From The Washington Post:
No More Special Counsels
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby should be the final proof that the system of "special prosecutors" is bankrupt and ought to be abandoned.
Fitzgerald, a highly respected federal prosecutor from Chicago, was given the task of investigating whether Bush administration officials had violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "leaking" the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame.
It is clear that, at least by sometime in January 2004 -- and probably much earlier -- Fitzgerald knew this law had not been violated. Plame was not a "covert" agent but a bureaucrat working at CIA headquarters. Instead of closing shop, however, Fitzgerald sought an expansion of his mandate and has now charged offenses that grew entirely out of the investigation itself. In other words, there was no crime when the investigation started, only, allegedly, after it finished. Unfortunately, for special counsels, as under the code of the samurai, once the sword is drawn it must taste blood.
The Plame affair began with the implication by Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that Vice President Cheney had sent him on a mission to Niger in 2002 to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy nuclear weapons material. Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons-grade uranium ore or "yellowcake" in Africa became an element of President Bush's justification for war, and it was included in his 2003 State of the Union address. British intelligence also believed that this attempt had been made, and the CIA's review of the matter -- including Wilson's trip -- emphatically did not suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, in July 2003 Wilson published a New York Times op-ed piece designed to undercut the administration's claims regarding Iraq's nuclear ambitions. The piece noted that Cheney's office had "asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer," and Wilson criticized the administration for proceeding to war despite his conclusions.
In fact, Wilson was not selected by Cheney's office. His wife, a CIA analyst working at the agency's Northern Virginia headquarters, was involved in getting him the assignment. Apparently in an effort to set the record straight, and to put the whole story before the American people, administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak about Plame's role in selecting her husband for the Niger mission. Administration critics immediately alleged that the name of a "covert" CIA agent had been revealed -- a federal crime. Instead of permitting this allegation to be investigated in the normal course of events by federal prosecutors in Washington, the Justice Department tapped Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago, to serve as a "special counsel" to investigate the officials who might have been involved. Ironically, the pressure to appoint a special counsel came only after the information about the Justice Department internal investigation was leaked to the media.
The age of special prosecutors, of course, began with Watergate. Since that time, a series of "independent counsels" and "special counsels" has left a trail of ruined lives but very few well-founded convictions for serious federal crimes. Republicans were thoroughly disillusioned with the system by the close of Ronald Reagan's second term, and many Democrats came to agree by the time President Bill Clinton left office. The independent counsel statute was not renewed and is no longer in effect. But the attorney general may still appoint special counsels as an administrative act, and this is how Fitzgerald took office. He should be the last.
The reasons were well and truly articulated by Justice Robert Jackson, then serving as Franklin Roosevelt's attorney general. Speaking of the prosecutor's power, Jackson noted the great danger that a prosecutor would choose whom to prosecute:
"Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone."
By being assigned to investigate one individual, or a small group, the prosecutor is deprived of normal constraints such as resource limitations and the perspective of having to choose from a range of cases to pursue. Another vital missing ingredient is supervision. Normally federal prosecutors have political superiors who review their decisions. This is supposed to be the case even with special counsels. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear -- but that may have involved some buck-passing by Justice Department officials -- Fitzgerald was specifically excused from even this minimal check on his power and as a consequence was accountable only to himself.
Enough should be enough. The courts will now handle Fitzgerald's allegations against Libby. But in the future, the investigation of high-level misconduct should not be removed from the normal processes of the Justice Department. The U.S. attorneys, and the department's Criminal Division, are fully capable of investigating and prosecuting alleged wrongdoing by important government officials, and can do it with proper perspective. Almost all federal prosecutors are, in fact, career lawyers quite capable of balking if their political supervisors abuse their authority. They should be left alone to do their jobs.
