Saint Augustine speaks in his Confessions of his eagerness to meet and hear the Manichean hero Faustus who had a great reputation for eloquence. Upon finally hearing him explain the Manichean philosophy, however, Augustine was disappointed, not in Faustus' agility with the language, but rather in his ideas. He writes:

These words come to mind as we reflect upon the political campaign which is heading for its denouement this Tuesday. John Kerry has said much these last twelve months and much of it he has delivered with great oratorical flourish and skill. President Bush, on the other hand, will never be considered to be the second coming of Demosthenes. Even so, eloquence has nothing to do with either truth or wisdom, and we shouldn't be blinded to the import and truth of one's words by the raiment in which they are attired.

To assess whether Senator Kerry has the "Right Stuff" to be president one needs to attend not merely to what he says or how seductively he says it, but rather to what he has accomplished in his public life.

In the early seventies the young John Kerry played a significant role in getting the United States to abandon the South Vietnamese to the armies of Ho Chi Minh resulting in the slaughter or imprisonment of tens of thousands of people who had placed their hope and trust in the U.S. to defend them. John Kerry's efforts to end our involvement in the war included defaming the American military and indirectly making life worse for the P.O.W.s being held in North Vietnam. For his contribution to an eventual N.V.A. victory he has had his photograph placed on a wall of honor in a North Vietnamese war museum.

We may argue about the quality of his judgment, or whether his behavior was actually treasonous or not. But what seems to be beyond dispute is that the North Vietnamese saw him as an ally, or, in Lenin's terms, at the least a "useful idiot", in their struggle against the United States.

Moreover, Mr. Kerry saw that war as a colossal mistake, a tragic blunder, and his prescription was to pull out immediately. Today we're engaged in another war which Senator Kerry regards as a colossal mistake and a tragic blunder. He says that as president he will nevertheless prosecute it until we win, but what in his record gives us reason to believe he's being truthful? If he was right about Vietnam he has no reason to treat Iraq any differently, and if he now thinks he was wrong about Vietnam he has never said so. If personal history is a reliable guide, a President Kerry will pull our troops out of Iraq as soon as he can, and the Iraqi people will be at the mercy of the brutal thugs who circle like hyenas waiting for the opportunity to destroy the Iraqi experiment in freedom and all who have put their trust in America to see that experiment through.

In the eighties Mr. Kerry was elected to the Senate where he compiled a record noteworthy only for it's un-noteworthiness. After twenty years of service he has no significant legislation to his credit, he has served in no real leadership capacity, he amassed a voting record that has placed him among the most left-wing members of the Senate, and his attendance at committee meetings has been abysmal. He voted consistently to raise taxes, diminish the military, and weaken our intelligence gathering capabilities. There is nothing in his tenure in Congress which exhibits the grain of presidential timber, which is doubtless why his acceptance speech at the convention last July doted so lovingly on his Vietnam service and hardly at all on his Senate career.

Since the convention he has spent the campaign blaming George Bush for everything from vaccine shortages to alleged missing explosives in Iraq, as if Bush worked in the lab that produced the vaccine and was himself standing guard at al Qaqaa. His campaign has been marked by charges and allegations which have either a very tenuous hold on, or are completely divorced from, reality. He has faulted "this president" for a terrible economy despite the fact that unemployment is lower now than it was during the Clinton years. He has faulted "this president" for invading Iraq without the blessing of the French, even though the French had been bought by Saddam and nobody could have persuaded them to join the coalition that was about to derail their oil-for-food gravy train. He faulted this president for botching the post-war in Iraq even though the Iraqi economy is strengthening almost daily, Iraqis are on track to hold the first democratic elections in their history in a few months, and 25 million of them are free of state terror for the first time in generations. Moreover, the insurgency in Iraq is in its death throes as the Iraqi military and police gain in competence and numbers and assume the delicate task of killing the Islamo-terrorists without antagonizing the Muslim citizenry.

Mr. Kerry's attempts during the campaign to appear pious and "manly" seem contrived and spurious. He has made it a point to attend church services every Sunday the last few months, but this is in stark contrast to the pattern he has established throughout his adult life. His goose-hunting foray was made risible by his purchase of the required license when he asked a clerk if he could "get me a hunting license here."

He repeatedly gives the impression of being willing to say or do anything in order to squeeze an extra vote or two out of his audience. His eagerness to castigate the President over the al Qaqaa story without knowing whether the reports were true or not is but the latest example of a reckless opportunism that goes back at least to his military days.

The Senator has manufactured crises where no crisis exists. He has accused this administration of blocking stem cell research, of planning to suppress the minority vote, of planning to deprive the elderly of social security, of planning to reinstate the draft, but none of these allegations is even remotely true, or even plausible. Similarly untrue are claims he has made for himself such as the claim to have met with the members of the Security Council for in-depth discussions prior to the invasion of Iraq, a claim flatly denied by the relevant U.N. representatives.

John Kerry himself promises us that he has a "plan" for every ill besetting our polity, but either his plan looks very similar to what the President is already doing, as in his plan for Iraq, or the numbers in his plan don't add up, as in his plan to rollback the Bush tax cut and to use that revenue to pay for all the programs he has promised. Or, most often, the plan goes unarticulated and remains a mystery.

Mr. Kerry can lay claim to only a single qualification for the presidency, if it even be a qualification: He is an eloquent and persuasive speaker. But as Augustine pointed out over 1600 years ago, eloquence has nothing to do with truth. Nor does it have anything much to do with leadership. Like pumice stone which gives the appearance of possessing weight, but which, upon hefting, one is surprised to find so airy, John Kerry's rhetorical graces mask an inner lightness that is totally inadequate for the stresses and tests which lie ahead of our nation.

In these times we need a president who has demonstrated both leadership and character. George Bush is not perfect, but he possesses those two particular virtues in abundance. John Kerry, by contrast, is a "hollow man" who has never evinced either. He offers no compelling reason to elect him and numerous reasons to blanch at the thought of a Kerry presidency. Viewpoint urges its readers not to base their votes on Tuesday upon superficial eloquence but rather upon each man's character and the capacity each has demonstrated to lead us in the continuing war against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

Belmont Club has two excellent posts up. The first is an analysis of the recently released UBL tape. Wretchard at Belmont Club observes:

In the second post Wretchard teams up with Chester for an analysis of the order of battle shaping up in Fallujah. It looks like there will be an assault sometime next week, probably soon after the polls close, and it doesn't look good for the insurgents. There's good stuff to be found on the military situation in Fallujah at both of these links.

A friend recommends this article in Commonweal for readers interested in John Kerry's position on abortion (at least as of today). The article is actually a critique of Mario Cuomo's 1984 Notre Dame speech on the subject which has taken on the authority of holy writ for many Democratic politicians, most notably John Kerry.

The article is authored by Ken Woodward, long time religion editor at Newsweek, and is an excellent analysis of the Cuomo/Kerry argument that one can be personally opposed to abortion, that one can accept the Catholic teaching that abortion is a ghastly crime against human life, and still strive heroically to do everything one can to prevent this offense from being restricted or ended.

There is a link to a reply by Cuomo to Woodward's essay at the end of the piece. In Viewpoint's opinion Cuomo's response, though articulate and tart, falls short of being a satisfactory defense of his position. We'll leave it to the interested reader to pursue the arguments for him or herself, but the general theme of the Cuomo/Kerry apologia is the oft-heard claim that no one has the right to impose his/her morality on another person. This concern, however, being founded on several errors, is quite misplaced.

We'll mention only in passing Woodward's point that it's difficult to name legislation which does not impose somebody's morality upon the rest of society. Everything from desegregation to affirmative action to welfare regulations to environmental regulations to laws prohibiting gambling, prostitution, public lewdness, drug use, capital punishment, bribery, and so on all presuppose moral values that might not be shared by many of those who are subject to the pertinent laws.

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

If the atheist is correct in believing that we live in a world without God then a man has a "right" to try to do whatever he wishes. In a world without God might makes right, so anything one is able to do one has a "right" to do. If the atheist objects to this, he might be asked what it is, exactly, upon which he bases his conviction that I have no right to impose my values. Is it the law? But if I can change the law then that objection fails. Is it that a right to impose one's will upon others robs the other of his worth and dignity as a human being? But in a world without God human worth and dignity are arbitrary and chimerical. They have no real existence in the first place, and even if they did, why would it be wrong to deprive someone of them?

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

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

The truth of the matter is that few people who argue that it transgresses some moral standard to impose one's beliefs upon others really believe it deep down. What they believe is that it's wrong to have others foist convictions and values with which they disagree upon them. They have no trouble burdening others with their own values, and that's why Cuomo and Kerry sound so insincere on the question of abortion. They claim to believe that abortion is a sin, but they are prepared to fight tooth and nail to perpetuate it. It is not, mind, that they promise to adopt a stance of political neutrality on the issue. It is that they promise to do everything in their power to see that neither legislatures nor courts nor any expression of the popular will diminishes a woman's right to kill her unborn child.

Surely this is an odd position to take. They certainly wouldn't suffer similar psychological dissonance over slavery. They would hardly say that they believe slavery is an offense against God and man, but since many people disagree with them about this, they promise as President to only appoint pro-slavery justices to the Supreme Court. If such reasoning is unthinkable with respect to the issue of slavery, why is it not equally unthinkable with respect to abortion?

When someone says they don't want to impose their values on others, they're really just trying to walk on both sides of the political street simultaneously. They are tacitly acknowledging that they're really not committed to at least one of the values they claim to hold. If Cuomo and Kerry really believed the Catholic Church's teaching on abortion they would scarcely oppose efforts to end it, much less would they actively fight to keep it legal.

ABC has in its possession a videotape made by an English-speaking terrorist who threatens an impending attack on the U.S. which will make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. ABC has, as of this writing, chosen not to run the tape giving as their reason that it's too close to November 2nd, and that releasing this horrifying threat might have a disruptive effect on the election.

We may interpret this to mean that since the threats will probably drive voters to push the Republican lever on Tuesday, ABC deems it imprudent to show it. If the tape had somehow made Bush look bad, if it was a tape, say, of new abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, does anyone think that ABC's scruples would cut the same way? To see the salient parts of the tape and some analysis of it go here.

Meanwhile, the MSM is full of reports about missing explosives from al Qaqaa. It's hard to understand what relevance this story, which has been known for a year and a half, has for the election. There is no reason to believe that the explosives were looted under the noses of American troops since the logistics involved would be daunting, but even if they were, how on earth would George Bush be culpable? Senator Kerry is trying to wring every drop of campaign advantage he can out of this story, but he's stretching so far he risks incurring a political hernia.

Indeed, if there's any political lesson in the whole al Qaqaa matter it is that Senator Kerry is willing to defame both our troops and the President without having any proof or even strong evidence that his charges are true. This shows a recklessness and indifference to truth that reflects poorly on a man who would be president. It also calls into question (again) his credibility on everything else he has said during this campaign.

The left seems to think that real news should not be reported but non-news should be hyped for a week. It seems disingenuous, but perhaps that's part of the job description for being a member of the MSM or of the Democratic party.

The news brings word that Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is being investigated by the F.B.I. Apparently, Dick Cheney's former company, which is Halliburton, may have been awarded contracts improperly. Cheney himself is not under investigation, but it is his former company and he used to be an executive at H-A-L-L-I-B-U-R-T-O-N so he may be implicated.

Halliburton, with which Vice-President Cheney used to be very closely associated, and probably still is, may have overcharged taxpayers for fuel and services in Iraq. There is a suspicion that the Bush administration of which Dick Cheney is Vice-president, of all things, showed favoritism to Dick Cheney's former company, HALLIBURTON!!!

The connection between Dick Cheney and HALLIBURTON is well-known in Washington circles. Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman who may or may not be indebted to Dick Cheney for her job, said the company is cooperating with various investigations, but she dismissed the latest revelation, somewhat naively, as election politics.

Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney who is a former executive at HALLIBURTON, said today on the Glenn Beck radio show that when her father resigned from Halliburton, his former company, he was given eight million dollars in options and other reimbursements (allegations that these were compensation for anticipated favoritism have not yet been proven. Yet.).

Ms Cheney confirmed Beck's report that her father gave the entire sum to charity. The news of this astounding gift will doubtless be soon displayed all over the MSM so that everyone will know what sort of man Mr. Cheney is. Or not.

John Kerry promises that he would fight a smarter, more effective war in Iraq, but he's having enough trouble simply bringing his vaunted intelligence to bear in the current political struggle. He seems to blurt out whatever strikes him as useful at the moment, which almost always proves embarrassing to him later. He has claimed, for instance, that Bush had banned stem cell research, that he (Kerry) had met with representatives of the U.N. Security Council about the pending invasion of Iraq, that Bush bungled the supervision of explosives in al QaQaa, all of which claims have turned out to be erroneous.

Senator Kerry is undeterred, however, by the fact that he seems so inept at getting the facts right. He staggers from one canard to the next, blithely indifferent to the tenuous relationship any of his yarns have with reality and completely unmindful of what his mendacity tells us about his character.

Today he delivered this piece of historical buffoonery from the stump in Toledo:

Let's see. Deposing Saddam, liberating 25 million people from oppression, and resolutely taking the first early steps to establishing democracy in the heart of the Arab world is, in the mind of the Senator, analogous to a president (John Kennedy) getting cold feet prior to the Cuba invasion and sending thousands of Cuban guerrillas to a pointless death because Kennedy decided at the last minute to withhold the air cover they had been promised.

Not only is the Senator's comparison of the Bay of Pigs with Iraq about as perverse as it can be, Mr. Kerry insists upon serving up this sublime specimen of asininity while the votes of the Cuban-American community in Florida, from whose ranks those dead were drawn, hang in the balance. Moreover, he implicitly reminds them that it was the Democratic president that Kerry models himself after whose dithering was responsible for their slaughter.

