Assessing the kind of president a man would be on the basis of a debate performance is like judging the kind of wife and mother a woman would be on the basis of a beauty contest. Whatever charms she dazzles us with in her swimsuit are really quite irrelevant to the judgment we have to make, and it would only be a callow young man, in thrall to his hormones, who would think otherwise.

The audience will sit on tenterhooks tonight waiting for one or the other speaker to make some trivial "gaffe" and then seize upon it as a reason to vote for the other guy. It's a ludicrous exercise. It debases our democracy and insults the intelligence of its citizens. In their promos for the debate the networks have been replaying what they consider to be the highlights, the salient moments, of past debates. They wax nostalgic over Nixon's heavy beard, Kennedy's attractiveness, Reagan's "there you go again" and his witticism about Mondale's "youth and inexperience," Bentson's ad hominem attack against Quayle, Bush '41's glance at his watch, Gore's oafish sighing and striding across the stage to try to stare down Bush, Jr., and so on.

These are the things people remember from past debates, but with the exception of Gore's buffoonery, perhaps, none of these events tells us what kind of leader a man would be. They may tell us whether the man is likeable or not, but there's no demonstrated connection between likeability and presidential ability. Both Clinton and Reagan were likeable, but you can find plenty of people who would argue that Clinton was a terrible president and probably just as many could be found to argue that Reagan was.

Aside from being an exercise in media auto-eroticism the debates do little more than satisfy the public's desire to turn everything into a spectacle or a game. Who will "win" the debate? It doesn't matter. The winner is whoever is most attractive to the audience. Viewers will not score these debates as if they were really forensics competitions, or as if they were genuine attempts to get at some deep political truth. Indeed, it wouldn't matter if they did because they're not going to vote for the guy who is the technical winner anyway unless he happens coincidentally to be the most articulate, or the best looking, or the most charming, or the wittiest, or the most relaxed guy on the stage.

Ninety five percent of the people watching the debates have already decided for whom they will vote, and they will not be swayed by anything that is said by Kerry or Bush. The other five percent, in an ideal world, should be dissuaded from voting at all. If they haven't decided by now what could they possibly be waiting for? Whatever it is, it can't be substantive because anything of importance that we're going to learn about these two gentlemen has been out there in the public arena for months or years. They can only be waiting for some superficial word or gesture that would rationalize a vote for one of the contenders. If that's the purpose of having these debates, however, to give a handful of people who couldn't care less about their responsibilities as citizens some trivial reason to cast their vote for one or the other candidate, then we're wasting our time.

Even so, I guess I'll watch it. Sometimes even a beauty contest can be interesting.

RLC

Mark Helprin of the Claremont Institute offers some excellent advice on what the U.S. needs to do to prevail in the war on terror. In an extensive analysis of what it will take to win this struggle Helprin claims that:

Later in the piece he says this:

Helprin has much more to say on the matter of what we should be doing in the GWOT and how we should be doing it. His suggestions are certainly thoughtful and merit full consideration. Let's hope the Bush administration is listening.

RLC

The August/September First Things contains much that is excellent, but three articles are particularly good. The first, by Stephen Barr, is entitled here.

Two other pieces are also very much worth your attention. In Capital Punishment: The Case For Justice the inestimable Jay Budzizewski makes a powerful argument for the inherent justice of the death penalty. Some excerpts:

The balance of the article is a fascinating and erudite attempt to answer those questions.

The equally distinguished Robert Bork makes a case for providing marriage with constitutional shelter in The Necessary Amendment. Judge Bork opens his essay with these words:

He makes a good case. Conservatives are in a bit of a bind on this issue because they tend to be loath to tinker with the constitution. On the other hand they value tradition and perhaps no tradition is more highly esteemed than the tradition of marriage. How then can this valuable tradition be protected from complete dissolution without amending the constitution. It appears that legislative remedies are inadequate as they can easily be overturned by a single unsympathetic judge who deems any restriction of the marriage laws to be an unconstitutional infringement on the right of individuals to marry whomever they wish. That leaves conservatives like Bork with only two options: Either acquiesce to the Zeitgeist and watch homosexual marriage become a constitutional entitlement or amend the constitution now to define marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman.

Some ask why we should care if marriage is extended to homosexuals. How, we are asked, are we effected by an expansion of civil rights to include all citizens? A local radio talk show host said the other day that homosexual marriage doesn't affect him in the slightest and the rest of us should keep our religious views to ourselves.

In other words, if we think homosexual marriage is a good thing we should promote it in the public square, but if we think it is a bad thing then we should keep quiet about it. According to this gentleman, the only reasons one could possibly have for thinking that gay marriage is "bad" are religious reasons. Aside from the reply that the only reasons one could have for thinking that anything is bad in the moral sense are religious, one might also point out that whether one is religious or not, if he wishes to preserve heterosexual marriage and the family as we know it, changing our understanding of marriage makes the task several orders of magnitude more difficult.

As Viewpoint has argued before, once we change the definition of marriage from one man and one woman to include two men or two women we no longer have any non-arbitrary basis whatsoever for restricting marriage to just two people, or even to people. Proponents of gay marriage tend to scoff at this concern but to scoff is not to refute. If there are no rational grounds for limiting marriage to two people or to require that the blissful union involve only people it will be a mere matter of time before these conventions are challenged in the courts and when they are they'll be unsustainable. Marriage will come to mean whatever we want it to and at that point it will cease to mean much of anything at all. At that point marriage will be effectively dead.

If we agree with Bork that marriage is worth preserving then it seems that he's also correct that a constitutional amendment is, like some forms of surgery, an unpleasant but absolutely necessary measure to preserve the health of our society.

RLC

David Petraeus on Iraq's progress is an effective counter to the doom and gloom of the Kerryites. Petraeus is the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq and, among many other things, he says this:

There are a couple of thoughts which come to mind when reading this article. First, it seems evident that time is on the side of the coalition. The longer things go, the more trained forces the Iraqis will be able to deploy against the terrorists in Fallujah and elsewhere and the less of a threat they will be. The worst thing we can do at this point is to pull out.

Second, no great thing has ever been accomplished by those who are always looking for reasons to justify their belief that it can't be done. Great deeds require men with vision and a positive spirit. They require leaders with a "can-do" mentality, men who see the goal and have the stamina, strength, and courage to pull the rest of us with them to that objective. Winners are optimists. They are cheerful and confident in the rightness of what they are about.

Senator Kerry offers us nothing but retreat, criticism, defeatism, and the politics of pessimism. According to him everything we're doing is wrong. We are, he asseverates, fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. Such an attitude certainly does not inspire our troops to strive for successful completion of their mission. It only discourages, disheartens, and demoralizes the people who hear him. His gloomy negativism makes him the wrong man to serve as our commander-in-chief in these momentous times.

RLC

Massachussetts Senator Ted Kennedy has repeatedly made the claim that we are becoming less and less safe from terror attacks on our homeland. We keep hearing this assertion from all sorts of people in the opposition party but the question one wishes someone would ask the senator and anyone else who makes this fatuous claim is: How do you know that what you're telling us is, in fact, true? What is the metric by which Senator Kennedy can descry an increasing probability of a terror strike in the U.S.? Is it that he, like so many others in his party, believes that any assertion critical of the President, no matter how incredible or outrageous, is self-validating?

Of course, claims like these are low risk/high yield investments because there's no way they can be falsified. If there is a terror strike Kennedy and his votaries will shriek and howl about how they warned us that it was coming, and if there is no attack, well, they will assure us, it's on its way, and Bush is doing nothing to stop it. Either way, there's no price to pay for their reckless dishonesty. Indeed, it's possible that by continually shouting to the world that we are in a pitiful state of unpreparedness, the senator and his allies may well be emboldening the Islamists to attempt an attack that they might not otherwise have risked.

At any rate, these sorts of unsupported allegations are rhetorical parries directed at morons. The Democrats have decided that they will say, and perhaps do, whatever they think an intellectually uncritical public will accept. They're putting out so many baseless charges about the administration's "secret plans" to do dastardly harm to virtually every constituency the Dems can think of that the Republicans are finding it impossible to refute them all. There are "secret plans" to deprive African-Americans of their right to vote, to draft young people, to strip away social security from old people, just to name a few, and now Kerry reveals to us the administration's "secret plan" to take away subsidies from Wisconsin dairy farmers.

Perhaps we'll soon be hearing that Dick Cheney "secretly" had Halliburton pilots fly the planes into the WTT on 9/11 in order to boost the administration's poll numbers. One wonders in astonishment how Senator Kerry has come to be privy to the inner machinations of the Republican party. How does he uncover all these "secret plans"? Maybe Bush should have made Kerry head of the CIA when George Tenent resigned.

Of course, incessant assurances of "secret plans" to hurt this or that group of people is the politics of paranoia, and it's quite contemptible. The Democrat party, however, has long ago ceased to care how much it debases the American political process or how foul their allegations are against their opponents. For the left there are no moral constraints as most people understand them. For them the highest good is to win and regain power. Anything which achieves this goal is morally justified. The end of securing power warrants the application of whatever means are necessary.

If the voting public rewards their conduct with victory in November it will ensure that these tactics become standard fare in our elections, and in the long term it will have a severely corrosive effect on our democracy. These people don't deserve to win for a number of reasons, but the fact that they find such slimy tactics so agreeable to their character is surely foremost among them.

RLC

In this election season it's not uncommon to hear the ideological labels "conservative" and "liberal" used to describe either an individual or a particular policy position. Since a lot of people may be unclear as to what these terms mean we thought it might be useful to offer a thumbnail sketch on what it is people are referring to when they use the word "conservative". Perhaps later we'll do something similar for the term "liberal".

There are at least four fields or arenas where the labels conservative and liberal are applied: Foreign policy, economics, social policy, and religion. Many people are conservative in some of these and liberal in others. Few people are uniformly one or the other so it behooves us to know, when someone is identified as a conservative, exactly what area of life he is considered to be conservative in.

It also should be pointed out that the ideological spectrum has shifted to the left over the past 100 years so that what is conservative today would in some cases have been considered liberal in the 19th century. Thus, to add to our confusion, people who are considered modern conservatives are sometimes said to be classical liberals. That is, they embrace the values of political and individual liberty advanced by liberals of the 18th and 19th century.

So what does one who calls himself a conservative believe? The foundational principle of conservatism is individual freedom. Conservatives tend to be in favor of small, decentralized government, low taxes and spending, and minimal governmental interference in our economic and personal lives. They believe that excessively high taxes are not only a violation of one's right to keep his own property but are also economically counterproductive.

Conservatives maintain that high taxes are counterproductive for this reason: The more money people have in their pockets the more they will save and spend and both of these activities are good for the economy. The more money people save the more money that is available for businesses and home and automobile buyers to borrow and therefore the lower interest rates will be. The more money people spend, the more money businesses earn and the more jobs that are created. The higher the earnings business enjoys, and the more people who are employed, the more taxes that are paid. Thus lowering taxes actually increases the tax revenues taken in by the government.

High taxes, on the other hand, have the opposite effect. They depress spending and saving and reduce the rate of job creation. This increases poverty and accomplishes nothing good except to allow people who resent the wealthy to feel good about taking their money.

The conservative emphasis on individual freedom and small, unintrusive government underlies their support for giving parents the right to send their children to whichever schools they wish. It also accounts for the conservatives' desire to privatize social security. They want the people who earn the money to have the freedom to decide for themselves how they will provide for their senior years, and they oppose what they see as a government sponsored pyramid scheme that passes the obligation to pay for social security benefits onto future generations.

Conservatives also tend to see human nature as inherently sinful or flawed. They believe that, although society should maximize individual freedom, it needs to balance liberty with the need to maintain a healthy moral environment for families to thrive in. Society needs to erect fences around human appetite to keep people from shedding the tenuous moral leashes which enable us to live together in community. Thus conservatives prize free speech, but believe that some speech, like anything taken too far, or too broadly interpreted, can be harmful to society. Thus the right to freedom of expression needs to be balanced by the right to raise one's children in a psychologically and morally healthy culture.

Conservatives, furthermore, tend to advocate a strong military which should be employed only in defense of our national interest. Many conservatives opposed the peace-keeping missions in Bosnia and Haiti in the nineties because they could see no national interest at stake. Many also opposed the war in Iraq, though not the war in Afghanistan, for the same reason.

This is one of the differences between "paleo" conservatives and "neo" conservatives. "Neo-cons" are much more willing to use American power in defense of those who cannot defend themselves. Paleo-cons would argue that we have no national interest in Sudan, for example, so we should do nothing more than use diplomatic and economic levers to effect change there. Neo-cons would argue that we should not stand by and allow people to be slaughtered if we can prevent it. We should do whatever we can to help those people, and if that includes the application of military force then we should not shrink from such a measure. "Paleos" tend to be militarily isolationist while "neos" tend to be more willing to intervene around the world on behalf of the poor and oppressed.

Conservatives also maintain that human rights need to be grounded in the transcendent, i.e. God. If there is no transcendent source of our rights then there are no rights at all. There are just arbitrary words on paper (See here for a fuller treatment of this topic). For this reason, it is less common to find atheists in conservative ranks than it is to find them among liberals who tend to see human rights as somehow inherent in persons.

Conservatives tend to hold, or at least support, traditional values and religious beliefs and oppose major structural change when undertaken just to accommodate current cultural, social or political fashion. They will, therefore, tend to oppose gay marriage, easy divorce, abortion on demand, and attempts to purge the public square of religious influence (for example, removing God from the pledge of allegiance).

They also tend to be strict constructionists with respect to interpretation of the constitution. The constitution, in their view, is not a document which can be stretched to mean whatever a handful of justices think it should mean. Conservatives believe that the constitution should be interpreted in the light of the intentions of those who wrote it. This leads them to oppose some gun control laws, which they see as an infringement of the second ammendment and to oppose the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which overturned the laws prohibiting abortion in every state in the union and for which they can find no constitutional warrant.