The writers are Washington lawyers who served in the Justice Department during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Friday, October 28, 2005
Ed vs. Joe vs. CBS
"Good Night, and Good Luck" and the perils of Hollywood history.
by Martha Bayles
10/31/2005
LET ME START ON A positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-54 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck has many fine qualities. If you like rich black-and-white cinematography; precision-tooled acting (especially David Strathairn as Murrow); artful skeins of cigarette smoke; meticulous re-creations of early-1950s offices, TV studios, and hotel bars; and jazz standards sung by the incomparable Dianne Reeves, then you will relish every minute of this film, which was cowritten and directed by George Clooney (who also plays CBS news producer Fred Friendly).
Or almost every minute. Curiously, the critics have ignored this movie's most glaring artistic flaw: a subplot about Joe and Shirley Wershba, two Murrow associates who kept their happy marriage a secret because of CBS's anti-nepotism rule. This is possibly the dullest subplot of modern times, made even duller by the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, a couple who generate about as much spark as a Kent cigarette stubbed out 50 years ago.
Why include this deadwood? My first impulse, naturally, was to blame the vast left-wing Hollywood conspiracy. By wasting valuable screen time on the Wershbas, Clooney and his boys avoided dealing with other, less boring, subplots, such as the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Maoist revolution in China, the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, the successful testing of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union, and the invasion of South Korea by the Communist North. But then a quick web surf revealed that the Wershbas (now retired and living on Long Island, Joe after a 20-year career at 60 Minutes) were consultants to the film. So, perhaps, in exchange for sharing their valuable memories, they were granted the pleasure of seeing their youthful selves depicted onscreen. At the risk of coming off as a heartless movie critic, I must note that this pleasure is not likely to be shared by the rest of us.
But enough artistic quibbles. The reader is doubtless slavering for political red meat, especially since Clooney recently underwent the standard Midlife Mulholland Mutation from skylark star to activist asteroid. "He's really interested in politics and social justice," says friend and cowriter Grant Heslov. Last summer, Clooney attended the G-8 summit in Edinburgh, where he and other celebrities enlightened world leaders about poverty. To his credit, Clooney's modest admission that the summit "taught me a lot of things" sets him apart from show-biz know-it-alls like Bono and Alec Baldwin.
Please. Of all the political districts burned over by righteous Hollywood, anticommunism is the most scorched. Again, it is to Clooney's credit that he did not head straight for ground zero: the 1947-48 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that resulted in the despised blacklist and the jailing of the Hollywood Ten--also known as the Unfriendly Ten (as in "unfriendly witnesses"). I believe it was Billy Wilder who remarked about these individuals: "Two were talented, the rest were just unfriendly."
No, Clooney went for the slightly less burned-over district of TV news in its early fluid state, before it hardened into the monstrous shape we know and love today. Not surprisingly, the red meat here is anti-anticommunism--or, if you prefer, red-baiter-baiting, performed at the highest level of photogenic integrity. The film neither stresses nor denies the fact that Murrow came late to this cause. By the time his program, See It Now, jumped on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, it was already loaded with radio commentators, print journalists, and editorialists, congressmen and senators from both parties, military brass, and the Eisenhower White House.
But no matter. If this movie achieves anything beyond flogging the well-pulped carcass of McCarthy, that achievement will be its portrayal of how unfree TV was during its so-called Golden Age. One set of pressures was technological. Back in 1954, there was no such thing as videotape, so the closest See It Now got to actually seeing it now was sending a film crew into the field, shooting a few thousand feet, shipping the film back to New York, and hoping it could be developed and edited in time for the live broadcast. (All TV broadcasts were live at the time.) This is what Murrow and Friendly did for their first indirect swipe at McCarthy: send a film crew to interview Milo Radulovich, a lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve who had been forced to resign on the grounds that his father and sister were Communist sympathizers. Radulovich came off well in the interview and was soon reinstated, an outcome depicted in the movie as a clear victory--although, as Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald wrote recently, "Would we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belonged to al Qaeda?" The next attack was more direct, and less costly. Just as Frank Capra had made brilliant anti-Nazi propaganda by recycling clips from Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, so did Murrow and Friendly make brilliant anti-McCarthy propaganda by recycling clips of McCarthy's TV appearances dating back to 1950. As Andrew Ferguson has pointed out in these pages, the result was "a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film." These same clips are blended into the movie so seamlessly, test audiences asked who was the actor playing McCarthy.