No Left Turns has this interesting piece of analysis about the prospects of a draft being reinstated in the next four years, not by a Bush administration, mind you, but by John Kerry:

Pass the word. Kerry has a secret "plan" to reinstate the draft. Here it is: Get himself elected as Commander-in-Chief and be so unpopular with the troops that the only way to maintain a viable military at all is to dragoon people into its service.

This theory has the advantage of being much more plausible than the feverish ravings that have been going around left-wing weblogs about George Bush's "secret plan" to restart the selective service.

National Geographic has a story about the discovery of a new kind of human, smaller in stature even than modern pygmies, which inhabited the island of Flores in Indonesia until as recently as 13,000 years ago.

These diminutive hominids have been designated a new species, Homo floresienses but the article does not mention the rationale for placing them in a separate taxon from modern humans. The fact that they were very small, about three feet tall, is not in itself sufficient reason for making them a separate species. Great Danes and Chihuahuas are at least as disparate in size as Homo sapiens and H. floresienses, but these dogs are both members of the same species. Usually, biologists consider two groups to be different species if members of the groups cannot produce fertile offspring, and we have no way of knowing at this stage whether H. sapiens and H. floresienses were interfertile.

At any rate, it's interesting that there have been myths and legends for centuries about tiny people having inhabited the islands in the region, but no hard evidence of it has ever been found until now. It causes one to wonder if the Irish legends of leprechauns and other ancient stories of elves might not have had some basis in pre-historical fact. Might these tiny three foot high humans have been at one time much more widespread rather than confined to just the Indonesian archipelago?

A friend passes along an article by Paul Roberts in the current issue of Mother Jones which addresses what is perhaps the most urgent problem of our time, Islamic terrorism notwithstanding. Roberts sounds the tocsin alerting us to the impending oil crunch and warns that it may be closer than had previously been anticipated.

There are things not to like about Roberts' piece, but his larger message is one we can't afford to ignore. Here are a couple of excerpts:

If oil prices continue to rise there will not be a single aspect of our lives which will not be negatively affected. Even the best scenario only gives us thirty years to switch to some other energy source and to adopt measures for depleting the oil we have less rapidly. It's time to get serious.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has put together a collection of quotes from Peter Singer which give the reader a good sense of why he has become the most controversial philosopher in the United States, if not the world. Carter cautions that the quotes are not placed in context and thus may be misleading, but with that caveat in mind here are a few of the dozen or so he lists:

On the Sanctity of Human Life:

How Buying a New TV is Like Selling a Homeless Kid's Kidney:

Why Killing Babies and Animals is Morally Equivalent:

There are more like these at the site. The reader might also check out our own critique of Singer's ethics with special attention to his lack of a basis for making any ethical pronouncements of any sort. It's titled Animals and Humanism.

Senator Kerry continues to add more whoppers to his already impressive repertoire. In addition to his prevarications about secret Bush plans to reinstate the draft, suppress the black vote, and take away social security, to name just a few of his recent flights of fancy, he has added two new fictional claims. He insists now that prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom he met with the members of the U.N. Security Council and held in-depth discussions with them on the crisis, a claim that the representatives of the relevant nations have flatly denied, and he is also currently resurrecting a bit of phony news from the spring of 2003 and presenting it not only as if it is a recent development but also as if it were true.

In fact, it's neither. The allegation he's making is that 380 tons of high explosives were looted from a storage facility in Iraq and that this shows the incompetence of George Bush as Commander in Chief. Actually what it shows is the desperation of the left in general and Kerry in particular to find anything with which they can bamboozle the ignorant to get them to vote for the Democrats.

The fact is that when our troops first arrived at the facility on their march to Baghdad in May 2003 the munitions had already been removed (See Kerry Spot for the details). These explosives, which had been identified by the I.A.E.A. and sealed prior to the invasion, were not there when we arrived. Saddam had probably trucked it to Syria before the outbreak of hostilities. How this reflects on the competency of the president is something Senator Kerry has not yet explained.

Kerry, of course, wants the voters to think that the looting occured after the facility was under our control, but there's no evidence to support this and lots of evidence against. There's also a huge logistical problem involved in trying to move that much material under the noses of the American military. Captain's Quarters has the math involved in undertaking such a heist.

A worse aspect of this is not just that Kerry continues to fault our troops and the President for the missing ordinance, but that the New York Times dusts this story off right before the election in order to discredit Bush.

That's dishonest enough, but there's even worse. CBS, the network that aired Dan Rather's fatuous forgeries a few weeks ago in an attempt to make Bush look like he'd disobeyed orders while serving in the National Guard, was planning to run the story on the missing explosives on October 31st so that the Republicans wouldn't have time to respond to it.

If anyone has demonstrated incompetence in these last months it has been John Kerry and his allies in the liberal media who have shown that they are utterly incapable of telling the truth. They keep trying, like Wile E. Coyote, to destroy the road runner, only to have their stupid lies repeatedly blow up in their faces.

Why anyone trusts either the paper of Jayson Blair, the network of Dan Rather, or the candidate these media outlets endorse to provide them with the truth is perhaps a question only a psychiatrist can answer.

The Strategy Page offers some fine insight into American/Iraqi strategy for dealing with the insurgency in general and for Fallujah in particular. A few excerpts:

The wild card in this prediction, of course, is how much patience the American people have to see this task through to the end. We'll know the answer to that on November 3rd.

A friend writes to voice his displeasure (see Feedback) over Viewpoint's tendency to highlight left-wing depravity and to associate it on occasion with the Kerry campaign. His concern was with our post titled How Low Can You Go. Our reply follows:

Is it that we haven't been paying very close attention or have the panegyrists of cultural diversity actually grown quiet over the last couple of years? It wouldn't be surprising if the celebrants of multiculturalism are feeling a little embarrassed by reports like this one from the Washington Times and have decided that maybe now is not a good time to be claiming that all cultures are "equally valid" and worth celebrating.

The article is about two young Nigerian women who have been sentenced to death by stoning for having sex. If you guessed that Nigeria must be a Muslim country then you are factually correct even if you are not politically correct. Under the rules established by the PC thought police we should never assume that some inhumane practice implies a provenience among any particular ethnic or religious group unless those groups are white Republican and/or Christian.

Nevertheless, Nigeria is indeed under Sharia Law and this article gives us a vivid idea of what a blessing it would be to reside in a land where Islamic ideas of justice and compassion prevail. Here's the gist of it:

Apparently these girls are appealing their sentences because they are, through no choice of their own, unmarried, and according to the mercies of Islamic law they should only be whipped for their crime, not stoned.

Perhaps someone reading this might think that Viewpoint is being a little harsh on Muslims. Perhaps Nigeria is an extreme example and maybe it is the case that the vast majority of Muslims find such laws archaic and distasteful. Such a hypothesis, however, would be mistaken.

Sharia is evidently the dream of even "moderate" Muslims. It is their vision for the entire world. It is the Muslim hope that one day all people will be subject to the glories of Sharia. Those who resist will, of course, be eliminated. In support of this admittedly uncomfortable assessment we offer as warrant, courtesy of Belmont Club, a resolution from the Communique of the Thirtieth Session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Istanbul last June. Item #62 of the Communique states:

This statement lends little encouragement to those who would like to believe that Sharia is outside the Islamic mainstream.

The moral and cultural relativists in the West who were so voluble a decade ago have had very little to say of late, as the cruelties and horrors of the Islamic way of life have become more familiar to the average American. It's hard to blame them for shutting up, though, because it must be difficult to credibly assert that all cultures are equally "good" or "valid" when their listeners have evidence like the above story in their hands. The whole project of multiculturalism, of "celebrating the world's diversity," is discredited by the manifest savagery of stoning girls to death for sexual indiscretion, while, it needs to be mentioned, almost never punishing the male. Moreover, the accounts which reach our ears of this sort of barbarism are doubtless merely the tip of the Islamic iceberg.

What is there to celebrate in a culture which thinks that it is good, right, and just to stone to death an 18 year old unmarried girl who had a sexual relationship after her former husband had abandoned her? So far from celebrating such evil we should be deploring it, condemning it, and subjecting it to the ridicule it deserves. So far from mouthing platitudes about how our way of life and our values are no better or worse than those of other people around the world we should be holding in derision those who actually believe such nonsense.

Only an addlepated liberal would deny that there are indeed some ways of life, some values, some religious convictions which are superior to others. A religious ethic which values mercy, compassion, dignity, and life as well as righteousness and justice, towers over one which values only a perverse form of "righteousness" to the exclusion of the other virtues like a sequoia over crabgrass.

To be sure, there is much in American culture to regret and to repudiate, but anyone who really believes, after all we've learned in the last ten years about the Islamic Arab and African world, that our way of life, our highest values, and our religious assumptions are not vastly superior to those of much of the rest of the world needs to spend some quality time with a de-programmer.

Investigative journalist Joel Mowbray reminds us that Senator Kerry has made his honesty a centerpiece of his campaign, calling truthfulness "the fundamental test of leadership." He closed the final debate with President Bush by recounting what his mother told him from her hospital bed, "Remember: integrity, integrity, integrity." In an interview published in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine, Mr. Kerry was asked what he would want people to remember about his presidency. He responded, "That it always told the truth to the American people."

So, when he told us in that last debate that he "went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable." We assumed there was at least a chance he was telling the truth.

When he said while speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, that he understood the "real readiness" of the United Nations to "take this seriously" because he met "with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein," we had no particular reason to doubt him.

Trouble is, it never happened. Kerry just made it up. Mowbray has checked out the story and reveals how much of an impact Mr. Kerry's mother's dying admonition made on him in today's Washington Times.

If anyone is inclined to spelunk the sewers of left-wing depravity you might, if your stomach can handle it, try a trip to a site called Metafilter which offers a thread of responses to the recent Guardian column by a man named Charlie Brooker which wistfully wonders where Lee Harvey Oswald and other assassins are now that they are "needed". Some samples of their thought:

These are the sort of folks John Kerry attracts. Nice people.

David Wayne at JollyBlogger invites his readers to submit their ten most frequently encountered objections to Christianity. It's an interesting challenge. I can only come up with nine off the top of my head, so if Viewpoint readers, Christians or non-Christians, want to weigh in on this topic feel free to do so via our Feedback Forum.

Here are the nine objections which I've encountered most frequently from non-Christians and which they tend to feel most strongly about. They are also, incidentally, perhaps among the most challenging for a Christian apologist:

It might be worthwhile to attempt to tackle some of these objections, if a humble layman might have the impertinence to undertake such a daunting task, in future posts. In fact, Viewpoint has already addressed some of them in past essays. Objection #1, for instance, is discussed here and here, and objection #3 is considered here. If anyone else wishes to take a shot at some of these, either pro or con, please feel welcome.

More peace, love, and humanistic sentiments from the leftists at The Guardian:

Let's all sing together: "What the world needs now is love, sweet love. Not just for some, but for everyone...." Even the depraved souls in the editorial offices of The Guardian.

Here's video of Lawrence O'Donnell's meltdown on MSNBC's Scarborough Country with Pat Buchanan filling in. Note: If you click on this link you will witness a man lose his sanity right before your eyes. O'Donnell is transmogrified from a calm, reasonable, articulate journalist into a raging, abusive lunatic. It's fun to watch.

If you do visit the site you might think, at first, that you're watching an advertisement for Prozac; or, you might think it's a role-play in a Rhetoric 101 class on how to win a debate when you have no case; or, you might conclude that you're simply watching a liberal just doing what comes naturally. Perhaps it's all of these.

Speaking of Dems behaving badly, the Democratic strategy for election day is crystallizing in the early voting in Florida and in Arizona the thuggery proceeds apace.

A Kerry supporter of our acquaintance, left with nothing much to say when confronted with these reports, rejoined that she's sure that Republicans are employing the same sorts of ugly, fascistic tactics. While we're prepared to entertain that as a logical possibility, of course, we felt the need to point out to her that the only way one can be "sure" of that is to cite examples of it happening. Perhaps it is the case that, somewhere, to some degree, some Republican is acting somewhat like a Democrat, but she couldn't point to an example, and we haven't come across any yet. Perhaps our readers are aware of some.

In any event, Lawrence O'Donnell should be fired after this pathetic performance.

Evangelical Outpost directs us to the site of the Hip Hop debate between John Kerry and George Bush. The two contenders meet in an alley and engage in a valiant struggle witnessed only by their closest associates. Don't miss it. It's an historic, an epic, battle between the two men.

Victor David Hanson offers up a sterling analysis of why John Kerry, despite so many advantages, still seems to lag behind Bush in the polls. Indeed, Hanson all but predicts that Kerry will continue to trail and will lose the election:

Beyond this, Hanson offers six reasons why he believes Kerry will fail to close the gap by election day. It makes for very interesting reading, but whether he's correct or not won't be known for another twelve days.

Here's the site for the new Bush ad which is supposed to start running in battleground states today. It's entitled "Wolves".

Wolves are an apt metaphor for the terrorist enemy we're facing around the world. Much better than, say, prostitutes and gamblers and other "nuisances".

It is odd that Senator Kerry would describe the attack on the U.S.S. Cole that took nineteen lives, and the first attack on the World Trade Towers, as mere nuisances. It's very unlikely that the families of the victims think that these horrendous attacks were only nuisances.

Charles Krauthammer advances a startling hypothesis about John Kerry's strategy for regaining the affection of our European allies. Krauthammer argues that either Kerry is just blowing smoke or he's serious about trying to woo the French et al back to our side. If he's serious, which Krauthammer thinks he is, there really is only one way he could persuade them to get on board with us in Iraq and elsewhere:

If Krauthammer is correct, this would be the nadir of American history. Unfortunately, it doesn't require much of a stretch of imagination to believe Kerry capable of such a sellout. He demanded it in Vietnam and got it and he has called for it in Iraq as well.

And if he abandons Israel, what logic would prevent him from also abandoning Taiwan or South Korea?

