiven will nevertheless find themselves suffering eternal punishment because, though they've been forgiven, they've never accepted that forgiveness and are thus not reconciled to God. Yet if hell is a consequence of sin and all sin has been expunged from the ledger (because it has been forgiven), why will there be anyone in hell? Indeed, what is the substantive difference between forgiveness and no forgiveness?

This quibble notwithstanding, Unspeakable is an excellent read and can be ordered here. Viewpoint recommends it to anyone interested in the phenomenon of modern evil.

George Mikan has died at the age of 80 from complications from diabetes. Perhaps no player in the history of basketball had as much of an impact on the game as he. There is a fine column on his life and his many contributions to basketball here. He was by all accounts an outstanding man.

Ron Brownstein of the LA Times does the math and concludes that there's not much chance that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2006.

Brownstein points out that there are more red states than there are blue states. Republicans hold 44 of the 58 red state senate seats and Democrats hold 28 of 36 blue state seats (six seats are in "swing" states). Moreover, the Dems are defending more seats in 2006 than is the GOP. The Republicans thus have more potential for gains than do the Democrats.

Of course, it might be asked why the Democrats should even worry about recapturing the majority as long as there are Republican senators like John McCain and his merry band who do everything possible to allow the Democrats to control things even when they're in the minority.

At any rate, there's a lot more interesting analysis in Brownstein's article. Incidentally, if he's correct and the Republicans hold on to, or even increase, their lead in the Senate, we expect a flood of editorials in liberal newspapers calling for amending the Constitution to allow for proportional representation in that body just as is done in the House. It rankles many Leftists that even though New York's senators represent more people than do the senators of many western states put together, each state gets two senators in Washington regardless of the population of the state. Thus a minority of small-state citizens can effectively neutralize the will of a large-state majority.

Call it "minority rights", of which senate Democrats should actually approve since they keep invoking the concept in order to justify the filibuster. Of course, the difference is that the right of small states to have the same number of senators as large states is fixed by the Constitution. That document is silent about any alleged rights of a minority political party.

The only surviving terrorist who participated in the Beslan massacre was put on trial yesterday and pleaded not guilty. Unfortunately for him there are witnesses. Pictures and details can be found here.

Amnesty International, which distinguished itself last week with singularly ridiculous allegations against the United States and a positively moronic suggestion that other countries arrest president Bush and his top officials, describes itself as nonpartisan. The following information is taken from an article in the Washington Times:

Ms Khan has evidently never read Solzhenitsyn's One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch nor his monumental Gulag Archipeligo. If she had she would have been far more reluctant to make such a completely asinine comparison of the conditions which existed in the Gulag to those which prevail in the relative country club that is Guantanamo.

Indeed. It only opposes the officials of those governments which have freed more people from tyranny in the last five years than have ever been freed by any nation in the entire history of the world.

Perhaps Amnesty should add to its governing principles not only freeing people from the oppression of political tyrants but also freeing the rest of us from the insufferable oppression of it's own buffoonery.

Christianity Today has an interview with Don Feder who is president of an organization of Jews formed last month which is committed to defending Evangelical Christianity from it's cultural despisers. This is an historically unprecedented undertaking on the part of religious Jews, and their aims and rationale for it are encouraging. At one point in the interview Feder says this:

There's much in this piece that we found fascinating, especially Feder's response to questions about why he and others started the organization as well as his thoughts on Christian proselytism of Jews. Give it a look.

He writes about the "logical impossibility" of "religion without fanaticism." In his essay, Religion & Morality: A Contradiction Explained, he opines that "humanity would be better off without religion," which he characterizes as "social poison," because believers are "susceptible to extreme forms of hatred and violence." He also calls religious believers "moral retards" and says they are "incapable of moral action."

He writes: "American Christians like to think that religious violence is a problem only for other faiths. In the heart of every Christian, though, is a tiny voice preaching self-righteousness, paranoia and hatred. Christians claim that theirs is a faith based on love, but they'll just as soon kill you. For your own good, of course." He then belittles religious believers "whose devotion is moderate," saying they "are only cowardly fanatics," not brave enough to "foment their own kind of holy war."

Who is he? His name is Timothy Shortell and he's just been named to chair the Sociology Department at CUNY's Brooklyn College. There's much more about Shortell and his radical Left politics here.

His claim that religious believers are incapable of moral action is a statement that only someone totally oblivious to cultural and social history could make. It is also philosophically inane. It is, after all, only religious believers who can even speak in moral categories. For the atheist there can be no morality. Shortell refers to himself as an "ubermensch", Nietzsche's term for the man who is beyond good and evil. Having adopted a Nietzschean attitude toward morality, it is disingenuous, if not fatuous, of him to pretend that he's morally superior to Christians or to pass moral judgment upon anyone. If, as we've argued many times, there is no God then there is no morality. There are just things that people do, some of which are preferred by some people over others.

If "moral retards" there be, among them are those who assert that one can have Christian moral principles without the Christian God.

Those readers who are fans of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers may be familiar with a guitarist named Jeff "Skunk" Baxter. If so, you may be surprised at what Mr. Baxter is up to these days.

This is a very interesting article in the Washington Post on embryo adoptions in the United States. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the piece:

It's worth reading the whole column.

Matt Drudge highlights some of the scandalous stuff in a forthcoming book on the Clinton presidency by Washington Post White House correspondent John Harris titled The Survivor. Viewpoint shamelessly repeats here the gossip Drudge has reported:

The context of the following is Sally Quinn's article from 11/98 explaining why the Washington Establishment was appalled by Clinton's behavior during the Lewinksy contretemps.

Not very flattering or pretty. I doubt that this book will be added to the collection at the Clinton library.

Joel Mowbray does the leg work to show that there are moderate Muslims. They're just not in the leadership of Muslim organizations in the United States:

There's much more at the link.