Some of us have often wondered why it is that when Jerry Falwell urges his flock to vote Republican he is engaging in an unconstitutional breach of Church/State separation, but when Jesse Jackson urges black parishioners to vote Democrat he's standing in the best tradition of African American preachers. Creationists are accused of illicitly trying to impose a religious point of view on students by suggesting that metaphysical naturalism may not be true, but Darwinians who tacitly advocate metaphysical naturalism are not. It seems that religion in the public square is just fine as long as it's used to reinforce the liberal side in the culture war, but not if it is invoked by conservatives. Thus Bill Clinton's religious affirmations were never seen as a threat to the health of American politics, but George Bush's are.

Even granting that religion should have a legitimate place in our public life, however, there is a right way and a wrong way to express it. Steve Waldman has some interesting thoughts on this at National Review Online He writes:

Waldman is right. Unless people can argue from mutually shared assumptions they'll just be talking past each other. Thus Christians may hold to a particular belief primarily for religious reasons, but unless they can find non-religious premises from which to advocate their beliefs they'll be unpersuasive to people who don't share their religious worldview. If Christians wish to be effective players in the public arena they have to learn to meet those with whom they disagree on their opponent's turf.

In other words, every big game for the Christian has to be an away game. The only time they can play at home is when they debate each other. If they insist on engaging non-Christians on their own field by quoting Scripture, etc. they're going to find that nobody is going to show up for the game.

Usually when John Kerry speaks he reminds me of the history teacher played by Ben Stein in Ferris Buehler's Day Off, but last night he was pretty good, style-wise.

The actual content of his speech, however, was bizarre. It was as if he'd undergone a political sex-change operation.

Like the old football star who brings his game films to the 30th class reunion, Kerry wanted to remind us, and keep reminding us, that he had been a soldier, but he seemed to go right from the Mekong Delta to the campaign trail for president. I almost expected to see thousands of Special Forces troops rappelling down out of the Fleet Center ceiling instead of a balloon drop. Where was there any insight into his nineteen years as a U.S. senator? What did he accomplish during his three terms in the senate? Most importantly, how does his record in the senate support the guarantees he made in his speech?

From the emphasis that was placed on his military service by himself and others it's clear that he considers this his chief qualification to serve as president, but it all seemed surreal, as did the reaction to it in the arena. These people are not big fans of military service, much less of service in Vietnam, and if they really believed that military sacrifice makes Kerry more fit to be president than Mr. Bush they would have all voted for Bob Dole in 1996.

Kerry proudly proclaimed, as if to distinguish himself from George Bush, that he defended his country as a young man, but almost no one over fifty in that arena would agree with him that, his combat heroics notwithstanding, whatever he was doing in Vietnam, it was not defending his country. By 1975 that war was seen by almost everyone as completely unwarranted and unrelated to any conceivable threat to the United States. Kerry knows this. He said as much in his war protest years, so why insist now that he was indeed defending his country?

Aside from the mass hypocrisy of the left-wing of the Democrat party masquerading as pro-military hawks for the rubes out in the heartland there were a number of things about Kerry's speech which were plainly cheapshots.

For example, Kerry slapped Bush for preaching family values but, he said, you don't value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter serving in Iraq. Well, true enough. What you do is ask the senate to approve an 87 billion dollar appropriation to provide those kinds of things and hope that Senator Kerry and his left-wing companions will not vote against it. Your hopes are disappointed, of course, because, despite his grand rhetoric last night Kerry has voted against every single appropriation that has come before him in his 19 year tenure in the senate that would better prepare our military for the battles they must face.

After having clearly implied that Bush lied to us about getting into Iraq, after having stated flatly that Bush only went to war because he wanted to, he called on the president to agree with him to conduct an honorable campaign. This is the Democrats' idea of an honorable campaign: They get to call the president a liar and a betrayer of his country, they get to allege that the president was AWOL from his National Guard service during time of war, they get to accuse the president of sending thousands of people to their deaths just because he wanted to, and they get to allege that the president's talk of values is hypocritical. The president, however, for his part, must refrain from citing the total disconnect between Kerry's votes on the senate floor and the promises he made on the convention floor because that would be a below-the-belt slander. In the democrats' vision of an honorable campaign the president may not even defend himself against the accusations against him for that would be to imply that those making the charges are liars which would be mudslinging of the worst kind.

Senator Kerry claimed that he would restore trust, credibility, and respect to the White House. If he did he would be the first Democrat since Truman to do so, but, the sorry record of his predecessors aside, how can we expect a man who so willingly distorts his opponent's record and motives to be honest with us when things get tough?

Why did Kerry imply that the Bush people have ever said that our economy can do no better than it's doing? When did any high ranking White House spokesperson ever say such a thing? Is this how we restore credibility to the White House?

Kerry observed that we need to bring our allies to our side and assured us that he's just the man to do this, but it's wrongheaded to think that our allies are not at our side because the wrong man is in the White House. As I wrote yesterday, there is a bitter hostility toward the United States percolating throughout Western Europe based primarily upon jealousy over our success and resentment that our success has shown up their own inadequacies. Europe (i.e. France and Germany) are disinclined to follow America's lead in any venture unless, and until, America subordinate itself to their wishes. Thus the only way Kerry will succeed in his arrogant claim to be the right man to bring France and Germany to our side is by diminishing our national sovereignty and weakening our economic, military, and cultural influence. We must, to appease them, repudiate capitalism in favor of the same socialism that has made them such economic juggernauts. In other words, no matter who is in the White House, the French, Germans, and even the Canadians will remain cold and aloof until we become as weak as they are. Like our own domestic politics, it's not about personalities it's about power.

Ultimately, though, neither convention speeches nor debate performances should matter much to a voter. Good speeches are not necessarily good indicators of whether a person would be a good president nor is a good debate performance. These events are media shows, and they do very little to help us determine how fit a man is for office. A man should be judged not on his style, nor his appearance, nor anything else but his record. It's insulting to the electorate to have political managers conducting focus groups and micromanaging a candidate's image, seeking to package a candidate to make him appealing to the least well-informed segment of the voting population, and tacitly telling us that they believe that all that matters to us are the most superficial qualities of the man. Both of the contenders in this campaign have an extensive record, and anyone who doesn't know by now what George Bush stands for or what sort of president John Kerry would be hasn't been paying attention and probably shouldn't vote in November anyway.

On night two of the Democrat Convention Ronald Reagan, Jr. delivered what he promised would be a non-partisan speech which he concluded by, in effect, urging people to vote for John Kerry. If Americans want to realize the miraculous cures latent in embryonic stem cell research, Reagan averred, then George Bush must be turned out of office. The casual viewer was given the impression by Reagan that the Bush administration had prohibited all stem cell research, but of course this isn't true. Michael Fumento explains why in an essay at National Review Online.

Fumento also points out that adult stem cells are available from many tissues in the human body, all of which are morally unproblematic, and that these cells are showing a great deal of promise in the treatment of some diseases. An excerpt:

What goes mostly unmentioned in the criticism of Bush's decision to deny federal funding to the development of new lines of embryonic stem cells is his chief reason for doing so. The President believes, not unreasonably, that it is morally wrong to create human embryos which will be deliberately destroyed in order to harvest their cells.

It's true that the embryos that would be used, at least at first, would be excess products of in vitro fertilizations of ova done to produce embryos for couples that cannot otherwise have children. The concern among many ethicists, however, is that this would put us on a slippery slope where eventually embryos would be produced exclusively for the purpose of harvesting their cells, and, given current law regarding abortion, there would be no legal basis for stopping at the use of mere embryos and their cells.