Isn't it about time that the media starts insisting that Kerry reveal to the voters what's contained in those two or three dozen "plans" he claims to have for when he accedes to the presidency?

You can read the reasoning behind Krauthammer's allegations at the site linked above.

The New York Observer has a very funny parody of John Kerry and his reference to Mary Cheney's sexual orientation, which reference he declares with an air of wounded innocence, was made with the purest motives and the deepest respect and admiration for his vict...er, the young lady. He had no idea his totally sincere remarks would be so misconstrued. He certainly had no intention whatsoever of trying to embarrass anyone. Here's the Observer's rendition of what Kerry wanted to say:

Okay, Senators Edwards and Kerry, we get the message. Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.

Once upon a time there was a man who gazed across a ravine toward the people who lived on the other side and decided he wanted to build a bridge so that he could bring people on both sides together. He announced his intention to undertake this unprecedented attempt at unity, and everyone watched as he set out to do just that. But there were people on the other side who didn't want to be joined with those across the divide, so every time the man laid a new span in the bridge these people pulled it down and tore away part of their side of the chasm making it virtually impossible to reach them.

Then, when the bridge building project finally seemed hopeless, when the gulf between the two sides seemed wider than ever, the saboteurs stood at the edge and taunted the bridge builder with his own promises. You told us, they scoffed, that you would be a uniter not a divider, but we're more divided now than ever. So much for your deceptions and empty promises.

This, of course, is pretty much what has occurred over the last two years in Washington, D.C. When George Bush came to office he tried to build bridges to the other side. He invited Senator Kennedy to write his No Child Left Behind legislation. He brought the Senator to the White House to honor his brother, John F. Kennedy. He tried to bring people together so that the nation would benefit from a government whose parties were able to transcend their differences and do what was best for the American people. He sought to restore civility and mutual respect to our political discourse, but it was not to be.

The scurrilousness of the accusations grew increasingly worse. No insult was too nasty, too base, too hysterical for the Democrats to employ. They weren't shy about telling whomever was paying attention how much they hated him. Their meanness grew in intensity as Michael Moore released the grossly dishonest Fahrenheit 9/11, and the Democrats found themselves swooning over the man who once called the passengers aboard the hijacked airliners that crashed into the Trade Towers cowardly white people because they didn't overwhelm their attackers like Black passengers would have.

Meanwhile, as the stomping of the president continued, the left encouraged efforts to undermine two thousand years of settled tradition concerning marriage. Anyone who wanted to keep the institution of marriage as it had been for two millenia was branded a hateful homophobe. Those who opposed tinkering with an already fragile, but vitally important institution, were said to be "divisive". President Bush was labelled "an ignorant man", a "divisive figure", because he believes the only way to guarantee the survival of that tradition is to shelter it in the constitution.

The left was relentless also in it's attempts to undermine the morale of our troops in Iraq and greeted every setback with an unseemly satisfaction. They were quick to declare both our efforts there and Bush's leadership in those efforts an unqualified failure. His opponents reflexively distort the situation in that theater in order to make Bush look incompetent. They ridicule his claim that Saddam was trying to build WMDs even though virtually all of them believed themselves that Saddam possessed these arms, and despite the finding of the Duelfer Report that Saddam had a strategy for ending sanctions and restarting his WMD program.

Then came the election campaign and the hysteria and acidulousness of the left were ratcheted up several notches. The MSM suppressed reports on the economy and on the war that would favor Bush and hurt Kerry and gleefully ran any story they could find that made Bush look weak, confused, or malicious. NBC's The Today Show gave Kitty Kelly three days to promote her veridically-challenged smear of the Bush family, but refused the Swift Boat vets even a single interview. CBS went so far as to run a story that made Bush look like he had refused orders during his National Guard service based upon documents that turned out to be an obvious fraud. The political news director at ABC put out a memo which essentially instructs his staff to slant their coverage toward Kerry. Chris Matthews at MSNBC plays Hardball with Bush supporters and throws Batting Practice to the Kerry folks.

The MSM grills Bush with tough questions every chance they get, distorting his record whenever they can, criticizing and blaming him for everything from 9/11 to the shortage of flu vaccine, but they never ask Kerry anything that might reveal his flaws. Never has he been asked why he won't release his records from his Vietnam service, for example, nor has he ever been asked what there is in his twenty year Senate career that he thinks qualifies him to be president, or what there is in that record that gives the voters grounds for thinking he can provide the leadership he assures us he will provide.

Now the President is being accused of having a secret plan to cut social security benefits to retirees in a patently cruel attempt to play on the insecurities and fears of the elderly and to drive a wedge between them and George Bush.

Desperate to solidify their African-American base, the Democrats have resurrected the old canard that Bush has another secret plan to disenfranchise Black voters. Remember Florida in 2000, they ask, when hundreds, maybe thousands of black votes were disallowed? They never mention that there were even more white votes which were rejected, and the reason they were was because the voters were ineligible, many of them being felons. Nevertheless, televison ads are appearing which show footage from the 1960s of Blacks being knocked down by fire hoses with the clear implication that this is the sort of thing African-Americans can expect in a second Bush term.

Hoping to discredit the president among those anxious for the promise of stem cell research to cure some human afflictions, they completely misrepresent the president's position on stem cells, making him appear either cruel or stupid or both, and they misrepresent as well the potential for success that stem cells hold. Senator Edwards has even promised that if John Kerry is elected, parapalegics and quadrapalegics will get up out of their wheelchairs and walk, perhaps the most despicable political promise ever made anywhere by anyone in the history of American politics.

On top of this have come allegations of yet another secret Bush plan, this one to reinstate the draft, preying upon the fears of millions of young people and their parents. In fact, the only people trying to reinstate the draft are Democrats in both the House and the Senate. The bills to resume a draft were introduced by Democrats, and only Democrats voted in favor of them. The most likely party to reinstate the draft is, in fact, the Democratic party, since it is only Democrats who are making the case for one.

Following close upon these calumnies are news stories about voter fraud in heavily Democratic districts and threats to litigate the election results, tying them up in courts, perhaps indefinitely, if Kerry doesn't win.

Having done all this and more, having sundered every bond of good will and decency, the Democrats now stand before the nation and have the insolence to blame George Bush for having divided us. They taunt him with his own promise to be a uniter not a divider, and deride him for having failed to achieve that which they themselves have made impossible.

Through this entire storm of invective neither Bush nor any of his team have answered in kind. He has kept his word about trying to change the tone of discourse in Washington despite the disgusting viciousness of his political opponents' slanders and utter lack of moral restraint. There is an ugliness and depravity in the rhetoric and tactics of the political left which is symptomatic of a sickness of the soul. There's been nothing remotely comparable to it on the Republican side of this campaign. President Bush has kept faith with his promise. He did what he could do. His honor and dignity are intact and that of the Democrats is in tatters.

They may win the White House, but it will be a Pyhrric victory if they do. They've done more in this election to destroy the public's faith in our political system than Nixon ever did with the Watergate scandal. They have injected so much poison into the process that, should they win in November, our political discourse and the public's trust may not recover for a generation, if ever.

This matters not at all to the left. Like a cocaine addict who will do or say anything, no matter how degrading or self-destructive, in order to satisfy her addiction to the narcotic, the Democrats are prepared to do whatever it takes, even if it means destroying the careers and reputations of anyone who stands in their way, in order to sate their lust for the narcotic of political power. It would be a travesty of calamitous proportions if the majority of voters in this country chose to reward this sordid record by putting these people in the White House.

Gregory Djerejian at The Belgravia Dispatch joins the growing number of analysts who are concluding that Osama's body lies moldering on some Afghanistan mountainside. After an examination of the evidence, Djerejian sums it up with this:

Thanks to Instapundit for the tip.

Evangelical Outpost directs us to a Christian lady by the name of Jane Stillwater who interprets Jesus' injunction to love one another in a most peculiar fashion. The gracious Ms Stillwater writes the following at her blog:

Whoever hid Ms Stillwater's meds please return them to her this instant.

Here's a link to a new pro-Bush ad called Ashley's Story. It's a powerful piece. You might send it to some undecided voter if you know any such people.

One thought that impressed itself upon me as I watched it was how different it is in tone from so much of the Democratic stuff out there. The Kerry ads, or at least many of them, are trying to scare the bejabbers out of old folks, African-Americans, and young men with complete fabrications about social security, vote suppression, and the draft.

This ad doesn't resort to calumny or lies, it just shows George Bush as the kind of man one hopes our president would be. Watch the ad and try to imagine John Kerry doing this.

Thanks to Power Line for the tip.

Vladimir Putin notes that the terrorists have a definite preference as to who they want to see elected in November:

Pretty scary, especially when we reflect that this would make absolutely no difference to most of those who plan to vote for Mr. Kerry in November.

George Bush claims that Senator Kerry, in twenty years of service to the taxpayers of Massachusetts and the nation, has authored only five bills which became law. Kerry testily replies that he has fifty six laws to his credit. Fact Check.org has done the heavy lifting and lets us know what's what.

Evidently, when Bush said Kerry passed five bills, he was counting only those measures Kerry authored which passed the Senate, the House, were signed by the president, and became law. That's technically accurate, but it omits six other pieces of Kerry legislation that have become law.

Kerry's twenty years in the Senate have, therefore, yielded the following legislative accomplishments:

A grant to fund small businesses run by women, a bill to name a federal building in Massachussetts after a WWII hero, a measure to limit the accidental taking of dolphins during commercial fishing operations, another to promote better understanding of coastal resources, and a bill to grant a visa and admission to the U.S. to one Kil Joon Yu Callahan.

The Bush campaign omitted mention of two other bills authored by Kerry which passed the Senate and later became law in a slightly different form approved by the House, under the same titles and mostly same substance. (This occurs when House and Senate versions differ so slightly that one house adopts the other's version rather than go to the trouble of a House-Senate conference to work out a compromise.) These were a bill to award Jackie Robinson a Congressional gold medal (posthumously), and another to increase research grants for small businesses.

Finally, there four "joint resolutions" that are not technically "bills" but which have the same force when passed by both houses and are signed into law by the president. All four created national events.

A resolution to make the week of Oct. 22 - Oct. 28, 1989 "World Population Awareness Week"; a resolution to renew "World Population Awareness Week" for 1991; a resolution to make Nov. 13, 1992 "Vietnam Veterans Memorial 10th Anniversary Day"; and a resolution to make Sept. 18, 1992 "National POW/MIA Recognition Day."

Even giving Kerry credit for eleven measures which became law rather than the five the president referred to his record amounts to a fraction more than one half piece of legislation per year served. The mediocrity of the accomplishment is matched only by the mediocrity of the laws themselves. It's little wonder that the Senator chose not to mention this lackluster narrative in his nomination acceptance speech.

Visit the Fact Check.org link above to see how Mr. Kerry arrived at the number fifty six. It reveals something dismaying about Senator Kerry's standard for legislative accomplishment. It's also a bit of a hoot.

What is there in the above tabulation that might lead anyone to believe that Senator Kerry has the qualifications to lead the United States through the difficult struggles that lie ahead? The times call for a leader, one who has demonstrated that he has what it takes to accomplish something significant. Viewpoint doesn't find much in the Kerry record in which to take comfort. In fact, it finds nothing in which to take comfort.

Christianity Today's Books and Culture Corner has a eulogy to Jacques Derrida written by James Smith, associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College.

Smith seems to tell us more about himself than he does about Derrida, but there is one paragraph which reveals something important of the personal qualities of the man:

Reading this paragraph makes one want to read more of Derrida, even if only out of admiration for one who can be so exalted by the academic establishment and yet so humble. There is something deeply attractive about the confluence of those two qualities.

Jonah Goldberg has a good fix on Kerry's religious talk. The excerpts begin with a quote from Senator Kerry:

Kerry has had much to say about matters of faith lately, but he seems distinctly uncomfortable when he has to do so, and never goes deeper than vague references to the "Almighty". He gives the impression of a man just going through the motions because he knows it's expected of him. Doubtless he'd much rather be talking about something else and wouldn't be speaking of religious matters at all if there weren't votes out there to be mined.

Speaking of Senator Kerry and religion, a PowerLine reader asks: "Why is it that when President Bush goes to church it is to worship and when Senator Kerry goes to church it is to campaign? The Democrats are the ones hollering constantly about separation of church and state and they are the only ones on the national ticket attending church to campaign."

Yes, and they do it with great panache. John Kerry has probably been in church more in the last six weeks than he has in the last six months, at least if his church attendance is anything like his Senate attendance. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and other Democrats regularly use churches as political platforms. As Power Line notes: Is it legal? No. And a Republican who did it would be in trouble. Or, rather, the church where he campaigned would be.

Church/State separation Democrat style means that Democrats can use churches to preach politics, but Republicans can only use them for worship.

Pat Buchanan makes news with his endorsement for president. He is scathing in his condemnation of the Iraq war and of the neo-conservatives surrounding Bush, but he is completely contemptuous of John Kerry. Some excerpts:

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. It really is an outstanding precis of the conservative case against the Bush administration and even more against John Kerry.

If the Democrats lose it'll be largely because no one has a reason to vote for John Kerry. He's a perfect denotation of the term "empty suit". The majority of voters who pull the lever for Kerry wish only to vote against George Bush. Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example of this phenomenon on the other side of the ballot that we've seen emerge thus far.

For people interested in such things this site gives an interesting graphical analysis of poll results over the last two months. The author, Steven den Beste, concludes that the only explanation for the pattern of results is a deliberate attempt to manipulate the election in Kerry's favor. He also believes the attempt has failed.

Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

Froggy Ruminations, a blog written by a former navy SEAL, offers this line of reasoning for believing that Usama bin Laden is currently composting in the Afghanistan mountains:

Viewpoint offers a second to the motion.

No Left Turns offers a good analysis of the electoral college numbers and why they break in the President's favor:

In one sense the election is close, but in the only sense that counts it's an uphill struggle for Senator Kerry. The real problem will be if the election is close in several states like it was in 2000. If it is, the results of the election will not be known for weeks as we are put through counts, recounts, claims of fraud, and all manner of lawsuits. Let's hope it's not close.