Conservatives are strong believers in personal accountability and consequently tend to favor tough enforcement of laws and serious punishment for serious crime. Their belief in personal responsibility combined with their conviction that government should be decentralized and unobtrusive leads them to be skeptical of the efficacy of many government welfare programs. Their objection to these has been primarily that historically they provide relief to people but require no accountability from the recipient and don't really help people in the long run. Indefinite relief with no accountability or reciprocation nurtures vices which tend to perpetuate the very poverty government wishes to eliminate.

It's probably fair to classify President Bush as a conservative or neo-conservative. He certainly fits this identification with respect to his positions on national defense, the constitution, and religion. He's somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum economically, favoring low taxes but indulging in high government spending, a combination that earns him criticism from both conservatives, who are aghast at the high spending, and liberals, who deplore low tax rates, especially if they apply to the wealthy.

On social issues Bush tends to be conservative in his stance on life issues like abortion and stem cell research, as well as on protecting marriage. He receives a lot of criticism for his immigration policy, but it's not clear that the criticism is ideologically grounded. He favors maximum opportunities for people to come to this country, but so do many conservatives and liberals. Both camps are split on this issue for quite different reasons.

There is doubtless much more that could be said about conservatism, and we invite readers to contribute their thoughts on the topic to our Feedback Forum.

RLC

Joanne Jacobs reports on a Washington Times story that administrators at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are trying to close down a Christian fraternity on the grounds the student group is violating the university's anti-discrimination policy because it excludes non-Christians and self-professed homosexuals from membership, the Times reports.

So, in order to continue to exist Christian organizations must allow atheists to join which would, in effect, cause them to cease to exist. In their desire to avoid discriminating against anyone the august administrators at UNC are demanding that Christian fraternities commit organizational suicide. Will they next be banning organizations that oppose abortion if they don't allow pro-choicers to join? Does UNC insist that Muslim organizations allow Jews to join? Why not insist that the basketball team allow midgets to participate? May men join the women's groups on campus? Did these administrators actually make it to college themselves or are they the product of an affirmative action plan to hire the mentally disadvantaged?

RLC

Profuse apologies to the tens of thousands of readers and potential readers who were denied access to Viewpoint this weekend. Apparently the phone company in North Carolina upon which our server depends chose this weekend to shut down service for some sort of maintenance and we were unable to operate as a result. RLC

NRO's Bruce Bartlett has a critique of Kerry's economic plan. The quick summary is that there isn't one, at least not one that makes any sense. Bartlett writes:

He then analyzes each of these four proposals and concludes that they are little more than political rhetoric. His promise to create jobs, for example, is based on ending outsourcing, but it's not clear that the advantages of this would outweigh the disadvantages:

He closes his column with these words:

The critique of the other three points is helpful, as well. It seems that Kerry's problem is that once he gets past criticizing Bush for everything he can think of he has really nothing to offer in his place. All he gives us are vague platitudes about how he'd do better.

Given the lack of a solid counter to Bush on the economy and other issues, he's decided to attack Bush on the war in Iraq where he hopes that he can still get some traction by heightening fears that Iraq is descending into chaos. This is why he was so quick to criticize Allawi's speech yesterday. Allawi claimed that the situation in Iraq is much better than the media portrays it, and Kerry couldn't let that notion take root in the public mind. Thus, in a rather unseemly act of disrespect for a man who is working hard to bring freedom and democracy to his people in the face of a very good chance of being murdered every day, Kerry, who didn't even show enough courtesy to attend the session to which Allawi spoke, essentially accused him of fabricating his story.

This strikes us as a sign of desperation. Why couldn't Kerry have been gracious enough to at least offer Allawi his support and good wishes and wait until he was back home before he attacked the man's claims? For the Kerry campaign there's nothing good happening in Iraq and anyone who says there is, is lying. Allawi is a genuine hero, even if he doesn't have a wall full of dubious citations, and all Kerry can do is criticize him, challenge his credibility, and embarrass him when he visits this country to thank us for what we've done for the Iraqi people. It's sad and pathetic.

RLC

Someone who repeatedly and willfully says, or endorses, contemptible things is in danger of becoming a contemptible human being. This is the danger John Kerry treads precariously close to in this campaign. Desperate to cut into Bush's lead in the polls the Democrats have decided to resort to the politics of fear and loathing, but in order to make it work they have to shed whatever integrity they had and try hard to sell the public the Big Lie. In the present case, three big lies, one each directed at Blacks, young people, and the elderly - three groups the Democrats cynically believe they can easily bamboozle.

The first lie is that Bush and the Republicans are going to suppress the African-American vote. There are currently ads on television claiming precisely this, but whenever a spokesperson has been asked for the evidence that this allegation is true, he can only answer with irrelevancies about mythical disenfranchised voters in Florida in 2000. No such voters are identified, however, because the claim that there were such is an urban legend. There's not a shred of evidence that the Republicans have done anything in the past, or the present, to prevent minority voters from exercising their right to vote, but facts don't matter to those who seek to create a climate of fear and resentment.

The second deception is that if re-elected the Bush administration is going to reinstitute the draft. It would take an act of Congress to reinstate the draft, and it's hard to imagine any politician pushing for such legislation in the current climate. When spokespersons are asked what they base this allegation upon they cite their belief that we are undermanned in Iraq. This is an example of liberal logic: We need more troops (maybe) so the Republicans must be going to reinstate the draft. They also cite two bills which have been languishing in committee and which call for young people to serve a period of national service, but these have nothing to do with a draft. See here for more on why this charge against Bush is implausible at best.

The third falsehood is that Bush's plan to privatize social security means that he intends to cut off benefits to the elderly. This is a patent and willful misrepresentation on the part of the Democrats of the president's plan. Bush's proposal leaves current recipients alone and the Dems know this, but they try to scare the old folks anyway. It is a despicable, if not unsurprising, tactic. After all, we shouldn't wonder that the campaign of a man who deliberately slandered his fellow veterans in order to advance his own reputation in 1971 would hold truth in such low esteem.

RLC

Hugh Hewitt posts this interview by an Iraqi blogger with an Iraqi Olympic soccer team goalie. You'll recall that some of his teammates distinguished themselves last month by making some anti-American remarks that were notable for their abject stupidity. This fellow has a different take, but you won't see his opinions on the evening news. Here's the interview:

This interview was passed on to Hewitt by a Marine who included his own thoughts and frustrations with the negativism of a media which, in Viewpoint's opinion, seems more and more to be actually hoping for a failure in Iraq. The Marine's e-mail is worth reading.

RLC RLC

Go here to see the trailer and tv ad for the newly released movie Celsius 41.11, the answer to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. RLC

Last night PBS ran part two of its two-part presentation of The Question of God (See here for a discussion of part one). The show is based upon an excellent book of the same title by Armand Nicholi of Harvard. In his book Nicholi compares and contrasts the worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis and shows how their fundamental assumptions about God led these men to much different answers to several of life's most profound questions.

Unfortunately, the PBS presentation was disappointing. The dramatization of his life made much of C.S. Lewis' faith in God but said next to nothing about the arguments he offers in his writings to undergird his belief. A viewer might well have come away from the show with the impression that, for Lewis, faith was exclusively a Kierkegaardian leap, a completely existential exercise in subjectivity, with no rational component.

Not only was a solid explication of Lewis' apologetic lacking in the portrayal of the Oxford don, but the roundtable discussions that interspersed the dramatization of both Freud's and Lewis' lives seemed to reinforce the impression that theism is bereft of any rational justification, that it's purely a matter of Freudian wish-fulfillment. The secularists, as they did last week, seemed to have reason and all the best arguments on their side, and the believers were left sputtering about their feelings and lamenting that they can't explain the difficulties that arise in their belief system, but that one just has to trust and have faith.

One man in the group admitted that he can't reconcile his conception of a good God with the existence of suffering, and Michael Shermer, an atheist, observed that he's just a step from atheism and invited him to try it. The Christian had no reply.

I don't know whether the believers around the table actually had no effective rejoinders or whether their best responses were edited out, but certainly there are plausible answers to the questions that were raised in this segment. To take just one, the program addressed the nature and origin of the moral law. What is it that tells us what's right and where does it come from?

The Christians in the seminar maintained that morality comes from God, but the atheists weren't buying that. They questioned why God is necessary for moral behavior. We can come to the same conclusions about how we ought to behave as the theist, they asserted, so why do we need God? People didn't decide to abolish slavery because God told them it was wrong, rather they abolished slavery because a consensus formed around the proposition that freedom is good and that it should be extended to all men. Human beings can be good whether they believe in God or not. We can live by the Golden Rule even if we're not Christians. And so on.

This is all true enough, which is why the Christians had a hard time responding to it, I suppose, but it's all irrelevant. To see why, consider this hypothetical conversation between a theist and an atheist:

In other words, the problem isn't that the atheist can't adopt the same values as the believer. Of course he can. The problem is that the adoption of those values is completely arbitrary, as are the values themselves. Someone who lived by radically different values would be doing nothing "wrong" because right and wrong cannot exist as anything other than social conventions. I might adopt a value of human kindness because that appeals to me. Someone else might value cruelty because that appeals to him. Which of us does the atheist say is right?

This problem is implicit in the above discussion of slavery. Slavery was ended because people decided that freedom was good and should be extended to all men, but what if they hadn't so decided? Would they have been wrong to continue to enslave Africans if the consensus had been that slavery was acceptable? And why should freedom be extended to all men? Where does that belief come from? Are right and wrong simply a matter of whatever society decides? If so, then if society decides to kill off all its minorities, like the Nazis tried to do, that would not be wrong.

Shermer says that the Golden Rule is a product of evolution, not of God. Very well, but then why should anyone follow it? Why should a product of blind, impersonal forces which shaped us for life in the stone age be in any way binding upon us today? Besides, lots of things are products of evolution, but we don't advocate submitting to them. We have an evolutionary penchant for aggressiveness and violence, for sexual promiscuity, avarice, and selfishness. Why should we suppress these inclinations but adopt the Golden Rule? Isn't that just an arbitrary choice? What criteria or standard are we holding these various evolutionary proclivities up to in order to arrive at the conclusion that one of them is superior to the others?

The point is that unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is no morality. There are just behaviors that people like and dislike. People can agree to adopt a certain set of behaviors and arbitrarily choose to value them, but that doesn't make someone who dissents from the consensus immoral. Nor does it mean that if society had adopted different values they would have been wrong. Moral right and wrong are empty, meaningless concepts unless there is a God.

RLC

President Bush has always taken hits from the left for his management of the post-war in Iraq, but now he's getting more heat from his own party. The neo-cons are rightly upset that several cities in the Sunni triangle have been allowed to fester and become havens for insurgents and terrorists. Word is that foreign fighters, emboldened by our reluctance to crush al Sadr in Najaf, are streaming into Fallujah and Samarra and a couple of other cities in the Sunni stronghold. The question that even Bush's supporters are asking is, why are we allowing this to happen? Our troops say they can take Fallujah in three, maybe four days, if they are given the go-ahead, so why aren't they?

There are two possible answers to this question, one of which is completely unacceptable. If the troops are being restrained by the administration because the suits don't want to give the impression of chaos and large numbers of casualties until after the election, then they don't deserve to be re-elected. If they're playing politics with this war then they've forfeited their right to our support (although it certainly doesn't follow that Kerry has done anything to merit it).

If, however, the administration is following a recommendation made by the commanders in the field then I think we need to be supportive. After all, if the commanders had recommended holding off on an attack and the administration overruled them for political reasons and ordered our troops into Fallujah and elsewhere, that would be as reprehensible as the scenario traced in the preceding paragraph.

If our military thinks it best, for whatever reason, to delay taking down these cities then we should defer to their judgment. Indeed, if that's the reason we're tolerating the current difficult situation I think the administration is to be commended for letting the military make those decisions, especially as the pressure mounts on the White House to do something.

One reason that has been floated as to why there seems to be so little aggressive activity is that our generals have decided that when we go in they want Iraqi troops in the mix. This is undoubtedly a wise long-term decision since it will give the Iraqis a sense of ownership as well as garner more support among the Iraqi residents of the cities we assault. It appears that the next wave of Iraqi trainees will not complete their training until sometime next month at which time Fallujah will come in for serious house-cleaning.

So, we'll see. If an assault does come in October the President's critics will scream about the "timing" of an attack coming so close to the election, but let them. Despite the fact that people are dying in Iraq because of the delay, the long term benefit of waiting until the Iraqis are ready to contribute could be a much more stable Iraq in the future. Let's hope that terrorists and others continue to flood into these cities over the next couple of weeks. It'll make those environments that much more target-rich.

RLC

This week's Dreyfus award, named for Inspector Jacques Clouseau's superior officer in the Pink Panther movies, Charles Dreyfus (Herbert Lom), who was driven mad by jealousy and hatred of the totally inept Clouseau (Peter Sellars) who bumbled his way to sleuthing success and fame. Last week the award went to Robert Kuttner for a column he wrote for the Boston Globe.

This week's prize is awarded jointly to two men, one of whom is clearly unbalanced and the other of whom was driven to professional suicide by his looney attempt to politically assassinate his own Inspector Clouseau (George Bush). This week's winners are William Burkett and Dan Rather. See here for more on Mr. Rather's strange career.

Each winner will receive a Dreyfus doll which is clothed in a white strait-jacket and which twitches uncontrollably.

RLC

After excoriating President Bush in a speech yesterday at NYU Wagner in New York for shortcomings that reside mostly in his own imagination, Senator Kerry, laid out four things the President must do now in Iraq. Presumably these are four steps he would take if he were president and which he offers to the public to help us distinguish how a Kerry presidency would differ from the Bush presidency.

Unfortunately for the Senator it is very difficult to find anything in these four items which is substantively different from what the Bush administration is, and has been, doing. Kerry may differ from Bush in how he would go about accomplishing these measures but the measures themselves have been underway for a long time now.

Here's what Kerry said that Bush needs to do:

I challenge Viewpoint readers to find anything in this list that the Bush administration is not, or has not, worked assiduously to accomplish.

This is Kerry's problem. He's like the unpleasant guy who likes to sit in the stands ripping the coach on the sidelines for whatever failures he might have, but when you ask the critic what he would do differently his response is either pretty much indistinguishable from what the coach is actually doing or it displays a complete lack of understanding of the nature of the game on the field.

