Who knows if this cri de coeur is genuine, but whether it really comes from inside the Obama campaign or not, the analysis is interesting. If it was, in fact, written by an Obama staffer, as it purports to be, then it's fascinating and highly significant. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The post gets more interesting as it goes on so read it all at the link. There's a similar report making the rounds from another anonymous Democrat who looks at the situation in Pennsylvania and draws a gloomy conclusion. That report can be found at American Thinker. Unfortunately, there's an accompanying video that shows McCain supporters responding in very unflattering fashion to the provocations of some Obama demonstrators. One wishes that voters on both sides would comport themselves with a little more dignity and class.

RLC

As soon as private citizen Joe Wurzelbacher posed a question to Barack Obama that caused Obama to say something impolitic, Wurzelbacher became the object of a state intrusion into his private records by Ohio government employees who also happen to be Obama backers. The invasion of his privacy was okayed by the director of Ohio's Job and Family Services Division, Helen Jones-Kelley, a donor to the Obama campaign, and whose underlings rummaged through files trying to discover whether Joe the Plumber could be found to have been cheating on taxes, child support or welfare payments.

The fruits of their searches were then turned over to the media so that Joe could be properly humiliated before the entire nation, all because he had the audacity to ask a question that Obama handled poorly.

It's frightening that public employees have no reservation about using their access to personal records for partisan purposes and will reveal confidential information about private citizens if it's politically useful to do so. This is an abuse of power, and it makes us wonder what such people will do when they have the IRS, the attorney general and the secret service at their disposal.

Michelle Malkin has details on this travesty and the media indifference to it in her syndicated column which can be read here.

RLC

John Podhoretz at Commentary elaborates on ten reason why McCain might win on Tuesday. He's not saying he will win, only that an Obama victory is by no means a certainty. Here are reasons 8 through 10:

8) What happened with the Joe the Plumber story is that Obama has now been effectively outed as a liberal, not a moderate; and because liberalism is still less popular than conservatism, that's not the best place for Obama to be.

9) The fire lit under Obama's young supporters in the winter was largely due to Iraq and his opposition to the war. The stunning decline in violence and the departure of Iraq from the front page has put out the fire, to the extent that, like the young woman who made a sexy video calling herself Obama Girl and then didn't vote in the New York primary because she went to get a manicure, they might not want to stand on line on Tuesday.

10) Hispanic voters, who are always underpolled, know and appreciate McCain from his stance on immigration and will vote for him in larger numbers than anyone anticipates.

Podhoretz's first six reasons can be read at the link. It may be grasping at straws, but Obama does appear worried, the polls are tightening, and Pennsylvania seems to be in play. If strongly blue Pennsylvania is close then red states that earlier appeared to be tilting toward Obama will probably remain Republican. If so, McCain could pull it out on Tuesday.

Poor Erica Jong.

RLC

The self important never seem to realize that they're a walking parody of themselves. Here, for example, are excerpts from an interview given by Erica Jong to an Italian newspaper describing her angst over the possibility that "The Messiah" (Louis Farrakhan's description) might lose next Tuesday:

Like someone hallucinating from a terrible fever, Ms Jong's agonies appear to have placed such stress on her cognitive faculties that she's seeing bogeymen everywhere.

The Bush/Cheney paranoia is par for the left, but I'm always amazed that "liberals" have so little compunction about insulting and demeaning an entire racial group and that the media lets them get away with it. What does it say, after all, about Ms Jong's assumptions about blacks that she speaks with such apodictic certainty of a resort to violence if Obama loses? Apparently Ms Jong believes, as does a sizable portion of the American left, that not only should we expect such behavior from African Americans but that we cannot expect better from them.

Such thoughts as these, if spoken by, say, Rush Limbaugh, would be trumpeted all across the country as proof of the insidious racism of the right, but when a member of the liberal literati delivers herself of such sentiments, her ideological confreres simply nod in solemn agreement. Even more amazing is the fact that black spokespersons, many of whom are hyper-quick to discern even the most minute racial slight or slander, don't seem to be insulted by such remarks. Very curious.

RLC

The Guardian informs us of this development in the British culture wars:

Well, if Professor Dawkins expects us to think perhaps we could follow the example of the renowned thinker Blaise Pascal and begin by asking if a thinking man wouldn't wish to see appended to the words "There's Probably No God" the question "but why on earth would you want to bet on it?"

In any event, like so much of what Dawkins says, the claim that thinking is anathema to religion is simply nonsense, at least if the religion under examination is Christianity. Most of the greatest thinkers in the history of human civilization were religious as are many of the finest thinkers doing philosophy today. If we would like an example of what ideas people propound when they refuse to think it's hard to imagine a better case than Dawkins' own book The God Delusion (See Hall of Fame in left margin of this page).

The slogan on the bus tells us to accept the probable non-existence of God, to enjoy our lives and not worry. Such an odd juxtaposition of thoughts. It's a bit like saying we're all doomed to a meaningless, pointless existence so let's enjoy ourselves and not think about it. It's precisely those who don't think who alone could enjoy life despite its horrors and absurdities, despite the monumental mass of human suffering. Anyone who thinks, would, if they really thought seriously about the emptiness of human existence in a world without God, be driven to despair.

Here is the assessment of a man known for thinking, an atheist like Dawkins: "I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre from Nausea.

But don't worry. We all escape the nausea eventually. We all die. Enjoy.

RLC

By Ramirez.

RLC

Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views composes a post in which he offers up a nice summary of various materialist views of the mind. He closes with this:

The question of whether we have a mind that is a qualitatively different "substance" than matter has, like almost all philosophical problems, enormous implications. If material stuff is all that makes up the world, our bodies, and our brains then it becomes much more difficult to hold onto a number of beliefs that many people hold dear.

If, for example, materialism is true it's harder to believe that there is a God, a life after death, human dignity, free will, and moral responsibility, just to mention a few. Indeed, most materialists don't believe in any of these things. Fortunately, it's very unlikely that materialism is true. Egnor's summary does a nice job in a relatively few paragraphs of showing us why.

RLC

I recently read Randy Pausch's Last Lecture. It's a poignant book written by a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given just a few months to live. In the book Pausch talks about his life and some very simple lessons he's learned that he passes along to his children and to the rest of us.

The chapters are brief but Pausch packs a lot into them. My three favorites, I think, are the chapters on Thank You Notes, Gratitude and Apologies. Anyone who has teenage children will find what Pausch has to offer here worth passing on to their kids.

For example on apologies he says this:

He goes on to give examples of two classic bad apologies:

And then he offers this:

Good stuff. If you've ever gotten a huffy "Well, I'm sorrrrry" from a teenager when you were hoping for a sincere apology then you'll immediately see the value of Pausch's little homily.

RLC

Another aspect of the human condition which is much easier to understand given theism rather than atheism is that we are burdened with a deep sense of moral obligation. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base it. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right. There simply is no moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state. Whatever those who control power do is not morally right or wrong - even if they commit torture or genocide - it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of the collective rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing, indeed, to tell us why the holocaust was wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the matter of moral obligation is the question of guilt. We experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to suit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral obligation, there's no transgression, and there's no moral guilt. As Dostoyevsky put it, if God is dead then everything is permitted.

RLC

Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal provides some background on the recent American Special Forces raid into Syria that eliminated much of al Qaeda's leadership in the region. His report opens with this:

There's more at the link.

RLC

Megyn Kelley is quickly turning into a cult hero of the right. She's nothing if not feisty. I like how the Obama spokesman apparently thinks that the best way to deal with concerns about Obama's desire to take from those who work and produce and give to those who don't is to blast FOX News. FOX must be out to do harm to the Democratic candidate, he apparently thinks, because they ask uncomfortable questions. For Team Obama you're either for them or against them. Nice.

This could be called the Joe-the-Plumber tactic: If people ask questions that tend to put the beloved candidate in a bad light, a recommended response is to obfuscate the matter by criticizing and/or talking over the person asking the questions.

RLC

Two moral and intellectual mutants have been arrested in what has been labeled by the press a plot to assassinate Barack Obama. Actually, reading the story, the threat to Obama does not seem to have been very serious. A more sickening element of their intent was to attack an all-black school and kill children. Their designs on Obama sound like an afterthought that they didn't have planned out and didn't expect to be able to pull off in any event.

Nevertheless, the attack on the school students would have been relatively easy and is as frightening as it is loathsome. These two deserve to be put away for many, many years.

Having said that there's something else about this story that bears mentioning because it's very likely to be misrepresented by the media. The two men involved, Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman 18, of Helena-West Helena, Ark., are identified by the police as neo-nazis. This fact will probably trigger howls of righteous indignation in certain precincts about the sickness and violence that reside on the political right in this country, but such accusations, if they materialize, would be a mistake.