It would be only a matter of time before fetuses and their tissues would be harvested as well, and it would not be much longer after that until there would be a legal trade in body parts extracted from unborn children. It's not hard to imagine women getting pregnant for the sole purpose of selling the tissues and organs of their unborn offspring. Given that abortion is currently legal for any reason the mother wishes, there's no non-arbitrary reason the courts could site for prohibiting such a grisly business. It would, of course, be justified by its advocates on the most humanitarian of grounds: ending the suffering of millions of people who are afflicted with terrible diseases and other maladies that might prove amenable to treatment with harvested tissue.

This is not the sort of activity Bush feels the federal government should be subsidizing with taxpayer dollars, and he's right.

Those who listened to John Edwards speech at last night's session of the Democrat National convention might be forgiven for getting the impression that Kerry/Edwards are about to usher in the Millenial reign of Christ. If it is true that the American voter is too sophisticated and too cynical to swallow the "chicken in every pot" rhetoric of politicians who promise everything and anything, word has not yet reached John Edwards. I was waiting for him to promise that when he and Kerry are elected every American would receive a free trip to Disney World.

Certain of his claims, of course, generated a bigger spike on the baloney meter than others. For instance, he averred:

Is this an invitation to examine John Kerry's record? What has Kerry spent his adult life doing? He did four months in Vietnam, was sent home after receiving a dubious third purple heart for a wound that was treated with a band aid, and proceeded to confess that he and thousands of other Americans were guilty of war crimes. The grisly deeds he admits to committing make the offenses of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib wane into insignificance by comparison. After his stint in the anti-war movement he began a political career notable only for two things. As a senator he amassed, over nineteen years, the most left-wing voting record in the senate and at the same time accomplished absolutely nothing of any legislative significance. He was a senatorial non-entity. His most noteworthy accomplishment, since leaving Vietnam, that has come to light is having persuaded two very wealthy women to marry him to save him the trouble of ever having to actually do any real work.

The "attacks" against Kerry have focused on his political record. They have examined his votes and his positions on issues. If Democrats think that scrutinizing someone's record and quoting their words is foul play then why do they relentlessly attack Bush's record? Speaking of attacks, Bush has been called a liar, a Nazi, a bigot, and a simpleton. He has been accused of betraying the nation, and deliberately taking us to war, with its attendant grief and loss of life, just to help his corporate friends. Aren't you sick of it?

John Edwards' legal career is, in fact, an example of why medical malpractice insurance is so high and consequently why medical costs are daunting. He won huge claims for clients whose children were born with cerebral palsy, because, he convinced juries, the mothers of these children should have been advised by their obstetricians to have Caesarean sections. Such procedures have since increased unnecessarily with no discernable effect on the incidence of CP, but plenty of impact on medical costs and doctors' insurance premiums. See here for a more detailed account of exactly what Edwards has "spent his life fighting" on behalf of.

These assertions reveal an incredible misunderstanding of why some schools are better than others. New York City's Schools spend more money per student than do many suburban schools, but the suburban schools are often more successful. Schools which are failing are not failing for lack of money, they're failing because of the quality of family life in the school district. Communities populated by healthy families will have better schools than those in which family life is chaotic regardless of how grandiose the buildings, how highly paid the staff, and where the school is located. If the Democrats want to improve education they can work to strengthen families but they would have to repudiate many of their philosophical principles and much of their legislative history to do that.

Has anyone run the numbers on this? What loopholes would they close? How much revenue will they produce by rolling back the tax cuts for the top 2% of taxpayers? How, exactly, are they going to cut wasteful spending? Haven't these same promises been made ever since the Great Depression? How many times will candidates be able to snooker their listeners with vague, meaningless promises before we catch on that this is all political legerdemain. Show us the numbers or forfeit your credibility.

That children are poorly clothed or go to bed hungry is no doubt true. The question is whether this is because there is no alternative for them or because they are in families which do not avail themselves, for whatever reason, of the assistance which their fellow citizens provide for them through government programs or charitable organizations. For Edwards to make it sound as if government is somehow failing these children is disingenuous. Likewise his claim that there are millions who work full-time and who still live in poverty is hard to credit. Few adults who work full-time earn only minimum wage. Most workers at the minimum wage are teenagers and others who are not the chief wage-earners in their family. If Edwards wants to do more than just rouse the masses of faithful at the Fleet Center, if he actually wants to demonstrate the truth of his claims, he's going to have to show that heads of households in significant numbers, despite working full-time, nevertheless have total household income, including government benefits, under the poverty line (about $22,000 for a family of four).

This reveals a disturbing naivete on Edwards' part as to why we are unable to get some of our erstwhile allies to follow our lead in world affairs. It's not because Bush is abrasive or because he lacks diplomatic skills. That's just a rationalization. It is rather because many of our supposed "allies" resent and even despise us for our hyperpower status. The United States is an economic, military, and cultural colossus, and much of the rest of the world resents the dominant role we play around the globe, a role they believe, in some cases, is rightly and historically theirs. This is especially true of France and Germany. Russia is reluctant to follow us because they resent their defeat in the ideological struggle of the Cold war. Nobody likes to feel inferior, everybody experiences shadenfreude when the top guy stumbles. As these nations see things, it is in their national interest for the U.S. to fail and it would take more than John Kerry to persuade them to act against that interest. John Edwards, and every other American for that matter, would do well to read Jean Francois Revel's book Anti-Americanism. It would perhaps cure him of the naïve idea that American "unilateralism" is a result of inept American diplomacy and that a more agreeable face in the White House is all we need to mollify the Europeans and others.

Bush gets a lot of criticism for dividing people, but the criticism is silly. People in this country are divided because of the multiculturalist emphasis on celebrating our differences. We are divided because of the practice of special interest politics, the appeals to people on the basis of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, etc. These are not Republican phenomena. This is the basic weaponry of the Democrat party and has been ever since the sixties. Democrats who accuse Bush of being divisive are projecting their own habits onto their opponent. Their definition of "divisive" is any condition in which you don't agree with them.

If, for example, you think it's immoral to kill children as they're being born then you're being divisive. If you think we should have judges who will rule according to what the law and the constitution say rather than according to the political whim of the day then you're being divisive, if you think that marriage is important and that we should preserve the understanding of marriage that has prevailed for two thousand years then you're being divisive. If you think the first amendment is being wrongly interpreted as it touches upon matters of religious expression then you're being divisive. They're trying hard in this convention to moderate their rhetoric, but all one need do is compare the words of Democrat leaders like Kennedy, Carter, Dean, Gore, Jackson, and Kerry during the primary months to those of Republican leaders to see who has been a force for division and who has been a force for national unity.

If you haven't seen the NASA photos that have the Kerry folks steamed but would like to, you can see them here. I can understand why the Dems are so upset about the release of these pictures. They make Kerry look like a gopher.

One of the hammers that the Democrats have used, and will continue to use, to beat the Bush administration over the head is the matter of job flight beyond our borders. As Senator Kerry has alleged, "Benedict Arnold CEOs" are outsourcing work to third world countries and depriving Americans of job opportunities. Bush's general commitment to free trade and globalization, the Democrats have argued, is resulting in tens of thousands of people being added to the unemployment rolls as their employers export their jobs offshore. The conventional wisdom among many is that job outsourcing is enormously harmful to the American worker and economy and Bush should be punished for it at the polls.

The conventional wisdom, however, is quite mistaken according to Brink Lindsey in a Reason article entitled Ten Truths About Trade. The article is clear, concise and very helpful in answering the main arguments raised by the left against free trade. An excerpt:

Lindsey then goes on to discuss ten reasons why free trade is beneficial to the country and, in the long run, to our workers.

Thanks to Dan Drezner for the tip. Drezner himself has a much lengthier, more scholarly piece on the same topic in Foreign Affairs for those who are interested in a deeper economic analysis of the effect of outsourcing on American workers.