Kerry's criticisms of Bush vascillate between these two types. He tries to appeal to those who support fighting terrorists in Iraq by saying he would do what Bush is doing but do it in some vague way differently, or he tries to appeal to the left-wing base of the party by saying he would do quite the opposite of what Bush is doing. In one speech he claims he would fight the war, but more effectively, the next speech he'd bring the troops home as close to immediately as is practical. In one speech he would spend any amount of money to depose Saddam Hussein, in the next speech he laments the cost and says, as he did in New York, that deposing Hussein isn't worth it.

The Senator seems to suffer from multiple personality disorder, and it's become something of a parlor game to try to predict which of his personas will manifest itself next.

RLC

Hugh Hewitt recalls an interview he did with Chuck Colson in which they talked about Colson's argument that the Watergate cover-up is a good example of how men behave when they're trying to defend a lie and that it would be helpful to keep it in mind when considering why the early disciples of Jesus were willing to suffer torture and death rather than recant their belief that Christ had risen from the dead. Here's Hewitt's summary of the interview:

On the subject of cover-ups generally, here's an exchange I had with Chuck Colson from my 1996 series for PBS, Searching For God in America:

Good point, but as Jesus said, even if someone rises from the dead those who don't want to believe, won't. Belief is not a matter of the reason, it's a matter of the will and of the heart.

RLC

Matt Drudge links us to a memo from Michael Moore who tries to buck up the Democratic troops' sagging morale with a message that must make the Kerry camp cringe. Here are some salient excerpts:

This last is an especially interesting admission. What the Democrats should be voting for, according to Moore, is a candidate whose defining moment came when he slandered his fellow veterans with false, unsubstantiated testimony, who committed an act of treason by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, who admitted to committing war crimes, and who consorted with the enemy in Paris while still an officer in the armed forces. This is the Democrat ideal? The guards at Abu Ghraib are going to prison for doing far less than what Kerry did when he was their age and this and this a man Americans should elect as President?

Moore's message is essentially this: Kerry is terrible but Bush is worse, and it's still possible to beat him. Why is Bush worse? Because Iraq is going badly. How would Kerry make it better? He'd pull our troops out and insert Kofi Annan, Jacques Chirac, and the Germans, the very people whose corrupt abuse of sanctions and the oil-for-food program propped Saddam up and made him a threat to his people and to his neighbors. The duplicity and greed of the French, Germans, and Russians and the U.N. was what ultimately made Operation Iraqi Freedom necessary in the first place and Kerry wants to give them access to Iraqi oil wealth. The blood of American troops and Iraqi civilians is on their hands and Kerry wants to reward them with contracts. Moore's message is every bit as inspiring as Kerry's plan is dumb.

RLC

Jim Gerghaty at KerrySpot proffers a fascinating and highly plausible scenario, suggested to him by a friend, which may well unfold should Kerry's poll numbers continue to tank and especially if some whiff of scandal attaches to the Kerry campaign as a result of the CBS memo debacle.

To be sure, Gerghaty doesn't think the scenario is as plausible as Viewpoint does, but in light of how the Democrats dumped incumbent Senator Robert Torreceli deep into the race for a Senate seat in New Jersey, it's not unthinkable that they might do likewise with Kerry, particularly if his feckless campaign threatens to take the whole party down with it.

Here's what Geraghaty, and his friend, say:

RLC

Mark Steyn has stroked a couple of home runs recently. The first is on "Rathergate":

You can read the rest of this very good column here.

The second outstanding piece by Steyn is on Iraq:

Both of these articles are must reading.

RLC

Joanne Jacobs has links to a study listing the top 500 universities in the world. According to the report, nine of the top ten schools are American and seventeen of the top twenty are. All told the United States had 170 universities make the top 500. Click here to see the listing by region and by country.

Jacobs notes that:

Viewpoint will leave the reader to ponder why that may be.

It's not clear, of course, how helpful this type of list is or what it really portends. The schools were evaluated mostly on the basis of their reputations for math/science excellence and some might argue that that's an incomplete measure of the quality of a school.

A number of the comments at Jacobs' site address the question how the U.S. schools can rank so high when our secondary education is so abysmal. Some of the speculation focusses on the high number of foreign-born professors on our university faculties, but we're not too sure that's the answer. Anyone who's ever sat in on lectures given by many of these foreign-born instructors is often outraged that he's paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for classes in which he cannot understand a single word of what's being taught.

There's no way to support this, perhaps, but I suspect that part of the reason our universities are so good is because public education in the U.S. is not really as bad as we're often led to believe. Students who want to get a good education and go on to a major university can usually get an excellent preparation in many of our high schools. Once these students complete their post-secondary education the universities draw from their ranks to supply their own faculties. Our high school test scores are poor overall because an increasing number of students in the last forty years are much less concerned with securing the best education they can and are much more concerned with academically peripheral matters like after-school jobs and extra-curricular activities, or they are handicapped by a substandard home life.

Most public schools and their teachers offer our young people a good to excellent opportunity for learning, but too many students are coming to school unprepared, unwilling or unable to avail themselves of that opportunity. Nevertheless, the students who do take advantage of the education American schools offer are the ones who are making our universities the best in the world.

RLC

I recently finished Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism and highly recommend it to anyone who would enjoy a good overview of the development of atheism, the rise of modernity, and the prospects for unbelief in a post-modern world. McGrath writes as a Christian who is not completely unsympathetic to the atheist critique of religion, having formerly been an atheist himself.

He argues that the appeal of atheism is historically rooted not in hostility toward the notion of God so much as it is in hostility to what people perceived to be a corrupt and illegitimate church. He suggests that throughout its existence the church has been debauched primarily by its lust for political power, and that atheism thrives today in Europe in large part because of the Church's illicit relationship in centuries past with secular governments, particularly in France and England. Atheism has not caught on to the same extent in the United States where the Church has never been seen as particularly tainted by the vices of politics, very likely because in the U.S. it is constitutionally barred from close proximity to the levers of power.

As McGrath recounts the story of the evolution of unbelief in 18th and 19th century Europe the reader is told much that he may not have known. He points out, for instance, that, contrary to conventional opinion, Voltaire and many of his cronies were not really atheists, but were led by their disgust with the church to a rather vague deism. One also learns that the famous story of John Calvin's alleged "refutation" of Copernicus, wherein he declared that the first verse of the 93rd Psalm proves that the earth is fixed and cannot be moved, a story which makes Calvin look like an arrogant buffoon, is completely apocryphal. So, too, is the even more well-known account of Bishop Wilberforce's challenge to Thomas Huxley when, in a public debate on the merits of Darwin's theory of natural selection, the good Bishop is alleged to have inquired of Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey. This story is told and retold with great gusto by atheists to illustrate the utter doltishness of religious clergy, but there is no historical evidence that the incident ever occurred.

One of McGrath's more controversial claims, perhaps, is his assertion that reformation Protestantism essentially opened the door for the emergence of atheism. His argument is that by desacralizing the world, by removing God from the Eucharist, by removing icons from their churches, Protestants turned God into "an absence in the world". Taking pains to avoid idolatry, these believers emphasized God's transcendence and inadvertently made it easier to think of God as removed from their everyday lives, a move which McGrath claims "inevitably encourages belief in a godless world". I suppose a lot of scholarship supports this view, but it strikes me as a little bit like blaming the Wright brothers for 9/11. Protestants did not, as McGrath states, remove any grounds for expecting to encounter the divine directly through nature or in personal experience, they merely insisted that people not confuse the divine with nature, that there is an important distinction to be made between creature and creator.

In any event, McGrath presents us with a fine introduction to many of the seminal figures in 19th century atheism: Ludwig Feurbach, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, William Clifford, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, and explains how their thought advanced the idea in the popular mind that God was an obsolete concept. Marx, for example, was famous for having called religion the opiate of the people, but as atheism hurtled toward the dark night of nihilism in the twentieth century, the true opium, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, "is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged." The true opium of modernity is not Christianity, which tells us that we are accountable for every choice we make in life, but rather, McGrath says, "the belief that there is no God, so that humans are completely free to do precisely as they please."

The second part of the book describes what the author believes is the decline of atheism and the forces which have triggered it. Atheism reached its zenith in the first sixty years of the 20th century during which it became official policy in communist and fascist nations around the globe. The fruits of state atheism were readily observable in the horrors of Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulag. Over one hundred million people were murdered in the name of a consistent naturalistic humanism. The terrible irony in this is that modernity sought to exalt man, to elevate mankind to the status of divinity, but in so doing they dehumanized him and reduced him to the status of a beast, fit to be herded, manipulated, exploited, and slaughtered.

The reason for this is clear. Atheism has nothing upon which to base human dignity, and consequently nothing upon which to base human rights (See Viewpoint here for a fuller treatment of this problem). Man has dignity by virtue of the fact that he is made in the image of God and is loved by God. He has rights only because he belongs to God. Take God away and man is nothing more than a lump of blood, muscle, and bone. There is no inherent dignity or "rights" in that. The holocaust and the Soviet slave labor camps were simply the logical conclusion of the assumption that there is no God.

Another strange irony of the 20th century is that people reflect upon the grisly barbarisms of the totalitarian states which encompassed much of the globe from 1917 to 1989 and, blaming God for the evils these states perpetrated, they despise him for them. How, they ask, could such atrocities happen if God is truly good? (See Viewpoint here and here). Yet surely this is to misplace the blame and to sink into confusion. God is held responsible for the crimes of an ideology that rejects him. Belief in God becomes impossible because the consequences of godlessness are so horrific. People reject God because of the evil they witness in the world, but they worship man who is the primary cause of the evil.

McGrath notes that John Lennon called upon us to imagine a world in which there's no heaven and no religion, but imagining such a world is unnecessary. All one need do is observe the former Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, Cuba, or Nazi Germany to see the sort of world we'd have if Lennon's dream were fulfilled.

The 20th century, McGrath writes, "gave rise to one of the greatest paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that religion caused intolerance and violence."

Now we've entered a new era, the post-modern, which McGrath believes undermines the plausibility of atheism. "God," he observes, "was never argued out of existence; a cultural mood developed which tended to see God as something of an irrelevance." Now a new cultural mood is upon us, one much more congenial to the realm of the subjective, one much more insistent on tolerating diversity of opinions and much more skeptical of all dogmatic truth claims, whether religious or materialistic. The attraction of atheism, he reminds us, "lies in what it denies, not in what it offers as an alternative....What propels people toward atheism is above all a sense of revulsion against the excesses and failures of organized religion. Atheism is ultimately a worldview of fear - a fear, often merited, of what might happen if religious maniacs were to take over the world."

This worldview has been weighed in the balance, however, and found wanting. It has failed to demonstrate through reason that God does not exist. It has also failed as a practical principle because, as we've seen, the adoption by the state of an atheistic ideology leads to degradation and death on historically unprecedented scales. It has also failed metaphysically because the implications of atheism all tend toward nihilism (See Viewpoint here for a more detailed discussion of this claim). Atheism denies any meaning to existence, any ground for moral judgment, any hope for ultimate justice, and any basis for human dignity or human rights. It withholds any rationale for believing in a self, or a hope for life after death. It is a philosophy of despair, and despair is not an attractive option for most people. To the extent that atheism is indeed slouching through its twilight it is these failures which have brought it to this pass.

Nevertheless, McGrath cautions, even though the Church today may not be plagued by the liabilities which stigmatized it in Europe, atheism will still continue to appear, at least superficially, to be a reasonable alternative for those repelled by what they see as the savage moral character of the God of the Old Testament and the merciless doctrine of eternal damnation in the New Testament. One wonders how many people have fallen short of embracing belief in God because they could find no compelling answers to their questions about the nature of God, evil, and our eternal destiny. How many others have been repulsed by the insouciance, arrogance, and insensitivity with which Christians sometimes dispatch their deceased loved ones to everlasting punishment? God must agonize over the boneheadedness of those who sometimes claim to speak with such certainty on his behalf.

McGrath again: "Christianity must provide answers - good answers - to such fair questions and never assume that it can recycle yesterday's answers to today's questions."

The Twilight of Atheism is an enjoyable and worthwhile survey of how atheism came to enjoy preeminence in the twentieth century and how its very success has laid bare its intellectual, ideological, and metaphysical impoverishment. Interested readers may order copies of the book here.

RLC

The media have been reporting that Bush's post-convention bounce has all but disappeared and that the race for the White House is once again a draw. This doesn't seem to be borne out by the polls, however, which continue to move in the President's favor. Gallup has Bush up by fourteen, a CBS/NYT poll just out has Bush up by nine, in Pennsylvania poll averages give Bush a three point lead and one New Jersey poll shows Bush leading by four. In the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Missouri, and Wisconsin Bush is ahead. In those states where Kerry has a lead it appears to be shrinking, even in New York, and it looks like Ralph Nader will be on the ballot in Florida. All of this is very good news for the President.

The commentary that focusses on the closeness of some polls while failing to mention those which are trending in Bush's direction, represents, apparently, an attempt to keep Kerry's marginal support from defecting and to keep his core supporters from losing heart. Another week or so of numbers showing a strong showing for Bush and Kerry will be forced to hit a grand slam in the debates, or Bush will have to show up drunk, to keep the lukewarm from deciding to stay home in November.

If the polls don't turn around for Kerry look for the Democrats to start questioning their reliability. They can't allow voters to think that a Bush victory is inevitable because too many of the people they're counting on to turn out on election day are really not that enthusiastic about their candidate in the first place. They don't need much of a reason to do something else rather than drive to the voting booth so convincing people that the race is close and that their vote is important will be crucial.

RLC

If one only gets his news about Iraq from the MSM they are likely to suspect that "Bush's war" is a complete disaster, that our efforts there are utter failures, and that the whole country is teetering on the brink of civil war. Media pundits are genetically disposed to see only the dark side of every moon, but their negativism and pessimism are misleading the American people. The following e-mail, posted at Captain's Quarters, is an antidote to the unfortunate predilections of the media Chicken Littles. It's from a Marine who is there:

This guy makes a good point. When we listen to reports from Iraq we have to remember that the reporters and the networks through whom the reports are transmitted have two agendas. One is to report the news, the other is to get Bush out of the White House. The latter is not advanced by reporting positive news about the reconstruction of Iraq. It's probably a good rule to keep in mind that whatever we hear about Iraq, it's never as bad as the reports make it seem.