(That's easy: James Gandolfini wearing extra eyebrow pencil.)
The second set of pressures on TV news was commercial. Next to Strathairn's, the film's finest performance is Frank Langella's as CBS president and chairman William S. Paley, a man who admired Murrow but also had to reckon with such harsh realities as the priorities of advertisers and the preferences of the viewing public. The scenes between the narrowly focused Murrow and the wider-ranging Paley are beautifully done, and convey a real lesson: To speak truth to power, you must have power yourself. And it doesn't hurt if your suit is also bespoke.
The third group of pressures were, for lack of a better word, professional. After the burp-and-grunt portrait of McCarthy aired, the critic Gilbert Seldes, who was a friend of Murrow's and no friend of McCarthy's, wrote a scathing piece in which he raised important questions about the character-assassinating powers of TV and the limitations of the "equal time" principle. According to historian Michael Kammen, "Liberals were generally puzzled by Seldes's concerns about precedent and high principles. The damaging substance of Murrow's achievement seemed easily to outweigh what might happen, if, at some future time, the white hats became black hats and the process were reversed."
Needless to say, these questions are still with us. And so are the three troublesome tendencies identified by Murrow in a 1958 speech before the Radio-Television News Directors Association in Chicago: "Decadence, escapism, and insulation." Since Clooney re-created this speech as bookends to Good Night, and Good Luck, it seems only appropriate to evaluate the movie in these terms. It isn't really decadent, unless you count the smoking. As Jack Shafer pointed out in Slate, Strathairn is the best screen smoker since . . . well, I'd say since Jeanne Moreau picked the tobacco off her tongue in Jules and Jim. Nor is it escapist like Julia, Fred Zinnemann's 1977 film about two women of the left, one of whom worships the other. Since Julia was based on the memoirs of Lillian Hellman, some critics wondered why it starred two actresses, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. The answer, of course, was that Hellman herself was two women, one of whom worshiped the other.
But Good Night, and Good Luck is insular. The only character whose mind ranges wider than a smoke ring is Paley, and his worries are mostly about the bottom line. And the decision not to have an actor play McCarthy--to reduce the dreaded witchhunter to a flickering shadow in a cathode ray tube--places the political reality of the time at an even greater remove than usual in such films. In the end, the movie is so swaddled in layers of artistic self-referentiality that it totally shuts out the concerns that made McCarthy's witch hunt possible. Maybe the Communists of the 1950s were not under every bed or in every State Department closet. But neither were they trick-or-treaters in black pointy hats. Some witches are real.
Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
"Good Night, and Good Luck" and the perils of Hollywood history.
by Martha Bayles
10/31/2005
LET ME START ON A positive note. For a film made in the present climate that dramatizes the 1953-54 clash between Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast personality who pioneered the TV news magazine, and Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator who gave anti-communism a bad name, Good Night, and Good Luck has many fine qualities. If you like rich black-and-white cinematography; precision-tooled acting (especially David Strathairn as Murrow); artful skeins of cigarette smoke; meticulous re-creations of early-1950s offices, TV studios, and hotel bars; and jazz standards sung by the incomparable Dianne Reeves, then you will relish every minute of this film, which was cowritten and directed by George Clooney (who also plays CBS news producer Fred Friendly).
Or almost every minute. Curiously, the critics have ignored this movie's most glaring artistic flaw: a subplot about Joe and Shirley Wershba, two Murrow associates who kept their happy marriage a secret because of CBS's anti-nepotism rule. This is possibly the dullest subplot of modern times, made even duller by the casting of Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, a couple who generate about as much spark as a Kent cigarette stubbed out 50 years ago.
Why include this deadwood? My first impulse, naturally, was to blame the vast left-wing Hollywood conspiracy. By wasting valuable screen time on the Wershbas, Clooney and his boys avoided dealing with other, less boring, subplots, such as the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Maoist revolution in China, the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, the successful testing of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union, and the invasion of South Korea by the Communist North. But then a quick web surf revealed that the Wershbas (now retired and living on Long Island, Joe after a 20-year career at 60 Minutes) were consultants to the film. So, perhaps, in exchange for sharing their valuable memories, they were granted the pleasure of seeing their youthful selves depicted onscreen. At the risk of coming off as a heartless movie critic, I must note that this pleasure is not likely to be shared by the rest of us.