Jonah's latest. It's masterful. An excerpt:

He does a fine job in this piece of deconstructing the hypocrisies of both Clinton and Carter. It makes one eager for his critique of Teresa Heinz Kerry's speech last night which seemed like it was being delivered on valium.

It may seem picky, but I thought it just a little bit odd that the Democrats appealed last night to their African American base by touting two speakers who lay claim to the coveted identity but who are African-American in only the most technical sense. Obama Barak had a Kenyan father whom he never really knew, but he shares almost nothing else in common with the heritage of American blacks. Teresa Kerry immigrated from Mozambique, but very few blacks would regard this white multi-millionaire heiress as a racial "sister." It's a small point, but one can imagine the hooting that would ensue if the African-Americans featured at the Republican convention included a white South African and a man whose maternal ancestors were white and whose paternal ancestors were never enslaved, nor ever experienced Jim Crow or the civil rights movement.

I guess that for people who consider Bill Clinton to be the first black president, almost anybody counts as an African-American, except Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice, Rod Paige, Colin Powell, and J.C. Watts.

USA Today fired Ann Coulter for being too, well, too much like herself. They replaced her with Jonah Goldberg who also has the distinction of having fired AC a couple of years ago from National Review for saying something like we should kill all the terrorists and convert the rest of the Muslim world to Christianity, or something like that. Anyway, Jonah's column on the Democrat Convention is here.

He makes the point that the fractious Democrats have constructed a Potemkin Village to fool the rest of the country into thinking that they're really all lovey-dovey with each other and with John Kerry when, in fact, the glue that's holding this convention together is not John Kerry, but a deep and irrational contempt for George Bush. The Democrat Party has for the last four years, been a roiling, seething cauldron of hate, but they know that even though venting their animus makes them feel good, they can't let the American voters see this. So the convention Democrats remind the viewer of Dennis the Menace all dressed up, sitting in church looking angelic, when in fact he's bursting inside to get out and roll in the mud.

Goldberg is always good. Read the whole piece.

The list of endorsements of Senator Kerry continues to grow, which would be good news for the senator were it not for the fact that many of those who find him deserving of their support are people or groups who for one reason or another do nothing to raise Mr. Kerry's stature. Indeed, quite the opposite is true (See here for a recent discussion of this phenomenon on Viewpoint). The latest such endorsement that Viewpoint is aware of is that of the Communist Party U.S.A.

The good folks whose ideological soulmates, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Kim Jong Il, brought you over 100 million dead in the twentieth century and the most repressive regimes in the non-Arab world - these folks who would abolish your right to own property, as well as the entire Bill of Rights - have this to say about Senator Kerry:

Reassuring words coming from people who doubtless have the best interests of America and Americans at heart.

According to The Washington Times the CPUSA has also endorsed Democrat keynote speaker Barack Obama, senate candidate from Illinois, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and Inez Tenenbaum in South Carolina.

Viewpoint asks the question again. What is it about John Kerry that makes such people as these think that he's the man they want as president?

One of the many critcisms President bush has had to endure since the onset of the Iraq war is that he is presiding over terrible human rights abuses carried out by the United States military. Abu Ghraib, we've been told, was just the tip of the iceberg and that torture and other forms of abuse proscribed by the Geneva Conventions were widespread.

Last week the army issued its report on prisoner abuse and demonstrated that yet again the president's war critics have been wrong. Powerline features an excellent commentary on the report by Dafydd ab Hugh. Dafydd writes:

One wonders how many more defeats of their credibility the left can suffer before they become a complete laughingstock.

This analysis by Steve Waldman of Kerry's "religion problem" says some interesting things, but it misses the root, I think, of the senator's difficulty. Waldman writes, for example, that:

In other words, religion is as important to the general population of Democrats as it is to Republicans, it's just that the Democrats to whom it's important are not in the leadership. So Democrats, including Kerry, tend to "act like the Party of Secularists even if they aren't."

Waldman thinks Kerry is making a mistake by not talking about religion more because, if he does, he'll have a very receptive audience among most members of his party. This is where I think Waldman misses Kerry's underlying difficulty.

Kerry's predicament is not simply that he's shy about his faith, it's that when he has talked about it he's given the impression of being only a nominal Catholic whose religious pilings are not driven very deep. He does not project the image of a man who is comfortable talking about religion quite possibly because it truly is terra incognita to him. For a person who has given little thought to matters of faith over the last several decades to suddenly assume the role of a man of piety is very difficult, not to mention extraordinarily hypocritical.

To suggest, as some of his supporters are, that Kerry talk about religion in order to reassure a voting public which looks for such convictions in a president is to ask him to adopt a persona to which he may well be philosophically and psychologically allergic. It's to ask him to be someone he's not. The gambit, if not sincere, can only make him appear phony, which, of course, he would be.

Kerry would be better off, if he has to say anything at all, to simply tell the truth about his religious beliefs, or lack thereof, and let religious voters decide for themselves if the honesty of his response is sufficient in itself to give him a pass on the matter.

The following piece by Ben Stein, who writes for The American Spectator and who appeared on Win Ben Stein's Money and in small roles in numerous movies, sums up the feelings of so many of us that I thought I'd share it with Viewpoint readers today.

Note: The restaurant Stein refers to, Morton's, is a high end eatery in L.A. For many years he has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's", but he's now terminating the column to move on to other things:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World? As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonline FINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to. How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists. We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject. There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament, the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive, The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery, the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children, the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards. Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero. We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves. In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters.

This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard-or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them. But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

To which the only thing left to be said is "Amen."

Joanne Jacobs at Joanne Jacobs.com specializes in education news. Her site has this intriguing report on the relationship between immigrants and their academic performance. An excerpt:

It often astonishes educators that children who have to overcome serious linguistic and other cultural hurdles to learn frequently outperform those who face no such impediments. It is also worth pointing out that these children often succeed in the same schools that are said to be failing so many children of our native-born population.

One would think that ascertaining the reasons for this would be a top priority in the Department of Education since it would be crucial to improving education in this country. I suspect, however, that it's not a priority for a simple reason.

Children of immigrants don't always do well. Generally, it is the children of Asian and Hindu parents who excel most frequently. And when they do, it is because their families are usually tightly-knit and very religious, they value education, respect, and self-discipline. The parents themselves are often professionally successful, they're oriented toward the future, not the present, and they often have not yet bought into the more dysgenic elements of American culture. These are, of course, the same reasons why children of non-immigrants also do well in school, when they do. Parents, whether immigrants or not, who lack any single one of these qualities may well produce high achieving children, but the more of these qualities they lack the less likely it is that their children will excel in the academic sphere of their schooling.

There's little interest in political circles in stressing this because if it is true, the key to school improvement lies in reversing the deterioration of the family, and this is an area where the only role government is willing to play is negative. For close to two generations government policies have been undermining the bedrock supports of family structure that many immigrants bring to this country. No fault divorce, promiscuous welfare benefits, abortion on demand, increased secularization of the public square, and now gay marriage rights, all have a corrosive effect on the values many immigrants cherish.

Moreover, improving our childrens' educational performance would take a conscious repudiation of the entrenched cultural relativism that many in government embrace. The view that different societies have different ways of doing things and hold different values, but that no one's values are any better or more corect than anyone else's is philosophically inane, but is, for all that, still part of the psychological furniture of many public servants today.

Add to the structural exacerbations of government policies a highly seductive pop culture which celebrates sexual infidelity, drugs, rebellion, and other expressions of short-term hedonism, the very opposites of the values which make for academic success, and it is not difficult to understand why the "immigrant effect" wears off after a generation or two.