Nazi fascism is widely, and incorrectly, believed to be a right-wing phenomenon resting at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from communism. Notwithstanding the pervasiveness of this belief it is false. As Jonah Goldberg instructs us in his excellent study of fascism titled Liberal Fascism, communism and fascism, so far from being polar opposites, are in fact fraternal twins. They're both forms of socialism. They're both ideologies of the left.

The main difference between them is that communism tends to be an international version of socialism whereas fascism is more nationalistic and militaristic. Fascists are also usually content to allow business to remain in private hands provided that owners and managers use their enterprises to promote the ends of the state.

Perhaps the best way to picture ideological relationships is to visualize a line or a spectrum. At the far right of the spectrum is libertarianism, the view that individuals should be as free of government interference as possible. Toward the center lies conservatism which shares the libertarian desire for individual freedom but which assigns a more significant role for government than libertarians do. As we cross the center of the spectrum and move leftward we find socialism or statism, the view that government should own or control all important elements of the economy and society. Statists believe that the rights of the individual should be subordinated to the welfare of the collective. The individual lives to serve the state.

Socialism comes in two forms, democratic and totalitarian. Many moderate liberals are democratic socialists, but it's among the totalitarian socialists that we find communists and fascists, and it's here that many of those in the modern left find their ideological home. They don't usually call themselves communists or fascists, of course, preferring instead to identify themselves as progressives or leftists, but their sympathies with the goals and methods of the totalitarians make the label they apply to themselves moot.

Some of those sympathies include a predilection for totalitarian government, economic socialism and egalitarianism, anti-Christian secularism, tribalism or identity politics, and subordination of the family and individual to the state. More can be found on this topic on a postfrom last spring which discussed Goldberg's book. RLC

Melanie Phillips attends an Oxford debate between the mathematician John Lennox and atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins and discerns some subtle shifts in Dawkins' thinking.

Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion, the popularity of which seems to be inversely proportional to the cogency of its arguments (See the review in the Hall of Fame on the left margin of this page). In Delusion and elsewhere Dawkins insists that there is no god of any kind and flogs philosopher Antony Flew for abandoning a life-long atheism in favor of a kind of almost Christian deism (I know, that's an oxymoron. Yet in his debate with Lennox he remarks that a strong case can be made for precisely the position Flew has adopted. Are Dawkins' views evolving?

The topic of the debate was "Has Science Buried God?" and Dawkins, realizing perhaps, the hopelessness of being able to successfully defend that thesis shifts the debate instead to the foolishness of believing that Jesus was divine. What this has to do with the debate topic is unclear, but when you're trying to defend the indefensible you grasp at whatever ploy or diversion that comes to hand, I suppose.

Anyway, Phillips' column offers an interesting take on Dawkins' position in the debate.

RLC

A month or so ago I wrote that in the upcoming election voters have to keep in mind one very important fact. We're voting not just for the next president. We're voting for that president's party. A vote for Obama is a vote for Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and a host of other very liberal and far-left Democrats. It's a vote to assist the Democrats in achieving their goals of a socialized, secularized United States.

Specifically, the Democrats and their presidential candidate aspire to do the following (based on what the Democrats have tried to do in the past and what Senator Obama has voted for in the past and said he would do in the future):

One or two of these may come to pass under a McCain presidency, of course, but it's almost certain that all, or most of them, will come to pass if the Democrats control both the White House and the Congress. If these measures sound good to you then you should pull the lever for Democrats on November 4th. If , however, you don't think this is what America needs then you should resist the seductions of Hope and Change and vote for McCain. There are other alternatives, of course, for the person who doesn't want to see the above items come to pass but who cannot bring him or herself to vote for McCain, but a vote for any one of those alternatives amounts to a vote for Obama.

RLC

This is rich. A Marxist terrorist anarchist wearing a Maoist red star on his shirt is pestered by a reporter and invokes property rights (!) to get the reporter to leave him alone. He then calls the police (!), the same public servants he conspired with other Weathermen to murder in the 1970s, to escort him to his car. When it comes to hypocrisy the secular lefties are far and away the champs:

Ayers was annoyed that a reporter would use such tactics to hound him. Maybe it would have been more appropriate if the reporter just set his house on fire like the Weathermen did to a judge and his family.

A lot of people don't know who the Weathermen were and what they did. Here's a video clip that might help with the history (Caution: brief obscenity):

These are the people with whom Barack and Michelle Obama associated until he ran for the U.S. Senate. Imagine if John McCain had associated with people who bombed abortion clinics and the homes of abortionists. Surely, the media would consider that a disqualifier for high public office, and it would be.

RLC

Steve Beard at NRO Online reviews Justin Dillon's documentary on child slavery and human trafficking titled Call+Response, and the statistics that emerge in the review and the film give us renewed insight into the depth of human degradation and depravity:

Reverend Jeremiah Wright proclaims America to be a fundamentally flawed nation because civil and human rights have, in his view, not advanced to where they should be. Michelle Obama declares that America is a "mean" nation. These people must have very little idea of what the rest of the world outside their neighborhoods is like or they'd never say such foolish things. The United States, like most of the first world, at least for now, is an island of high civilization, a relative utopia, surrounded by a sea of third world degeneracy and barbarism.

I don't know whether Call+Response is available in your area, but while you're waiting for it a couple of other films that'll give you a powerful sense of what it's like to be a child in some parts of the globe are Blood Diamond and Innocent Voices. If you choose to watch Blood Diamond note the parallels between Solomon Vandy and his son to Jesus' parable describing his determination to save the Lost Sheep. The parallels are probably unintentional, but they're there nonetheless.

RLC

The previous posts in the series titled Without God have looked at how well the atheistic and theistic worldviews fit with certain physical and psychological facts about the world and about human beings. Most of the remaining posts in the series will look at how well these two competing worldviews harmonize with some of what we might call "existential facts" of human life.

It is typical of the human beings, for example, to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As intelligent, thoughtful men and women we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence. In the world as the atheist sees it, however, there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die. We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, there's only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our yearning for answers. We are all alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is as absurd as the questions themselves.

The atheist must advise us to simply acquiesce to the awful disconnect between our deep need for answers and the impossibility of ever satisfying that need. In the words of biologist Jaques Monod, "Man knows that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance."

If, on the other hand, God exists then we're not alone in the cosmos, and it's possible that each of those questions indeed has an answer. Moreover, if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answers are, but we can cling to a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there's a reason why they gnaw at us. The questions are signs or indicators that there's something rational and meaningful about the universe. It's not just a terrifying and impersonal void, but is rather a beautiful, ornate cathedral engineered and constructed by God to house a world on which the creatures he loves can exist.

The theist, and only the theist, is in a position to counsel hope and to rejoice that the mysteries of existence are not forever inscrutable, but are there to serve as clues to point us toward the ultimate answer, God Himself.

RLC

Have you heard people say during this election cycle that they're not enthusiastic about either presidential candidate and are really not interested in just voting for the "lesser of two evils"? These folks often say that they'd much prefer to vote their conscience by pulling the lever for a third party nominee but are reluctant to do so because it would help the "greater of the two evils" get elected.

In other words, think of someone who will vote for John McCain only because he fears the thought of a far-leftist like Barack Obama in the White House, but who really would rather vote for, say, the Libertarian Bob Barr. Or think of someone who was wild about Hillary Clinton but who will reluctantly vote for Obama whom she believes to be completely unqualified because she doesn't want a pro-lifer like McCain picking Supreme Court Justices.

Well, my friend Byron passes along a link to a group that offers a simple solution (simple in theory, at least) to this problem. Check it out. Their idea would allow people to vote for a third party candidate (or a write in) without feeling like they're implictly aiding one major candidate or the other by withholding a vote from their rival.

RLC

Yesterday I posted a piece on Rush Limbaugh in which I lamented the ethos of consumption which is such a prominent part of his daily program. Then, at the behest of my friend Byron, I read an essay by Andy Crouch titled "Why I Am Hopeful" which made a similar point but applied the lesson more generally.

For example, Crouch writes this:

Good stuff. So, why is he hopeful? You'll have to go to the link and read the rest of the essay to learn that.

RLC

Senator Obama has frequently assured us that 95% of the people in this country would receive no tax increase under his tax policy. Only the top 5%, those persons, families and businesses making over $250,000 would see their taxes raised. This claim is a little misleading for a couple of reasons:

1. By raising taxes on business he will give businesses a big incentive to either reduce benefits, reduce wages, lay off employees, move offshore, and/or pass the added cost onto the consumer. In any case, the average person is going to wind up paying the tax increase in one way or another whoever Obama imposes it upon.