Blogger Derek Melleby relates the following encounter with a friend:

Derek raises the question but leaves it for his readers to answer. He's correct that the question is simplistic and doesn't directly relate to the conflicts in which we find ourselves engaged as a nation. Nevertheless, to the extent that there are Christians who really would find one question harder to answer than the other, it should be addressed.

The short answer to the query is that we should never go to war "in the name of" Democracy or America. We should, however, be prepared to go to war for Justice. Justice may entail defending ourselves and our families, or it may entail defending others who are threatened and oppressed and who live in fear and deprivation.

Justice is a necessary condition for going to war, but it may not be a sufficient condition. There may be times when a war is justified but not wise. If, for instance, success is doubtful then, even though there might be just cause for waging war, actually doing so may be unwise.

The Bible, which is the Christian's guide to faith and morality, does not proscribe war. It calls evil the motives for which most wars are fought: avarice and the lust for power and blood. The protests against the Iraq war often tried to focus on this point. The protestors argued that we were going to war to slake our greed for oil, a claim which is absurd on its face. If it were oil we wanted we could've invaded Saudi Arabia or Kuwait with a lot less trouble. The Bible repeatedly calls upon us to do justice in the world, and there may be circumstances in which doing justice entails the use of deadly force. In such cases war may be a Biblically and morally legitimate option.

The question posed by opponents of the Iraq war - if invading Iraq was justified why didn't we invade Iran or North Korea which are also threats to peace - is both disingenuous and foolish. Disingenuous because the critic knows that if invading Iraq was justified then whether we invade other countries has nothing to do with the rightness of invading Iraq, and foolish because it demands that we do everything all at once.

Invading Iraq was both justified and wise. It delivered 25 million people from a most brutal oppression, it eliminated a major abettor of terrorism and a future threat to peace in the region and the world. It was wise in the same way it would have been wise to have acted preemptively against Hitler before 1938, rather than waiting until he had amassed the strongest military on the continent. Moreover, by attacking Iraq and disposing of the most powerful army in the Arab Middle East in a matter of weeks other countries, such as Libya, which might be considering emulating Saddam's example of pursuing WMD were put on notice that they would do well to reconsider.

There is something of a myth circulating among people who talk about these issues that war should always be a last resort. The truth is that war must never be a last resort. The last resort is to surrender or to do nothing that is effective in relieving an injustice. Making war a last resort is code for never making war at all. Those who say, as Senator Kerry has in the current campaign, that George Bush did not make war a last resort are really saying that as long as the other side is willing to "negotiate", as long as there is a glimmer of hope that they are prepared to concede here or there, as long as they haven't actually attacked us, as long as we can't prove they're going to attack us, as long as .... but this is to keep putting off ending a threat until the other side is so powerful that he makes ending it impossible. It is precisely the lesson Neville Chamberlain learned in the 1930s, and as the Duelfer Report makes clear, it was Saddam's strategy throughout the last thirteen years.

No, we should never fight a war in the name of "Democracy" or in the name of "America", but we should be prepared to fight in the name of Justice. Pacifists argue that war is by its nature inherently unjust, but it is hard to see how this could be so. How is it unjust to rescue people from evil? If, in the course of rescuing a nation, innocent people are accidentally killed does that tragic fact make the rescue of the nation unjust? Were the passengers aboard the hijacked plane which crashed in Pennsylvania wrong to use force, perhaps even deadly force, certainly force which resulted in the deaths of innocent passengers, to save the intended victims in Washington, D.C.?

The pacifist argues that war violates the principle of loving one's enemies, since it entails the deliberate killing of those enemies, but love for one's enemies must be tempered with love for all people. With deep respect for those who consider themselves pacifists and who strive to understand the Bible's teaching on war and peace, it must be said that pacifism is not always an expression of Christian love.

It is not love to see, as in Iraq, your fellow man living in fear, having his children tortured in front of his very eyes, being forced to watch his daughters scream in horror as they are being raped and horribly abused, watching helplessly as his children starve because the oppressors won't let them have food, and ultimately finding himself being tortured and murdered - it's not love to see all this and refuse to do anything more to alleviate the awful suffering of these people after peaceful attempts to end it have met with failure. To be able to end the horror through force, but to refuse to do so because it is believed that it is wrong to kill the people who are responsible for it, is perverse. To be able to end it and to refuse is the exact opposite of love.

What, one wonders, would be the pacifist response to a Beslan here in the United States? Would the pacifist counsel that we negotiate endlessly while the hostage children are delirious with thirst? And when the negotiations come to naught, what then? Give the terrorists whatever they want? Refuse to yield to their demands and stand by and watch as they murder our terrified children one at a time? Do nothing because we don't want to be responsible for the deaths of the terrorists and because the use of deadly force might also inadvertently cause the deaths of some of the children?

There are times in the course of events when the demands of justice and compassion, honor and prudence, come together and make the use of force both necessary and right. God grant us the wisdom to recognize when force is justified and wise, and when it is not.

A rap artist, a person named KRS-One, finds much to be satisfied about in the fall of the Twin Towers. Evidently he was once turned away by security guards there for talking and dressing like, well, like a rap artist, and now justice has been served. Three thousand people paid with their lives for the affront. Or something like that. Here's the story:

Having availed himself of his first amendment right to sound like an moron as well as dress the part, KRS has evidently taken umbrage again at the way the story was reported.

He offers a resounding non-rebuttal here. The fellow claims in his reply to be a philosopher and a keen observer of social events. Viewpoint has no doubt that as a thinker he's a fine rap lyricist.

Charles Krauthammer has commentary on the utter dishonesty of the Kerry/Edwards exploitation of the stem cell issue, and John Edwards' shameless promise to heal paralysis victims if he and John Kerry are elected. Krauthammer, who has himself been confined to a wheel chair since he was a medical student, finds the Democrats' pandering on this issue completely repugnant. Some excerpts from Krauthammer's column:

Krauthammer closes his column with these words: "There is no apologizing for Edwards's remark. It is too revealing. There is absolutely nothing the man will not say to get elected."

Ditto that for John Kerry.

Hugh Hewitt doesn't seem ready to let go of the Kerry remark about Mary Cheney's sexual orientation any time soon.

Personally, although the statement seemed to have been thoughtless and gratuitous (We wonder how Kerry would've felt had someone chosen to publically comment on his daughter's choice of a totally transparent dress at a recent soiree), we'd be willing to give the Senator the benefit of the doubt that he had no malicious intent.

We would, that is, if it weren't for the fact that Kerry no doubt knows dozens of public figures in his own party that he could have used as examples, but he choose someone who is intimately related to the opposition (Hmmm). We would be willing to give Senator Kerry the benefit of the doubt if it weren't for the fact that John Edwards pulled the same stunt in his debate with Dick Cheney, and if it weren't for the fact that Mary Beth Cahill declared Mary Cheney's sexual orientation to be "fair game" (What's next, "open season"?), and if Kerry himself had had the grace to offer a sincere apology for having precipitated such a misunderstanding.

So far from getting an apology, what we got from Mrs. Edwards was a totally graceless comment that Lynne Cheney's pique at Kerry's remark shows her to be ashamed of her daughter. This crass statement by Mrs. Edwards is, in our opinion, even worse than Kerry's original blunder, assuming that Kerry's original blunder was indeed a blunder and not a calculated and cynical attempt to discredit the Bush/Cheney ticket by announcing to the world, or that part of it that may have been unaware, that Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter.

The Democrats have been quick to accuse the Bush administration of dropping the ball on the matter of flu vaccine supply, but this is an example of political opportunism masquerading as profound concern for human welfare.

The available supply was cut in half because that portion of it produced in England was found to be contaminated by a bacterium. This raises the question, of course, of why we have to rely on foreign manufacturers to supply our vaccine in the first place. The answer is that over-regulation by the FDA and the fear of litigation have made domestic production unprofitable. In 1988 there were twenty five companies in the United States producing vaccines. Today there are only two. The rest weren't able to make enough money to cover the cost of insurance and R & D, so they decided to get out of the vaccine business altogether, and we were forced to seek our vaccines abroad. As a result, possibly thousands of people, perhaps many of them children, will die this winter because there isn't enough medicine with which to innoculate them against the flu. It's a good illustration of how government screws everything up when it tries to control too much.

Another problem is that demand for flu shots fluctuates from year to year as public interest waxes and wanes. Last season brought huge demand for a flu shot; the year before saw little interest. But flu shots have to be made six to eight months in advance, so the manufacturers must rely on projections which puts them at risk of creating far more vaccine than there is demand for. Since they can't store it, whatever they can't sell is a total loss. Companies often have to discard millions of doses a year.

Yet a third problem is that the government has become the most important purchaser of vaccines and now controls the market. This is because public health agencies have stepped into the market to help the poor by providing low-cost vaccinations. While this sounds like a laudable goal, the "public customer" has come to dominate the market. This has lowered prices for these medications.

With prices low, the risks associated with vaccine manufacture have become relatively more important. Vaccine manufacturers continue to be sued in vaccine-related lawsuits. Over the past 15 years, such litigation has chased several companies out of the vaccine business altogether.

What we need is more companies making vaccines in the United States. That means it has to be more profitable with less liability risk and fewer economic restraints. These important medicines save thousands of lives each year. To burden the manufacturers with onerous pathways to regulatory approval, unrealistic standards and exorbitant and unreasonable legal judgments, and to depress profits and innovation with price controls, is to cheat the American people.

It's hard to see how the Bush administration, which advocates all of these measures, can be fairly held responsible for this year's vaccine shortage, but it's not hard to see that an administration in thrall to trial lawyers and "big government" regulation of industry will be a major part of the problem, not part of the solution. John Edwards, who, as a lawyer, has enriched himself by bringing suit against medical practitioners, and his running mate, John Kerry, have consistently opposed measures that would effect genuine tort reform and are also strong advocates of government regulation. Despite Senator Edwards' claim the other day to possess supernatural powers of healing, both his and Kerry's records give the beleaguered flu sufferer little hope of any future relief.

A friend writes to chide us for Viewpoint's partiality to George Bush (See Get Tougher On Bush on the feedback page) and for our reluctance to be as critical of his shortcomings as we are of Senator Kerry's. His concern is well-taken, not only because he's a very bright, reasonable, and honest guy, and not only because he has written a very thoughtful piece, but also because he happens in this instance to be correct. Viewpoint has indeed been on Bush's side in the current campaign and we have withheld criticism of the President while trying to make the case that Senator Kerry lacks the most important qualities we want our president to possess.

It might be helpful to explain why we don't adopt a more neutral stance. My brother Bill and I started Viewpoint last May for several reasons. One was that we felt that our culture was becoming increasingly secularized, even to the point of being hostile toward the Christian faith. There is a widely accepted belief in the Western world to the effect that religion is outmoded and obsolete; that it is nothing but myth and superstition; that it lacks any credible epistemic basis and has nothing to say to modern man. We wanted to add our voice to those who believe that socially, culturally, and philosophically this belief is a grave mistake.

A second reason for starting our web log was that we were dismayed by the failure of the Mainstream Media (MSM) to present a balanced picture of the policy issues confronting our nation and the men who would lead us. We believe there is not only a deep-seated bias against George Bush in the MSM but, more than that, a profound antipathy, even hatred, for him.

Bill and I hoped that we could perhaps be a voice, albeit a small one, in our little corner of the world, that might offer a tiny dissent against the roar of the MSM megaphone. In order to do this we felt we had to concentrate on the positives about George Bush and his policies since his opponents in the MSM were already engaged in the business of denigrating them. We also felt that much of the criticism of the president was manifestly unfair, even dishonest, and that the only realistic alternative to Bush, John Kerry, is completely unsatisfactory.

It's not that we think President Bush is perfect. We don't, and in fact the last time we talked about it, Bill was not even prepared to vote for him. George Bush is wrong, as far as we're concerned, on spending and immigration, among other things. He can also be faulted, perhaps, for some aspects of the post-war in Iraq. Even so, there are three issues which trump everything else in this election: The war on terrorism (of which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are a subset), the appointment of federal judges and supreme court justices, and the economy. On the last, Bush's judgment on spending (and, for Bill, globalism) is questionable, but his opponent's is worse. On the first two issues there is simply no contest between the two candidates in either of our minds.

For this reason, Viewpoint has taken the position that it is imperative for the welfare of this nation and the future of our children that Bush be re-elected. Four more years of George Bush will not guarantee success in the three paramount matters mentioned in the previous paragraph, but we can't accept replacing him with a man who has spent twenty years in the Senate without having a single major accomplishment to his credit and whose votes, and the political company he keeps, are uniformly indicative of a man whose policies would be quite detrimental to the long-term good of this nation.

We're not neutral about this nor do we pretend to be. We have religious and political points of view which we believe are preferable to their opposites and we wish to use our humble little forum to advocate them. There will be time enough after the election to explain our disappointments with the president, but now is not the time. Too much is at stake.

The BBC has an article about the discovery of another mass grave in Iraq. This one is more heart-breaking than most:

Forty mass graves! And still the squeamish Europeans don't want to get involved. Yes. By all means, the Europeans should not help to accumulate the evidence of Saddam's crimes because, why, then they'd be helping to show that he actually deserved to die and what kind of gratitude would that express to the man who filled the purses of so many of their countrymen with cash in order to keep them quiet about his crimes. The Europeans are nothing if not loyal to an ally, at least whichever ally offers them the most lucrative bribes.

Perhaps this is all one might expect from the people whose culture produced Hitler and Stalin. The Europeans have a soft spot in their hearts for murderous savages like Saddam, they tend to regard them as existential heroes, and we should be understanding of their desire not to see a Nietzschean Ubermann get what he meted out to so many others.