But enough artistic quibbles. The reader is doubtless slavering for political red meat, especially since Clooney recently underwent the standard Midlife Mulholland Mutation from skylark star to activist asteroid. "He's really interested in politics and social justice," says friend and cowriter Grant Heslov. Last summer, Clooney attended the G-8 summit in Edinburgh, where he and other celebrities enlightened world leaders about poverty. To his credit, Clooney's modest admission that the summit "taught me a lot of things" sets him apart from show-biz know-it-alls like Bono and Alec Baldwin.
Please. Of all the political districts burned over by righteous Hollywood, anticommunism is the most scorched. Again, it is to Clooney's credit that he did not head straight for ground zero: the 1947-48 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that resulted in the despised blacklist and the jailing of the Hollywood Ten--also known as the Unfriendly Ten (as in "unfriendly witnesses"). I believe it was Billy Wilder who remarked about these individuals: "Two were talented, the rest were just unfriendly."
No, Clooney went for the slightly less burned-over district of TV news in its early fluid state, before it hardened into the monstrous shape we know and love today. Not surprisingly, the red meat here is anti-anticommunism--or, if you prefer, red-baiter-baiting, performed at the highest level of photogenic integrity. The film neither stresses nor denies the fact that Murrow came late to this cause. By the time his program, See It Now, jumped on the anti-McCarthy bandwagon, it was already loaded with radio commentators, print journalists, and editorialists, congressmen and senators from both parties, military brass, and the Eisenhower White House.
But no matter. If this movie achieves anything beyond flogging the well-pulped carcass of McCarthy, that achievement will be its portrayal of how unfree TV was during its so-called Golden Age. One set of pressures was technological. Back in 1954, there was no such thing as videotape, so the closest See It Now got to actually seeing it now was sending a film crew into the field, shooting a few thousand feet, shipping the film back to New York, and hoping it could be developed and edited in time for the live broadcast. (All TV broadcasts were live at the time.) This is what Murrow and Friendly did for their first indirect swipe at McCarthy: send a film crew to interview Milo Radulovich, a lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve who had been forced to resign on the grounds that his father and sister were Communist sympathizers. Radulovich came off well in the interview and was soon reinstated, an outcome depicted in the movie as a clear victory--although, as Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald wrote recently, "Would we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belonged to al Qaeda?" The next attack was more direct, and less costly. Just as Frank Capra had made brilliant anti-Nazi propaganda by recycling clips from Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will, so did Murrow and Friendly make brilliant anti-McCarthy propaganda by recycling clips of McCarthy's TV appearances dating back to 1950. As Andrew Ferguson has pointed out in these pages, the result was "a compendium of every burp, grunt, stutter, nose probe, brutish aside, and maniacal giggle the senator had ever allowed to be captured on film." These same clips are blended into the movie so seamlessly, test audiences asked who was the actor playing McCarthy.
(That's easy: James Gandolfini wearing extra eyebrow pencil.)
The second set of pressures on TV news was commercial. Next to Strathairn's, the film's finest performance is Frank Langella's as CBS president and chairman William S. Paley, a man who admired Murrow but also had to reckon with such harsh realities as the priorities of advertisers and the preferences of the viewing public. The scenes between the narrowly focused Murrow and the wider-ranging Paley are beautifully done, and convey a real lesson: To speak truth to power, you must have power yourself. And it doesn't hurt if your suit is also bespoke.
The third group of pressures were, for lack of a better word, professional. After the burp-and-grunt portrait of McCarthy aired, the critic Gilbert Seldes, who was a friend of Murrow's and no friend of McCarthy's, wrote a scathing piece in which he raised important questions about the character-assassinating powers of TV and the limitations of the "equal time" principle. According to historian Michael Kammen, "Liberals were generally puzzled by Seldes's concerns about precedent and high principles. The damaging substance of Murrow's achievement seemed easily to outweigh what might happen, if, at some future time, the white hats became black hats and the process were reversed."