2. The Democrats plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010 which means that everyone's taxes will go up automatically. Obama has said that he would keep the lower rates for the middle class in place, but it remains to be seen whether a Democrat congress would agree to this. This also means that the upper income earners and businesses will get hit by another tax increase right after the first one. Obama also wants to raise the capital gains tax. The cumulative effect of these increases will be crushing and although they will not immediately impact those making less than $250,000 the middle class will soon enough be faced with all the consequences noted in #1.

3. In addition, the Democrats are planning to do away with 401k plans and place them in a government run account at 3% interest funded by the sale of government bonds. This would increase the tax liability on everyone's income (if they had a 401k), including employers who had previously contributed to the plan and received a tax break for so doing, and reduce the amount the contributions would have earned over the long term if these accounts had stayed in the market. It will also depress the market even further when the funds are removed.

4. 40% of American filers currently pay no taxes but under Obama's plan they will get a "refund" anyway. These people will essentially get a check from the government paid for by those who do pay taxes. It's essentially welfare. It's one way to "spread the wealth around," I guess.

There's more on what's in store for us after Inauguration Day here, here and here.

I've heard a number of commentators attribute the current bear market, which seems to puzzle many experts, to investors' fears about what Obama and his fellow Democrats will do to the economy once they ascend to power. Maybe they're on to something.

RLC

Thirty two hundred university and college professors recently signed a petition defending William Ayers against those who call him an "unrepentant domestic terrorist" (which he is). Megyn Kelly gets one of them to submit to an interview on FOX News, and she insures he'll never make that mistake again. Be sure to watch the whole thing:

Professor Singer lauds Ayers for being an educational reformer. What he doesn't tell us is the sort of "reform" Ayers, and Senator Obama, have tried to bring about in Chicago schools. Ayers is a Marxist socialist who wants to use public education to create a generation of revolutionaries who will throw off democratic capitalism and usher in a new, North American version of Cuba.

Stanley Kurtz, whose article at NRO is linked to in the previous paragraph, ends his piece with this:

Ayers does not try to hide who he is or where he is coming from. He is a proud leftist revolutionary. His driving idea, in this phase of his career, is that the classroom is the frontline of the revolution. And when he was given the opportunity of a lifetime, a $150 million fund to be doled out as seed money for the kind of programs he thought would advance the cause, the guy brought in to run it was Barack Obama - with whom he worked closely on "change" in the schools for five years.

That's reassuring. In an ideal world there would be at least as many journalists seeking an interview with Bill Ayers as there were seeking to interrogate Joe the Plumber. In such a world these intrepid advocates of the public's right to know would ask Mr. Ayers this question: "Sir, do you think you know Barack Obama fairly well?" If Ayers' answer were yes, then the follow-up question should be: "Does he share the same views about the role of education that you do?" Unfortunately, real journalism appears to be dead, or at least comatose, in this country, so I have no illusions that this fantasy would ever be realized.

On the other hand, maybe FOX will send Megyn Kelly out to Chicago to ask Ayers the questions. Now that would be an interview worth watching.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Mind you, I listen in the car to Rush Limbaugh whenever I can. I enjoy him and am informed by him about the events of the day. I think his views on the issues are mostly correct, and he's not at all the man his critics often portray him to be. He's neither a hater nor a bigot. Like all of us, however, he does have his faults. His egotism is, unfortunately, only partly a pose, though he at least has the virtue of acknowledging it, unlike Sean Hannity who constantly reminds us, implausibly, that he's humbled by his success. Limbaugh's biggest flaw, however, is something else, something much more insidious than his mildly amusing bombast.

Joseph Knippenberg puts his finger on it in a post at No Left Turns in which he discusses a column by David Brooks. Brooks describes for us a "typical" affluent middle-aged American male whom he calls "Patio Man". Patio Man is concerned much more about stability, order, and his 401k than he is about the issues that stoke the fire in the hearts of the political bases of both left and right.

Knippenberg says this:

This is exactly right, and it goes to the core of my biggest problem with Rush, who is otherwise a national treasure. Day after day, show after show, Limbaugh champions a lifestyle of consumption and indulgence. Some of this is just intended to tweak the nose of the left, to be sure, but there can be no denying that he really does advocate conspicuous consumption.

I know his defenders will point to the fact that the man gives fortunes to charity and should be permitted his foibles, and I agree that he certainly seems to be generous beyond that to which most people aspire. Even so, his munificence occurs relatively quietly and without much fanfare whereas his self-indulgence is trumpeted publicly and blatantly. The lesson that a lot of people might be taking from his show, then, is not that charitableness is a virtue but that consuming is. I think this is a toxic message to spread abroad and has a pernicious influence on people, especially young adults, the patio men who might better be encouraged to constrain their appetites and to live comfortably but modestly. Indeed, if more of us valued a greater simplicity we probably wouldn't be seeing so much economic volatility and so many home foreclosures.

The idea of living large and boasting of one's excesses is one of the fundamentals, evidently, in Rush's philosophy of life, but it's one I'd be happy to see him push aside. He does a lot of good, in my opinion, but he's in a position to do a great deal more. I think it sad that he doesn't see it that way.

RLC

As we've compared the compatibility of the theistic and atheistic worldviews with our existential experience I've argued that there's a significant number of facts about the world and about human life that make more sense given the truth of theism than given the truth of atheism.

To those facts we've already considered in our previous posts we can add our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our intuition that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic. In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to unyielding physical laws. In a Godless world our choices are nothing more than the product of chemical reactions occuring in the brain, and the reactions themselves obey the mechanistic laws of chemistry. There's no freedom in chemistry.

Thus for the atheistic materialist there can be no free will. There is only the inexorable laws of nature. At any given moment there is actually only one possible future, if there is no God, and our belief that we can freely create the future is pure sophistry and illusion. The future has been fixed since the Big Bang.

Consider the words of atheist Will Provine, an evolutionary biologist as he summarizes the views to which his Darwinism has led him: "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death ... There is no foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will."

If there's no free will in the atheist's world then an atheist who faults me for writing this post would be acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am driven to write by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could be ultimately responsible for anything they do.

An atheist should be a determinist, but this puts him in a bind. If determinism is true then those who believe it do so for reasons unrelated to its truth, and those who disbelieve it should not be criticized for their disbelief since their skepticism is mostly a function of their genes and environment, over which they have no control. Should a determinist argue that he believes determinism because it's true he's pretty much denying the belief he claims to hold. If someone believes in determinism it's because he was determined by his life's experiences and/or his genetic make-up to believe in it. The truth of determinism is irrelevant or, at best, incidental to whether we believe it or not.

RLC

Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times sees a lot of positives arising out of the current financial distress. For example:

There's lots else for which to be grateful that we're headed into a recession (I'm kidding). Read Kristoff's column to find out what some of the other "benefits" are.

RLC

Paul Bloom is a developmental psychologist and an atheistic materialist. In a fine essay at Edge he tackles the question of whether we have a soul, and although he believes we don't he says some fascinating things about that topic as well as the development of such beliefs in children.

He writes, for instance, that:

I wonder what the implications of all this are for the belief that we are hard-wired with certain kinds of knowledge, knowledge that we have a priori. Discoveries like those Bloom adumbrates would seem to be fatal all by themselves to an empiricist epistemology.

Bloom goes on to explain why he thinks we are predisposed to believe in substance dualism (the belief that the world is comprised of at least two disparate essences, matter and mind, or soul)and that this belief appears early on in childhood.

It's a fascinating essay, but it suffers from one drawback. it seems to me that the problem that must be settled before we can even begin to talk about whether we have a soul is the problem of what exactly the soul is. Until we know what it is that we either have or don't have we can't say much about whether we have it or not.

Unfortunately, Bloom doesn't see fit to define what he means by the soul except to say that it's an immaterial substance. he does seem to imply that the soul is, in his view, identical to what most people call a mind. In any event, Bloom, being a materialist doesn't believe there is anything immaterial about us, yet he seems enchanted by the universal belief, present from birth, evidently, that there is more to us than just the matter that makes up our bodies.

For my admittedly speculative view of what the soul might be see this post.

RLC

Related to the matter of qualia, which we discussed in the previous post in this series, is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at or listening to something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why? Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Yet another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. It seems that the atheist has no warrant for this belief. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, all of our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explicated in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. The atheistic materialist is in the intellectually unenviable position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth."

In other words, if there is no God then our reason is a product of evolution, and evolution selects traits for their survival value, not their ability to lead to truth.

Only if our reason is an endowment from a good and omniscient Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness is itself irrational.

Thus the theistic hypothesis not only makes better sense of beauty than does atheism, but it's the only hypothesis upon which we can logically suppose that our cognitive faculties are reliable guides to truth.