As for those who have not yet descended to European levels of effete decadence there still exists the concept of Justice. Saddam deserves worse than death, of course, but that should be left to God. Our only obligation, as General Norman Schwartzkopff once said, is to arrange the meeting.

The Strategy Page has some interesting reading on the war of attrition going on in Fallujah and gives us some insight into the psychological effects of the Coalition's strategy on the insurgents:

There's more here.

UPDATE: Fox News reports that it looks as though an assault on Fallujah is imminent. See the report here.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the double helicoid structure of the DNA molecule, has passed away at the age of 88. Mark Steyn graces us with an excellent obituary.

Crick was an atheistic Darwinian who was most interested in taking his naturalistic assumptions to their logical conclusions, though like most such thinkers, he stops well short of going all the way.

For instance, Steyn quotes him as writing in his last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, "that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"

In other words, the human being is for Crick nothing more than a clump of chemicals, mud and blood, a muscle and bone machine. If Crick is right about this, however, it has the most distressing and devastating consequences for our view of human existence. As Viewpoint has argued on previous occasions, every major yearning of the human heart is hopelessly unfulfillable if all we are is a pack of neurons. Life and the world are completely absurd, there's no meaning or purpose to human love, striving, or suffering. There's no ground for moral judgment, no real justice, no basis for human dignity or rights. There is only, for most people who've ever lived, the prospect of pain, conflict, alienation, and finally annihilation with perhaps a few fleeting moments of joy arising briefly like the ephemeral light of a firefly in an otherwise uniformly dark and bleak night.

The worldview of such as Francis Crick leads anyone who is serious about its logical consequences into the abyss of nihilism and despair. Anything else is just whistling past the graveyard. It is an odd thing about atheism that few people are able to live consistently with its fundamental convictions that we are an accident of blind, impersonal forces and that this life is the only life there is.

Senator Kerry claims that Iraq is in chaos, that the president is botching it so badly that Kerry has no idea what he will find when he takes office in January. He may, he claims, find that Iraq is another Lebanon, and so on. Yet everything we read coming out of that country, except what we read in the MSM, suggests that the Senator simply doesn't know what he's talking about. This is understandable, of course, since he never attends the meetings of the Intelligence Committee he serves on, but it's not excusable.

There is much news from Iraq which indicates that things are going much better there than the Senator would have us believe. One such story at National Review Online concerns the quality of Iraqi troops which are daily growing more competent, more effective and more numerous. Consider these excerpts:

Speaking of Iraq, there is another helpful article on the conditions in Fallujah in the Washington Post (free registration may be required). Evidently, the American tactic of wearing down the insurgents in that city is paying dividends by setting the various groups against each other, and the foreigners are feeling both the heat and the fear.

One way or another Fallujah will be pacified by the end of November as will be Ramadi and Sadr City. Elections will be held and foreign corporations, eager to get a chunk of Iraq's oil wealth, will stream into the country to further hasten reconstruction. This will drive the left in this country to near hysteria, not only because George Bush will be largely vindicated and given the credit, and the judgment and motives of the left will be indicted, but also because once Iraq is stabilized, the attention of the world, i.e. the U.S., will perforce turn toward Iran's nuclear program. If Iraq begins to settle as November draws to a close, look for the left to employ every play in their playbook in a desperate attempt to preempt military action against Iran should it be deemed necessary.

Moreover, if Bush is re-elected in a couple of weeks look for the French, Germans, and Russians to join the coalition against Iran. They will seek to redeem themselves after their disgraceful behavior in Iraq, where they accepted bribes from Saddam in exchange for thwarting the American demarche. Unless, of course, they're also accepting bribes from the mullahs in Tehran.

Transcripts of two new Swift Boat Veterans ads, set to run during Monday Night Football, can be found here. The second of the two sounds like it will be very powerful. Thanks to Kerry Spot for the tip.

Many people have wondered why President Bush doesn't defend his record more vigorously in the debates and attack Kerry's record, which is eminently vulnerable, more incisively. The answer, perhaps, is that Mr. Bush suffers from three rhetorical liabilities. First, he seems to assume that everybody already knows all the facts. He himself is immersed in matters of policy all day long, and it's easy for such a man to think that what's obvious to him is obvious to everybody. Perhaps he doesn't realize the depth of political ignorance and indifference that resides just outside the beltway. When, for example, he accuses John Kerry of being a "liberal", probably three quarters of citizens of voting age have no idea what he means.

Second, he's just not a quick thinker on his feet. His mind doesn't seem to work well when he's under the pressure of having to come up with gaffe-free answers in front of the whole nation. He no doubt works much better in intimate, relaxed settings where he can be himself, has time to consider options and think through problems.

Third, he's not particularly eloquent so that when he does know what he wants to say he has trouble putting it into words and using the appropriate inflections and gestures to drive the words home.

All of these liabilities work to his detriment in a debate setting, and it's quite surprising that his team didn't insist on the same sort of format that was used in the Cheney/Edwards debate which would have put him more at ease. It's also surprising that they didn't insist that he be allowed to use notes which would've made his task much less onerous.

None of this, mind you, should be taken as in any way a reflection upon his intelligence. Brilliant men have suffered the same sorts of disabilities, and absolute dolts can appear eloquent and articulate in public. Everyone is different in this respect. One reason why Viewpoint opposes Presidential debates is that they give the impression that the skills needed to do well in such events are somehow necessary qualifications for the presidency. That is not the case and never has been, and we do our nation a disservice by placing so much emphasis on the minutiae of these events.

Among the many reasons why the nation seems so divided this election season is the fact that the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party (about 90% of politically active Democrats) seems to have taken leave of their senses. Their febrile minds conjure up all manner of nightmarish fantasies that they are quite certain are accurate accounts of Bush administration plots and machinations, and out of their paranoia and hallucinogenic condition arises the most spiteful and vile rhetoric. Or they express their distaste so ineptly that it just sounds dumb. Either way most sane folk are put off by it and wish to have nothing to do with them.

Slate.com provides us with a fine illustration of the mental state of the contemporary left. They interviewed thirty one novelists to see who these writers will be voting for in November. As one might expect from such a group, twenty four responded that they will be voting for Kerry and four favor the President (three chose other options). More interesting than who they support, however, are their reasons for their selection. Here's a sample from the twenty four Kerry supporters:

Dan Chaon

He [Bush] seems truly, frighteningly dangerous and completely without scruples. I'm alarmed by his administration's attacks on civil liberties, by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war, by the gleeful disregard for the environment, by the social policies - the tax cuts, which so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else; the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy; the reckless budget deficit .... I have found myself recoiling from the newspaper, and I dread where another four years of his administration would lead us. I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed "Christianity," even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime.

Amy Tan

I'm voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he.

Rick Moody

The Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece.

Jonathan Franzen

He's [Bush] the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's [Kerry] a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot.

Jane Smiley

Would George Bush steal the election if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence is that he has (disenfranchising black voters in Florida in 2000) and wants to again (attempting the same trick already this year). That such a man, an amoral prevaricator and ruthless opportunist, actually has supporters in his bid to wreck American democracy appalls me. I think that the coming election will result in a constitutional crisis of unprecedented danger. I consider a vote for Bush a vote for tyranny.

David Amsden

A cousin of mine spent a year fighting with the Army in Iraq. He was a harder man when he returned, tweaked, difficult to relate to. His stories were crushing - did you know that there are giant spiders that creep up on sleeping soliders at night? That this is the sort of thing that causes nightmares....For all his swaggering bravado, the guy has no real backbone, no confidence in anything but his squinty little grin, which is frightening.

Well, we could go on, but why bother. After all, the level of ignorance, falsehood, anti-Christian bigotry, and plain stupidity in this brief sample of responses is just too depressing to warrant prolonging the exercise.

Despite the intellectual perversities, eccentricities, and loopiness on display here, there are a few bright lights of rationality shining amidst the liberal gloom. These are mostly provided, however, by those novelists who are supporting Bush. Click on the link above to read their statements.

Scott Norvell has a fine piece here on the election in Afghanistan. He writes from Kabul:

This is a Nobel prize caliber accomplishment. In fact, it surpasses in magnitude virtually anything any previous recipients of that award have achieved. What other world leader has done so much for so many of the world's oppressed in just four years? Maybe FDR in WWII (although it's questionable), surely Reagan, but it took him eight years, and even then it wasn't until after his presidency that his policies toward the communists brought about the collapse of their tyranny.

What other world leader has done as much for women's rights in such a brief period of time as has George Bush? Twenty five million women in Afghanistan and Iraq can vote for the first time ever. In Afghanistan they can go to school and hold elective office for the first time. This is monumental, but it leaves our feminists unimpressed. After all, Bush still opposes the right of a woman to kill her unborn child.

Bush's accomplishment of freeing fifty million people in Afghanistan and Iraq is probably unique in world history, but the odds that Bush will be awarded the Nobel are probably about the same as they were for Ronald Reagan. Doubtless the enlightened eminences who decide upon the recipients, if they don't select some mentally unstable virago who rants about white scientists developing AIDs in order to wipe out the black race, will choose someone who campaigned hard to prevent what Bush has achieved. Maybe Jacques Chirac, now that he's no longer receiving bribes from Saddam, can use the cash.

The Democrats are in a massive snit over the decision by Sinclair Broadcasting Corp. to preempt regular programming to air a film based on the book Stolen Valor which takes a very close look at the character of the Senator who would be president. The film is seen by the left, who ought to know one when they see it, as an attack piece.They're outraged that a broadcasting conglomerate would use the public airwaves to promote a partisan assault on their candidate.

One wonders where all this anger and indignation from the left were when CBS and Dan Rather were using 60 Minutes to slander George Bush with fraudulent memos.

One commentator on MSNBC said that this new film is not like Fahrenheit 9/11 because people had to buy a ticket to see that and this is coming into homes free courtesy of the public airwaves. Of course, Fahrenheit 9/11 was shown for free to students in taxpayer subsidized universities all across the country, but that's different. That was a hit piece on George Bush. Those should be subsidized. Unlike Michael Moore's movie, this film is factually accurate, however, and may seriously hurt John Kerry, so it's an obvious abuse of the public trust that must be stopped.

Anyway, what is it that the liberals always tell people who complain about the sleaze and junk network television serves up on a daily basis? "Hey, if you don't like it, don't watch it."

John Kerry has evidently made a last minute switch of running mates exchanging John Edwards for faith-healer Benny Hinn. At least that's the word out of the midwest today where the Democratic vice-presidential candidate had these promises for an Iowa audience:

If the race stays close look for the vice-presidential candidate, whoever he is, to be promising voters eternal life if Kerry's elected.

No word from Iowa yet as to how many listeners were "slain in the Spirit" at the event.

Mark Steyn is always worth reading. He's bright, funny, and an outstanding writer. He recently wrote a column for his paper, The Telegraph in England, which the editors declined to run. They evidently felt that Steyn was a little too insensitive in discussing the reaction of some British government officials and the family of Ken Bigley in the wake of his abduction and murder by Islamic terrorists in Iraq. Viewpoint wonders, however, if the refusal to publish the column doesn't say more about The Telegraph's editors than it does about Steyn. Be that as it may, he subsequently posted his column online with a brief explanation. Go here to read it. It's very good.

Senator Kerry has been receiving a drubbing in the New Media for his gaffe in yesterday's New York Times to the effect that he wants to see terrorism reduced to the level of a nuisance. The statement was at best stupid and Power Line does a fine job of explaining why it is so egregious. Even so, I don't think that that is the worst thing he says in the interview. Elsewhere in the article he's quoted as saying that:

This statement reveals a shocking lack of understanding of our enemy. Kerry sees terrorism as a problem of diplomacy, of economics. This is incredibly naive and almost guarantees worse strikes against our country than we experienced on 9/11. The jihadis are not trying to kill us because we have inept diplomats. Nor are they trying to destroy us because they resent our exploitation of their oil. They are trying to murder us because they see us as enemies of God who must be converted or exterminated. In their eyes we are infidels who are guilty of two major crimes.

The first is that we serve as a guarantor of Israel's continued existence. The only diplomatic strategy we could adopt which would (temporarily) appease the Islamists would be to pull out of the Middle East completely. Not only would we have to abandon Iraq and our bases elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, but we would also have to abandon any and all commitments to Israel's security. Nothing short of this will mollify the terrorists, and this will only assuage their hatred in the short term.

The second crime of which we are guilty is that we are, in their eyes, spreading a corrupt, decadent culture throughout the Muslim world. It's not just our sexual permissiveness that upsets them, it's the freedom we have to believe and say what we wish, it's the equality we give to women, it's the idea that church and state should not be entangled. Each of these is abhorrent to Muslims and their religion, or their interpretation of it, calls upon them to wage tireless, unceasing jihad against the corrupting influences of the West which threaten to undermine the Faith.

As long as we're strong, however, their efforts are unlikely to prosper so they must defeat us by destroying our economic power base. They must conquer us by wearing us down, by striking at our homeland in order to dispirit us. As long as we're a politico-cultural presence in the world they will strive relentlessly to bring us low, and terror is the only means they have at their disposal to accomplish this. They certainly are not prepared to wage a war of ideas nor can they persuade us through diplomacy to commit cultural suicide. Thus for Kerry to suggest that better diplomacy will reduce or eliminate terrorism reveals an alarming naivete on his part. The Islamic hatred for the West does not lend itself to diplomatic ameliorations.

What diplomacy would accomplish, however, is an illusory lessening of conflict. The jihadis would doubtless give the impression that they were succumbing to whatever inducements or bribes a Kerry administration held out to them. They would attempt to lull us to sleep with assurances that now that the cowboy Bush is out of office it is possible to discuss our differences reasonably. Tensions would ease. Americans, always willing to delude ourselves, would become complacent.

To show our good faith, and to keep negotiations moving along, a Kerry administration would likely relax our prosecution of the war against Muslim terrorists abroad. With the reduction of military operations would come a simultaneous relaxation of vigilance which would almost surely result in making our borders even less secure than they are now. It would be just a matter of time before a WMD was smuggled into the U.S. and detonated in one of our cities. The resulting death and chaos would be unprecedented.