It's also not difficult to see why government is not interested in focussing on these factors. It's much easier to blame failing schools than to muster the political will, courage, and consensus necessary to do something meaningful to reverse the academic trendlines. So politicians and other bureaucrats content themselves with attacking the symptoms rather than the problem. The decline of American education is a concomitant of the deterioration of faith, family, and pop culture, and there's no inclination in government, particularly not on the political left, to do anything at all about that.

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future, that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future, it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil. Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

This is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wanting to prevent evil but for some reason he chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility but, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers, if he could do something to stop it? No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God the theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork. First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist might say here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having said this, let's look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that it is within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in a future post.

The argument that many Christian theologians have put forward goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it. This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it. On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him strikes me as very plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning. Let us assume that it is possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create. Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation. He has an image of every world he could possibly make in his mind. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created. At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't. Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often.

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell. People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out, or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right, or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure how man would choose to use his gift of choice. Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed them worth it.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create some other world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it. Some have even called proponents of the "Open Future" idea heretics. I myself am open to the argument but am sympathetic to the objections of the traditionalists. Perhaps, readers can shed some light here. I invite anyone who's interested in pursuing it to contact us through our Feedback option.

The argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc. These will be discussed in another post.

Here's interesting news. Apparently deployment of our missile defense shield has begun. Perhaps this will cause the chuckleheads in Pyongyang and Beijing to think twice before they decide to launch offensive nuclear missiles.

Of course, there are those who are skeptical about whether the missile defense system can actually perform as it's supposed to, and for all I know their doubts may be warranted, but this particular argument strikes me as silly:

Coyle's objection seems to be that since this first generation of missiles can only succeed against 60% of incoming ICBMs that therefore the system is useless. I don't think he would say that if North Korea launched a ten missile attack against the West Coast and Coyle happened to be living in one of the six target cities that was spared because of the deployment of a less than perfect defense system.

In fact, though, the system doesn't have to work perfectly to be useful. Merely the uncertainty it creates in the minds of the war planners on the other side is itself a deterrent, a deterrent that one cannot put a price tag upon.

Is Coyle saying that we're better off depending solely upon a preemptive strike than we are by having a backup option? Furthermore, haven't North Korea and China already built several dozen missiles? Did Coyle call for us to bomb them when they were being built? Should we do it now?

Moreover, these missiles are not usually constructed out in the open with bullseyes painted on them. To preemptively destroy them, assuming that were politically feasible, would require inserting ground troops, which would doubtless precipitate an all-out war. Nice alternative. What think tank is this guy with?

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip on the story.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has some interesting thoughts on Christian evangelism. Reading it, I wondered how many people accept the Gospel because someone just walked up to them and invited them to give their life to Christ? I suppose it happens and I suppose some of those commitments are enduring, but I still wonder even so if, on balance, that approach is more often seen by the "target" as insulting and simple-minded.

Good stuff.

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well, guess.

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well...guess.

Despite a heavy barrage of media criticism of President Bush's claim that there were connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, the president and Vice-President Cheney have remained adamant in their defense of their claims. The president seemed to back off a little but not much and the vice-president has insisted that the media criticism has been unfair on this as well as other matters.

When the preliminary 9/11 Comission staff report was released last month the media jumped all over the statement that there had been no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaida and accused the president of misleading the nation into thinking there was. Bush, however had only claimed that there were ties between the two, not that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 or any other terrorist act against the U.S. Now the full report is out and the media has egg on their faces yet again. Like the coyote trying to snare the road runner, every stratagem they employ to discredit Bush simply backfires.

Byron York has done the pick and shovel work, digging through the voluminous product of the Commission's efforts to bring us their findings regarding Iraq's links to al Qaida. A couple of excerpts:

For the details behind this summary, and the evidence of the connection between bin Laden and Hussein, read the whole column. No one interested in Bush's justifications for OIF should miss it.

Viewpoint is thinking of taking up a pool, the proceeds to go to the reader who correctly guesses how long it will take for the media to apologize for treating the president as if he had the integrity of a Kerry foreign policy advisor.

Go here for an outstanding piece in the New York Sun on Sandy Berger's role in the Clinton White House and national security. Some excerpts:

The last sentence reminds me of Machiavelli's caution that a Prince should be judged by the quality of the people with which he surrounds himself. Three of John Kerry's foreign policy advisors, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, and Sandy Berger have all been shown in recent weeks to be either dishonest or lacking sound judgment, or both. As the Sun asks, what does that tell us about Kerry?

Charles Krauthammer gives us a glimpse into what will almost certainly be one of the first matters the Bush administration will have to address if it is reelected in November: What to do about Iran.

A question Viewpoint wishes someone would ask John Kerry is what, exactly, he proposes be done about a state which supports terrorism, is exceptionally hostile to the United States and Israel, and which is, by its own admission, soon to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Kerry can't fall back on some vague mumblings about a multilateral approach and involving the U.N. since that's what the Bush administration is trying now with notable lack of success.

Kerry's realistic choices seem limited to attempting to ignite a revolution, military preemption against Iran's nuclear facilities, or doing nothing. The first doesn't seem as likely to succeed as we had hoped last spring, the second is pretty much what Kerry has been criticizing Bush for over the past two years, and the third puts the world at a risk that we simply can't accept.

Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. If people like John Kerry had had their way in the spring of 2003 we would be in a far weaker position today to do whatever it is that needs to be done to prevent it, and if John Kerry has his way in November what needs to be done probably won't be.

One of the questions that arises among people who enjoy talking about the philosophy of religion concerns the relationship between God and time. Does God exist in our time? If not, is He outside time altogether or does He exist in his own, supernatural, temporality? I thought of this as I read an excerpt from a book by Kitty Ferguson entitled The Fire In The Equations: Science, Religion and the Search For God. at Belief Net.

Since our time is part of the creation and coterminous with it, and since God transcends the creation, it seems likely that although God may enter our time, He is not restricted to it or constrained by it. We may deduce that our time, cosmic time, is part of creation, i.e. the cosmos, by asking this: If there were no motion and no matter to move, if there were no thing at all, could cosmic time exist? If so, what, exactly, would it be that is existing? How would its existence be discerned? Since it's difficult to imagine time apart from matter in motion, or some sort of change, it seems reasonable to suppose, although it can't be proven, that our time came into being when space, matter, and energy did. Thus scientists talk about the "space-time" universe.

If we assume, then, that God is outside our time then we might ask further whether God is cognizant of our past, present, and most intriguingly, our future. Many theists hold that the concept of omniscience imputed to God entails that God must know the future, but if so, can humans have free will if God knows what they will choose?

We can frame the question in the form of an argument:

When put this way it certainly seems as if God's knowledge of the future determines my choice, since I cannot be free to do Y if God knows I am going to do X. But there is something odd about this. Certainly, if God knows I will do X then I will do X , but it doesn't follow that God's knowledge determines my choice. Might it not be that my choice determines God's knowledge?

Consider the following propositions:

Let's stipulate that I freely choose X tomorrow.

This set of propositions is logically coherent, that is none of them is logically incompatible with any of the others, as far as I can tell. The conclusion which follows from them is simply that:

Put this way there's no contradiction between my free choice and God's foreknowledge. In fact, God's foreknowledge may be seen as a consequence of my choice rather than my choice being an inevitable consequence of God's foreknowledge. Since it's possible to frame the argument this way it's at least possible that there is no contradiction between God's omniscience and human free will.

This does not satisfy some who can't shake the notion that if God knows X will happen, then X has to happen. It is certainly true that if God knows X will happen then, of course, X will happen, but confusion settles in because we tend to think of God as existing within our temporal frame of reference, but because God is outside our time it could be, as I've said above, that the event X causes God's knowledge, not the other way around.