RLC

Hot Air has an excellent "video essay" by two young journalists (plus Ed Morrissey) who work for major news organs and who explore in their piece the qualifications Barack Obama brings to his candidacy for the presidency. The column is well-documented and brings together a number of themes that have caused people to have serious reservations about the man who may well be our next Commander-in-Chief. Their summary provides a good introduction to their case, and I urge everyone who plans to vote on November 4th to read their entire argument at the link.

Here's the summary:

RLC

A student commends this Monty Python video to his fellow philosophy students:

RLC

In this third installment of our series comparing the explanatory power of theism and atheism we'll consider two more facts about the world that are more easily accounted for on the assumption of theism than on the assumption of atheism.

The first is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it got here. The naturalist's answer is that information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience, as scientists should, we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind, never the result of chance.

Random processes can produce highly improbable structures (like the particular pattern of rocks in a field) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but we've never observed a random, non-teleological process generate both (such as an instruction manual). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests that an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

Another fact about the world that comports better with the assumption of theism than with atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for example, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, have intentions, or understand something? How does matter come to be aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs?

These are vexing questions for those holding an atheistic view of the world and materialists have no answer to them. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become aware of itself, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that matter is all there is consciousness is inexplicable. Its existence suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) just embrace the very odd belief that consciousness doesn't exist at all. I say it seems an odd belief because presumably one must be conscious in order to hold it.

At any rate, the problem posed by consciousness is an embarrassment to the materialist, but the theist can simply point out that our consciousness is bestowed on us by God who is Himself a conscious being. Human consciousness derives from God's consciousness, but it's very difficult to account for in a universe without God.

RLC

From Pajamas Media:

But you probably knew about this because it happened a month ago and it's been all over the media. Or maybe not.

The attacker was a paunchy middle-aged male and the victim was a woman. The writer of this post, Oleg Atbashian, speculates that the media reaction would have been considerably different had a male McCain supporter hit a female Obama supporter. As it is all we've heard from the MSM about this episode is the sound of snoring.

There are details of the assault at the link and a photo of the perp. I have to say that he looks like he knew what he was doing when he picked on a woman to assault rather than a man.

RLC

A reader writes to comment on the post titled More on the Right to Health Care. In that post I commented that when people are encouraged to turn to the church for their needs it benefits both them and the church in ways that government is simply unable to match. She writes:

It is true, of course, that government has financial resources that churches cannot muster and that there's a role for government to play, but churches are much better positioned to give people what government cannot - love, concern, and life skills. They can, in the case of the poor, offer them training in the virtues necessary to get and keep a job and also help them to learn how to properly raise their children. The kind of help many people need today, and which churches are uniquely situated to provide, goes well beyond finances, but people will never seek out the church's assistance, and the church will never develop its full potential to do good in the community, if the government is at the doorstep with a check every time they need it.

I mentioned Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion in the previous post on this subject. It really is a book that should be read by everyone concerned with the poor and the best way to help them.

RLC

Byron forwards us a link to an essay by George Weigel of the Witherspoon Institute. Weigel offers a compelling explanation as to why Senator Obama's defense of his vote as an Illinois state senator against legislation that would have protected babies born alive after a failed abortion attempt is simply false. After having methodically stripped away any possible justification for Obama's vote Weigel closes with this:

It may be worth mentioning in passing that Obama has promised Planned Parenthood that his first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.

Speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, Obama said, "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do."

This act would invalidate all laws regulating abortion, including laws prohibiting partial birth abortion. The National Right to Life Committee explains:

Whatever his views on other issues, Senator Obama is certainly a pro-abortion extremist.

RLC

An ordinary guy, a plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher, asks Senator Obama a simple question in a rope line and someone catches it on video. The candidate's answer reveals him to be pretty much of a Marxist socialist, and the revelation threatens to do Obama great political harm. So what does the left do? They do whatever they can to slime the poor guy who was only asking a sensible question. Naturally.

Joe the Plumber has become the center of media attention, and as with Sarah Palin, the subtext is that he must be discredited. A full scale investigation is launched by the left to dig up whatever dirt they can find on the guy who asked the question. Here's some of what they're publicizing now to embarrass him:

I don't care if the guy is the incarnation of Lucifer, what does any of this have to do with his question about what Obama's tax policy will be for small businesses? It was Obama's answer that has gotten him into trouble, not the question. Obama's reply was that he thinks everyone is better off if we "spread the wealth around", a classic Marxist sentiment:

The left's attempt to smear an ordinary guy who asked a simple question just makes them seem mean, vindictive and moronic.

Meanwhile, as the media digs furiously to unearth whatever dirt they can find on Joe, they haven't shown any interest at all in probing into the life of, say, Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. Why have there been no interviews with either of these men to help us learn a little more about their relationsghip to Barack Obama? Indeed, we now know more about Joe the Plumber than we know about Barack Obama's college years. I can't help but wonder why that is or what kind of people we have doing journalism in this country that they're more interested in humiliating an ordinary citizen than in learning more about who Obama is.

RLC

The story of the guy in Sarah Palin's audience who yelled "kill him" when one of the warm-up speakers mentioned Barack Obama's name has taken on the status of an urban legend. You can't read a liberal columnist or watch a leftist television talk show without hearing the story mentioned with embellishments and much agonizing over what this says about the dark and ugly passions to which the Republican ticket is appealing.

Now it turns out that like most urban legends this one has absolutely no warrant. Here's the story:

In other words, Sonderman is saying, it's a good story and we're not concerned that there's no evidence to support it. Even if it didn't really happen it could have, so what's the difference?

RLC

This post is the second in the series on whether atheism or theism offers a more cogent explanation for the world and our experience of it. The second fact that's easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here's one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10 to the 30th universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of regions in our universe (the multiverse hypothesis) having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes, why they must be thought to possess all possible values rather than being identically calibrated, and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to apply Ockham's razor and assume that there's just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it's rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

So, the explanation for what appears to be an amazingly brilliant engineering job is either the existence of trillions upon trillions of discrete regions in a multiverse, for which there's absolutely no evidence, or the existence of a transcendent engineer. It seems to me that the latter explanation is at the very least as plausible as the former. Indeed, it would seem far more plausible to most people were it not that they rule out the engineer hypothesis a priori because it doesn't fit their materialist worldview.

RLC

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that Obama told at least three whoppers during last night's debate. He denied having launched his political career with Bill Ayers' help, he denied having given $800,000 to ACORN, and he misrepresented the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act which he voted against.

Morrissey has details at the link if you'd like to check them out.

For my part, I'm a little reluctant to call Obama a liar, as Morrissey does, but I'm beginning to think that his problem (and thus ours) runs even deeper than lying. I'm beginning to think that Obama has a very pragmatic, Rortian view of truth. In this view, if a particular fact is unpleasant or inconvenient or impedes achieving the goals one has set for oneself then it's simply not a fact. It's not true for him. Truth is what works and obviously the sorts of claims that McCain was making about Obama's association with terrorist Bill Ayers, his support for ACORN, an organization which is being investigated all across the country for voter registration fraud, and his vote on the BAIP act, which is essentially a vote to permit infanticide, are not helpful to his candidacy. Thus he's able to persuade himself, and say with a straight face, that such claims are not "true", they're not "facts".

Truth, according to the late philosopher Richard Rorty, is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying. Obviously, Obama's peer group of radical leftists, socialists and media liberals have no problem with what he says and thus tacitly validate his claims. The truth for him as well as for many of those who want to see him attain the presidency is simply not the same as what is true for his critics. Therefore, his denial of the facts McCain cites is probably not technically a lie since he believes he's telling the "truth", or at least what's true for him.

I don't know, then, that it's quite accurate to call Obama a liar, a charge I deem to be very serious in any event, but he certainly does appear to be epistemically challenged.

RLC

Senator Obama and his allies are fond of laying the blame for the subprime lending fiasco at the feet of Republican fondness for deregulation, but although a supine MSM has largely let him get away with this misrepresentation of the historical truth, Peter Wallison at The Wall Street Journal does not.

In a column that deserves to be read in its entirety because it sets the record straight on several mythical elements of the Democrats' campaign narrative, Wallison says this:

Not willing to buck his party's leadership the senator refused to do the right thing. Instead he laid low, hiding in the political tall grass. His behavior in this episode displayed neither leadership nor political courage. Indeed, Senator Obama has never done anything to evince either of these virtues yet somehow he has managed to persuade a majority of American voters that he has both of them in abundance.

Is it that we are gullible, naive, or stupid? Or are we all three?

RLC

A friend passed along this thought:

George Bush has been in office for just under eight years. For the first of them the economy was pretty good. For example, a little over one year ago:

But we wanted change. So, in 2006 we voted in a Democratic Congress. Since then:

The president has no control over any of this. Only Congress could have done anything to prevent it but Congress has been preoccupied with trying to find Bush administration officials that they can put in jail.