Needless to say, these questions are still with us. And so are the three troublesome tendencies identified by Murrow in a 1958 speech before the Radio-Television News Directors Association in Chicago: "Decadence, escapism, and insulation." Since Clooney re-created this speech as bookends to Good Night, and Good Luck, it seems only appropriate to evaluate the movie in these terms. It isn't really decadent, unless you count the smoking. As Jack Shafer pointed out in Slate, Strathairn is the best screen smoker since . . . well, I'd say since Jeanne Moreau picked the tobacco off her tongue in Jules and Jim. Nor is it escapist like Julia, Fred Zinnemann's 1977 film about two women of the left, one of whom worships the other. Since Julia was based on the memoirs of Lillian Hellman, some critics wondered why it starred two actresses, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. The answer, of course, was that Hellman herself was two women, one of whom worshiped the other.
But Good Night, and Good Luck is insular. The only character whose mind ranges wider than a smoke ring is Paley, and his worries are mostly about the bottom line. And the decision not to have an actor play McCarthy--to reduce the dreaded witchhunter to a flickering shadow in a cathode ray tube--places the political reality of the time at an even greater remove than usual in such films. In the end, the movie is so swaddled in layers of artistic self-referentiality that it totally shuts out the concerns that made McCarthy's witch hunt possible. Maybe the Communists of the 1950s were not under every bed or in every State Department closet. But neither were they trick-or-treaters in black pointy hats. Some witches are real.
Martha Bayles, who teaches in the honors program at Boston College, posts a blog called Serious Popcorn at www.artsjournal.com.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
WHITE SOX SWEEP WORLD SERIES!
Chicago White Sox World Series Champions Cap - $22.99
Chicago White Sox World Series Champion Clubhouse T-Shirt - $24.99
Chicago White Sox putting a beat down on two quisling former Yankee pitchers who "wanted to play at home," and winning the World Series in the turncoats home ballpark. Priceless!
Chicago White Sox World Series Champions Cap - $22.99
Chicago White Sox World Series Champion Clubhouse T-Shirt - $24.99
Chicago White Sox putting a beat down on two quisling former Yankee pitchers who "wanted to play at home," and winning the World Series in the turncoats home ballpark. Priceless!
Could Someone Recommend a President?
By Paul Craig Roberts
Someone should tell Condi Rice that the gig is up. With the Bush administration dissolving in illegalities committed by key officials in their attempts to protect the lies that they used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the secretary of state is trying to ramp up war against Syria.
Grasping a U.N. report that uses unreliable witnesses to implicate Syria in the assassination of a former Lebanese government official, Condi Rice told the BBC on Oct. 23 that Syria’s crime cannot be “left lying on the table. This really has to be dealt with.”
This is amazing for many reasons. Here is the person in charge of U.S. diplomacy acting as if she is the secretary of war, unsheathing military force. Whoever heard of an American diplomat wanting to start a war because a former Middle Eastern government official was assassinated?
The U.N. investigator, Detlev Mehlis, has no more idea who assassinated the former official than the United States knows who is responsible for assassinating the many Iraqi officials under its protection. After more than two-and-one-half years of war in Iraq, the United States still doesn’t know exactly who the enemy is that it is fighting. Yet Mehlis blames Syria for an assassination on the strength of an informer described by the German news magazine Der Spiegel as a convicted felon and swindler.
On the basis of the word of a convicted felon and swindler, Condi Rice wants a high-level U.N. Security Council meeting to condemn Syria so the Bush administration can bring about “regime change” in Syria.
With the U.S. Department of State doing everything it can to demonize and destabilize Syria, Condi Rice’s mouthpiece, Adam Ereli, declared that Syria must end attempts to destabilize its neighbors. This is the type of propaganda we were fed about Iraq. Syria is not destabilizing any country. It is all Syria can do to maintain its own stability. The United States is the great Middle Eastern destabilizer.