If this is difficult to grasp think about it this way: Each of us knows what other people did yesterday, but we don't think our knowledge determined their behavior. Their behavior was chosen by them yesterday and the choice was unaffected by the fact that we know about it today. So knowledge of a choice doesn't necessarily determine the choice. The problem is that knowledge of a choice prior to its occurrence is different in kind than knowledge of a choice after it has occurred. This is true of us, embedded as we are in cosmic time, but if God is outside of cosmic time, it may not be true of Him.

If God is outside of our time, past and future are all in His present. Our past and future may well be temporally the same to God. Whether He is looking "back" at the past or "forward" into the future, it's all "present" to Him. Thus, if looking "back" doesn't determine what people chose in the past, looking "forward" may not determine choices either. In other words, It's possible that the choices God sees us make determine the content of His knowledge, His knowledge doesn't determine our choices.

For some theologians, however, the whole question of God's foreknowledge is moot. They argue that to say that God is omnipotent is to say that God can do everything that it is logically possible to do, but one thing that may not be logically possible is to know with certainty today what a free agent will do tomorrow.

This view is not very popular among orthodox theists, especially evangelical Christians, among which group I count myself, because it seems to diminish to too great an extent the sovereignty of God, and it is also difficult to reconcile with Scriptural passages which manifestly foretell choices which people will make centuries later. Few Christian thinkers, particularly evangelical thinkers, wish to sacrifice their belief in the Divine inspiration of the Bible on the altar of a philosophical speculation.

Advocates of the "Open Future" hypothesis reply to these concerns by asking how God can possibly know what someone will choose to do in the future unless their behavior is somehow determined? How can God know an indeterminate future that has yet to occur? If God knows the future doesn't that imply that the future somehow exists? If so, where, exactly, does it exist?

I confess I have read no fully satisfying answer to these questions. I also confess that, although I tend to hope that God does know the future, I find a certain allure in the notion that He does not. The reason for the attractiveness of this view for me is that it offers a possible answer to one of the most vexing of apologetic questions. The troubling question arises out of attempts to reconcile God's goodness and power with the existence of evil in the world, but a discussion of that topic will have to wait a couple of days.

How many have to die before the U.N. acts? The Sudan is Rwanda all over again and, as then, Kofi Annan dithers. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to do something to stop the killing of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, but the usual suspects are thwarting our efforts once more. From the article:

Of course, the United States could act "unilaterally", but the domestic secular left, which cares little about the suffering of black Christians in Africa but cares enormously about rendering America militarily impotent in the world, would doubtless make this very difficult politically. Add to the political difficulties the U.N.'s hurt feelings over Iraq which evidently trump the moral imperative to do something to bring relief to the suffering in the Sudan, and you have a recipe for inaction.

So there the delegates sit, arms folded, a scowl on their faces, adamantly refusing to protect tens of thousands, even millions, of starving, disease-ridden women and children because the United States grew weary of their failure to do something about the horrors occurring in Iraq (and Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda) and finally did it ourselves.

In other words, not enough Christians have died yet for the secularists and Muslims in the General Assembly to regard this as worth getting serious about. In a response to a question about the possibility of military intervention to stop the butchery of thousands of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, Annan displays in a single sentence the complete irrelevance of the United Nations, the absurdity of the Democrat criticism that George Bush failed to get U.N. permission to depose Saddam Hussein, and his own nincompoopery:

A "no-no"?! I guess that will make the thugs in Khartoum think twice about helping the militias commit their genocide. Next Kofi will make them sit in a corner for a time-out. No wonder Saddam was so contemptuous of U.N. resolutions. And this is the body to which the Democrats want the United States to subordinate its national sovereignty and interests?

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting debate going about Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism for those Viewpoint readers with a philosophical turn of mind who are interested in the question of how life arose. Warning: Some of the comments are pretty technical but Joe's arguments are relatively brief and easy enough to understand by a non-specialist who has read a little bit on the topic.

According to this Fox News report 40% of Canadian youth think the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. Youth can be forgiven their stupidity, but the Canadian media and educators who instill this nonsense into callow minds cannot.

If Canada's youth wish to see real evil in action they might simply read this news report. The United Nations, determined to show the U.S. why it should withdraw from this tawdry organization forthwith, voted 156 to 6 with ten abstentions to approve a resolution calling upon Israel to heed an International Court of Justice ruling that called upon them to tear down the barrier that has reduced terrorist attacks by 90% and saved the lives of countless Israeli women and children.

Unfortunately, the spared lives are evidently of no moment to the august delegates in Manhatten, who voted, in effect, to have the murders resume. Their rationale was that the wall is working a hardship on Palestinian landowners in some regions, but one would think that if that were really their concern the U.N. could bring other resources to bear to mitigate the hardship. Instead, the U.N. prefers to salve the suffering of the Palestinians by adopting measures that can only insure that more Israelis will die.

Only Israel, the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voted against this odious resolution. Where was Canada? Canada was too busy teaching its youth that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world to vote against a resolution which would deprive Israel of any means of protecting its citizens from the savages who wish to blow them to bits. In a display of moral courage they abstained.

Isn't it past time that the United States washed its hands of this absurd institution? America should join together with those nations which pledge themselves to the values of equality under the law, freedom of religion, press, and speech, representative government, free and open elections, and establish an alternative to the United Nations. The U.N. is little more than a bunch of thugs masquerading as statesmen and we should no longer be party to the charade.

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief at The New Republic has some thoughts on a variety of matters including the Joe Wilson and Sandy Berger affairs as well as the attitude of the French toward their own Jewish population. About the Wilson episode he says this:

Perhaps another question Mr. Kerry might wonder about is this: Evidently Bill Clinton knew that Berger, an important advisor to Kerry, was under investigation, so why didn't he tell Kerry about it?

There's more at TNR Online.

I don't know if this UPI story is true, but if it is it could change the entire course of the presidential campaign. It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats and the media handle this report if it is confirmed.

Several weeks ago Viewpoint suggested that the array of individuals supporting John Kerry should give others leaning in his direction pause. We wrote that:

Now we can add to this list of disreputable characters the names of Joe Wilson, a Kerry advisor, and arrant slanderer, Whoopi Goldberg, whose sleazy put downs of the president were so offensive and vile that her corporate sponsor, Slim-Fast, dropped her from its celebrity endorser list, and most recently Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor under President Clinton and, until last night, current advisor to Senator Kerry, who purloined documents dealing with matters of national security by concealing them in his pants and socks.

Berger calls his behavior an honest mistake. He inadvertently left the archives, he claims, with documents stuffed in his socks and down his drawers. The Dems want to laugh all this off, but they would be howling in outrage had it been a Bush administration official who stole the papers. Not only does their reaction to this incident, or rather their lack of reaction, evince a deep hypocrisy in the Democrat party, it also suggests that we may infer that this sort of behavior falls within the bounds of the Democrat standards for honesty. Berger is like a shoplifter with merchandise stuffed in his socks, trying to convince the police that he inadvertently left the store with the items, that he certainly didn't intend to steal them, and the Democrats seem to be okay with that.

Rather than expressing dismay that so many of their friends and political allies seem grossly deficient in either taste or integrity, they respond to this last incident by fretting instead about the "timing" of the revelation about Berger's conduct, as if that somehow is more nefarious than the conduct itself. It's no wonder the Democrats insist that character doesn't matter for public servants. If it did, a sizable number of them would be rendered ineligible.

George Bush can take comfort that people like these hate and oppose him, because people have always despised those who are morally superior to themselves. He can take comfort that so many feel impelled to lie about him, to utter the most mean-spirited and vile slanders about him. People do this because they know that they can't merely tell the truth about the man since the truth is not going to alienate voters from him.