In 2006 America voted for change and we got it.

Now Barack Obama promises that he is going to deliver real change.

Just how much more change can we stand?

RLC

Among the indictments of religious believers recently registered by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism is all faith and no evidence, the believer is condescendingly assured, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by "evidence", it often turns out that the word is being employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, of course there's no proof that there is a personal God, as if God's existence were the conclusion of a deductive syllogism, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. We have proof for very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It is actually, in my view, more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I will argue in this series of posts over the next week or two is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion that theism is true is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of evil is the most troubling example. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism. If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

The first of these facts, then, is our intuitive conviction that the universe must have had a cause and that it didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that the universe's existence depends upon something beyond itself, something which transcends space and time. It's possible, perhaps, that the universe somehow created itself, but that seems both counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator itself requires an explanation. As Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium. Most people would think that the cube was produced by aliens and would regard the cube as virtual proof that aliens existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of aliens, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the cube and that until they can offer some account of the aliens the skeptic is under no obligation to believe they exist. Most reasonable people would think that the inability to say anything much about the aliens doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube nor does it mean that the alien theory is on philosophical par with the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube would be a reasonable inference and would seem to be the most plausible explanation even if it could not be proven.

Likewise, given the contingency of the universe, the existence of a transcendent cause responsible for the universe is a reasonable inference. The alternatives, that the universe is eternal or that the universe brought itself into being, are possible but scientifically and philosophically no more compelling, and perhaps much less so, than the view that the universe had a transcendent cause.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Jack Cashill at The American Thinker does a literary analysis of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father and draws two interesting conclusions: Obama didn't write it and Bill Ayers probably did. If Cashill's correct, and he seems to have done some homework, the finding is significant. First, Senator Obama's reputation for intellectual brilliance is predicated largely on the grace and style of Dreams, and, secondly, it gives the lie to the senator's claim that he didn't have a very close relationship with Ayers.

The circumstantial evidence that Cashill amasses is, by his own admission, not dispositive, but it's much more than merely suggestive. Read his case for yourself and make your own judgment.

RLC

How many times will we have to hear that Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed his crimes before someone asks what that has to do with anything? No one thinks that Obama participated in Ayers bombings so why does his age at the time they happened matter? Would it be exculpatory if someone friendly with German nazi war criminals during the 1960s was only eight when the crimes were committed? Would we be saying that it doesn't matter that the man associated with nazis decades later since he was only eight when the nazis were perpetrating their evil?

It's an indication of the weakness of the case that is made in Obama's defense that he and his supporters have to grasp at such an inane and irrelevant excuse.

Meanwhile, the candidate pretty much admits he's a Marxist socialist:

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

RLC

Recently, I wrote a trio of posts titled Hurtling Toward the Cliff in response to an article by physicist Stephen Weinberg titled Without God. Over the course of the next two weeks or so I'd like to elaborate on this theme in a series of posts which will examine a number of facts about the world and human existence and consider these facts in the light of both atheism and theism. The series will borrow for its title Weinberg's Without God.

It'll be my contention in the series that theism offers a far superior account of these facts, that it makes better sense of them, than does atheism and that the theistic view of the world is therefore more intellectually satisfying and more rational than is it's opposite. Seventeen facts or phenomena about the world and human life will be considered:

In what follows it will be argued that theism provides an easier, more comfortable explanation for each of the above than does atheism. When taken together they add up to a powerful case for the proposition that it's eminently reasonable to believe that a personal mind, a mind similar to that imputed to the God of Christian theism, undergirds the world.

The first installment of the argument will be posted tomorrow.

RLC

A few days ago I made the comment that Senator Obama's view that people have a fundamental right to health care/insurance strikes me as ill-considered. A couple of readers thought this sounded a bit callous and uncompassionate, but I think it's Obama's view, though no doubt well intentioned, that is the less compassionate. Here are a few reasons why:

1) A right held by one person entails an obligation owed by another. By conferring a right to health care on one person we obligate everyone else, including others who may be struggling to make ends meet, to fork over even more of their income to the person with the right. In other words, we give people who may or may not be in genuine need a claim on your wallet. That may seem compassionate to the recipient, but it's decidedly uncompassionate to the person who must hand over his purse rather than be allowed to use his resources to help his own family.

2) When someone feels they have a right to receive a benefit from the state it stifles gratitude. They expect the taxpayer to pay up, indeed they come to believe they're owed the benefit and are aggrieved if the taxpayer resists. Rather than fostering gratitude for the sacrifice others make on their behalf the right cultivates instead a sense of entitlement in the recipient.

3) Since a right to health care puts the taxpayer in relation to the recipient like a debtor stands in relation to the person he owes, the taxpayer tends quite naturally to feel resentful at the transfer of his resources to people who demand that he do so. This not only serves to foster bitterness between classes but, to the extent that the classes break along racial lines, it nurtures a seething racial animosity.

4) When people feel the government owes them a benefit it stifles their initiative. People who know that others will provide for their needs are much less motivated to work to provide them for themselves. If we didn't learn anything else from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs we should have at least learned that dependency destroys the work ethic.

5) When charity becomes a government function it harms the church. Churches which have robust charitable ministries are often strong and vibrant, but churches which have had their outreach to their communities co-opted by the state often grow flaccid, weak, and cold. Charity should be the role of the church and people should turn first to churches when they're in need of help. Churches are then in a position to help these people not only with financial assistance but also to teach them how to manage money, how to parent, and instruct them in many other of the virtues necessary to rise out of poverty. When the government takes over this role, however, recipients have no expectations placed upon them and thus often fail to rise above the station in life to which they were born.

Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion should be required reading for anyone who thinks that government "compassion" is the only way, or even the best way, to help people.

RLC

Edward Heathcote Amory of The Mail Online summarizes David Freddoso's book, The Case Against Barack Obama, and declares that it has disabused him of his infatuation with the Illinois senator. Somewhat amazingly, in light of what Amory reveals about Obama, he still hopes Obama wins. Oh well.

Read the column at the link. You'll learn some things about Obama you probably didn't know and they're not pretty.

RLC

I don't know if you've been watching any of the talking-head shows lately, but there's been a lot of handwringing about how McCain and Palin are inciting mobs and stirring up hate and whatnot at their rallies. Yet, despite the terrible climate of "insane rage" that the Republicans have allegedly been fostering, no one who has made such allegations on any of these shows has been able to give a single example of anything either candidate has said that was inflammatory. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there was only one incident involving one person at one campaign event who shouted a single ugly remark, but this single episode has been amplified by the media to the point that a casual observer might think that Republican rallies are typically Nazi-like hate-fests.

Meanwhile, the media turns a completely blind eye to the "discourse" on the left which is frequently as vile and hateful, and far more common, than anything you would find coming out of a GOP rally. No Republican sounds anything remotely like Barack Obama's pastor, the racist hate-monger Jeremiah Wright. Nothing any Republican has said or done is remotely similar to the movies made about assassinating Bush or the ugly things said about Todd and Sarah Palin. The media ignores the threats, for instance, by Sandra Bernhard who describes the grisly fate that awaits Governor Palin if she shows up in Bernhard's city.

Michelle Malkin lays out many of the disgusting details of what has become an almost typically despicable discourse emanating from the American secular left.

The Democrats and their supporters in the blogosphere, of course, are trying to intimidate the Republicans into so softening their criticism of Obama that it does no damage. They want McCain to lob marshmallows at their candidate. By failing to give any balance or perspective to the reports of howling mobs of frenzied, spittle-spitting Republicans, the media is doing their part to help the cause.

The irony in this is that, if anything, McCain has been far too timid in his willingness to cast a probing eye on Obama's associations with Ayers, Rezko, Wright, Pfleger, et al. He seems willing to allow his opponents to dictate what is acceptable criticism and what isn't.

It reminds me of the time I watched a hawk swoop down and seize a chipmunk. Once the chipmunk was caught it didn't even struggle, it just acquiesced in its fate. McCain has been acting like the chipmunk caught in Obama's talons. If he's not going to fight he ought never to have run for the nomination.

RLC

Ramirez captures the plight of the American taxpayer:

If taxpayers feel squashed by free-falling corporate CEOs just wait until Obama gets into the White House. His promise that no one making under $250,000 will see a tax increase is very hard to believe.

If the Obama plan is implemented taxes will go up on almost every business in the country which means that employees will be laid off and prices will rise. Being unemployed and having to pay more for goods is just as much a tax increase as is having to pay the tax directly to the government.

RLC

ESPN's Jemele Hill dares to rush in where more timorous observers fear to tread. In a column at ESPN's Page 2 she wonders about something that everyone knows, but few are willing to talk about - the dearth of white running backs in major college and pro football.