RLC

Some of Viewpoint's readers will be familiar with the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky who, since the 1960s has been one of the foremost critics of almost anything the United States does at home or abroad. Chomsky has been very influential among college students. His calm demeanor and unquestioned intellectual abilities have caused many to find his arguments seductive.

Now comes a collection of critiques of those arguments titled The Noam Chomsky Reader and edited by former left-wing radicals Peter Collier and David Horowitz. A review of the book can be found at Front Page Mag. Anyone who has ever been exposed to Chomsky's large body of work and either been persuaded by it or had the sense that something was wrong with it but couldn't quite put their finger on what it was, will find these essays useful.

RLC

Our local PBS affiliate on Wednesday night aired the first of a two part program called The Question of God. Based on the book of the same title by Harvard professor Armand Nicholi, the show traces the spiritual development and ideas of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Last night's segment, which was two hours long, was interesting and instructive.

The narrative of the lives of these two men was punctuated by panel discussions led by Nicholi himself on some of the religious and philosophical issues raised by the biographies. The panel was an eclectic group consisting of two atheists, two new-age types, two traditional Christians, and a film-maker who looked like he was spending the evening wondering why he was invited.

Unfortunately, the atheists came across as having the better arguments throughout the show. Whether this was because of the way the program was edited or because the Christians simply had no compelling reply to the objections that were raised to their faith, I don't know. Even so, it seemed to me that the arguments of the atheists were vulnerable, but they were usually allowed to stand as the last word.

I also felt that the new-agers were given entirely too much face time. Their position, articulated with noticeable condescension, seemed to be that the truth of any religious belief is ascertained by one's intuitions and that whatever speaks with greatest forcefulness to your heart is true for you, and that's the end of the matter. Any talk of reason, logic and evidence is pretty much irrelevant.

Now there might be a grain of truth to this, but it's nonetheless a sure-fire discussion stopper. If God exists is a true claim simply because the idea of God has purchase upon my intuitive faculties, then how does one argue or discuss a contrary position? One can only nod politely that that's an all-well-and-good view for the person who holds it and then turn his attention to those at the table for whom the claim that God exists is objectively true or false and with whom one can have a conversation.

Despite these quibbles the show is worth watching, and even if you missed part one, you can still catch the second segment at 9:00 P.M. next Wednesday, September 22nd.

RLC

Latest polls at Real Clear Politics show Bush's lead widening from one point to three points in Pennsylvania and going from three points down in New Jersey to four points up. These results are within the margin of error and they reflect the results of only a single poll, not an average, but they're not good news for Kerry. If Bush takes Pennsylvania and New Jersey, two states won by Gore in 2000, Kerry's toast. In states where polls show him ahead, Bush's electoral vote count has also risen from 269 to 279. He needs 270 to win.

The bad news for Bush is that the bounce he enjoyed coming out of his convention seems to be dissipating and his lead over Kerry in several battleground states as well as nationwide is shrinking. Whether the gap will continue to close remains to be seen.

RLC

Viewpoint is considering initiating an Inspector Dreyfus award named for the character in the Pink Panther movies who went insane because his hated subordinate, the incompetent Inspector Clouseau (played by Peter Sellars), went from one completely serendipitous success to another. As Clouseau's accidental successes took an increasing toll on Dreyfus' sanity he first developed severe facial ticks, then he contrived plans to assassinate Clouseau, and finally he went completely over the edge and into a strait-jacket.

The Democrats seem to be playing Dreyfus to Bush's Clouseau (at least they regard Bush much the same as Dreyfus regarded the Peter Sellars character), and like Dreyfus they have been driven to varying degrees of madness.

There will be no shortage of candidates for the award, of course, and we may have to make daily presentations to accomodate the large number of deserving entrants. We'll see. In the meantime, Robert Kuttner of the Boston Globe makes a strong bid to receive today's honor. Here's an excerpt from his current column:

Okay. I know it's pretty tame compared to, say, Al Gore's stuff, but the award is not retroactive. It starts today. Gore still has plenty of time before the election to give another unhinged speech and stake his claim to the Dreyfus trophy. Readers should feel free to submit their own nominations through our Feedback section.

RLC

Mohammed at Iraq the Model gives us a good idea of the level of support for the American effort among Iraqis and has some inside scuttlebutt on what's going on in Fallujah and Talla'far as well. He also says this:

Meanwhile, Arthur Chrenkoff's 10th edition of Good News From Iraq is available here. It's stuff you'll never hear from Dan, Peter, and Tom, much less the New York Times.

RLC

If you're 18 and a U.S. citizen but are not registered, time is running out. In Pennsylvania you must be registered by October 4th. The race is going to be very close in PA and every vote will matter. Pennsylvania residents can download a registration form by going here and following the link. This will only work, however, for those who would vote for President Bush in November. If you are a Kerry supporter the link is unfortunately down and probably will be until October 5th.

RLC

The next time you hear someone talk about celebrity or sports "heroes" tell them about Yanis Kanidis, a 74 year old phys.ed. teacher in Beslan, Russia. Here's his story:

Men like Yanis Kanidis make the cultural icons of our day seem small indeed.

RLC

Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online has some pithy remarks about the 60 Minutes scandal and the sudden implosion of Dan Rather's career. Here's a paragraph or so:

Good stuff. As a stunned Dan Rather gazes at his credibility and his career swirling down the drain one wonders who's next? Will we ever know who actually composed the frauds? Whoever it was could be looking at serious criminal charges, since forging military documents is a felony. No doubt there is somewhere a political hack who will be sleeping fitfully tonight. Defaming the president is not as much fun, nor as easy, as these folks apparently thought it would be.

RLC

Now that CBS's attempts to salvage its credibility seem to have arrived at an ignominious denouement the libs are going to have to try to rescue something from this burning building. Here's Viewpoint's prediction:

It won't be long until we start hearing something like this clap-trap from otherwise intelligent people. Other than blaming the whole scam on the omnipotent and diabolical Karl Rove, it's really the only tactic remaining to the left, unless it intends to leave Rather, who's been a good soldier over the years, twisting despondently in the wind.

You heard it here first.

RLC

This piece by Ali at Iraq The Model should be read by everyone who thinks that all we're accomplishing by our presence in Iraq is spawning more terrorists. He starts off by discussing his theory as to why suicide bombings in Iraq decline while al Sadr is fighting and pick up when he's not, and then predicts that attacks against Americans in Iraq will increase as we get closer to our election but that attacks against American civilians will diminish as the elections approach. His reason is that mounting losses of troops will help Kerry, but terrorist attacks against civilians will help Bush. The insurgents and their allies want Kerry to win and so will not do anything that might unite the nation behind Bush.

Then in his last three paragraphs Ali makes a poignant plea in less than perfect English for America to remain steadfast and reminds us of what is at stake:

God help us if we let them down.

RLC

This essay at Power Line on the fallout from the apparent attempt by CBS to discredit President Bush by proffering amateurish forgeries as legitimate documents indicting his National Guard service is worth reproducing here in full:

CBS wanted so desperately for those documents to be genuine that they suppressed their doubts and ran with them. Now it has all blown up in their faces, torn away the pretense of journalistic "standards", and has ruined reputations that took decades to build. It's ironic that President Nixon's nemesis, Dan Rather, is perhaps the biggest casualty. The irony resides in the fact that Nixon was disgraced mostly because he would not come clean to the American public over Watergate. In his hubris he stone-walled investigations until finally his credibility lay in tatters on the Oval Office floor, cut to ribbons by, among others, Dan Rather. Now Mr. Rather, no stranger to hubris himself, seems to have stumbled into the same deadly pit and may, perhaps, suffer a similar fate. Pride indeed goeth before a fall.

RLC

Nina Shea adds some perspective to the American response to the Dharfur genocide in a fine piece at National Review Online. Here is a portion of her essay:

The entire article bears careful reading. As I read through it one question that came to mind was, Where are all the millions of protestors who were so concerned about the welfare of Iraqis prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom? Why are they not overflowing the streets of European and American cities demanding an immediate end to the genocide? Is it because the victims are black? Is it because they're Christians? Or is it because the left doesn't really care about oppressed people at all unless they can be used as a cudgel to beat the United States over the head with? Take your pick.

Then a second question occured to me as I reflected upon this awful situation. If it should require that we insert military forces into Sudan to bring about an end to the slaughter being perpetrated by the Islamic government in Khartoum, would the left object? Or would they argue, like they did before, during, and since OIF, that we have no business jeopardizing the lives of innocent civilians in order to save them from being murdered by their oppressors? Elie Wiesel, in giving his acceptance speech for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, said this:

If only the New York Times and the Washington Post read Wiesel.

A final question: Will Bush get credit for this historic demarche from his leftist critics in the MSM? The answer here is easy: Probably not. The liberal elite media is following their marching orders from the DNC and has become riveted, like a cat fixated on a moth fluttering around the ceiling, on Bush's National Guard service of thirty three years ago. They can't allow themselves to be distracted by the extraordinary events taking place in the world today as long as there's a chance that they'll be able to discredit Bush with his supposed National Guard derelictions. These are the sort of people Christ referred to when he spoke of straining out gnats while swallowing camels.

Confronted with a man who has accomplished the extraordinary feat of liberating 50 million people while simultaneously waging a global war on terror and pulling us through an inherited recession that was pushed even deeper by the devastating blows of 9/11, the media carps not about his current deficiencies, whatever they may be, but instead they obsess over whether he showed up for every one of his weekend Guard meetings more than three decades ago. These are not serious people, some of them may even be teetering on the brink of psychological pathology, but in any event they are certainly not the sort we want advising us on matters of great moment in the years ahead.

RLC

Jean Paul Sartre writes in Existentialism is a Humanism that "Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position." For Sartre and like-minded thinkers existentialism is necessarily atheistic and there is much that follows from this, not the least of which is the conclusion that man is forlorn, abandoned, alone in a world which is incompatible with his deepest yearnings and needs. In a word, the world is absurd and life is meaningless. I've discussed this consequence in several places on Viewpoint (see, for instance, In the Absence of God and Grounding Human Rights).

There is another strand of existentialist thinking, however, which goes back to Kierkegaard, Pascal, even to Augustine, emerging out of the Christian worldview of these thinkers.

Like the atheistic existentialism of Nietzsche, Sartre, and others, it places a strong emphasis on man's subjectivity, that is upon his feelings, intuitions, emotions, and experience. Christian existentialism, no less than the atheistic variety, elevates the heart over the head, the realm of interior experience over the coldly rational, objective, and logical. Like his atheistic colleagues the Christian existentialist considers the preeminence of the subjective to be the essential characteristic of an existential approach to life, but in contrast to his skeptical friends he couples subjectivity to a belief in God. Indeed, belief in God is seen as the paramount example of the triumph of the subjective over the dehumanization of the purely rational approach to life and the world.

In his book The Universe Next Door James Sire discusses some ways in which Christians who tend toward the existential in their thinking differ from Christians who do not. For Sire, Christian existentialism focuses on the personal and the relational. The non-existential is more impersonal and more oriented toward the rational. Sire applies this distinction to a number of aspects of Christian belief and compares the two approaches. Using Sire's work as a springboard but not confining ourselves to it, let's consider the following examples of the difference between what Sire calls depersonalized Christianity and personalized, or existential, Christianity as applied to various doctrines of faith and practice:

Sin: The depersonalized view sees sin as a breaking of a rule, like one of the commandments, whereas in the personalized, or existential view, sin is seen as a betrayal of a relationship. Sin is anything which harms, or would harm, oneself or another, and, as such, it damages and subverts our relationships to our fellow men and certainly to God, who requires of us that we love each other.

Repentance: The depersonalized view sees repentance as an admission of guilt, whereas the personalized approach sees it as a deep sorrow or anguish over our unfaithfulness to God or our betrayal of our obligation to love our fellow man.

Forgiveness: In the depersonalized view one is forgiven in much the same way that one is absolved of a traffic ticket, i.e. by simply paying the fine. One breaks the rule, is fined, and that's the end of it. In the existential view forgiveness is a restoration of a ruptured relationship that can only be accomplished with tears and embraces, whether literal or metaphorical.

Faith: For the non-existential Christian, faith is merely giving one's assent to a set of propositions, as in the recitation of the Apostle's Creed. For the existential Christian, however, faith is committing oneself to a person in a love-relationship. The difference between the two views is like the difference between signing a contract and falling in love. It's living moment by moment with the deep angst that comes from knowing that what one loves could be lost, that what one believes can never be made sure by reason, it can only be certified by the heart.

Christian Life: In the non-existential approach the Christian life is a matter of observing certain rules of behavior. For the Christian existentialist it is living for, and with, another person (i.e. God). It is immersing oneself in the other to the extent that the other is the entire purpose and focus of one's being. The difference between the two views is like the difference between being in a business partnership and being involved in a passionate romance.

The Authority of the Bible: In the existential approach the meaning of Scripture is determined by how it speaks to the individual reader. The significance of the text is different for different people, and all meanings or interpretations are equally valid because they're all subjectively discerned. In a non-existential approach to the Bible, the text is seen to have an objective meaning, or meanings, quite apart from any subjective impression it makes on the reader. In other words, the meaning of the text is to be discovered through proper hermeneutics and not simply by consulting our feelings and intuitions.

Many Christians are wary of existentialism because of the overt atheism of its twentieth century practitioners and because of what they see as a rather "squishy" view of Biblical interpretation, but there is much else about this view of life which resonates with the profound human desire for union with God. Augustine wrote that: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee." Christian existentialism is a response to this deep yearning of the heart for a relationship with the God who has created us for himself.