People often feel indicted by another man's strength of character, by his integrity. His virtue is a mirror that constantly reminds them of their own inferiority, and they detest not themselves for being less, but they detest him for being better. Their jealousy doesn't motivate them to rise to his level, but rather it motivates them to drag him down, to discredit him, ruin him.

Destroying a man is one way to exert power over him and the exercise of power is the only way some people know to compensate for the character they themselves lack. If a man is better than they, they wish to destroy him. They can't tolerate a man whose very existence condemns them. They will project their own pathologies onto him in an attempt to prove that he's not really as virtuous as he seems. Thus they accuse Bush of lying to the world about Iraq when, in fact, the only evidence that people have lied points back to them. This is a sickness, a depravity which seems to reside deep in the human heart, and it's the root of so many of our social and political ills.

One of the silver linings of vacationing in a Central American country during the rainy season is that there is ample time to read. Having spent the last ten days in Costa Rica where it rained fairly often I had the good fortune to have along a copy of Paul Berman's best-seller Terror and Liberalism which does an outstanding job of helping the reader understand the nature of the battle with the forces of radical Islamism in which we are currently engaged. Berman's book is interesting, easy to read, and all the more compelling because Berman himself is a man of the left who is dismayed by the reaction of most leftists, both here and in Europe, to the war against terror. He notes in his preface the irony of millions of leftists marching in the largest mass demonstrations in history two years ago in an effort to prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrannies of the modern age. Even more incongruous, he adds, is that deterring the U.S. from deposing Saddam Hussein was seen as "the correct stance for every true friend of the downtrodden."

Berman himself is, in his words, one of maybe fifteen or twenty people in the country who are both pro-war and left-wing, and much of his book is given to explaining how the bulk of the ideological left, which began as a champion of the poor and oppressed, came to so passionately defend the most brutal of tyrannies, not just in Iraq, but in earlier times, also in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany.

Berman's argument is complex and I will scarcely be able to do it justice, but it distills to this: There is in the human heart an impulse to rebel, to rebel against God, to rebel against authority. That impulse led millions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into mass movements of rebellion, such as communism and fascism, which evolved into totalitarian tyrannies and ultimately into cults of death. He argues that this sociopathological pattern is universal and expresses itself in cultures other than the European. What we're seeing in the Muslim world is an Islamic version of the European model.

Berman traces the evolution of the Baathi and the radical Islamists, two separate but parallel expressions of the totalitarian impulse, to the writings of Muslim scholars like Sayyed Qutb in the 1950s. He shows how both of these versions of Muslim totalitarianism have followed the logic of Qutb's thinking to become mindless, irrational mass movements drenched in blood and terror, and implacably hostile to the liberal values of the West. Following the trajectory of the earlier European movements, contemporary Islam, or at least a major portion of it, has become obsessed with killing and death.

In a chapter titled Wishful Thinking Berman explains why liberalism has been so blind to the threat these murderous totalitarianisms have posed in both the past and the present. He suggests several reasons. One is that liberals simply cannot believe that millions of people could possibly choose such an irrational path. Perhaps, they convinced themselves in the 1930s, the media was lying about Hitler, or the Bolsheviks. Perhaps today the media is being duped by corporate interests, and the jihadis are really not the threat that they are being made out to be. Perhaps if we could talk with them, understand their grievances, aid them in overcoming their suffering instead of threatening them, they would gladly lay down their arms. Surely, these people don't really despise the values we cherish: individual freedom, equality under the law, tolerance, separation of church and state. Surely they are not so unreasonable as to wish to kill us just for the pleasure of killing us. And so on.

In other words, although Berman doesn't put it quite this way, the left is convinced of the truth of the secularist assumption that man does indeed live by bread alone and that if only material conditions were optimal people would behave rationally. Put another way, the left has for at least eighty years been in denial about the low appeal for most of the world's peoples of the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and rationality. They have been in denial about the true nature of the human heart and the power of the non-rational compulsions, convictions, and obsessions which drive men all over the globe to commit genocide. Liberals, having long ago abandoned religion, cannot bring themselves to believe that evil actually exists, except perhaps in the Republican party, and cannot understand the hold that religious beliefs and motivations have on millions of Muslims.

What is worse, in my view, is that liberals tend to see the real enemy as anyone who possesses a realistic understanding of the nature of those who wish to do us harm and who are willing to fight to prevent it. This behavior horrifies the left because they are like the fellow in school who lives in fear of the tougher kids and who resents, even hates, any of his peers whom he thinks might provoke the bullies to start throwing their weight around. Like herd animals resigned to having the wolves now and then take a few of their number from the margins of the flock, they hope that by making themselves inconspicuous the predators will leave them alone.

If that doesn't work perhaps the wolves can be appeased somehow. Maybe if we disarmed and showed them we mean them no harm their hatred for us would be mollified. The left, in its naiveté, is completely oblivious to the utter contempt this response engenders in the mind of the wolf. The wolf simply sees all of it for what it is, an acknowledgement of weakness and a confirmation of the rightness of their cause and their strategy.

Bush and Blair have refused to go along with this politics of fear, instead they have swatted the Islamist hornets' nest with a stick, and the left at home and abroad loathes them for it. "Look what you've done!" they protest, "Now the wolves will really hate us!" In a strange, neurotic twist of an old aphorism, the left declares the enemy of my enemy to be my enemy. Thus it despises anyone who actively opposes the Islamist cult of death. It despises anyone who would seek to liberate millions of people from savage oppression if by doing so we risk offending those whose sole ambition in this life is to destroy America.

The Jews, the Americans, and anyone else they think the Islamists hate, the left also hates in the hope of ingratiating themselves with those who are eager to slaughter them. The left, Berman writes, has undergone a strange transformation. "They had begun [In the 19th century] as defenders of liberal values and human rights and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder." They started as liberal democrats and themselves became allies and de facto sympathizers with fascists.

Berman gives many examples of this phenomenon, but one in particular stands out. He describes an episode at the 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference in New York where a substantial crowd listened to an Egyptian novelist defend a female Palestinian suicide bomber who had recently committed mass murder by blowing herself up in a crowd. When the novelist was finished praising the young woman the audience burst into applause. Applause for such a horrible crime is a symptom of a deep-seated sickness of the soul, but as Berman, citing Camus, points out, the left has always had a strange fascination with, and attraction for, violence, at least as long as it is not directed at them.

Berman's book is a powerful indictment of the modern left's hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy as well as a lucid presentation of the historical evolution of radical Islam. I urge anyone who is interested in trying to gain a better grasp of either of these to read the book in its entirety. Every page is enlightening, although his gratuitous plinking at George Bush at the end of the book is an unfortunate and transparent attempt to reaffirm his leftist bona fides. Nevertheless, both conservatives and liberals will profit from reading this work. You can obtain a copy of Terror and Liberalism by contacting our good friends at Hearts and Minds Bookstore here.

Anyone who would like an update on the progress the new Iraq is making on its road to viable nationhood should check out the very comprehensive research done by Chrenkoff, an Australian blogger who has been posting updates on the good news from Iraq every two weeks for several months now. Chrenkoff's labors, he tells us, are motivated mostly by frustration with a press that seems to find only bad news to be newsworthy. His reporting is yet another example of the kind of analysis that the mainstream press should be providing but chooses not to, evidently preferring to continue its slide into irrelevancy.

Annie Jacobsen has an update on her report Viewpoint recommended to its readers two days ago. Apparently the national media are on to the story, but nothing has come out yet.

For those who might have missed it, Jacobsen was on a NorthWest Airlines flight that was also occupied by fourteen Syrian men whose behavior onboard raised very deep concerns and considerable fear. Jacobsen's description is riveting and if you haven't read it, you should. You can find it here.