Isn’t the secretary of state aware that the government of which she is a part is in dire difficulties because it went to war based on highly unreliable “intelligence” supplied by highly unreliable people?
Does the secretary of state read the CIA reports? Doesn’t she know that the United States has created extraordinary instability in Iraq? A country that formerly had no terrorists now serves as a training ground for Al-Qaida, according to the CIA.
Is this the time to repeat the Iraq blunder in Syria?
The American people should be terrified by the warmongering ideologues that President Bush has put in charge of his government. The greatest danger that the United States faces are the fools in the Bush administration.
Why is Syria being demonized? Syrian troops were part of the U.S. coalition organized by President George Herbert Walker Bush that liberated Kuwait in 1991 from Saddam Hussein. The current head of government in Syria is a mild-mannered ophthalmologist who inherited the post five years ago when his older brother was killed in a car crash.
Syria has done nothing to the United States and poses no threat to the United States. The Syrian government is concerned about Syria becoming unhinged by schisms like the Sunni-Shi’ite schism set loose in Iraq by the incompetent Bush administration.
Why does Condi Rice think the Bush administration has the right to decide who heads the Syrian government? According to news reports, the Bush administration has asked the Israeli and Italian governments to nominate a replacement for the current president of Syria.
A country incapable of choosing a better president than George W. Bush has no business choosing a president for any other country. In place of aggressive interference in the internal affairs of other countries, the United States needs to find a competent president for itself.
Maybe we should ask the Italians whom they would recommend
By Paul Craig Roberts
Someone should tell Condi Rice that the gig is up. With the Bush administration dissolving in illegalities committed by key officials in their attempts to protect the lies that they used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the secretary of state is trying to ramp up war against Syria.
Grasping a U.N. report that uses unreliable witnesses to implicate Syria in the assassination of a former Lebanese government official, Condi Rice told the BBC on Oct. 23 that Syria’s crime cannot be “left lying on the table. This really has to be dealt with.”
This is amazing for many reasons. Here is the person in charge of U.S. diplomacy acting as if she is the secretary of war, unsheathing military force. Whoever heard of an American diplomat wanting to start a war because a former Middle Eastern government official was assassinated?
The U.N. investigator, Detlev Mehlis, has no more idea who assassinated the former official than the United States knows who is responsible for assassinating the many Iraqi officials under its protection. After more than two-and-one-half years of war in Iraq, the United States still doesn’t know exactly who the enemy is that it is fighting. Yet Mehlis blames Syria for an assassination on the strength of an informer described by the German news magazine Der Spiegel as a convicted felon and swindler.
On the basis of the word of a convicted felon and swindler, Condi Rice wants a high-level U.N. Security Council meeting to condemn Syria so the Bush administration can bring about “regime change” in Syria.
With the U.S. Department of State doing everything it can to demonize and destabilize Syria, Condi Rice’s mouthpiece, Adam Ereli, declared that Syria must end attempts to destabilize its neighbors. This is the type of propaganda we were fed about Iraq. Syria is not destabilizing any country. It is all Syria can do to maintain its own stability. The United States is the great Middle Eastern destabilizer.
Isn’t the secretary of state aware that the government of which she is a part is in dire difficulties because it went to war based on highly unreliable “intelligence” supplied by highly unreliable people?
Does the secretary of state read the CIA reports? Doesn’t she know that the United States has created extraordinary instability in Iraq? A country that formerly had no terrorists now serves as a training ground for Al-Qaida, according to the CIA.
Is this the time to repeat the Iraq blunder in Syria?
The American people should be terrified by the warmongering ideologues that President Bush has put in charge of his government. The greatest danger that the United States faces are the fools in the Bush administration.
Why is Syria being demonized? Syrian troops were part of the U.S. coalition organized by President George Herbert Walker Bush that liberated Kuwait in 1991 from Saddam Hussein. The current head of government in Syria is a mild-mannered ophthalmologist who inherited the post five years ago when his older brother was killed in a car crash.
Syria has done nothing to the United States and poses no threat to the United States. The Syrian government is concerned about Syria becoming unhinged by schisms like the Sunni-Shi’ite schism set loose in Iraq by the incompetent Bush administration.