Hill considers both the possibility that the disparity between white and black at some positions is due to a kind of discrimination as well as the possibility that it's due to genetic advantage, but, though she doesn't seem persuaded of the former possibility, she seems shy about drawing the full conclusions from her speculations about the latter explanation.

The idea that white football players are excluded from playing running back (or corner back) because of discrimination is silly. If whites had the talent to play these positions they'd be in them. It seems obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in sports that the ratio of whites to blacks at positions requiring speed is due to a difference in physical endowment that is racially linked. Blacks of West African ancestry are simply better suited, by virtue of their genetic gifts, for sports that require running and jumping.

Hill's article quotes a researcher who draws the right conclusion but then moonwalks away from it by asserting that genetic endowment is not a matter of race but a matter of one's ancestral environment. For example, people who come from high altitude regions, this researcher opines, are better suited for sports involving endurance. This, however, is flummery. It's like arguing that the lack of melanin in whites is not due to their race but due to having descended from people living in northern Europe. Regardless of how a race of people came to have the genetic characteristics they do it's simply nonsense to think those traits are not linked to their race.

Indeed, we've become so fearful of talking about race in this country that we are loath, like the people called out to gaze upon the emperor's new clothes, to note obvious truths even when no one doubts them. This seems absurd, perhaps, but there's a reason for it, maybe even a good reason.

Hill doesn't push her speculations this far, but it seems likely that we shrink from talking about the physical advantages that blacks have in sports like football and basketball because there's a very distasteful inference lying just down the road. If the success of blacks in certain sports is due to physical superiority then the inability of whites to compete with them is due to physical (i.e. genetic) inferiority. If we're intrepid enough to follow this inquiry further we find ourselves forced by consistency to acknowledge that the paucity of blacks in other areas of endeavor, like the technical fields and sciences, suggests a general inability to compete intellectually that must also be genetic. If the physical inferiority of whites is genetic then there's no reason to think that intellectual inferiority is not also genetic.

This is such an unwelcome conclusion, fraught as it is with so many unpleasant sociological implications and so vulnerable to abuse, that most people think it's safer to just not bring the matter up, which is why so few people ever remark out loud on the complete absence of white running backs in the NFL.

Hill's article makes a couple of bows to political correctitude but is overall an interesting read. It's certainly unusual that someone would be willing to take on this topic. I wonder what the reaction to her article would be had it not been written by an African-American woman.

RLC

Here's encouraging news:

So, let me see if I have this right. Millions of people are losing their life savings in part because many illegal aliens, whose presence in this country, we were told, will boost our economy, were not required to have any credit standing or social security number.

Unlike the financial debacle, which can largely be laid at the feet of Democrats, the illegal alien mess is truly non-partisan. Few in Washington, including the president and both of his would-be successors, have any inclination to do much about it. Like Nero, our political leadership is content to fiddle while Rome burns.

And it is burning. Illegals are placing an enormous burden on our police, hospitals, schools and other tax-payer funded facilities, especially in the southwest. Illegals kill thousands of Americans every year either by murder or by automobile accidents. Now it seems they're also partly responsible for the mortgage mess for which the tax-payers also have to pay.

No presidential candidate who shrugs his shoulders when confronted by this onslaught deserves to president. Unfortunately, one of them will be. At least McCain is willing to build the fence along the border. Obama isn't even interested in doing that.

RLC

A while ago we noted that Democrats were dependent upon the least educated members of our society for their electoral success and thus shouldn't asperse the intelligence of Republicans. We received a bit of criticism after this post for suggesting that idealistic young community organizers would be so cynical as to deliberately seek to exploit the poor and uneducated for political purposes. Well, read this:

It's interesting that these "progressives" regard their electoral base as "idiots". That's the same language that Lenin used to describe the people who swallowed communist propaganda and wrote favorably of the communist revolution in newspapers and magazines. Lenin reportedly referred to them as "useful idiots".

Read the whole report and you find nuggets like this which indicate that the agenda of the Colorado Democracy Alliance is not dissimilar from Lenin's:

In the opinion of this left-wing progressive woman it's "arcane" to allow taxpayers to decide through the ballot whether they will be taxed and by how much. In other words, for her and others who share her ideological outlook representative, democratic government and political freedom is outdated and obsolete.

Liberals and Progressives, like the old Soviets, use words like "democracy" as code. What they mean by it is what the rest of us mean by "tyranny".

RLC

CNN's Drew Griffin is doing some of the best investigative journalism of this election cycle. He's looked into the allegations of voter registration fraud against ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and shares his findings with Campbell Brown:

The "good" news is that ACORN is active in all of the battleground states. Good luck Senator McCain.

RLC

Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC were gleeful the other evening over a video (see below) which shows an Obama spokesperson named Robert Gibbs making an inept comparison between Obama's association with uncontrite terrorist Bill Ayers and Hannity's association with some unsavory guests on his show.

Apparently, Olbermann and Maddow think that somehow Gibbs' attempt to show that Hannity's asociation with his guests is no different than Obama's association with Ayers is successful, but it seems to me that a child could distinguish between the cases. Obama was allegedly friends, or at least friendly, with Ayers, they were exchanging e-mails and phone calls up to 2005. They are ideologically sympatico. Hannity is not connected to his more odious guests in any way except as an interviewer. How the two cases could justify the sort of snide contempt at which Olbermann is so adept is beyond me.

Take a look for yourself (first four minutes):

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Every conservative's favorite liberal senator, Joe Lieberman, has some thoughts on Barack Obama, the Democratic party, and his future in it:

You can read the whole thing at the link.

RLC

It might soon come to this:

RLC

Alpha and Omega? Are these young men in their camouflage pants and military style drill arrogating to Obama the title by which God describes himself in Revelation 21:6?

Fascism often begins with paramilitary groups indoctrinating their members in a cult of personality. But fascism is not just paramilitaries investing a leader with a reverence usually reserved for the deity. It also involves propagandizing the young to regard the leader as a savior, the repository of all their hopes for a grand future. Watch this:

We are actually witnessing in the parents of these children an apotheosis, the promotion of a man with no record of achievement to Mt. Olympus. Maybe Obama himself is embarrassed by all this, maybe not, but it certainly says something important about many of the leftists who support him. Like the ancient Roman emperors, Obama has become more than a cult figure to them, even more than a savior. In the minds of the people who choreograph these performances he's sung and talked about in the same tones employed by religious people to sing and talk about God. It'd be funny if it weren't so serious. As it is it's truly scary.

Do rank and file Democrats not feel uneasy about this?

RLC

In Tuesday night's debate Barack Obama surprised many viewers who had not yet fallen asleep by declaring that Americans have a right to health care. I wonder what he meant by that. Surely it's not a constitutional right, since nowhere in that document can we find such a right enumerated (of course, neither is it stated in the constitution that a woman has a right to kill her unborn child, but that omission doesn't mean much to liberals who reason that since it should be there we can safely act as if it is there).

Maybe Senator Obama meant that health care, or health insurance, is a human right, but, if so, where does he get that idea? It can only be a right of any kind if the rest of us are somehow obligated to provide it, but what could possibly obligate you to pay for my health insurance? Perhaps Obama derives the obligation from his Christian faith, but if so he's importing into the public square religious reasons for public policy, and that's illegitimate, as we've all come to learn from the good people at the ACLU.

Moreover, why would there be a human right to health insurance or care but not, say, to food or transportation or shelter? These are more basic needs than health insurance which many people can do without for years. Once we agree with Senator Obama that each of us has a right to be insured do we not also have to agree that the government, i.e. you and I, has a deeper obligation to provide everyone with a house, a car, and a full refrigerator?

Senator Obama has inadvertantly given us an object lesson in the injustice inherent in liberalism. Liberals, in order to win votes, persuade the masses that they will open up to them the public purse. This sort of demagoguery appeals to the great bulk of the population, but it's totally irresponsible and only encourages the masses to believe that they must also have a right to every other amenity in life. Of course, liberals encourage this thinking and believe it a grand act of compassion to take from those who work and give it to those who don't, or can't.

No one has a problem with helping those who are physically or mentally unable to help themselves, but the idea of helping those who choose not to help themselves, who make consistently bad choices in life and then expect the taxpayer to shield them from the consequences of those choices, rankles. The liberal solution, Obama's solution, is to tell us that the people who have worked hard and played by the rules have an obligation to support those who don't. A lot of folks see this as grossly unjust.

RLC

Say Anything blog has an interesting statistic that reflects well on the civic virtue of the good people of Indianapolis. It turns out that 105% of eligible persons in that patriotic town and the surrounding county are actually registered to vote. The region has 644,197 people and 677,401 of them are registered to exercise the franchise in November. This is a very impressive feat.