RLC

The New York Times has a stable of writers who seem to be spiralling into dementia in their desperation to unseat George Bush. Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristoff, and Frank Rich have all written columns laced with paranoia and vituperation in recent weeks, but Maureen Dowd can get just as nuts as any of them. Ms. Dowd's motto is never pass up an opportunity to insult someone. Unfortunately, her insults often make her look profoundly dumb. Consider this statement from today's column:

Never mind the drive-by cheap shot about missing critical opportunities to vanquish al Qaeda (What opportunities did they miss? How does Dowd know they missed them? Does she have access to secret information?); never mind the unsubstantiated allegation that had we not been involved in Iraq our ports would be safer (In what way would they be safer? Are we spending less money on protecting our ports than we would have had we not gone into Iraq? How does Dowd know that deposing Saddam has not made this country safer?); the part of this paragraph that makes her look positively buffoonish is her implication that had we not invaded Iraq we could have prevented the Beslan tragedy.

If Ms. Dowd ever deigns to descend from her Olympian vantage at the Times to mingle with us mortals perhaps she'll explain for the benefit of those of us not blessed with her divine insight how, exactly, our invasion of Iraq diverted resources that would have saved the Beslan children. Is she suggesting that we would have had Marines stationed outside the Russian school when the terrorists arrived had they not been stationed in Iraq instead? Does she have compelling information that had we never gone to Iraq our spies would've penetrated Chechen terrorist cells? Does Ms. Dowd feel herself to be under no obligation to ground her claims in something approximating reality?

So that our readers know, Viewpoint has received word just this evening that in her next column Ms. Dowd will allege that had George Bush not invaded Iraq, Hurricane Ivan would not now be threatening Florida and scientists would have discovered a cure for cancer. Reason enough to vote him out of office, I say.

RLC

The Belmont Club has an excellent analysis of CBS tactics regarding the apparent duping they suffered with allegedly fraudulent documents purporting to prove that George Bush had disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard. Both the analysis and the comment thread which follows is fascinating.

For other takes on the unravelling scandal at CBS see the comparison of the questionable memo and a computer generated copy overlay at Little Green Footballs, and by all means don't miss the column by Mark Steyn, one of the funniest columnists in the business. Here's a taste:

RLC

On this somber day of remembrance Viewpoint suggests another must-read essay from the pen of Victor David Hanson. Every paragraph is a gem. Here's a sampling from The Whole World is Watching:

As fighters against armed Americans and Brits the flower of Islamic manhood is risible, succeeding only to the extent that they are willing to strap bombs to their sons and daughters and send them to grisly deaths. How can Muslims be anything but profoundly ashamed of what is being done in their name and in the name of Allah? How can they be anything but humiliated that their "warriors" are such savages? How many 9/11s, Balis, Madrids, and Beslans must the world endure before it demands that Muslims give up their dream of revanchism, world domination, and world-wide Islam or suffer the consequence of becoming complete and utter pariahs among civilized nations?

RLC

God bless viewpoint, for it offers me an opportunity to vent an occasional rant now and then and perhaps I'll live a little longer as a result of it.

I have had the most difficult time understanding the importance of the issue of a trade deficit and finally I discovered exactly why it's a problem for every American today and even for future generations.

This revelation is so profound, so subtly insidious, that I feel compelled to share it on viewpoint. It's actually very simple.

We incur debt to foreigners which are excesses of imports over exports. The dollars earned by foreign businessmen usually are deposited in foreign commercial banks which deposit them in their central banks, which invest them directly in U.S. Treasury obligations or other claims and assets in the U.S.

It appears, on the surface, that you are not a part of this mechanism simply because you go to Wal-Mart and purchase some goods made in China at dirt-cheap prices but it is important to realize that the money you spend on those products go to Hong Kong and come right back with many other dollars for the purchase of U.S. Treasury bills, notes, or bonds. All of these are certificates of debt that you or your children are obligated to meet. In other words, the U.S. government is enabling you to participate in this mechanism and the majority of Americans don't have a clue of the consequences of their bargain purchases. In fact, those shrewd purchases only contribute to the hidden debt liabilities, via our government, that are adding to the hundreds of billions of dollars already owed!

To add to the problem, every good or service purchased from outside of the U.S. is one less item that needs to be manufactured here. This pressures American companies until they eventually lay off their employees or go out of business altogether.

Now here's the interesting part. Instead of allowing free markets to determine the value of the Chinese currency, China has pegged its currency value at approximately 8 of their currency units to 1 U.S. dollar. The effect of this is that as the U.S. dollar looses value against other world currencies which would make imports less attractive and our exports more attractive, the Chinese currency depreciates proportionally so their exports are always competitively priced when compared to American products. This guarantees that the trade deficit (and our debt obligation) will continue to widen until something dramatic occurs. They don't say "Buy American" for nothing!

We hear that all of this is because we, as a nation, must subscribe to the concept of "Free and Fair Trade". Well what's fair about China artificially manipulating their currency at our expense? Furthermore, what's fair about competition with a country that has zero labor laws? I read a news article about an investor who visited a Chinese company where they manufacture tennis rackets. It was evening when they walked into the manufacturing facility and the company owners had to turn on the lights of the facility which enabled the investor to see hundreds of people, previously working in the dark, stringing tennis rackets. Is it fair for America to compete on terms like that?

What's fair about trying to compete against companies in China that have no environmental restrictions against pollution and can operate much more economically than companies in the U.S. that must meet ecological standards set and enforced by our government?

The bottom line is that there is nothing fair about it and the only thing that's free is the free ride China is getting at the expense of Americans.

Just recently, groups have petitioned the Bush administration to bring a case before the World Trade Organization because the currency of China is generally considered to be undervalued by perhaps as much as 40%. This makes Chinese goods extremely competitive compared to U.S. goods. But the Bush administration quickly rejected the petition, declaring that it would not "retreat into economic isolationism" by bringing a case that could impose economic sanctions on Chinese goods.

This is totally unacceptable because America is being gutted at the speed of light yet the Bush administration is doing nothing whatsoever to impact the logical, disastrous conclusion. Sanctions are precisely the remedy for what is happening. Otherwise, nothing will change until an equilibrium is reached. The standard of living of every American is going to be reduced until it is comparable to the standard of living of people in China, and India, and Mexico. Once that happens, the trade deficit will be zero because foreign goods will no longer be attractively priced. Americans will be making the same products, in the dark, for perhaps $5 per hour. Just remember that during your next trip to Wal-Mart.

WSC

Digital Freedom Network has a piece by Luke Thomas on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Specifically Thomas addresses how the signatory nations bridged some deep philosophical divides in order to arrive at the finished document, but in the course of the discussion he mentions something that Viewpoint has questioned in the past and wishes to do so in this instance as well. First some groundwork:

The preamble to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states:

And Article 1 of the UDHR reads:

Thomas provides a gloss on these passages:

He then goes on to quote a philosopher named Jack Donnelly:

As Donnelly sees it, Thomas explains, human rights arise from human action. Donnelly categorically denies that they originate from a deity, society, or nature. Instead, "human rights represent a social choice of a particular moral vision of human potentiality." Donnelly argues that man has profound potential for good towards others and for themselves, a "moral vision" or "potentiality" as he describes it. That potentiality can swing in a number of directions, but under the guidelines of an appropriate moral vision towards dignity and worth, it can largely be used for good. Thus, "human rights are a social practice that aims to realize a particular vision of human dignity and potential by institutionalizing basic rights."

Now here's the problem. When one cuts through the verbal undergrowth it turns out that the ascription of human rights to persons is purely arbitrary. It represents a mere "social choice" based upon the signatories' particular "moral vision" which is, of course, different for different people. Human rights turn out to be nothing more than words on paper. They're not grounded in anything more solid than the subjective preference of the authors of those words. If the writers had other preferences they would've come up with a different set of human "rights", or none at all.

In other words, if we want to live a life which has some dignity, we have to enjoy certain rights, but there's no right, nor can there be, to dignity itself. The dignity of the individual is an arbitrary value in the hands of the state. There's no reason, beyond the preference of those who hold power, why a state should care about the dignity of its citizens. Thus the rights which make dignity possible are contingent upon the whim of the state which grants them.

In this view, human rights can be nothing more than mere conventions. Contrary to the UDHR preamble, they don't really inhere in persons at all. They are not inalienable. If the government is the source of our rights then government can easily strip us of them, and should they do so, they would be doing nothing for which they could be reproached. The state is under no obligation to provide for the dignity of its citizens, and is therefore under no obligation to grant "human rights".

This is a considerably different picture of rights than that envisioned by the Founding Fathers, and the reason for the difference is not hard to spot. Donnelly may deny that rights originate from a deity, but the Fathers, following John Locke and others, were convinced otherwise. They realized that unless human rights and human dignity were grounded in something beyond human predilections, unless they had roots in the firm soil of transcendence, they were simply empty concepts hanging on sky hooks anchored in nothing.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government, which exerted such powerful influence upon the Founding Fathers almost a century after its publication, wrote this:

Locke is telling us that we have dignity only because we are made by the Creator of the universe, in His image. We are loved by Him and belong to Him. That is what gives us value. We have a right not to be harmed because no one has the right to harm what belongs to God, and they do so at their eternal peril.

Thomas Jefferson incorporates this same understanding of the source of our rights into the Declaration of Independence where he writes that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If Donnelly is right then Locke and Jefferson are wrong, and God is not the basis for our rights nor our dignity. But if that is true, then human dignity and human rights are mere illusions, empty conceits, hollow words that we comfort ourselves with to mask the truth that we are just ephemeral gobs of mud and blood, with no significance or value, in a vast, empty universe that laughs at our pretensions to "rights" and "dignity".

If Donnelly is correct then the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights is like a bunch of children saying "Let's play make-believe. Let's pretend that we have rights." Everything goes well with this make-believe fantasy until someone says that he doesn't want to play the game any more and then the fantasy collapses.

The attempt to ground human rights in something other than the transcendent is doomed to failure and frustration, and any rights not so grounded are chimerical. They have no reality, no substance. They are mirages of oases in the moral desert that is the history of human oppression.

RLC

The CBS National Guard document scandal has been all over the blogosphere for the last twenty four hours. The question is no longer whether the documents are fraudulent, that seems to be highly probable, the question everyone is speculating about now is how did these counterfeits get into the hands of 60 Minutes and who's behind the scam.

There are other interesting questions as well, like will there be any accountability, will this shorten Dan Rather's career, and so on.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of this episode, however, is that it will make it exceedingly difficult to persuade the American voters of the truth of any charge against George Bush. CBS and Rather are being made into laughingstocks over this and few elements of the major media are going to risk a similar fate trying to shore up Kerry's sagging campaign by running allegations based on anything less than absolutely certain evidence.

It is astonishing that, according to The American Spectator's Prowler, the DNC first came into possession of these documents and had suspicions about their authenticity, but passed them on to the Kerry campaign anyway which then forwarded them to CBS. In other words, they were willing to tarnish Bush with charges which they believed may not have been true. Nice people. They're getting what they deserve.

As a side note: Anyone who has read Bernie Goldberg's book Bias which exposes the inner workings of CBS News and Dan Rather's pomposity will think that any embarrassment which attaches to Rather over this will also be richly deserved.

This episode is turning out to be a black eye, or worse, for everyone involved except the man whom the punch was intended for. As Viewpoint has noted before, watching this campaign is like watching the 1976 Peter Sellars film Return of the Pink Panther with Bush's opponents in the role of Inspector Dreyfuss.

For more on the controversy go here, here, and especially AllahPundit here.

RLC

Never let it be said that the Democrats are not the party of optimism. The latest incantation of the Kerry campaign is that George W. Bush's middle initial stands for "wrong". Presumably the Dems are hoping that if they hear it often enough their base will associate the word "wrong" with George Bush. Such a hope is a sign of unbounded optimism. Recall that these are the same voters who found the Florida ballots beyond their ken and the same people so detached and apathetic about politics that a pack of cigarettes and a ride to the polls were sufficient inducement to get them to pull the lever for Al Gore. It's not at all evident that these folk are even aware that the word "wrong" has a "w" in it, much less that they would ever associate the word with George Bush's name.

RLC

There've been a lot of reports of fighting in Iraq but not much detail. The Strategy Page is a good place to go to find it. Their report for September 9th makes for interesting reading. Here's an excerpt:

The site has updates daily. Good stuff.

RLC

CBS's 60 Minutes presented documents the other night purporting to be memos written by George Bush's commanding officer in the National Guard and suggesting that, among other things, Bush had disobeyed direct orders. Now it turns out that the consensus among documentarians is that these particular documents are fraudulent. CBS is sticking to their story, however, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Meanwhile, readers who are interested in the story and curious as to how the documents were determined to be fraudulent can go here and here.

RLC

Byron York has what should be the last word on Bush's National Guard service but doubtless won't be. You can read his column here. It's very informative.

Viewpoint would add to this (thereby guaranteeing that York's is not the last word)that there are several salient differences between Bush's service and Kerry's. The temptation, of course, is to forgive both men the misjudgments of their youth, but the Kerry campaign won't allow it. They insist on presenting Senator Kerry's war record as his chief qualification for the presidency, and, at the same time, they insist on attacking President Bush for alleged shortcomings in his role as a National Guard aviator.

Given that the Kerry campaign insists on the comparison, let's make it. George Bush has often said that he did things as a young man for which he's not proud and he has never claimed that the voters should elect him on the basis of his record in the National Guard.

Kerry has acknowledged doing things as a young soldier for which he should be ashamed but has repeatedly said that he's nevertheless proud of his service and advances that service as the chief reason why America should elect him president.

Given the difference in the attitudes of both men toward their checkered records it seems to us that basing one's vote for or against Kerry on his record is warranted, whereas it's not warranted in the case of Bush. Bush doesn't commend himself to us on the basis of his service, Kerry does. In Bush's case the temptation to forgive the distant past is appropriately yielded to. Kerry's position, however,is that the distant past should not be forgotten, so in his case we shouldn't forget it.

Moreover, Bush has publically acknowledged that Kerry's months in a combat zone deserve his respect and he grants it. For his part, Kerry has refused to return Bush's graciousness and has chosen instead to denigrate the President's service as a jet fighter pilot, an accomplishment that few men are capable of achieving, and which itself deserves respect.

Additionally, no member of Bush's campaign that I'm aware of has criticized Kerry for his tenure in Vietnam, yet the Democrats take every opportunity to criticize Bush for delinquencies, both real and imagined, in the early seventies.