Why does Condi Rice think the Bush administration has the right to decide who heads the Syrian government? According to news reports, the Bush administration has asked the Israeli and Italian governments to nominate a replacement for the current president of Syria.
A country incapable of choosing a better president than George W. Bush has no business choosing a president for any other country. In place of aggressive interference in the internal affairs of other countries, the United States needs to find a competent president for itself.
Maybe we should ask the Italians whom they would recommend
Two Thousand Dead, And For What?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
These are not the halcyon days of George W. Bush.
With his approval rating below 40 percent, his reputation as a decisive leader ravaged by Katrina, his conservative base shattered by Harriet and his closest aide facing indictment, the president is said to be shouting at and blaming subordinates for the lost opportunities of his second term.
None of the above problems is insoluble. For if or when the Miers nomination dies, and Bush sends up a Michael Luttig or Edith Jones, his base would rally and he could lead his coalition in a decisive battle over whose judicial philosophy should guide the Supreme Court.
The real crisis the president faces, and we all face, is Iraq. If the war ends in failure, no success will redeem the Bush presidency.
By the time this column appears, the remains of the 2000th U.S. soldier to die in a war that has lasted longer than World War I for the United States will be on the way home. And it is difficult to visualize the end of this war or the victory so often predicted and promised.
Even critics now praise the successes of Bush’s father: the liberation of Kuwait, unification of Germany, the deft handling of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union. But the son’s foreign policy is on the precipice of failure. Only a third of the nation still supports him as a war leader, while more than half believe Iraq was a mistake and we should begin to bring the troops home now.
A preliminary list of winners and losers from our invasion seems to show that it is our enemies who have prospered and our friends who have suffered. As of today, the principal winner of the Iraq war is Iran.
While our invasion of Afghanistan smashed a Taliban regime hostile to Iran, our invasion of Iraq was even more beneficial. It brought down a Baathist regime that had inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on Iran in their eight-year war in the 1980s. In power in Baghdad today, in place of Saddam, is a Shia regime that looks to Iran as patron and ally.
In 2001, Iranians had demonstrated in support of the United States after 9-11, and in successive elections, a moderate presidential candidate had carried 70 percent of the vote. The Tehran mullahs were on the ropes.
But with Bush declaring Iran an “axis-of-evil” nation, which was to be denied, even if it meant preventive war, any nuclear program or weapon of mass destruction, Iranians responded as nationalists. A hard-liner won the presidency, and Tehran’s defiance is now a popular policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. threat of military strikes to effect the nuclear castration of Iran becomes less and less credible the longer the war next door goes on.
With Iraq smashed and perhaps splintering after we depart, Tehran is set to fill the power vacuum. History may yet record that the U.S. Army did all the heavy lifting in the Persian Gulf to make Iran its pre-eminent power.
A second winner of the Iraq war is Al-Qaida. While the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan dethroned the Taliban enablers of bin Laden, killed countless followers and destroyed his base camp, our invasion of Iraq compensated him for his losses. The Iraq war radicalized the Islamic world, recruited thousands of jihadists and converted Saddam’s country—inhospitable terrain for Islamists—into the world’s training ground for Islamic terrorists.
Among the other beneficiaries of America’s Iraq war are the Shia fundamentalists who stand to inherit their first Arab country. Among the losers are the Turks, who must contend with Kurdish nationalism inflamed by Kurdish successes next door, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
If the Iraqi insurgency evolves, as it appears to be doing, into a civil-religious war, the Sunni and Shia populations of those three autocracies cannot but be affected and those nations perhaps drawn in. And peoples’ wars have almost always proven unfortunate for kings and emirs.
How does the balance sheet look for the United States?
Saddam and his neo-Stalinist regime are history, the Iraqi people, especially the Shia and Kurds, are free, a threat to U.S. interests and the region is removed forever.
On the liability side, there is the high cost in dead and wounded, in alienated allies, in a radicalized Middle East, and in the creation in the Sunni Triangle of a base camp and training ground for jihadists that did not exist before the U.S. Army crossed the Kuwait border, 30 months ago.