Some commentators have dismissed Jacobsen's experience as nothing to worry about, but, as Jacobsen reports in the current update, a number of airline officials and pilots say that there is a strong likelihood that the Syrian passengers were making a terrorist practice run.

Read both columns for yourself and let us know what you think.

Yesterday Viewpoint carried a piece based on a Fox News story supporting the veracity of president Bush's claims that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Niger for use in nuclear weapons production and suggesting that Joe Wilson, who had been vociferously accusing Bush of lying about this, had himself been lying.

Mark Steyn has a fine piece on Wilson's prevarications in the Chicago Sun Times, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review refutes a couple of Wilson's lame attempts to defend himself in the Washington Post.

The important question is how Kerry will respond to this development. Kerry's campaign sponsers Wilson's web site and Wilson has been campaigning with Kerry, calling Bush a liar at Kerry campaign events. Doesn't Kerry owe Bush an apology?

Steyn writes that this isn't going to happen. Wilson was useful in discrediting Bush, whether his allegations were truthful or not, and now that his usefulness has expired he will be quietly allowed to fade into the oblivion of media amnesia.

NewsMax.Com has a couple of sobering reports today. The first claims that it is a widely shared opinion in Washington that an Israeli airstrike/ special operations effort is in the works for Iran's nuclear facilities. The only question seems to be whether it will be timed to take place before or after the November election. The article offers some speculation as to how Iran might retaliate should such an attack occur.

The second piece is even more disturbing. Apparently there is some evidence that al Qaida has obtained as many as ten suitcase-type nuclear weapons each powerful enough to level half of Manhatten. There is concern that at least some of these may have been smuggled into the U.S. with the intention of detonating them in either Boston or New York during the political conventions soon to be held in those cities.

Let us pray to God that our Homeland Security Department is better than its critics have been telling us.

Nikita Demosthenes has an interesting observation on the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush:

We might add that the 50 million people liberated so far is a number that may well increase in the years ahead as other Middle Eastern tyrannies, Iran, for example, begin to realize that they are on the wrong side of history and begin to move toward granting their people more freedom. Or, perhaps more likely, the people begin seizing freedom for themselves.

It should also be noted that Bush is achieving this marvellous historical accomplishment at tremendous political risk to himself. There were no guarantees that the military operation in Iraq would be a success, and the outcome of that undertaking is still uncertain. Bush didn't do this because it was politically popular or expedient. He did it because he believed it was right, and if doing what was right costs him reelection then he is prepared to suffer that consequence.

This is one of the things about him that I personally find so admirable, and it certainly distinguishes him from the current challenger and any number of other focus group politicians for whom the phrase doing what's right is synonomous with doing what'll get me elected.

According to a story at FoxNews.com it's beginning to look like George Bush told us the truth after all about Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger and that Joe Wilson, winner of The Nation's truth-telling award, lied. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Apologies are expected to start pouring in at any moment from all those who have been insisting for the past year that Bush lied to us about Iraq's attempts to obtain nuclear fuel.

Back from ten days in glorious Costa Rica! Many thanks to Bill (WSC) for his provocative pieces on the gold standard and economic policy in general in my absence.

I didn't look at a newspaper the entire time I was gone so I suppose I have some catching up to do on what's going on in the world. For example, this astonishing story may have been featured prominently in the news. If so, please forgive me for calling it to your attention here. In case it wasn't, however, don't miss this article. If you're a flier, or even if you're not, it'll give you a knot deep in your stomach. One wonders how the FAA can justify passenger screening procedures that elevate an incredibly stupid adherence to political correctness above the safety of those who travel by air.

Unless the Bush administration shakes itself free of the ridiculous pretense that ethnic profiling is somehow sinful and wakes up to the fact, obvious to all but the most rationally impaired bureaucrats in the upper echelons of the Department of Transportation, that the threat to the lives of our loved ones and ourselves is primarily a threat posed by swarthy Islamic Middle Eastern men, and unless it determines that people fitting this description should come under extra scrutiny from airport security, there is almost certainly another horrific episode aboard an American airliner in our future. Surely the Islamists haven't given up trying.

If this story hasn't broken yet I'd like to know why. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit for the tip.

www.mises.org/econsense/ch76.asp

The $44 Trillion Abyss

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.html

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/opec_iraq_euro.htm

Taylor On US Dollar & Gold

That we may be of service to Senator Kerry in his ongoing search for a suitable vice-presidential candidate Viewpoint puts forward the name of...Al Gore. Gore has experience, name recognition, he was a journalist in Vietnam which gives him the cache of being familiar with war without the liabilities associated with actually having participated in it, and he would bring a little vivacity to offset Kerry's somnolence. He could also be counted on to be a raging bull as a campaigner given the chance to avenge his loss to Bush in the 2000 election. The fact that Republicans could be expected to capitalize on the fact that Gore sometimes tends to act as if he's lost his mind is a downside, but nobody's perfect. Sounds like an over-all good choice to us.

The 18th century French writer Voltaire is famous, inter alia, for having proclaimed what is perhaps the most well-known endorsement of free speech ever uttered: "I may not agree with what you say," he wrote, "but I will fight to the death for your right to say it." Sadly, this noble sentiment has not managed to penetrate the land of unbounded tolerance for all things morally and socially exotic but where speech is tolerated, apparently, only to the extent one says the approved things. No, we're not talking about New York or Los Angeles (although the day may not be far off when we will be). We're talking about Sweden, believe it or not:

This is what freedom of speech looks like in Sweden. Thank God for the first amendment.

I don't want to make too much of this and maybe I'm misinterpreting him, so you tell me, is William Rivers Pitt over at the anti-Bush site TruthOut actually hoping for an armed insurrection to depose the Bush administration? If not, what else does his poem mean? If so, is the entire left now howling at the moon or are there still a few sane souls to be found on that side of the ideological divide?

Here's a piece on the different approaches to religion taken by President Bush and Senator Kerry. It gives a little insight into Bush, somewhat less into Kerry, except there is this interesting anecdote about the senator:

This is odd. After assuring us that, unlike Bush, he will base his decisions on scientific facts he talks about his faith in the ethical judgment of scientists, which leads one to wonder whether he is consulting the scientists for facts or for moral advice. It appears it's both, but then what's the point of his implicit criticism of Bush?

Bush's reservations about stem cell research have nothing to do with the scientific facts of the matter, of course, and everything to do with the morality of producing human embryos only to have them killed by extracting their stem cells. Why listening to scientists rather than theologians on a matter of morality is a particularly wise course of action is unclear. No doubt that if President Bush had a question about what stem cell research can do, he would consult scientists, but the important questions are about what we ought to do, and in that arena scientists qua scientists must be silent.

In what has to be one of the most vacuous comments of the campaign Senator Kerry says he has faith that scientists will follow a moral compass. Well, I suppose they will, although history gives us reason to wonder which way their needle points. Scientists have not infrequently been guided by the maxim, "If we can do it then we should do it," so one wonders what it is, exactly, that the senator bases his faith in the ethical judgment of his scientists upon.

Scientists, at least in Senator Kerry's view, deal only with facts. By their own admission, in addressing moral questions, they would be mere laymen encroaching upon the domain of theologians and ethicists. These, however, are the very people president Bush has properly drawn upon for guidance in the matter of whether the Federal government should fund stem cell research.

Kerry's beliefs, we are given to understand, lead him to consult scientists on a matter of ethics, whereas Bush's lead him to consult theologians and ethicists. And Kerry criticizes Bush?

For a much deeper look at how Bush's Christian faith shapes him as a man and as a president see Terry Eastland's piece in the March 1st, 2004 Weekly Standard titled Bush's Gospel.