Finally, Bush never turned on his comrades like Kerry did in 1971, while still an officer. Bush never accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes nor did he give aid and comfort to the enemy. What Kerry did is arguably treasonous, and it's a wonder that he's not been prosecuted for it.

If the Democrats want to use Bush's service record as a means to discredit him among the voters they may succeed, given the nature of the voting public, but the potential cost to Kerry seems quite high. The more they nitpick about Bush's spotty attendance at meetings the more they invite scrutiny of Kerry's admitted war crimes. Sean Hannity said the other day that Kerry's record of admitted offenses makes him unfit to be a guard at the Abu Ghraib prison much less commander-in-chief. He's suffered enough from the indignant Swiftvets over his record, he certainly doesn't need the Republican National Committee jumping on him, too.

RLC

Hugh Hewitt has posted a memo from Ed Gillespie the chairman of the RNC warning of an intense campaign to villify and personally destroy the president. The left has consistently demonstrated that it does not consider itself to be constrained by the normal standards of decency and is willing to say anything, no matter how despicable, in order to destroy its opponents. Gillespie's memo reminds us of the depths to which these people have already sunk:

These kinds of personal, ad hominem attacks are a symptom of souls wallowing in bitterness, spite, envy, and hatred, and are beneath contempt. How any decent person can join with those for whom such cruel and hurtful words come so easily, and support a candidate who condones them, is beyond comprehension.

RLC

Senator Kerry seems determined to enhance his reputation as a man perfectly comfortable advancing two completely contradictory opinions almost simultaneously. Hugh Hewitt has this:

No wonder people are saying that before Kerry takes on Bush in debate he ought to settle the debate with himself.

RLC

Ryan Sager at Miscellaneous Objections takes Bush to task for not pushing school choice harder and for not enforcing No Child Left Behind. Well, okay.

Viewpoint realizes that it's flirting with conservative heresy here, but having spent parts, or all, of five decades teaching in a public school we're unconvinced that any effort to reform schools is going to work until there is a fundamental transformation of the culture.

Here's what happens. The only way to assess how well a school is doing is to test students. In Pennsylvania they devised a battery of standards that students at various grade levels are tested upon. The standards themselves are problematic, but that's a topic for a different post. The problem the state faces is this. How difficult should they make the test? If they make it rigorous, most suburban students will do okay, but urban students will struggle.

This is just a sociological fact of life, but it would be politically untenable to have it splashed across newspapers every year. Poor performance in minority communities would elicit complaints of racist tests and racists in the government, and so on. Bureaucrats react to the charge of racism as if it were political HIV. So what will they do? Eventually the difficulty of the test will be diluted until anyone with an IQ in double digits can pass it. At this point it'll become a joke and a complete waste of time for the suburban kids. It won't measure much of anything, educational reform will suffer another setback, and all the pundits will be wondering what went wrong.

We've said it before but it bears repeating: The quality of education tracks the quality of family life in a community. A school filled with kids from disadvantaged and/or dysfunctional families will find it very difficult to succeed with those youngsters no matter how many reform measures the bureaucrats toss at them. Schools filled with kids from affluent and/or well-adjusted and healthy homes, on the other hand, will do well almost without trying. It's another sociological fact of life, and the sooner it becomes acknowledged that the family is the key to educational success, the sooner we'll be able to direct our energies away from band-aid nostrums and devote our energies to the radical surgery on our culture that's needed to restore health and strength to our families.

RLC

So Dick Cheney opines that the United States would be less safe from terorism under Kerry/Edwards than under Bush/Cheney, and Senator Edwards takes major umbrage:

This reaction seems a bit ridiculous in light of the constant iterations of the Democratic mantra over the last year that George Bush's war has made us less safe, not more. Maybe there's a difference between what the Dems have been saying loudly and often and what Cheney said the other day, but we here at Viewpoint are scratching our heads trying to figure out what it is.

RLC

Thankfully, Muslim voices are beginning to be heard condemning terrorism in general and the Beslan atrocity in particular. MEMRI has a good summary of the Arab reaction to Beslan including a few impassioned pleas by Muslims to disavow terror. Perhaps the best is this one:

The last sentence is a little mysterious, but at least the overall sense of the paragraph is on the right track. This one from an Iraqi newspaper man is also on the mark:

On the other hand, there are still those so blind that they will not see. For instance, several writers, like this one, blame the Russian military, incredibly enough, who are said to be as guilty as the abductors:

Apparently there's no difference, in this man's mind, between soldiers trying to rescue children and terrorists who arrange to murder them. And, of course, no round-up of Islamic opinion on terrorism would be complete without somebody blaming the Jews:

Of course. Why didn't we think of that. After all, we know the Jews were behind 9/11 because no Jews showed up for work in the Trade Towers that day. How plain can it be?

So there are some rational minds sprinkled throughout the Islamic world, but evidently they have an awful lot of work to do to overcome the darkness that clouds the minds and hearts of so many of their brethren.

RLC

Our local Sunday paper had an extensive piece on the controversy over whether Intelligent Design is an appropriate topic for science classroom instruction in public schools. The article itself was well-done, but some of the individuals who were quoted in it made what I thought were somewhat misleading statements. The article can be found here and my response to it, which has been submitted to the paper for publication, follows:

The York Sunday News and Laurie Lebo are to be commended for compiling such a thorough and fair treatment of the controversy surrounding Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution (9/5/04). I would like to say just a couple of things in response to the thoughts expressed by two of the gentlemen who were quoted in the article.

John Staver of Kansas State University argues that ID "requires faith which contradicts the critical thought demanded in science". This statement is very misleading. It implies, first of all, that there is no faith involved in science, which is completely untrue, as will be shown below, and it also implies that ID is based primarily upon faith with no critical thought or empirical component, which is also untrue.

Karl Kleiner of York College is quoted as saying that ID violates the scientific method because no experiment can prove or disprove God's existence. The implication here is that only ideas which can be confirmed by experiment are permissible in science classrooms. This, however, is a pretty stringent rule that no science teacher could possibly follow. If, for example, we wish to limit science to just what can be confirmed by experiment then we need to exclude any discussions of the existence of other universes, string theory, and much of quantum mechanics. If we cannot introduce non-empirical metaphysical assumptions into the science class then we cannot talk about a Grand Unified Theory in physics, the pursuit of which is motivated by an aesthetic preference for "elegance" or simplicity in our explanations. Nor can we examine the superiority of Copernicus' system over Ptolemy's which is based not upon different facts but upon the same preference for simplicity. Likewise, little could be said about cosmology since much about the subject relies upon the metaphysical assumption of uniformity, i.e. that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe. Nor could we justify the commonplace assumption that every effect has a cause. Indeed, we cannot even talk about the material reality of an external world since our belief in one is an exercise of faith in the reliability of our senses. There appears to be a world independent of our minds, so we believe there is, but it's awfully difficult to demonstrate its existence. Moreover, the scientist's confidence in reason itself is empirically unjustifiable. Any attempt to demonstrate that reason is a reliable guide to knowledge founders on the inherent circularity of trying to reason our way to the reliability of reason. Yet no one objects to any of these metaphysical assumptions and hypotheses being employed in science classes. For some reason it is only when the metaphysics turns toward the possibility of intelligent agency that the defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy become aroused and agitated.

Furthermore, if we are not allowed to affirm the possibility that intelligence is behind the biological phenomena we see under our microscopes then neither should we be able to deny that it is. Yet that is what we tacitly do when we instruct students that natural processes are entirely adequate to explain life's complex and specified patterns, a claim which many students find counterintuitive and at least superficially implausible. We teach our students to assume that there is no need to posit intelligence, but this assumption itself displays another philosophical preference, in this case a preference for materialism.

It's true that no scientific experiment can prove God's existence, but it's also irrelevant. ID theorists aren't trying to prove God's existence. They're trying to show that the biosphere is a highly complex organization of information systems and to investigate whether such information systems could be the product of natural mechanisms alone or whether the best explanation for them must not include intelligence. As even materialists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett affirm, biological machines bear the impress of design. The question that arises, then, is what is the nature of the designer? Is the designer blind, purposeless, mechanical nature or is the designer an intelligent, intentional mind? To allow the first answer in our classrooms, but not the second, is an unwarranted and inexcusable act of philosophical prejudice. To suppress the question altogether because it leads us into the realm of metaphysics is hard to justify since so many other metaphysical notions are admitted into science. It is also a repudiation of the fundamental principle of scientific investigation that we should follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it upsets our most cherished theories.

Professor Kleiner states that science tests theories by trying to prove them false but that advocates of ID are unable to do that. This is not quite correct. First, there are many hypotheses which scientists hold which they do not try to falsify because there is no way to do so. Scientists believe, for example, that life arose from non-life, some scientists believe that there has been, is, or will be, life existing elsewhere in the universe, some believe that life began in a primordial sea, some believe that there is a multitude of other universes, or that our universe somehow brought itself into being, or that mass/energy is infinitely old. None of these theories is even in principle falsifiable, but we don't therefore banish them from science classrooms.

Nevertheless, the claim that ID is not falsifiable is not correct anyway. If scientists ever manage to show how molecular machines like the much celebrated bacterial flagellum could have been produced in a non-teleological (i.e. purposeless) way, through the action of purely non-intelligent processes, then ID would be, if not technically falsified, at least deeply discredited. So far as I know, no one has done this satisfactorily. If it turns out that it can't be done then that would show that the Darwinian's conviction that natural mechanisms are adequate to generate biological complexity is not based on empirical evidence, but is, in fact, an act of faith. Indeed, the fact that many scientists believe that natural processes gave rise to the myriad of bio-molecular machines in any living cell, even though they have no idea how it happened, pretty much refutes Mr. Staver's suggestion above that faith has no place in science.

Professor Kleiner asserts that "evolution doesn't deny the existence of a God. It just doesn't require one". The implication is that Darwinism is neutral with respect to the question of God, but this is misleading. By insisting that the evolutionary process is impersonal, undirected, random, and mechanistic, and by insisting that this process prevails not only in the production of biological diversity but also in the biochemical origins of life, and by insisting that only materialistic processes be permitted in science, Darwinism eliminates any role for God in the universe and makes him irrelevant. For most people there's not much practical difference between an irrelevant God and one which doesn't exist.

Professor Kleiner also expresses the concern that ID could potentially curtail critical thinking and quash scientific curiosity. ID, however, is actually the result of critical thinking and curiosity. What stifles curiosity is institutional and philosophical dogmatism, revealing only one side of a story as though that side were the only side, or declaring to our children that certain kinds of explanations in the pursuit of truth are taboo because they might have religious implications. As William James wrote: "Any rule of thinking that would prevent me from finding a truth, if that truth were really there, is an irrational rule." Any rule which demands that our children not be permitted to hear the case for listing intelligence as among the causes of biological diversity while insisting, as the Darwinian paradigm does, that nature can do the job all by herself, is itself curtailing critical thinking and quashing curiosity.

Finally, Mr. Staver is quoted as saying that ID theorists "want to recast the paradigm of science to include God within it". It would be more precise to say that they want to admit intelligent agency as a possible causal factor in our accounts of the structure of the universe and of living things. Whether that intelligence is the God of traditional monotheism or not is not a question with which ID needs to deal.

Even so, why, if there is evidence to suggest that purely natural processes may not be up to the task of providing an adequate explanation for the phenomena we see in the world around us, should we nevertheless insist that those explanations be the only ones we be permitted to entertain in our science classes? It may be that the evidence that ID theorists cite is not best explained by intelligent agency, but let's at least have that debate. Let's let our children hear the arguments on both sides. To prevent them from seeing and considering the evidence for both sides of the issue is perhaps the surest, most effective way to curtail critical thinking and quash scientific curiosity.

RLC

In addition to the double-digit lead Bush now enjoys over Kerry in both the Newsweek and Time Magazine polls and the seven point lead in the Gallup poll, NewsMax.com announces news which suggests that Senator Kerry's troubles with veterans are not yet at the high water mark. In an e-mail alert NewsMax claims that:

This comes on the heels of news that the Navy has launched an investigation into his citations. They want to know how the recommendations were written up and by whom.

A couple of years ago an Admiral named Borda committed suicide when he was discovered to be wearing a "V" that he hadn't merited. The same charge has been levelled at Kerry, who, sources have alleged, has a "V" (for valor) with his silver star. The problem is, evidently, that the Navy never gave a "V" with a silver star and so questions, and eyebrows, have been raised in the Pentagon.

For an excellent update on the Kerry campaign's reaction to the Swiftvets go to Captain's Quarters. One of the many interesting points that the Captain makes is that it has become commonplace to hear Kerry supporters refer to the Swiftvets' charges as nothing but lies, and yet not a single one of their charges has been shown to be substantively false. On the other hand Kerry has had to back down on a number of the points in contention. The Kerry strategy seems to be to just call these men liars and maybe the voters will start to ignore them. It's a pretty despicable strategy but these are desparate people. The Captain adds:

RLC

Viewpoint has asked where the expressions of soul-searching are in the Muslim community and is gratified to find a particularly good example of it here. It would, however, be a little bit more credible if the writer, Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, were not general manager of the Al-Arabiya News Channel which has not been particularly hostile to the jihadis. Nevertheless, the article sets a salutary example for the rest of the Muslim world. Here are some excerpts from Al-Rashed's column:

The entire piece is worth reading and one hopes it receives a wide audience. It's evidently needed in London where the disease of radical Islam infects simple-minded clerics like Omar Bakri Mohammed. Mohammed, The Sunday Telegraph informs us, supports the targeting of children in terror attacks although he draws fine but ridiculous distinctions, as befits a cleric of the religion of peace. Here are a couple of his observations:

I'm sure this is news to the Israelis whose women and children have been deliberately targeted by pious Muslims for decades now. I'm sure it's news to the survivors of the horror at Beslan who watched their tormentors wire bombs to the basketball rims and laugh at the agonies of their children that this was all a big accident. It must have been an accident, too, that fleeing children were shot in the back. Mr. Mohammed is a moral and mental idiot.

The Telegraph tells us that the cleric made the remarks to promote a "celebratory" conference in London next Saturday to commemorate the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Why this man is allowed to walk the streets in London is not clear as of this writing. For that matter, it's not clear that he is any longer walking the streets.