The terrorists would then announce through their media outlets to a stunned nation that there are similar weapons planted in other cities throughout the United States and that unless we meet their demands, i.e. get out of the Middle East and abandon Israel, they will begin to set the others off as well. They don't have to really have the weapons, they only have to have had the first one, and have used it, and the ensuing panic would be seismic in scale. No administration which refused to accede to these demands would survive. The result would be a paralyzed, panic-stricken America, and this would be catastrophic for the entire globe.

With a United States helpless to impose its will, war would almost certainly break out between Arabs and Jews, between China and Taiwan, and on the Korean peninsula. It would probably also erupt between India and Pakistan and Iran and Iraq. In each of these cases it would no doubt be nuclear. Tribal warfare in Africa would rage unnoticed against the global conflagration that would result from a United States crippled by a terror strike such as we've envisioned. Civil strife would plague our cities as well, especially in locales with Muslim populations.

This is the world John Kerry's thinking and approach could very likely create. It is the most plausible consequence of believing that the war on Islamic terror can be fought by diplomats and deal-making.

Below the media radar screen the struggle in Iraq continues and is clearly moving in the coalition's favor. Heretofore, there were two main groups of resistance, Muqtada al Sadr's Mehdi Army in Najaf and Sadr City, and al Zarqawi's thugs in Samarra, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the Sunni Triangle. As Strategy Page reports, however, al Sadr is just about finished, Samarra has been pacified, and time is running out for the insurgents in Fallujah.

Elections are on track for Iraq just as they were in Afghanistan, the Iraqi economy is taking off, schools and businesses are bustling, and all the Democrats can say is that the liberation of 25 million Iraqis is a disaster, a colossal mistake. Even as the Democrats sing their woeful dirges the insurgents find themselves caught in the coils of a python, and as more Iraqi troops and police come on line the squeeze is only going to get tighter.

In light of all this, the real colossal mistake would be to elect the twin paladins of pessimism, John Kerry and John Edwards, to determine the direction of the war on terror for the next four years.

In the debate in St. Louis last Friday evening John Kerry said, "Now, here's what I believe. I don't believe we need a good conservative judge, and I don't believe we need a good liberal judge. I don't believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side."

He then followed his claim to be uninterested in whether a judge is liberal or conservative by conjuring an image of a liberal jurist: "The future of things that matter to you - in terms of civil rights, what kind of Justice Department you'll have, whether we'll enforce the law. Will we have equal opportunity? Will women's rights be protected? Will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards? Will a woman's right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law."

Last May the Senator spoke these words: "I believe that a woman's right to choose is a constitutional right, I will not appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who will undo that right."

In other words, Kerry will not, contrary to what he said Friday night, appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court who disagrees with him on whether there is anything in the constitution guaranteeing a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. If this is Senator Kerry's position, so be it, but it is simply disingenuous of him to suggest that ideology doesn't matter, as if he were only interested in finding the best qualified person for the job. He isn't. By his own admission, if the best qualified person has a strict constructionist view of the constitution he would have no chance of serving on a Kerry court.

Whichever man is elected president on November 2nd will probably have the opportunity to profoundly restructure our highest judicial Court. Justice John Paul Stevens, a liberal appointed by President Ford, is 84. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative first appointed by President Nixon and then elevated to chief justice by President Reagan, just turned 80. Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan appointee who often votes with the liberals, is 74. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee who anchors the court's left, is 71. At 56, Clarence Thomas, a conservative, is the only justice under 65.

It's possible that the next president will have the opportunity to make four appointments to the Bench. That's why this election is so important in the eyes of so many. The next president will not only decide the future of the war on terror but the direction of law in this country for the next fifty to a hundred years. The choice is between a man who would appoint people to the Court who believe that we should interpret the constitution in light of what its authors intended (Bush), and a man who believes that the constitution should be interpreted to conform to current political and social fashion (Kerry). Senator Kerry's claim that a judge's ideology doesn't matter to him is nonsense.

Thanks to Captain's Quarters for some of the above.

A friend passes on this little illustration of the difference between conservatives and liberals with respect to the problems of unemployment and poverty:

It'll be difficult, as we watch the debate Wednesday night, to keep from imagining John Kerry with his hand in the pockets of America.

Uh Oh. A friend passes word that yet another ballot has been rigged by the Republicans in order to suppress the Kerry vote. No doubt this will be an issue in the next debate. Go here and try to cast a vote for Kerry to see what we're talking about.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. When it comes to dirty tricks all the attempts by the Democrats to hide who they are, to deny the vote to servicemen and servicewomen, to deceive the public about what the Republicans will do if re-elected, and to register new voters in excess of the populations of some voting districts, all seem amateurish in comparison to stunts like this.

Gasoline prices will probably soon become an issue in the presidential campaign and perhaps they should, but Viewpoint cautions against falling for the claim that they're higher now than ever before in our history. That would be true if the price is considered in constant dollars, but if the price is adjusted for inflation we find that a dollar buys much more gasoline today than it did in 1980. Brother Bill, who is the brains behind this blog, sends along a link to this graph to buttress the point.

Peter Singer is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University who is has famously made a case for legalizing infanticide and who is also well-known for his advocacy of animal rights. In the recent issue of Free Inquiry, the organ of the Council for Secular Humanism, Singer chides his fellow humanists for their overall failure to shed the prejudice of speciesism which, he claims, has been inherited from Christian forebears.

He writes that Christians believe that "God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God doesn't care how we treat it....Nature itself is of no intrinsic value," in the Christian view, "and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful." This, of course, is the sheerest flapdoodle, but more on that later.

Singer chastises humanists for holding to the Christian idea that humans are at the center of the moral universe and for thinking that values are grounded in the welfare of humans rather than in the "welfare of all beings capable of having a welfare at all." There is, Singer asserts, "no non-religious reason why the pains and pleasures of non-human animals should not be given equal [moral] weight with the similar pains and pleasures of human beings."

As an atheistic Darwinian, this is a very peculiar argument for the Princeton professor to make. It may be that there's no non-religious reason for not treating animals as the moral equal of humans, but the salient point is that there's no non-religious reason why one should do it. Searching the article for reasons why he believes humanists are wrong to exploit animals, the only thing one finds is his claim that they should reject this sort of behavior because it's based upon Christian dogma and, the implication is, anything Christian is ipso facto wrong.

Singer is in an awkward position here. He wants to make the case that exploitation of animals is immoral, but as a Darwinian he has no basis for making such a claim. What grounds does Darwinian survival of the fittest give us for condemning the mistreatment of animals? The only ethic one can derive from evolution is that one should look out for one's own interests. The principles of evolution are silent, as they must be, about the means employed to insure one's survival. If human survival is accomplished through behaviors that involve cruelty to other creatures, evolution affords us no basis for passing judgment. Darwinian evolution, to the extent that it endorses any ethic over any other, simply endorses the view that might makes right.

Singer's complaint against the mistreatment of animals distills to this: He likes animals and it makes him sad to see them treated badly, and he wishes others would feel the way he does. As an atheist that's the most he can say. To suggest that others are immoral if they don't feel the way he does is silly. Indeed, an animal abuser could reply that it is Singer who is immoral for not believing that animals should be killed for sport and pleasure, and his argument would be no less compelling than Singer's.

One of the oddities of what people like Singer are trying to do is that in seeking to convince people that they should discard every vestige of religious dogma, they make it clear that they themselves wish to retain the concept of moral judgment. Yet moral judgment is incoherent apart from religious assumptions, specifically the assumption that there exists a personal God.

It needs to be stressed that the only basis we have for saying that it is wrong to treat animals unkindly is the Christian doctrine that animals, and nature in general, belong to God who has given us stewardship over them. He grants us the right to derive pleasure from them in various ways, but he expects us to treat them with respect and care and to avoid inflicting gratuitous pain and harm. We have, therefore, an obligation, a moral obligation, to be diligent in our care of his creation.

We're in the position of the babysitter who has been told to feel free to help herself to the refrigerator, but such a privilege does not entitle her to go on a destructive rampage throughout the house. Take away the belief that God exists and has made us stewards over his creation, however, and adopt instead the view that all of life is just an amazing fluke in a vast, empty cosmos, and the notion that there exists some imperative to treat animals, or other humans for that matter, in any particular way becomes ludicrous.

There's much blustering and harrumphing going on in the blogosphere over the ABC memo from ABCNews political director Mark Halperin that fell into the hands of Matt Drudge on Friday, but, truth to tell, I'm not sure what to make of it. The easy interpretation is that it's just another illustration of how the MSM see themselves as the propaganda arm of the Kerry campaign, and perhaps that's the correct way to read it. It's just that the memo is so enigmatic, obscure, and unintelligible that whatever Halperin was trying to tell his troops at ABC it's doubtful that any of them could decipher it. Here's the last paragraph:

Perhaps they simply speak in code at ABC so that when Halperin states that We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable when the facts don't warrant that maybe they just assume he's giving them the green light to stick it to Bush whenever they see the opportunity. Maybe, but, heck, why do they need a cryptic memo to know to do that? They're liberal media creatures, for heaven's sake. Savaging Republicans is part of their genetic endowment. It's what they do.

Perhaps, like a coach at halftime trying to rally a team which has played listlessly in the first half, Halperin feels the need to prod his staffers on to a more vigorous performance of their duties. Perhaps he's striving, in his semi-coherent way, to inspire them to feats of political partisanship of which they otherwise could not have imagined themselves capable. Whatever. It would have been easier to discern what he was trying to accomplish if the guy knew how to write.

Peter Schramm at No Left Turns relays word that the famous French literary critic and philosopher Jacques Derrida has passed away. Derrida was famous for his work on textual deconstruction which reduced literature, in the minds of many, to nothing but a series of expressions of self-interest. Schramm offers this obituary:

In Australia Prime Minister John Howard, a dependable ally of ours in Iraq and in the war on terror has been re-elected to office, defeating an opponent who sounded a lot like Senator Kerry in his promises to pull Australia's troops out of Iraq and concentrate them on the "real" war on terror closer to home.

This is by itself good news, of course, but it may be even better than it appears. Reports up until election day had the race very close, John Kerry's sister, who lives in Australia, campaigned vigorously against Howard, and yet he seems to have won a 53% to 48% plurality. There might be a lesson here for our election which seems to have some things in common with Australia's. Just because the polls show the race getting tight doesn't mean that it really is.

It's impossible to say how many viewers were willing to have their vote decided by anything that happened on the stage last night, and, of those who were, we can't know how many will make their decision based upon what was said rather than upon the image that the candidates projected. In our post-modern world, unfortunately, people are persuaded more by style than by substance, more by how one says what they say rather than by what they say. A smooth, eloquent delivery covers a multitude of sins against logic and coherence.

Consequently, for the fashionably po-mo John Kerry is very appealing, but for the remnant of modern thinkers who believe that character counts and that substance should trump style, George Bush would've been awarded the laurel last evening and should be granted it on election day as well. Hugh Hewitt tells us why:

We're not as sanguine about all this as Hewitt is because, as mentioned above, too many people who will go to the polls on November 2nd don't really care about facts or argument. They'll cast their vote on the basis of "presence" or physical attractiveness or verbal eloquence, all criteria which are absurdly irrelevant to picking a president but by which Kerry will score high. Even so, Viewpoint certainly hopes that Hewitt is right.

The irrationality of the Bush haters induces an episode of cathartic venting by Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online. A couple of excerpts:

Indeed. If Clinton were still president and had led the war against Iraq there would be not a peep of protest from the Democrats. They would, in fact, be right now praising this undertaking as one of the greatest causes in the history of Western civilization (which it is). They would be shaming any naysayers for their reluctance to have America bring to completion an historic mission of liberation. They would be castigating their opponents for not caring sufficiently about the horrible oppression of millions of Iraqis who simply yearn to be free of fear, torture, and murder. They would be decrying the implicit sexism of the critics who are content to see women ground down under the boot of Islamic machismo. They would be condemning the greedy selfishness of a people who have so much but who are loath to spend a relatively small portion of their abundance to help the desperate millions in Iraq get up on their feet.

This is why so much of the Democratic criticism of the President is so difficult to abide. It's so manifestly hypocritical, self-serving, and unprincipled.

Hugh Hewitt has the facts concerning Senator Kerry's repeated claim that General Shinseki was fired because he criticized the decision not to put more troops in Iraq. The truth is he wasn't fired. He retired after serving a full term and his retirement was announced months before the invasion of Iraq.

When someone says what is false they are either mistaken, deluded, or lying. The claim that Shinseki was fired has been made too often, and rebutted too often, for it to be a mistake.

Senator Kerry keeps repeating this falsehood because it makes the White House look like it punishes dissenters and wouldn't listen to advice from military men about how to plan for the invasion. Kerry's campaign could be forgiven for having made a false claim once, maybe even twice, but to continue to mislead the American people and to persist in slandering the President when they know that what they're saying is false is unconscionable.

It should give John Kerry supporters, as well as the rest of us, some measure of pause to consider that a large segment of Kerry's supporters are voting for him because either they believe he's lying or they hope that he is. Something like 30% of the Democrat party is fervently anti-war. This is the overriding issue for them and they want us to get out of Iraq now. Even so, Kerry has vowed to stay and win it. Yet this 30% is solidly in his camp. There can be only one reason for this discrepancy and that is that they don't believe the Senator really means what he says.

After all, everything he's ever done in his public life suggests that he doesn't mean it. He first broke upon the national stage by insisting that the United States summarily withdraw from Vietnam because it was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time and there were no national interests at stake. Since then he has consistently sought to thwart efforts to use military force abroad. To think that he would now be genuinely transformed into an advocate for "staying the course" in a war he believes is misbegotten and pointless is to think that he has somehow undergone an ideological transformation that would be nothing short of miraculous.