We're sure it's a mere coincidence that the group ACORN, which is currently being investigated all across the country for voter fraud, has an office in Indianapolis, and that the Obama campaign's contribution of $800,000 to ACORN to help them get out the vote is an innocent misjudgment. Just saying.

RLC

Back during the heyday of the debate over capital punishment opponents of the practice argued strenuously that offenders should be given life in prison without parole rather than be put to death. Advocates of the death penalty, on the other hand, argued just as fervently that once we end executions of murderers in favor of life in prison the "reformers" will next argue for imposing less draconian sentences so that ultimately no one will even get life in prison.

Jeff Hawkes, staff writer for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal offers an excellent illustration of how the debate over how to punish killers will evolve. He argues that juvenile murderers should not be sentenced to life in prison, but all of his reasons apply just as much to killers as old as thirty five. Hawkes writes that:

Hawkes thinks that as long as a killer is no longer a danger to others he should be let loose, but if we accept this logic why impose a sentence at all? As soon the inmate convinces a panel of "experts" that he's rehabilitated why not release him forthwith? Indeed, those who have killed others in crimes of passion or revenge are probably not a threat to the general population in the first place so why incarcerate them at all?

He goes on to write that:

Well, if this is a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on juveniles then it's equally a rationale for not imposing a life sentence on anyone under thirty-five. Is that where Hawkes is headed with his argument?

Hawkes concludes that "science and compassion are on the side of giving a lifer hope of showing a parole board he's not who he was at 13".

Of course the killer's not who he was when he was thirteen. No one is. No one at thirty is who they were when they were twenty. Everybody changes. Hawkes' argument is really a brief for doing away with life sentences altogether. First we stop executions, then we end life terms. What's next on this particular slippery slope? Doing away with prison?

RLC

In what was otherwise a snoozer of a debate last night the most startling revelation to emerge was Senator Obama's statement that he would go to war with Iran to keep them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He didn't say it exactly like that, but that was the clear implication of his assertion that we cannot let Iran have nuclear weapons and that, though we should try sanctions, etc., etc., he would not take the use of military force off the table.

Add this to his stated policy of surging troops in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban/al Qaeda who threaten to undo all that has been accomplished there, and his claim that we should invade Pakistan to get bin Laden, and those who saw Obama has the great anti-war hope must be seething with disappointment and frustration. Obama presented himself early on in the primaries as an anti-war progressive and garnered a lot of support from the constituency to which that position appeals. Now he turns out to be something quite other than what he originally appeared. In fact, with his threat to attack Iran, he seems to be a proponent of the "Bush doctrine" of striking an enemy who is preparing to strike us.

I have a word of encouragement, though, for those who may be feeling betrayed by Obama's willingness to bomb a nation that has not attacked us: Don't worry. I doubt very much if the senator really means what he's saying. He may think he does, but I believe the real Obama is the Obama of the early primaries, not the Obama of the campaign's homestretch.

As for the rest of the debate, the candidates were simply treading water. No one did badly, but not doing badly does not help McCain. McCain simply lacks the instincts necessary to wage a come from behind race. To be sure, he was hindered by the blandness of the questions selected by the moderator, Tom Brokaw who apparently turned aside any questions about illegal immigration, abortion, Obama's unsavory associations, or judicial appointments.

Even so, McCain needs to show the country what Barack Obama and the Democratic party will do to the nation should they get the power, and he doesn't seem to have the stomach for that. He didn't seem interested, for example, in explaining to viewers that the worst financial crisis this nation has experienced since the depression of the 1930s is due almost entirely to Democrat malfeasance. Maybe he should have Sarah Palin pinch hit for him at the last debate as a sort of designated debater. At least she won't go gently into that dark night of political defeat and oblivion.

RLC

Saturday Night Live did a funny skit on the financial crisis which pretty much puts the blame on everyone, but especially congressional Democrats, bad credit risks, greedy yuppies and liberal moneybags. The skit was pulled from the SNL website, evidently because of pressure from somewhere, but it was caught by patdollard and can be viewed there. It's pretty good.

RLC

This story by Dinitia Smith on William Ayers appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terror attacks on New York and Washington. It gives us good look at who Ayers is, and although both he and his wife try in the article to soften the ugliness of some of their earlier pronouncements, one wonders if this is out of genuine regret or if it's simply a public relations move. Here are a couple of the most salient paragraphs:

The article also gives us insight into Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn:

Other reports recount how Ms Dohrn flashed a three finger salute to the crowd to symbolize the fork.

Ayers and his wife are past associates of Barack Obama. Among other things, they hosted him in their living room when he launched his campaign for the Illinois senate and served on several boards with him. Obama's campaign is trying to minimize the connection, while admitting that they were friendly, but the relationship seems to have been closer than they're letting on.

This is important, not because it suggests that Obama is sympathetic to terrorism, but because it reflects on his judgment, the sort of people he is drawn to, and the sort of people who might find their way into his administration.

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were learned that John McCain was supported by, and worked closely with, an unrepentant abortion clinic bomber. I feel quite certain that the media would go ballistic and insist that this association alone would disqualify him from being president of the U.S. Yet much of the media seems completely unconcerned that Obama was involved with Ayers and Dohrn who bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

UPDATE: CNN, of all people, has done a piece which pretty much shows that Obama and Ayers were pretty tight back in Chicago. I'm sure that this kind of reporting is not going to be popular with CNN's viewership, but Drew Griffen is to be commended for doing real investigative journalism. He'll probably be looking for a new job next week:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Christianity Today reviews Bill Maher's polemic against religion and finds it amusing but ultimately frivolous.

Here's an excerpt from the review:

Like schoolyard bullies who always pick on the kids least able to defend themselves, people like Maher always seem to mock those who are least able to articulate their beliefs or whose beliefs are the most outlandish. They never seem to have much appetite for engaging those who are their intellectual betters because they doubtless realize at some level the damage that would do to their project of embarrassing religious belief. Indeed, the Bill Mahers of the world probably realize that were they to pick on those who've actually thought about their religious convictions they themselves would be the ones who'd wind up looking silly.

RLC

Did you know that any criticism of Senator Obama's former associations is a form of racism? It's true, at least if Douglass Daniel of the AP is an authority on such matters. Writing of Sarah Palin's reference to Obama as having palled around with terrorists the racially sensitive Daniel espies racism lurking in the weeds:

The fact is that Obama has mingled with an unsavory cast of characters (a Weatherman terrorist, an Islamic terrorist financier, a felon, a bigoted preacher), and these are facts of which the electorate should be made aware. If we're known by the company we keep the American public should be informed of what kind of people Obama has gravitated toward. If calling these associations to attention be racism then the word no longer has any meaning.

Patterico has more examples of the promiscuous use of the incendiary term against critics of the man who is the leftmost candidate for president since 1946.

RLC

Why we are where we are:

Now let's all turn out in November and reward the people who caused this mess by putting their party in the White House. That makes sense, doesn't it?

RLC

Barney Frank deserves to be pilloried for his role in the financial crisis we're now facing, but people like Bill O'Reilly are obviously not the ones to do it. This video is an embarrassment to those who agree with O'Reilly's point but think that a much more effective case could be made against Frank and the Democrats by calmly and rationally explaining it rather than acting like a three year-old having a tantrum in the sandbox:

The lesson here is that we need to carry on our discourse in ways that are polite, courteous, and calm. We persuade no one by yelling at them and calling them cowards. Nor do we impress our listeners if they're repelled by our belligerence and name-calling, which any decent person would be. It's disgusting when the left does it, and it's no less so when it comes from the right.

This is not to say that there's no place for anger. There is, but if we want to persuade others to our point of view our anger should be controlled. Anyone who doesn't understand the issue in this video, and who doesn't know the players, is going to find Barney Frank a much more sympathetic character than Bill O'Reilly, and that would be unfortunate, at least it would be if you believe that conservative ideas must prevail if our nation is going to survive.

People like O'Reilly (and Michael Savage) succeed only in making the task of conservatism's opponents that much easier.

RLC

In his essay titled Without God physicist Stephen Weinberg says this:

Set aside the pomposity and self-righteousness implied by his claim to be a moral exemplar. He's being hopelessly naive when he says that belief in a transcendent creator has no moral implications. Unless there is a transcendent moral authority there simply is nothing that obligates or binds us to act in any way beyond how we feel like acting. There's nothing that makes kindness better than cruelty. Both kindness and cruelty are simply things some people prefer, like they prefer a particular flavor of ice cream. We may like or dislike the behaviors we label kind and cruel, just as we like or dislike a particular flavor of ice cream, but as with the ice cream, there's nothing wrong with them.

Weinberg then adds this:

As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing....Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation-that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking-with good humor, but without God.