Christianity Today reports that Sojourners' David Batstone is calling for the Catholic bishops to excommunicate any Roman Catholic who supports the Iraqi war. In a letter to the Catholic bishops Batstone writes:

More evidence that philosophers are no smarter than anybody else:

"The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decison, and every action responsiblity."

Martin Heidegger, from an appeal by Heidegger to the students of Freiburg University

Yesterday (7/2) I posted an e-mail from a friend who thought it inappropriate to make light of Senator Clinton for her recent promise to raise taxes "for the common good." My reply is in the Feedback forum under Hillary and Taxes.

I listen to Sean Hannity from time to time, but although I agree with much of what he says, I don't appreciate the way he handles dissenting calls.

Even so, I heard him say something yesterday that I thought was pretty clever. He had a Kerry supporter on, and he asked the fellow if he could ever imagine voting for any of the seven soldiers accused in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal should one of them someday run for president. The gentleman replied that he could not, implying that anyone who would do such awful things was disqualified from holding high office. Whereupon Hannity asked him why, then, he was going to vote for John Kerry who confessed to doing far worse in Vietnam than what these soldiers were accused of doing in Iraq. The man had no answer.

That's an interesting question, I think.

A friend takes me to task for passing along the Scrappleface parody of Senator Clinton's comments about confiscating wealth for the common good:

Michael Moore has created quite a controversy with his new film Fahrenheit 9/11. FrontPageMag.com has two reviews, one by former New York mayor Ed Koch and one by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. Both reviews take the film to task for being wilfully dishonest.

Also at FrontPage is a must read piece by Lee Kaplan documenting how he underwent training by the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to aid Palestinians in their intifada against Israel. One thing that becomes obvious to the reader is how different, how much more humane, the Israeli soldiers and police are from any other such force in the Middle East and how the left exploits this as a weakness. Another thing that leaps off the page is how incredibly dishonest and deceitful the left is in working to prevent the Israelis from defending their women and children from suicide bombers and other terrorist attacks. Kaplan writes about some ISM tactics:

The ISM are accomplices to murder, but for leftists the end of facilitating the ultimate victory of the Palestinian radicals, which entails destroying the state of Israel, justifies any means, even aiding the deliberate, willful murders of innocent women and children. Consider this:

In other words, Israel must cease to exist. Please read the whole article. It's an eye-opener. Totalitarian communism is dead, but the people who passionately defended and promoted it throughout the twentieth century haven't gone away. They've simply mutated into another virulent form adapted to fight on the turf of the twenty-first century Middle East.

Power Line directs us to a humorous parody of Senator Clinton's claim that the Democrats are going to take money from those who have it on behalf of the common good. At Scrapple Face we learn this:

(2004-07-01) -- In the same week that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, told a San Francisco audience that future President John Forbes Kerry will take money away from wealthy Americans "on behalf of the common good", the former First Lady's publisher announced it would not pay the $5.3 million deferred advance it owes for her book Living History.

A high profile African-American is saying what a lot of people, black and white, have thought for a long time, but have been prevented from saying by an intimidating politically-correct culture. The unfortunate thing is that a white person could still not say the things Bill Cosby is saying without being branded a racist bigot, and most blacks can't say it without being labelled an Uncle Tom or a sellout. Maybe that's changing. Let's hope so.

I think Bacon got the countries mixed up, although after the last election in Spain, where the voters succumbed to terrorist pressure, maybe the wisdom of both is in question.

The piece Doing Good with Other Peoples' Money (June 29) elicited a couple of replies including the following from my brother Bill. See the Feedback section for another. Bill writes:

It appears that the discussion of taxes misses a most important point that, once recognized, may lead anyone who is interested to a different perspective on the subject. There are taxes and then there are income taxes.

According to the Constitution of the United States: "Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." But the founding fathers who crafted the Constitution had no idea that the above section would lead to an income tax. And it wasn't until the 16th amendment that income tax was instituted, almost 140 years later.

The XVI amendment states that: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." It was ratified in 1913, the same year that the Federal Reserve was established. Prior to this time, there was no Federal Income Tax. There's a connection here but that's probably best left for another post.

It's also interesting to note that under the Federal Reserve, the dollar has lost approximately 98% of it purchasing power since 1913. This is the hidden tax known more commonly as inflation, the true rape of the American people and that fact isn't open to interpretation. Consider the following from economist John Maynard Keynes:

So when talking about taxes, it really doesn't matter if you are a Republican or Democrat. Both parties are analogous to vehicles on a superhighway..the Republicans are in the right lane, knowing that they will eventually get to the destination..absolute socialism. The Democrats are in more of a hurry and are in the left passing lane determined to reach their destination as soon as possible. The income tax is the way they will accomplish their goal because it enables the politician to reach into your pocket, take your wealth, and redistribute it to those they want to be beholden to them, and Hillary (the Socialist's Socialist) has no problem telling you so.

If you were to look at a demographic map of the US showing the density of the population that voted in the 2000 election you would see that it shows a concentration of Gore voters around urban areas while the George Bush constituency was more rural. Why is that? Because many of the people living in urban areas live there precisely to take advantage of the largesse Alexander Tyler speaks of in the following quote:

The loop-hole in the Constitution that makes this possible is the phrase "The Congress shall have power to .. provide for the general welfare of the United States" in Section 8 of the Constitution. Surely the founding fathers never expected it would be exploited as it is today.

When this country was founded, it was established as a republic, and as such, the individual was considered a sovereign entity, hence the Bill of Rights. The individual states also shared that status but over the years, the Federal Government has gradually morphed the U.S. into a democracy which is what Mr. Tyler laments in his quote above. A democracy pays no consideration to sovereignty of the individual or the state and as a democracy, the Federal Government has usurped the freedom and legitimacy of both the individual and the state. A democracy is about majority rule. A democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what they're going to have for dinner.

For more on this topic, see here.

Evangelical Outpost brings word that Arts and Faith has come out with a list of the 100 most spiritually significant movies. As with any such list one wonders why some selections are on it and some aren't. I haven't seen all of what's on Arts and Faith's list, but much of the films I have seen I apparently failed to recognize as spiritually significant.

I don't know why, for example, Winter Light, Romero and Leap of Faith are not on the list, and Dogma, Fight Club, and American Beauty are. I'm not saying these movies weren't well done (Well, Dogma was pretty awful) only that I'm not sure what their spiritual significance was (Although, as I think about it, American Beauty did do a pretty good job, inadvertently, I suspect, of showing the absolute banality and sterility of the lives of the main characters, all of whom were complete secularists in whose lives religious belief played no role whatsoever, so maybe I shouldn't criticize that movie's selection to the list). Anyway, de gustibus non est disputandum (there's no disputing matters of taste).

Go to Evangelical Outpost and see how Joe Carter rated some of the films. I'd be interested to know what Viewpoint readers think should be added or deleted.

Here's an interesting item from the Washington Times. It seems that Senator Kerry has actually been charged with heresy by a Roman Catholic lawyer in the Boston Archdiocese. The lawyer, Marc Balestrieri, argues that Kerry's pro-choice stance on abortion amounts to heresy in the Catholic Church and since the bishops apparently refuse to do anything about it, he will.

If the Boston archdiocese declines to act on the charge, Mr. Balastrieri is entitled to appeal to Rome. This has no doubt given Church officials a case of heartburn, and could be a ticking time bomb during the election run up. The question is who will be most likely to look bad, Sen. Kerry or the Catholic Church?

Ali at Iraq The Model writes movingly of his feelings about the handover. He describes a scene where he and a number of his medical colleagues are having a small celebration:

Beginning to have faith in America! Now if only some of our politicians, journalists, and celebrities could do the same.