Moreover, there is another sizable chunk of Democratic voters who are viscerally opposed to an unfettered right to bear arms. It is perhaps one of the top three issues for them in determining their vote. Kerry flaunts his support of such a right and yet the anti-gun folks are out campaigning for him. Why? Is it because they don't think he's telling the truth about his love for the 2nd ammendment?

It is certainly one of the oddities of this election season that the Democrats have mustered such an animosity toward President Bush because, as they claim to see it, he lied to the American people, while, at the same time, a large number of them are going to vote for Senator Kerry precisely because they believe, or are hoping, that he really is lying to the American people.

Strange folks, these liberals.

Jay Cost has some great analysis of recent polls which show the race tightening. The news is not all as bad for Bush supporters as it might seem. Kerry Spot posts the following excerpts from Cost:

In other words, a solid performance tonight by Bush might make victory irretrievable for the Democrats even with one debate left.

The philosophically-minded and intellectually curious will want to check out and bookmark MeaningofLife.tv, which offers an archive of video clips of interviews of many of the foremost thinkers in the U.S., Britain, and Canada on a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects. The interviews are conducted by Robert Wright who uses brief clips (two or three minutes) to explore a wide diversity of ideas, and each set of topic includes the thoughts of several prominent thinkers. Topics include Free Will, the Anthropic Principle, Quantum Wierdness, the possiblity of goodness without God, the nature of Consciousness, and many others. Good stuff.

A friend passes on an article in Front Page Mag on the political conversion, sort of, of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is an erstwhile advocate of all the causes of the far left, but 9/11 was something of a Damascus road experience for him. The scales fell from his eyes and, like a lot of former leftists who have experienced a political epiphany, he suddenly realized that the left-wing criticism of the U.S., though perhaps still valid in some respects, was woefully mistaken in those areas of greatest importance. He also came to see that in many ways the left was phony and unprincipled. One wonders why it took something as dramatic as 9/11 for such an intelligent man to see that, but nevertheless, it did.

Hitchens is very much of a moralist and is also an outspoken atheist. Indeed, he calls to mind the character that Orwell describes as "an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Hitchens even wrote a book the whole point of which was to discredit, of all people, Mother Teresa. He has not moved away from these positions and writes regular essays for militantly atheistic publications like Free Inquiry.

We mention this because it will be interesting to see how comfortable he feels in the company of neo-cons, many of whom are devout. It will also be interesting to see whether he has a second enlightenment and comes to the realization that his strong sense of moral outrage is incompatible with his equally strong belief in the irrelevance of God.

Anyway, the article is an interesting read even if the reader is not familiar with Hitchens, and it's fascinating if he/she is.

Captain's Quarters has a couple of important pieces. The first goes into some detail about how Saddam had bribed Jacques Chirac to get him to oppose us at the U.N. It's incredible that having suffered the betrayal of our putative allies in the U.N. who chose avarice over loyalty, that Senator Kerry still criticizes President Bush for not letting these people in on Iraqi reconstruction contracts. What's equally difficult to believe, or would be if we hadn't had prior experience of Kerry's ability to simultaneously advance two mutually exclusive criticisms of Bush, is that he condemns the president for "allowing" American business to be outsourced to other countries, while at the same time condemning him for not outsourcing American business in Iraq.

The second is a sad recitation of recent examples of Democrats vandalizing and threatening Republican campaign facilities and workers. This is the party of liberalism, but it's pretty hard to distinguish these tactics from those of the European fascists in the 1930s.

Combine these sordid episodes with the Dems strategy of assuring the public that there will be a draft if Bush is reelected, telling the black community that the Republicans are trying to suppress their vote, and scaring old people about alleged Republican plans to take their social security away from them and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Democratic strategy to win in November consists largely of lying, cheating, and thuggery.

Much has been made of the claim by Paul Bremer and others that we didn't have enough troops in Baghdad to suppress the looting and violence that followed hard upon the liberation of that city. The lack of troops has been seized upon by the president's opponents as evidence that he mishandled the post war and didn't have an effective plan to control the country. For those who want a much more trenchant analysis, however, Wretchard at Belmont Club has a must-read essay.

Wretchard reminds us of two important facts. First, Bremer claimed that there weren't enough troops available at the time he got there shortly after Baghdad fell, but he believes that the number of troops deployed there now is adequate.

Second, the shortfall was not because of poor planning but rather because the troops that had been planned for were rendered unavailable by the last minute decision by Turkey to refuse permission to the 4th Infantry Division to use their soil as a staging area for an invasion of Iraq. This caused a delay in their deployment that seriously hampered attempts to bring the looting under immediate control. Read the details, they're quite interesting.

Vice-president Dick Cheney delivered a right hook to the chin of John Edwards last night by shining a light on the North Carolinian's abysmal record of attendance in the Senate. His recitation of Edwards' lackluster senate career was devastating. We sat there wondering how America can vote for a guy who's been collecting a paycheck and benefits for almost six years while doing next to nothing to earn it. How, we wondered, can anyone defend such an egregious abuse of tax-payer trust?

All we had to do to find an answer to that question was be one of the dozen or so viewers who watched Keith Olberman on MSNBC tonight. Did Olberman hammer Edwards for failing to fulfill his obligation to do the people's business? Of course not. He spent a large part of his show castigating Cheney for having forgotten that he'd ever met Edwards' before last night's debate. Olberman seemed outraged that Cheney would say this. Cheney must be lying, he hinted. We know they met, we have it on video, Olberman scoffed. True enough but so what? It's possible that there's not a person in this great country of Dick Cheney's age and background who remembers every meeting of every individual in his life, but Olberman couldn't get over his glee in having caught Cheney in a whopper.

Worse, Olberman, having demonstrated a remarkable proclivity for diving into the shallow end of the pool, found himself unable to make his way into deeper waters. He could manage no outrage at all over the fact that Edwards has been essentially AWOL from the Senate since almost the day he was sworn in. The senator's absenteeism is surely what matters, not whether Cheney's memory was correct, yet to such as Keith Olberman, Cheney's lapse negated his entire critique of his opponent's pathetic attendance record. Olberman never once tried to challenge the vice-president on the substance of his allegations. Instead he latched onto an irrelevant mistake and treated it as if it were a felony. No wonder nobody watches.

David Wayne at Jollyblogger challenges his readers with the question "Does the doctrine of 'sola scriptura' have a place in the post-modern world?" The doctrine of sola scriptura (Literally, scripture only) arose out of the Protestant Reformation and affirms that the Bible is the word of God and is our ultimate authority in all matters of faith and practice.

The question seems to imply that if we can't conform our theological views to current cultural fashion we might be impelled to discard our theology. For someone who accepts the principle of sola scriptura, this probably seems backwards. It might perhaps better be asked whether post-modernity can find any place to dwell within a scriptural worldview.

Whichever way we frame it, however, the question must be answered in the negative. Whatever one thinks about the Bible, it seems pretty clear that the post-modern mindset is quite incompatible with sola scriptura.

The Bible makes claims to truth. It asserts in the strongest possible way that there is an objective universal truth about God, about man's condition, about morality, and about man's destiny. It tells us of Jesus' assertion that he is the way, the truth, and the life and it insists that Jesus' claim is objectively true.

Post-moderns, however, would find this claim incomprehensible and would tend to ignore it just as they would ignore all exclusive claims and all claims about any absolute truth. Post-modernity seeks to relativize or pragmatize truth, not absolutize it.

In a post-modern culture scripture would be removed from the lofty perch upon which it was ensconced by the Reformers and reduced to the status of secular literature. It could not be permitted to occupy the exalted chair of final arbiter of matters of faith and belief for these would be determined by the consensus in the existential communities in which people find themselves.

Thus one community's truth would not necessarily correspond to that of another and the same would be the case for individuals within the community. Communities of faith might choose to continue to accept the traditional theological significance of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but their decision to do so stands on a cloud. It's purely an emotional choice which is grounded in nothing but an arbitrary preference.

Should the church acquiesce to the post-modern view the whole notion of doctrine would soon be subjectivized and relativized until "truth" morphed into whatever gives the individual or the community a sense of well-being and hope. Truth would be that which grips the imagination of those in the relevant faith community and whatever they agree upon as having some "purchase" upon their commitments.

Faith would be based on nothing more substantial than emotional experience. It would forfeit any objective ground in the scripture, because scripture would be interpreted to mean whatever the reader felt most deeply that it meant. The significance of scripture would be intensely personal. What it means to me would be my truth, it would be true for me. Questions like whether Jesus was in fact divine or did indeed rise from dead would be moot. If you believe he did, then he did, if someone else believes he didn't, then he didn't. Each of us would be an island possessing our own private truth, and there would be no point in asking whether Jesus really was divine or really did rise from the dead. If you believe it strongly then the answer's yes. If you don't the answer's no.

Moreover, even the notion that the Bible is the word of God would come in for revision in the light of deconstructive unmasking of the authors' hidden agendas. Such an analysis would surely conclude that the texts are obvious attempts by the writers to empower males, or some such thing, and that the Church perpetuates this gender oppression by foisting upon the community the myth that these writings were really the very words of God.

The doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible alone is the final authority in matters of faith and practice, is antithetical to the post-modern idea that there is no final authority in such matters except the self or the community. The doctrine implicitly denies human autonomy while post-modernity explicitly affirms it.

Post-modernity is not unreceptive to everything about Christian belief, but it is incompatible with the doctrine that the Bible is the ultimate authority in our lives. If we choose to conform to the world then we will have to abandon the Reformation view of the Bible, and if we wish to be conformed to the Bible we will have to reject much about the post-modern view of the world. Perhaps this is just another illustration of what it means to be in the world but not of it.

Sigmund Freud captures the disillusionment of those who in the early years of the twentieth century embraced the liberal view of man as inherently good, a Promethean shaper of a glorious future, an Olympian god:

Sigmund Freud --On Transience

Those earlier humanists who thought man to be the closest thing to divinity in the cosmos were devastated by the horrors of WWI. The same thing happened when the full extent of the holocaust became known after WWII, and it happened again when the crimes of totalitarian communism were exposed in the second half of the last century. Yet the project of deifying man is resurrected every generation. The liberal, humanistic faith that man can be his own deity, that he doesn't need a transcendent God, that he can create heaven on earth all by himself, is as irrepressible as it is manifestly false.

Jim Skillen at the Center for Peace and Justice has a piece on the election wherein he makes these remarks:

Mr. Skillen's advice needs a little clarification. First, it's simply misleading to say that Kerry has no presidential deeds to evaluate as if there were no relevant record at all upon which a voter can base a decision on Mr. Kerry. He has spent almost twenty years in the Senate and, on those occasions when he has shown up, has cast votes. There is plenty of record there for voters to contemplate. Mr. Skillen doesn't mention it because unless those who take the trouble to discover how the Senator has voted over the years are pro-abortion, pacifist socialists Kerry's record is likely to alienate most of them, including, one hopes, not a few of Skillen's own readers.

The biggest untold story in this campaign, in fact, is Senator Kerry's senatorial record. The media aren't going to publicize it, of course, because they know it would swing the election to Bush, and the Republicans, for some unfathomable reason, haven't made much of an issue of it either except to cite the Senators chronic tergiversations on Iraq.

The second point on which Mr. Skillen allows his ideological preference to cloud his judgment is when he suggests that Mr. Bush has "relied on Kerry-bashing". It's not clear whether he means to imply that Bush himself has engaged in this behavior, or whether he means to suggest that Bush is relying on others to do the bashing. The latter interpretation is more charitable toward Skillen because it merely makes him look silly, but it is less plausible than the former.

If Skillen is indeed stating that it remains to be seen whether Kerry will rely on others to do the bashing of the president, then we must conclude that Mr. Skillen must have been sequestered in a cave for the last two years during which time Kerry's surrogates have been flaying Bush with the most odious charges and allegations imaginable.

Assuming he hasn't been on a two year retreat somewhere, Skillen must mean that Bush himself has been taking cheap shots at Kerry and that we should watch to see if Kerry responds in kind. If so, Skillens' claim is simply false. Bush has publically said nothing about Kerry except as it pertains to his record throughout this campaign. He has been extraordinarily gracious to his opponent in praising his dubious military record and has refused to attack Kerry personally. Perhaps Mr. Skillen can offer us a counterexample or two, but it's doubtful. Unless he can, however, his assertion above that Bush has engaged in some ignoble political chicanery slanders a man whose conduct in this campaign should serve as a model for politicians everywhere, and Skillens' insinuation to the contrary, therefore, is itself a disreputable cheap shot.

Thanks to Derek Melleby via Byron Borger for the Skillen article.

Having been roundly criticized, Senator Kerry attempts to clear up his reference to the need for a "global test" which any foreign policy initiative would evidently have to pass in his administration:

"Elsewhere"?! Is Bush now going to be hammered by the left because his coalition didn't include Martians?

Wretchard at Belmont Club quotes from an article in the London Times that discusses Muslims living in London:

Wretchard cites this anecdote to highlight the futility of abandoning the war on terror, or turning it into a police action, as Senator Kerry proposes. These people are cruel, vicious, sick, and consumed with hatred for the West. They will not be stopped by a police investigation.

The article, however, summons another observation to mind. Muslim terrorists are sometimes said to be little different from, say, the Irish terrorists in Belfast. Both are motivated by religion, in one case Islam, in the other Christianity, and both use terror and murder as weapons to achieve religiously inspired aims.

The assumption is that religion of any kind can lead to horrors, but the comparison of the jihadis to the IRA is inapt. The Irish of the IRA or Sein Fein are not devout, pious men. Their religion is merely a social bond which gives them group identity. They don't invoke their devotion to Jesus Christ as their justification for their murders. They are thugs who use religion as an identifier like L.A. street gangs use race or the colors of their jackets.