So atheism amounts to this: We are like a lone man lost in a wilderness and facing certain death. We can face our predicament bravely or not, but which we choose isn't going to change anything and doesn't much matter. And why worry about bravery? What makes bravery a virtue? The fact that other people admire it? People admire a lot of things in others that are not virtuous, what makes bravery different?

Atheists like Weinberg adjure us to face the absurdity of life with a smile on our face, but it's the smile of a clown. It's there but there's an incongruity between the smile and the emptiness and despair that lurks behind it. The smile is a mask that tries to send the message that one's life means something when in fact anyone who thinks about it knows that it doesn't.

Thanks to Logan Gage at EN&N for calling Weinberg's essay to our attention. See here and here for additional posts on Weinberg's Without God.

RLC

Senator Biden is often praised for his extensive foreign policy experience but that experience is of little moment if he doesn't know what's going on in the world's hot spots. In his debate with Governor Palin the senator took some swipes at the Bush policy in Palestine and along the way delivered himself of the asseveration that we and France kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon and that he and Senator Obama urged that NATO fill the void.

I haven't a clue as to what he's talking about, and neither, I suspect, did he. Lots of other folks are wondering about it, too. It's as if Biden just made this up on the spur of the moment.

He made a number of other erroneous statements during the debate, but this one is perhaps the most bizarre. Check out the link.

Maybe he was thinking of something else and got confused in the spotlights, but the point is that after this debate there should be no more gibes at Sarah Palin's relative lack of knowledge about the world.

RLC

In his article Without God which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Physicist Stephen Weinberg paints a bleak and depressing picture of a life without God, but seeks to redeem that portrait by urging us to enjoy a drop or two of honey before we dissolve into the void of nothingness. Weinberg urges us to be brave, but his prescription is really a form of denial. He tells us that human life is pointless and absurd so we should embrace...poetry. He adds that poetry doesn't need God for its inspiration:

Perhaps, but whether the poet loves God or hates him he is still fascinated by him and this fascination is what inspires his art. If it weren't for God what would these poets write about? Weinberg seems to think that a culture can produce great art without God and perhaps it can produce some, but if the art and literature which has been inspired by God, either positively or negatively, directly or indirectly, were removed from our museums and libraries, there would be precious little of value left.

Moreover, we are justified in wondering, where are the great artists from those countries which are officially atheistic? Who are the men and women of genius in those countries whose work is completely indifferent to God and yet rises to the level of greatness? Most of the great writers who emerged behind the iron curtain, for example, were religious dissidents. The record of official state atheism does little to inspire optimism that Weinberg's assessment of atheist art is correct. If history is a guide, it seems more likely that atheism stifles and impedes creativity and artistic genius.

I'll have a little more to say about Weinberg's essay tomorrow.

RLC

Last night's debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin was remarkable. Biden seemed the more knowledgeable and yet, according to some analysts, he made at least ten misstatements of fact. Palin may also have made some errors but, despite having to rely frequently on her notes, she turned in a stunning performance. She was up against a man who has been involved in such debates in three different presidential campaigns, including the recent Democratic primary. Palin has been on the national stage for about five weeks, yet she not only held her own against the 35 year veteran of Congress, but she came across as a very appealing candidate.

Biden had only to avoid embarrassing himself in order to pass muster (though he certainly exceeded that minimal requirement,) but Palin had to show the country that she was smart, knowledgeable, charming and competent. She had to show that she belonged on the stage with Senator Biden. She did all of that, and by so doing she probably pulled McCain's bacon out of the fire for a second time within a month.

His campaign was beginning to falter going into the convention and Palin's speech at that event turned it around. Then, after McCain moved into a slight lead, the financial crisis hit and the attacks on Palin piled atop her distressing appearances with Charles Gibson and Katie Couric, began to sap the original excitement she generated. McCain could not overcome these problems in his debate with Obama, which was considered an approximate draw, and it looked as if his campaign was about to fade into oblivion. Indeed, NBC analyst Chuck Todd just yesterday declared the race essentially over.

But after last night I'm not so sure. It's not that Biden lost, rather it's that Palin seemed to reassure a lot of people that the calumnies leveled against her abilities were unwarranted, and her disappointing performances in her interviews with Gibson and Couric were correctable stumbles. She re-energized a lot of Republicans last night and probably wooed more than a few independents and undecideds to her side.

We'll have to wait to see what the polls show to be sure, but I'll be surprised if McCain doesn't get a bit of a bump from Palin's performance last night.

A final thought: It occured to me as I watched the debate that the country would be better served if the two debaters, Biden and Palin, headed their respective tickets. Isn't it ironic, for instance, that we may elect in November a man to be commander-in-chief who, because of his past associations with terrorists, would probably otherwise be denied a top security clearance by the CIA or FBI?

RLC

In a fun parody, Victor Davis Hanson at NRO puts all of Joe Biden's howlers and other goofy utterances in the mouth of Sarah Palin and tacitly invites the reader to wonder what her treatment from the media would be like if she had said half the dumb things that Biden has said.

Tonight Sarah Palin will debate Joe Biden (in an event moderated by Gwen Ifil who has a big financial stake in a Biden win). I was thinking about this debate today and the treatment that Palin has gotten from the media and the left-wing blogs, and the thought occurred to me that it's a wonder that any good person runs for elective office in this country. Fine people like Palin are ridiculed and treated with contempt by the Charles Gibsons of the world while crooks, scam artists, buffoons and perverts like Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, William Jefferson, Nancy Pelosi and many others get a complete pass from the media. Why do good people subject themselves to the abuse and humiliation they must endure to serve the people when others who have no business being seated in Congress are never examined, never questioned, never exposed because they happen to be members of the correct party?

I suppose it's true that when the people in a democracy don't take the time to find out what their political leadership is doing, and who they are, they wind up with the politicians they deserve.

RLC

I have on many previous occasions argued here at Viewpoint that an atheistic worldview leads to nihilism, or it would if the atheist were consistent with his fundamental assumption that there is no God. Our worldview is like a train which, once we climb aboard, heads off toward a particular destination. The terminus toward which the atheistic train is bound is a yawning abyss of despair and nihilism. If one stays on the train all the way one inevitably plunges into the chasm. Few are willing to go all the way, however, so, once they see the abyss looming ahead, they jump off the train.

Atheistic physicist Stephen Weinberg, in an article in The New York Times Review of Books titled Without God, looks down the track and espies clearly the cliff over which his atheism will plunge him:

Weinberg is about to jump off the train. He won't give up his atheism, but he can't bear to follow it to its logical endpoint either.

So he urges his readers to embrace humor, beauty, pleasure, and moral virtue despite the fact that there's no non-arbitrary reason why anyone should do so and no reason to think that these could inject any real meaning into the otherwise dreary ordeal of life. Weinberg's answer reminds me of a parable that Leo Tolstoy tells in his Confessions:

Weinberg, like many atheists, is like the man in the well about to die but somehow persuading himself that licking the honey has some point to it.

RLC

Thomas Sowell explains why the collapse of Freddie and Fannie is not a failure of free market economics but rather a predictable consequence of government involving itself in the marketplace. He says, for example, that:

Sowell also explains briefly why it's wrongheaded to try to blame this crisis on the Bush administration. It's a good op-ed but the page on which it's found seems to take a while to load. Nevertheless, it's worth the wait.

RLC

Eleanor Bourg Donlon laments what she sees as a growing disinterest among the young for reading the classics, particularly Dickens and Shakespeare, and she places the blame squarely on classroom teachers, both secondary and college:

I suspect Donlon exaggerates her case at least a little. The teachers of literature that I know best love the classics and teach them with a contagious verve and affection. Even so, those closer to the literature class, whether teacher or student, would be in a better position than I to assess the accuracy of Donlon's indictment.

Her essay is worth reading in its entirety.

RLC

Suppose you were running for high office and were to debate your opponent in front of the entire nation. Would you think it fair that the moderator of the debate stands to make a great deal of money if your opponent wins the election but earn nothing if your opponent loses? Probably not, but this is the situation Sarah Palin will find herself in during tomorrow night's debate with Joe Biden.

The moderator, Gwen Ifil, has written a book about Barack Obama which is due to be released in January right around inauguration day. If Obama is the man being inaugurated, Ifil will probably sell a lot of copies. If Obama has lost the election no one is likely to be interested in her book. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which invited her to moderate, committed a gross error in judgment and, for her part, she should have declined their offer.

The fact that she will be asking the questions means that she is in a position to influence the outcome of the proceedings. Her tone, her inflection, the kind of questions she asks, can all work to the advantage or disadvantage of one or the other debater. A moderator is supposed to be disinterested, but Gwen Ifil is surely not disinterested.

No one who has a financial stake in the outcome should be permitted to be in this position any more than a basketball official who has bet on the game should be allowed to officiate it.

For more on this go here.

RLC