Then we came across this pathetic piece of human detritus who has difficulty taking comfort in the fact that he has found favor with Allah for his participation in the heroic deeds at Beslan.

Anybody feel sorry for him?

RLC

Not that the President would ever see, much less heed, Viewpoint's advice, but we think it would be a wonderful thing for him to personally travel to Russia, if there is a memorial service for the slaughtered children of Beslan, and carry with him the sincere and profound sympathies of the American people.

To grieve with them in their devastation, to symbolically wrap our arms around them in a gesture of sympathy and consolation, would not only be the right thing to do, it would bond our two peoples together to an extent that words could never accomplish.

Some have pointed out that Putin is not to be mistaken for a friend of the U.S., that he feels we are partly responsible for Russian weakness and for Islamic antipathy toward Russia itself. This may be nonsense, but be that as it may, a visit from George Bush to identify with the citizens of Beslan in their bereavement would go a long way toward diminishing those kinds of suspicions.

It would be a wonderful expression of compassion and solidarity, and we hope he does it.

Feel free to forward this suggestion to the White House if you agree.

RLC

Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute is a philosopher of science who has published a paper on Intelligent Design in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. According to The Scientist this provoked Eugenie Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education, to lament that: "It's too bad the Proceedings published it. The article doesn't fit the type of content of the journal. The bottom line is that this article is substandard science."

The article was peer-reviewed, however, by three reviewers who each hold faculty positions in biological disciplines at prominent universities and research institutions, one at an Ivy League university, one at a major U.S. public university, and another at a major overseas research institute. All found the paper meritorious, warranting publication, according to Richard Sternberg an editor of the Proceedings.

Reaction to the publication of the paper is interesting. Opponents of ID have always been quick to point out that ID theorists have never been able to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, implying that their work is of poor quality. ID theorists have responded to this charge by arguing that it's very hard to overcome the bias that editors have against any work that challenges the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy. Now a paper has passed muster and rather than welcome the opportunity to engage ideas which may help us move closer to the truth, the Darwinians are in a snit because the journal didn't reject the paper out of hand.

So much for the unfettered pursuit of truth that scientists are supposed to be engaged in.

John Stuart Mill wrote in his masterful work On Liberty, perhaps the finest statement of the advantages of free speech and free inquiry ever written, that when a belief system is protected from criticism and challenge "the creed remains, as it were, outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of our nature; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh or living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind or heart, except standing sentinel to keep them vacant." Those who are outraged that the Proceedings published Meyer's paper could do worse than spend a couple of hours with On Liberty.

Reflecting on the reaction to his paper, Meyer notes that: "I have received a number of private communications from scientists expressing their agreement or intrigue with the arguments that I develop in my article. Public reaction to the article, however, has been mainly characterized by hysteria, name-calling and personal attack."

Viewpoint wonders if the three peer reviewers have changed their phone numbers yet and if they still even have their jobs. If you're interested in reading Meyer's paper itself go here, but the reader should be aware that it's a technical work.

RLC

Viewpoint has long thought that the political left in this country had lost it's sanity and certainly lost whatever class it might ever have had. Three reports from Mark Steyn reinforce the conclusion. The first tells of a play, first published in The Nation, which subjects both George and Laura Bush to withering ridicule. Steyn's description includes this passage:

No doubt this was boffo with the East-Side crowd that was in attendance and for whom serious thinking about moral questions just makes their heads hurt. Admittedly, it's much easier and lots more fun to have one's own superficial judgments reinforced by collectively holding the man who does have to make difficult decisions in derision. Small people have always tried to tear down their betters in order to make themselves feel more important.

The second report was on a Paul Krugman article for the New York Times. Krugman's columns during this election cycle have often bordered on the bizarre and have frequently been well across the border of nasty and vile. This one manages to be both, a not uncommon achievement for Mr. Krugman.

Krugman offers no evidence to support his claims, but of course, even if he did, and someone refuted it, that would only prove that the skeptic is part of the conspiracy and that the conspiracy is too insidiously clever to allow itself to be exposed by evidence. Besides, as among true believers of any stripe, evidence is irrelevant. One knows in one's heart that it's true, and in a post-modern world where truth is subjectively justified that's the only proof one needs. This is all so nutty as to be absolutely hilarious if it weren't impolite to laugh at the tragedy of a man losing his sanity before our very eyes.

The third report is yet another illustration of the coarseness of those on the left who seem to be incapable of engaging in political discourse without wallowing in verbal sewage. The event was called The Big Tent Extravaganza sponsored by Planned Parenthood. It was billed as a celebration of unity between members of both parties who support a woman's right to an abortion. Steyn writes:

These are the sort of individuals who despise Bush and support John Kerry. This fact by itself should tell us almost all we need to know about both men.

RLC

One can scarcely open the newspapers in this enlightened age without reading about some celebrity being charged with sexual misconduct of one form or another. Kobe Bryant, Mike McGreevy, William Kennedy Smith, Charles Barkley, Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton and perhaps tens of thousands of lesser known figures all share in common that they have been charged with sexual crimes. Perhaps things were always thus, but I doubt it.

Until relatively recently there was a wall, porous perhaps, but a wall nonetheless between men and women. The wall consisted of a complex of psychological, social, and moral inhibitions that served to protect young women from being treated by young men as though they were little more than receptacles for male passion. Today the wall is scarcely more than a speed bump.

Our highly sexualized culture has persuaded many young men that women are just as lascivious and willing as they are. Women have been complicit in this by not insisting that men refrain from sexual expression in their presence, by behaving and dressing provocatively, and by eagerly participating in the sexually relaxed atmosphere of the last three decades and the consequent general coarsening of the culture. Whereas women in previous generations strove to give the impression that they were sexually inaccessible absent an enduring matrimonial commitment, whereas they strove to give the impression, however misleading, that sex was not even something they thought about, today's woman tacitly sends the message in dozens of ways that she is indeed sexually available to the any man who knows how to go about claiming the prize. Celebrities young and old, brimming with the swagger of self-confidence, have no doubt in their minds that such women really want to be won by them, and there's no reason they can think of why they shouldn't possess that which one is convinced wants to be possessed.

Modern society has taken the cookie jar down from an inaccessible shelf, placed it directly under the child's nose, and admonished him with a wink not to take any cookies. If the child finds the temptation irresistible the fault is not entirely his.

In a culture saturated with messages about how eager women are to jump into the sack on the first date, a young man who encounters a woman who is not sufficiently compliant draws the reasonable conclusion that his only problem is that he must be insufficiently forceful. She wants to be taken, he assumes, she wants to be given no choice, it's part of the game.

After all, he knows, if only subliminally, that there are few young men who would not succumb to the seductions of a woman who was insistent, persistent, and forceful. This is especially true of young single men, most of whom would fall like ripe fruit into the hands of any reasonably attractive woman intent on bedding him, so why shouldn't he draw the conclusion that women share the same human vulnerability and yearning? He's heard from feminists and social commentators ever since he was young that in terms of their sexual needs men and women are pretty much the same. Isn't that the message of Sex in the City and countless movies, novels, music videos, and songs?

He's genuinely surprised when the charges are filed to realize that she didn't welcome his advances after all. He'd been totally unprepared by the environment in which he grew up for the possibility that one or two of the cookies in the jar might really be forbidden.

Sexual assault will not soon abate in a culture which treats sex as little more than a form of recreation or as just another appetite to be satisfied no matter how draconian the laws against it might become. Nor will it abate in a relativistic culture which can offer no moral sanction against it. Nor will it subside in a politically correct culture which insists upon throwing young men and women in the midst of hormonal frenzy into close contact with each other in school, in the military, or on the job as if sex were the furthest thing from their minds when in fact it's almost all they're thinking about. Sexual offenses will only diminish when sex is returned to the status of a sacred prerogative of the marriage union and when society rebuilds the wall by teaching young men from childhood on that sex has a moral dimension no matter what confusing and contradictory messages our culture might convey.

Sex needs to be seen as an enjoyment reserved for the culmination of a long period of courtship and commitment. Apart from that commitment it is a distortion and violation of the will of God. Apart from that commitment women will be increasingly victimized by young men who have never been given any serious reason to restrain and discipline their libido.

RLC

Let us imagine for a moment that two female Christians blew up a couple of airliners and killed everyone on board. Imagine further that another Christian woman blew herself up in a subway station and killed nine people, that Christians were systematically murdering thousands of black Africans, and that they kidnap a thousand people and slaughter several hundred terrified children. What would the world be saying about Christians? If Christians themselves remained silent, or even if they didn't, would there not be demands from every quarter of the globe to rid ourselves of a religion which motivates and countenances such atrocities? How, people would ask, can anyone accept a faith that justifies such horrors? Christianity and Christians would be justly treated with the contempt and disgust they would so richly deserve.

So why do Muslims get a pass? Why do we think that somehow all this terror, all this killing is aberrational? Why is Islam not held to account for the crimes being committed in its name? If it were Christians who were guilty of such savagery we would be deafened by outraged voices accusing the Faith of being systemically rotten, and those voices would be correct. It was Jesus, after all, who instructed us that the quality of any belief system, like the quality of a life, can be told by the fruit that it bears.

Hundreds of children are put through the darkest hell for three days by incredibly cruel Muslims acting on the conviction that they are doing Allah's will, and what do we hear from the Islamic community? Where is the anger and outrage? Where are the cries from Muslims for repentance, for introspection, for prayer and fasting in the Muslim communities? Where are the anguished pleas from Muslims for forgiveness for a religion which is apparently so deeply sick in its soul? Don't they feel that as co-religionists they share in the guilt of the crimes committed by their brothers and sisters? Christians would, and they would be expected to. Christians are still disparaged for the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the internecine strife in Ireland, and still even now periodically ask forgiveness for offenses committed by our fathers and our brothers. Maybe the anger, outrage, and cries of repentance and pleas for forgiveness are out there, but, if so, they haven't come to our attention.

Meanwhile, while we're waiting, let's have no more post-modern twaddle about the equal moral and spiritual legitimacy of all religions. Let's have no more nonsense about Muslim tolerance, mercy, and peace. Let's not hide from unpleasant realities. Any religion that would permit the atrocities that have occured in Russia to take place in its name without sending mosques all over the world into paroxysms of remorse, self-doubt, and a resolve to eliminate the evil scourge from their midst, is a barbaric, savage creed that has no place in a civilized world. Any religion which accepts the mass murders of terrified children with equanimity, satisfied, evidently, that the will of God is being done is truly Satanic.

RLC

One expects distortions and tendentiousness from the secular left because the secular left holds to a pragmatic view of morality. For them whatever works is right and if one has to lie about one's opponent, distort his words, or smear his reputation such acts are justified by the end result of bringing about his defeat. From the Christian left, however, we expect a principled comittment to truth and fairness. Thus we're a little disappointed in the response by evangelical writer Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine to President Bush's convention speech. Wallis makes a number of claims in his essay which are either unfair, completely mistaken, or simply ludicrous. He opens, for example with this:

This statement is, in my opinion, completely unsupportable which is why, evidently, Wallis doesn't support it. I challenge Wallis to cite anything in Miller's speech which was scurrilous, let alone vicious. The only way he could honestly see Miller's speech as either of these is if his definition of these words is synonomous with "angry". Miller was indeed angry, but what's wrong with that? Wallis' description implies that MIller was untruthful and slanderous. If Miller was indeed untruthful then Wallis should tell us exactly how he was instead of just letting the charge hang in mid-air. As it is Wallis' statement gratuitously tarnishes a good man and that's inexcusable coming from a representative of the body of Christ.

He goes on:

Wallis criticizes the president for not issuing a mea culpa in a convention acceptance speech. This is a little silly. And it's more than a little unfair since not only did he not take Kerry to task for not even discussing his senate record in his own nominating speech, he didn't even write a response to Kerry's speech like he did for Bush. In other words, Bush is faulted for not saying everything, and Kerry is given a pass for not saying anything. Even so, Wallis should know that the recession which caused the job losses he mentions began under Clinton and was exacerbated by 9/11, so it's misleading to cite this as though Bush had caused the problem through presidential mis-management.

He goes on to say:

This claim is absolutely baseless. There were no personal attacks on Kerry in the entire convention, at least not in prime time. Not one. Wallis acknowledges that criticism of one's opponent's record is legitimate, so I urge him to provide a single instance of any speaker attacking anything about Kerry other than his record.

Keep in mind that according to Wallis the Republicans went "over the top again and again". In support of this claim he offers a single example. He cites the most offensive thing the President said about Kerry, and Wallis finds it beyond the pale because he doesn't know anyone who "believes that about Hollywood". The implication here is that the President is just making stuff up about Kerry which would indeed be inexcusable if that's what he were doing. Apparently, though, Wallis hasn't been paying much attention to events in the campaign. Last July, Kerry attended a Hollywood fund raiser at which there were a number of celebrities in attendance and at which Whoopi Goldberg did an obscene "comedy" routine that was degrading to the President. One celebrity after another then rose to add their disparaging remarks to those of Goldberg. Finally Kerry concluded the show by thanking the crowd and making the claim himself that it is among such people that the soul of America resides. Here's the relevant description from CNN's account:

Wallis' best example of the offensiveness of the Republicans turns out to be an act of quoting Kerry himself. He needs to do his homework before he takes it upon himself to derogate others and he needs to offer a public apology to the President for his slander. I wonder whether Wallis wrote about the offensiveness of Fahrenheit 9/11 or the repugnant rhetoric of Al Gore who has called Bush a liar, a traitor, and a coward. I wonder if he's written about how maliciously over-the-top Ted Kennedy is in accusing Bush of concocting a war just to enrich his corporate buddies.

Maybe he has, and if so, his criticism of Bush for quoting Kerry is merely dumb and uninformed. But if he hasn't, his criticism of Bush is both foolish and hypocritical.

RLC

This news from Time magazine online reinforces what Viewpoint suggested Thursday night about the creeping sense of fatalism among Kerry supporters:

Other polls have the race much closer but a double-digit lead has to be giving the Kerry team heartburn. What do they do to reverse it at this point? They have two hopes. They can hope that something bad happens in the war or to the economy, hopes so ignoble that they would never dream of admitting to them, or they can hope that Kerry will devastate Bush in the debates.