The jihadis, on the other hand, are extremely devout, offering their crimes as a sacrifice to Allah and imploring his blessing upon their savagery. In their mind their viciousness and bloodthirstiness pleases God and gains them his favor. Everything they do they do in the name of Allah.

Another difference between the Irish terrorists and the Muslims is that the Irish could not take their Christianity seriously and still remain terrorists. The jihadis take their Islam very seriously, and because they do, they are murderers.

Their religion condones their depravity. What, then, are we to make of a belief system which encourages so many of its most fervent adherents to revel in death and butchery and others to remain passive and mute while such atrocities are carried out in the name of their faith?

There is a deep pathology associated with any religion which teaches that the unbeliever should have his head severed and that God will not only approve but reward the deed. There is a deep pathology in a religion which condones and encourages such hatred and which produces young men who delight so much in such horrific behavior that they collect videos of it.

Until Muslims do more than they are presently doing to demonstrate that the Islam we're seeing and reading about is not the genuine faith, until they begin to convince us that their version of God is not really just a gross perversion of the God of Christianity, we have every reason to insist that there be no room in the civilized world for what certainly appears to be a primitive, hate-drenched cult of death.

American Muslims have much work to do. We want to believe the best of them. We're listening.

Here's a weird story out of New Jersey. It seems that a middle school teacher got in trouble with parents and administrators for having a picture of the president on her wall, but declining to talk about politics with her students who questioned her about it. See here for the details. The story itself makes no one look particularly good, least of all the administrators and the parents who sound like a bunch of bigots. Here's part of it:

Viewpoint has no idea what all is going on here, but it sounds like teachers in this school cannot post pictures of the president of the United States in their classrooms unless they are prepared to talk politics, whether such a discussion is relevant to the lesson or not.

It's not hard to imagine what the principals would have done had she actually been talking politics and the parents complained about that, especially if she were defending George Bush against students' criticism.

Don't these people have enough problems without making an issue out of this? Don't these parents understand that it is completely appropriate to honor the president? Don't the administrators understand that it's their job to defend their teachers from unreasonable parental criticism? Doesn't the teacher understand that when students initiate a question about Bush's policies she's missing a good opportunity to provide valuable education if she declines to answer it?

Unless there's more to this story than meets the eye, which there probably is, the parents here look stupid, the administrators look pusillanimous, and the teacher looks paranoid, maybe for good reason.

Thanks to JoanneJacobs.com for the tip.

Education blogger Joanne Jacobs has a story that is repeated every year in almost every school around the country which has Asian immigrants in its student body:

It's not necessarily that Asian kids are inherently brighter than kids in other ethnic groups (although they may be). Their academic success is correlated to the expectations of their families. If a family doesn't value education the children from that household are going to perform well below their potential no matter how much money the state spends on them and no matter how good their teachers are.

David Foster, writing for the Claremont Institute, has an outstanding piece on whether, and under what conditions, Muslims have a right to practice their religion in a country founded on the principles of tolerance and freedom of religion. The reflexive response is to assert that freedom of religion, if it means anything at all, means that all citizens have the right to believe and practice whichever religion they choose, but Foster presents a persuasive argument, based on the writings of John Locke and George Washington, that this is simply not the case. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Islam, Foster argues, only has a right to be tolerated to the extent that it genuinely supports tolerance itself. If its goal is to establish an Islamic state by whatever means necessary and subsequently impose second class citizenship on unbelievers, then it forfeits its right to constitutional protection.

This essay should be read by everyone with an interest in political philosophy or simply in the appropriate response to the Islamic threat to Western civilization. Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

The 11th installment of Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq is on-line. Despite the lamentations emanting from the Democrat left there continues to be much to be encouraged about. As Chrenkoff says in concluding his report:

Complementing Chrenkoff's report are a couple of other items from the blogosphere. A post by Omar at Iraq The Model underscores the apparent willingness of Iraqis to fight to rid themselves of the pestilence in their midst.

Meanwhile the campaign to clean up the nests of insurgents in the Sunni triangle is underway. See here for a discussion and, of course, don't miss Wretchard's analysis at Belmont Club. It's excellent.

Chrenkoff's updates (He also does them for Afghanistan) are must reading for anyone who finds the constant metronomic negativity of the media and the Kerry campaign to be dispiriting. This is not to say that there are not very serious problems in Iraq. There are, but by focussing only on the problems the media give the impression that the situation there is chaotic and hopeless. Since they have abrogated their obligation to give us both sides of the story, in hopes of persuading Americans to reject President Bush in November, people like Chrenkoff are performing a very valuable, even essential, service.

Drudge has video of Senator Kerry flagrantly violating the rules of last Thursday's debate which explicitly prohibited the use of any notes, etc. The rules stated that "No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by either candidate.... Each candidate must submit to the staff of the Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate, and the staff or commission will place such paper, pens and pencils on the podium..." Go to the video and see for yourself.

Whether these smuggled notes, if they were notes, helped Kerry or not is really beside the point. The question is, if he was in fact cheating, as it certainly appears that he is, what does it say about the Senator that he can't be trusted to do what he agreed to do in the negotiations for this event? If he feels compelled to cheat in a venue like this what kind of a man is he?

Novelist Philip Roth, in speaking of president Bush, says that "born-again Christianity is the ignorant man's version of the intellectual life."

Let us pause a moment to pity the poor benighted believer bereft of the pleasures and satisfactions of Roth's intellectual life. The Christian serious about his faith will likely never know the joys of ending one's life slowly in chaos and dissolution as so many intellectuals have, or quickly with a bullet to the brain as have others. Instead he's destined by fate to plod through life finding his happiness in the company of family and in the toil of work. He'll never have a great idea like, say, socialism, and he'll never know the immense satisfaction that accompanies the publication of smutty novels.

He must resign himself to the paltry fulfillments of being a hero to his children and an inspiration to his co-workers and friends. When he dies there'll be no lengthy obituary in the New York Times with an enviable list of literary accomplishments, just a notice in the local paper that he was loved and admired by all who knew him. No one will ever say of him that he was a fine artist or thinker, they'll never be able to say that he spent his life creating things that no one has any use for. They'll have to be content with saying something insignificant about him like "he was a good man who spent his life trying to make other people's lives better." It really is too bad that those ignorant Christians will never know how great it is to be an intellectual like Phillip Roth.

On 9/21 Viewpoint posted an interview with Chuck Colson in which he said that one reason he believed the accounts of the Resurrection of Christ as recorded in the New Testament was that had Jesus not literally risen from the dead, his followers would not have been willing to suffer and die for a cause they knew to be based upon a lie.

If there was no Resurrection a lot of people would have known that the claim to the contrary was untrue and would have seen no point in perpetuating such an obvious error when it became clear that those who were involved in promoting it would be persecuted, imprisoned and executed.

What motive could the disciples of Jesus possibly have had for trying to promote the completely "unbelievable" assertion that a man had risen from the dead? What about that claim would have encouraged these men to bear up under deprivation, torture and death if it were not true? What was in it for them? As C.S. Lewis points out, men will often die for what they believe to be the truth, but only lunatics will die for what they know to be a lie. Just like the men involved in the Watergate cover-up that Colson alludes to, the followers of Jesus, were they really trying to foist a religious fraud upon people, would eventually have looked to their own self-interest and admitted to the authorities what had actually happened.

Any explanation or "debunking" of the miracle of Christ's Resurrection has to contend with the stark fact that this, however, is not what happened. The historical record produces no one who confesses to having participated in a hoax, even though they could have saved their lives by doing so.

Skeptics, however, have another means of justifying their refusal to accept the historicity of the Resurrection that avoids having to confront arguments like Colson's altogether. They argue that the nature of a miracle is such that no amount of evidence for one could ever overcome a presumption of the regularity of nature's laws. In other words, miracles are so much in conflict with the way we understand the world to work that the evidence that an exception to the laws of nature had really occurred would have to be exceptionally detailed and well-documented for us to accept it.

W.K. Clifford wrote that "It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence," and the evidence that a miracle had occurred is always going to be insufficient because, as David Hume put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. An account of a man rising from the dead is so extraordinary that no evidence, short of personally witnessing the event oneself, could ever be sufficient to justify one's belief that it occurred. Thus, no one is ever justified in believing that a true miracle, i.e. a supernatural intervention, actually happened.

This is certainly a nifty argument since it avoids the uncomfortable problem of having to counter the large body of evidence that a miracle really did occur in the case of Christ's Resurrection. However strong that evidence might be, the skeptic avers, such an event is so alien to our experience that a natural explanation, no matter how unlikely, is still more probable than that a man was raised from the dead.

There are problems, however with the skeptic's claim:

The first difficulty is that Clifford's maxim is self-refuting. There is no evidence that supports the assertion that we are always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Why, then, should we believe it? Why are we not within our epistemic rights to believe something on the best evidence available?

A second difficulty is that there is no way to determine what should count as "sufficient evidence" for believing in a miracle anyway. Why is the skeptic justified in setting the standard of plausibility so high that it effectively eliminates the possibility of ever justifying belief in a miracle? Can we not agree that an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence without agreeing that in the case of a miracle the evidence must be so extraordinary as to be impossible ever to attain?

Indeed, what counts as "extraordinary" is going to differ from person to person. How do we determine when the evidence has satisfied our notion of "extraordinary"? Someone who is hostile to the idea of supernatural interventions in the world is going to set the bar for satisfaction far higher than someone who is open to them.

To cite the American philosopher William James, "To preach skepticism as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for [a miracle] be found, is tantamount to telling us, when in the presence of the [claim that a miracle has occurred] that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser than to yield to our hope that it may be true." Better to err on the side of fear than of hope, the skeptic argues, but, as James counters, what proof is there that being wrong through hope is so much worse than being wrong through fear? The skeptic's position is that it's better to miss out on a truth than to fall prey to an error, but why should anyone agree with that? Where is the evidence that justifies our believing such a principle?

The skeptic makes the conditions for one's believing that a miracle has occurred so stringent that such belief is impossible to justify. But the only way we can know that belief is impossible to justify is if we know a priori that it is not possible for a miracle to have occurred. However, miracles can only be impossible if supernatural intervention is impossible, and supernatural intervention is impossible only if there is no God.

In other words, natural explanations are more probable than supernatural ones only if we know a priori that either there is no God or that God never interjects himself into history. Since we don't know either of those, we have no justification for assuming, prior to any consideration of the evidence, that any natural explanation is more likely to be true than one which relies on supernatural agency.

If God exists then it is possible that miracles occur and we should look at the alleged evidence for any instance of one and evaluate it on its own terms. If the possibility of a miracle is held open, then, to borrow from James once more, any rule of thinking that would prevent us from recognizing a miracle, if it really happened, is an irrational rule.

As numerous scholars have made clear, the historical evidence that Jesus literally came back to life after having died is quite compelling unless one has already decided that such an event can't possibly be true. If one's worldview doesn't allow for the possibility of a miraculous event, well, then, one will never be persuaded by the evidence that a miracle has occurred. To paraphrase Pascal, however, there's enough evidence that one did occur to convince anyone who is not already dead set against it.

Apparently Diebald has released a sample of the ballots to be used in battleground states like Florida this November. It looks like those rascally Republicans are up to some dirty tricks.

John Kerry debates himself at GOP.com. The site has a video clip of Kerry's inconsistencies titled Top Ten Iraqi Flip-Flops From First Debate and it presents Kerry disagreeing with a number of things he himself said in last night's debate. I'm not sure that all of the disagreements can technically be called flip-flops, but they certainly seem to be confusions.

The Holy Observer has a shocking story. Apparently CBS and Dan Rather have in their possession documents which they claim disprove the Resurrection of Christ. The article contains photos of the actual documents which are apparently fragments of a diary kept by the disciple named Thomas.

This might be just what Rather needs to rescue his career from the ignominy surrounding his recent debacle over the fraudulent National Guard papers.

Economist Daniel Drezner has an op-ed in The New York Times that'll be of interest to those readers who are concerned about job losses due to outsourcing. He looks at the numbers and concludes that it's a non-issue. Here are some excerpts:

Go here to read the whole column.

Whether George Bush is relected president in November or not he's going to have a very difficult decision on his hands, a decision which evidently must be made before the New Year. Iran will, in a few months by some estimates, begin construction of nuclear weapons. Once they start they must be assumed to be prepared to use them as soon as they can because every day they delay they risk losing them to an Israeli or American attack (It is just fantasy to think that perhaps Europe would have the will to do something to prevent a nuclear-armed Islamist state).

Iran has fifteen sites working on the production of fissile uranium. Those sites are presumably hardened to withstand a bomb drop. Do we try nonetheless to destroy them with conventional ordinance? Do we insert troops? Do we have the manpower available to take out these sites if bombing doesn't work? How will the Iranians respond if we attack? What will they do if we let them produce nuclear weapons? Can we afford to wait and find out? Belmont Club has an interesting discussion of some of the relevant questions.

Quick debate analysis: Those who are impressed by style will say that Kerry won. He was smooth and articulate. Those who look for substance will say that Bush pretty much dominated. Kerry sounded and looked good, but if one listened to what he was saying there simply was nothing there.

His most puzzling statement, in our opinion, was his claim that Bush made a terrible mistake in going into Iraq and is mismanaging the post-war badly but that he believes we now have to fight to win and that's exactly what he'll do.

The reason this is puzzling is that the first part of this statement is exactly what people said about Vietnam, but Kerry's response then was not to demand that we fight the war properly but that we get out immediately. "How", he asked at the 1971 senate hearings, "do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Now he's saying that instead of cutting our losses and leaving, as he insisted we do in Vietnam, he would stay and fight to win in Iraq. Given his history why should anyone believe him?

Perhaps he would reply that Vietnam was different. He might argue that there are national interests at stake in Iraq that weren't at stake in Vietnam. If so, however, how does he justify his repeated claim, made again last night, that he fought as a young man to defend our country in Vietnam. If there were no national interests at stake in Vietnam then whatever he was doing over there he certainly wasn't fighting to defend the United States.