This latter hope is realistic, but it shouldn't be. In Viewpoint's opinion presidential debates serve no useful purpose. They are a waste of time and resources in almost any election season but especially in this one. No one who has been paying attention is going to be swayed by what they hear and anyone who hasn't been paying attention to this campaign by now shouldn't vote in November anyway.

Both of this year's candidates have extensive records which are far more reliable predictors of what they would do as president than anything they say in a debate. Moreover, a good debate performance is no indicator at all as to what kind of president a man would be. We don't elect a debater-in-chief, we elect a commander-in-chief. A man may be an excellent debater but a terrible leader.

Presidential debates do not promote the national interest, they only cater to the media's appetite for attention. They give the narcissists in the elite media an opportunity to enhance their own sense of self-importance, but beyond that they accomplish almost nothing other than to provide an opportunity for one candidate or the other to get off a zinger at the expense of his opponent. Certainly they are not sincere attempts to learn the truth about the candidates. They are all about image and style, and scarcely at all about real substance. To get at the substance of a candidate we need only consult his record and the media can display that without the irrelevant trappings of a mano a mano gladiatorial contest.

Almost none of what is memorable from past debates tells us anything of importance about the candidates involved. Richard Nixon had five o'clock shadow. Gerald Ford "liberated" Poland. Reagan admonished Carter, "There you go again". Lloyd Bentson scorched Dan Quayle with, "You're no John Kennedy". George H.W. Bush glanced wearily at his watch. These are the things that the media found infinitely fascinating and worth going to the trouble and expense of having a national debate in order to witness and talk about, but none of them had any relevance at all to the question of whether the candidate deserved our vote.

The only image from any debate that revealed anything of importance to voters was when Al Gore stomped across the stage to hover menacingly above George W. Bush while Bush responded to a question. That bit of buffoonery announced to the world that Gore was a nitwit. Other than that debates have never revealed anything useful.

Even so, the media will insist that we undergo the ordeal so that the 5% of undecided citizens who have been living in a cave somewhere for the last three years can have one last chance to closely scrutinize the candidates. All this flummery for people who don't care, who probably won't vote anyway, and if they do, will doubtless base their vote on which candidate is cutest, is pretty hard to justify.

RLC

Good news on the economic front. The Labor Department reported today that employers added 144,000 payroll positions in August, and revised job totals for June and July upward by 59,000. Unemployment dropped from 5.5% to 5.4%. Viewpoint joins with Democrats all across the country in welcoming this news.

RLC

Andrew C. McCarthy has a good piece at National Review Online on the Chris Matthews/Zell Miller contretemps the other night. McCarthy unmasks Matthews' motives pretty well.

In the Hardball shows we've seen, Matthews' guests serve the same function as the accused prisoners in the old communist show trials. They're trotted meekly onto the set and prevented by Matthews from saying anything in their defense while he berates them for things they don't believe and never said.

The seventy-two year old Miller, however, didn't sit docilely in the dock absorbing his punishment like he was expected to. He startled Matthews by actually refusing to suffer the harangue, and if the two had been in the same studio Miller probably would have turned the bully's lights out for him.

On the conservative side, Sean Hannity often behaves toward his guests the same way. The two of them ought to be put into a sound-proof room and left to shout over each other until they both pass out from exhaustion.

If you saw the dust-up with Zell you'll enjoy the article.

RLC

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting discussion of atheism triggered by the claim made by several of his correspondents that atheism is an epistemological default position, i.e. unless the theist can provide proof that God exists, or at least provide good reasons for believing that He does, the atheist is justified in believing that He does not. In other words, the burden of proof is on the one who affirms an existential proposition, it's on the person who affirms the existence of something.

Since we cannot prove that God exists, and since we cannot offer compelling evidence that He exists, the atheist is justified, he claims, in believing that there is no God and in holding that belief until such time as the theist can offer evidence to the contrary. The problem, as Carter points out, is in deciding what will count as reasonable or satisfactory evidence:

In the case of entities such as God, whether evidence is reasonable or compelling will often depend on the inner state of the observer's "heart". The individual who wants there to be a God will find certain arguments and evidence more persuasive than will the person who does not want God to exist. That is, the mind will embrace what the heart desires and will reject what the heart disdains. This is what Blaise Pascal had in mind when he said that "the heart has reasons that reasons cannot know."

For example, someone hopeful, but perhaps doubtful, of God's existence might find the plethora of biological information and irreducible complexity in the biological realm much more persuasive of the existence of a transcendent mind than someone who is hostile to the notion that such a being exists. One who would welcome the reality of a Creator might be more inclined to see Aquinas' cosmological argument as plausible even if it's not a proof in the strict sense, whereas one who would not be at all happy with news of God's existence would argue that since it's possible to quibble with one of the premises of the argument he's therefore justified in rejecting the whole thing.

Evidence and arguments are person-relative. We see this in our responses to recent arguments justifying the invasion of Iraq. Many people who are inclined to support the Bush administration found their arguments persuasive. Those who were disinclined to support the current leadership were unconvinced. How one reacts to the facts depends in large measure upon how one feels about what they entail.

The fact that two people can view the same facts and come to different conclusions illustrates that there is a non-logical component to our reasonings, and it is this non-rational aspect of our noetic structure that people are referring to when they talk about Faith. Belief in God is primarily a matter of the heart and secondarily a matter of reason. The person who does not want God to exist will never be persuaded that He does, even "should they see someone return from the dead," as Jesus put it. On the other hand, a person who is open and receptive to God's existence will find ample warrant for believing that He does.

Again, Pascal put it well. He said, "There is enough evidence to convince anyone who is not dead set against it." The corollary to that is that no amount of evidence would convince one who is dead set against it.

RLC

Wretchard at Belmont Club talks about the recent terror in Russia. He offers this interesting insight into a nation's response to terrorism:

We can either exterminate the Muslims or we can strive to bring them into the civilized world. Leaving them alone is suicide. George Bush, almost alone in the world, believes that we must try to bring them into the civilized world. The rest of the globe, especially the West, wants to essentially spray them with perfume.

When I was in college I kept a black rat snake in a glass aquarium. From time to time I would place a mouse in the enclosure. The mouse went about its business acting as if everything was normal. The snake lay coiled in the corner ignoring the mouse. The mouse, however, was living in denial. It was just a matter of time until the snake grew hungry. Sooner or later I would awake in the morning to find the mouse gone and a lump in the distended abdomen of the snake.

Europe is a mouse which finds a seething, pullulating mass of Arab Muslims living, like the snake, in their proximity. Every now and then the Europeans cast a nervous glance in the direction of the snake, but they live as if they believe that they and the snake can coexist. One day the world will wake up to find Europe gone and the belly of the Muslim world swollen with its corpse.

Europe can either wait like the mouse for this to happen or they can join the United States in trying to bring the democratic values of free elections, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and ideas to the Muslim world. The alternatives to this course are too awful to contemplate.

RLC

Viewpoint believes that if Satan were human there's a good chance he'd be an Islamic fundamentalist. The news carries the story of the horror in Russia where Islamists are holding hostage several hundred people, half of them terrified children. They've already killed some and threaten to kill more. We may think that adherents of a peaceful, compassionate religion like Islam could never follow through on threats to kill frightened children, but then as infidels doomed to hell we probably can't fathom Allah's inscrutable mercy.

Islamic morality has recently been on display elsewhere as well. In Najaf where Moqtada al-Sadr's holy warriors have recently made temporary peace with the Iraqi National Guard, ING soldiers moved into the buildings that al Sadr's pious disciples had vacated. They found:

The report continues:

One wonders why the Iraqis wish to make peace with such savages. Ceasefires and truces only delay the inevitable and allow time for murderers to sacrifice more innocents to the glory of Allah. Najaf and Fallujah will have eventually to be cleansed of the human vermin which terrorize these cities, and Moqtada al Sadr will have to be "martyred", one way or another. To talk of allowing such a man to participate in the government is to spit on the memories of every Coalition soldier who served and died so that Iraqis can enjoy civilized life.

The Iraqi government is only fooling itself if it thinks that by pulling the insurgents' fat out of the fire these thugs will be grateful and loyal. So far from coveting the loyalty of people who commit such crimes, especially against children, government officials have a duty to punish them, and to punish them severely, and if the Iraqis and the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani need a push in the right direction the Marines should give it to them.

The entire report can be read here.

RLC

Senator Zel Miller's speech at last night's Republican convention was truly astonishing. A Democrat disgusted with the ideology of the leadership of his party, he has come out in full support of President Bush. He delivered a blistering keynote address at the convention and scalded the Democrat leadership in general, and Senator Kerry in particular with heavy doses of white-hot political rhetoric . How much damage he did to Kerry is impossible to tell at this point, although I suspect that it was not insignificant. Perhaps a more pressing question is how much damage the Georgia senator did to himself. His career in the Senate is coming to a close because he's retiring so his political future is not at issue, but he doubtless made some very serious personal enemies tonight. Maybe the Senator should stay away from Fort Marcey Park for a while.

If you watched the MSNBC Hardball segment after Vice-president Cheney's speech you received a rare treat. Chris Matthews had Senator Miller on and was peppering him with questions about his extraordinary speech earlier in the evening. As he often does with guests, Matthews would ask Miller a question and then interrupt him as he tried to answer. Miller finally got visibly angry with this rudeness and told Matthews that he didn't know why he was submitting to the interview. He also informed the startled host that he wouldn't be bullied like the "young lady" (Michelle Malkin) Matthews had on last week whom he also wouldn't allow speak. Then in frustration the fiery ex-Marine proclaimed that he wished he was in the studio with Matthews and that these were the old days so that he could face him in a duel!

It's not clear that Matthews understood what Miller was saying, but he could tell that Miller was angry with him and he grew considerably more subdued and deferential. He realized that Miller wasn't going to be pushed around like many of his other guests. It's one thing, after all, to browbeat demure young women, it's something else to take on a crusty ex-Marine from Georgia. It was surely one of the most fascinating and entertaining exchanges in the history of cable news television.

The last duel fought by a major political figure was, I think, fought by Andrew Jackson. Maybe Viewpoint should start a movement to get Zell Miller's face on the $20 bill.

Speaking of Hardball and shows like it, one gets the feeling watching and listening to the pundits who tend to lean toward Kerry that a certain fatalism is setting in. It's as if they know in their hearts that they have a deeply flawed candidate and they realize that his flaws will only receive increasing exposure as the campaign wears on. There was not much of a rebuttal to Miller's vigorous criticism of Kerry tonight, as if even the Kerry troopers in the media knew that Miller's indictment was too obviously true. Matthews tried to discredit some of Miller's allegations until he got all but challenged to a fight, much to the delight of the panelists in the studio, but the other lefties on cable had little to say by way of substantive criticism of Miller's performance.

We don't want to make too much of this, but it does seem as if some of these pundits are perhaps beginning to show signs of resigning themselves to four more years of a Bush presidency.

RLC

Senator Edwards, who is playing Robin to John Kerry's Batman this electoral season, is a congressional non-entity who nevertheless has made a fortune extorting vast sums of money from hapless medical practitioners and insurance companies. He has, hearsay has it, almost single-handedly driven ob-gyn practitioners out of the state of North Carolina.

Jean Pearce lays out the history of this man who would, if elected, be a heartbeat from the presidency, and the picture she paints for us is deeply disturbing. Here are some excerpts:

There's much more in Pearce's article to give us pause about this candidate. He strikes us as the sort of man that should be treated like a pariah rather than a messiah, but for reasons that Viewpoint finds excruciatingly perverse, millions of Americans will nevertheless vote for him.

It'll be interesting to see how much of Edwards' Senate record and professional history as a legal shake-down artist comes out in the vice-presidential debates. The elite media certainly can't be expected to trouble themselves to inform us about it. They'll be too busy trying to prove the really important stuff like that Bush did too say that we can't win the war on terror and searching under every rock to show some tenuous connection between Bush and the Swiftees. No wonder they're becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Meanwhile Viewpoint will be spending the evening reassessing the confidence we had placed in John O'Neill's judgment and integrity. O'Neill, the reader will recall, is the author of the Kerry expose Unfit For Command. There's nothing in the book which calls O'Neill's judgment into question, but he did make the statement a couple of weeks ago, while trying to explain that he was not working on behalf of Bush or the Republicans, that he would have indeed voted for John Edwards for president had he won his party's nomination.

We're flabbergasted.

RLC

Here's another new blog that's just starting up. It's being managed by a couple of former students of mine, and I'll let them tell about it in their own words:

Pay them a visit and wish them luck.

RLC

Evangelical Outpost brings word that one of the most famous contemporary atheistic philosophers, Antony Flew, is apparently moving away from atheism toward some sort of deism.

Joe Carter explains the significance of the move:

One shouldn't make too much of a single instance of a repudiation of atheism, if that's indeed what Flew is doing, but perhaps it isn't premature to suggest that naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, is in the early stages of terminal exhaustion. There are many atheists who will never give up the cause, of course, but there seem to be many others who are coming to realize that any view of life that leads to moral, epistemological, and metaphysical nihilism (see here, for example) is left with very little to commend it. When adherents of that same view find that it is also unable to offer a plausible explanation for the astonishing fine tuning of the universe, or a compelling explanation for the ubiquity on this planet of biological information, or any explanation at all for the existence of consciousness, they tend to become intellectually and spiritually restless.

Few people actually want to believe the things one is logically compelled to believe if he is an atheist, which is why most atheists don't follow their atheism to its logical conclusions. Some are beginning to realize, evidently, that there is something amiss with a worldview whose entailments are so repugnant to the human spirit. They're saying, like Flew, that we can no longer remain bound to the shibboleths of the nineteenth century but rather we need to go wherever the argument leads. For some (who knows how many) the argument is leading away from the sterile, arid deserts of naturalism to something brighter, richer, and more fertile.

It'll be interesting to trace this cultural development throughout the coming years. It may amount to nothing much, but on the other hand it may well presage a spiritual revolution.

RLC