As George Bush’s place in history is riding on the outcome of this war, he is right to be angry and alarmed. But this war is not the doing of any subordinate.
By Patrick J. Buchanan
These are not the halcyon days of George W. Bush.
With his approval rating below 40 percent, his reputation as a decisive leader ravaged by Katrina, his conservative base shattered by Harriet and his closest aide facing indictment, the president is said to be shouting at and blaming subordinates for the lost opportunities of his second term.
None of the above problems is insoluble. For if or when the Miers nomination dies, and Bush sends up a Michael Luttig or Edith Jones, his base would rally and he could lead his coalition in a decisive battle over whose judicial philosophy should guide the Supreme Court.
The real crisis the president faces, and we all face, is Iraq. If the war ends in failure, no success will redeem the Bush presidency.
By the time this column appears, the remains of the 2000th U.S. soldier to die in a war that has lasted longer than World War I for the United States will be on the way home. And it is difficult to visualize the end of this war or the victory so often predicted and promised.
Even critics now praise the successes of Bush’s father: the liberation of Kuwait, unification of Germany, the deft handling of the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union. But the son’s foreign policy is on the precipice of failure. Only a third of the nation still supports him as a war leader, while more than half believe Iraq was a mistake and we should begin to bring the troops home now.
A preliminary list of winners and losers from our invasion seems to show that it is our enemies who have prospered and our friends who have suffered. As of today, the principal winner of the Iraq war is Iran.
While our invasion of Afghanistan smashed a Taliban regime hostile to Iran, our invasion of Iraq was even more beneficial. It brought down a Baathist regime that had inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties on Iran in their eight-year war in the 1980s. In power in Baghdad today, in place of Saddam, is a Shia regime that looks to Iran as patron and ally.
In 2001, Iranians had demonstrated in support of the United States after 9-11, and in successive elections, a moderate presidential candidate had carried 70 percent of the vote. The Tehran mullahs were on the ropes.
But with Bush declaring Iran an “axis-of-evil” nation, which was to be denied, even if it meant preventive war, any nuclear program or weapon of mass destruction, Iranians responded as nationalists. A hard-liner won the presidency, and Tehran’s defiance is now a popular policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. threat of military strikes to effect the nuclear castration of Iran becomes less and less credible the longer the war next door goes on.
With Iraq smashed and perhaps splintering after we depart, Tehran is set to fill the power vacuum. History may yet record that the U.S. Army did all the heavy lifting in the Persian Gulf to make Iran its pre-eminent power.
A second winner of the Iraq war is Al-Qaida. While the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan dethroned the Taliban enablers of bin Laden, killed countless followers and destroyed his base camp, our invasion of Iraq compensated him for his losses. The Iraq war radicalized the Islamic world, recruited thousands of jihadists and converted Saddam’s country—inhospitable terrain for Islamists—into the world’s training ground for Islamic terrorists.
Among the other beneficiaries of America’s Iraq war are the Shia fundamentalists who stand to inherit their first Arab country. Among the losers are the Turks, who must contend with Kurdish nationalism inflamed by Kurdish successes next door, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
If the Iraqi insurgency evolves, as it appears to be doing, into a civil-religious war, the Sunni and Shia populations of those three autocracies cannot but be affected and those nations perhaps drawn in. And peoples’ wars have almost always proven unfortunate for kings and emirs.
How does the balance sheet look for the United States?
Saddam and his neo-Stalinist regime are history, the Iraqi people, especially the Shia and Kurds, are free, a threat to U.S. interests and the region is removed forever.
On the liability side, there is the high cost in dead and wounded, in alienated allies, in a radicalized Middle East, and in the creation in the Sunni Triangle of a base camp and training ground for jihadists that did not exist before the U.S. Army crossed the Kuwait border, 30 months ago.
As George Bush’s place in history is riding on the outcome of this war, he is right to be angry and alarmed. But this war is not the doing of any subordinate.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
From TownHall.com:
Self-denial at the White House
By Diana West
Oct 24, 2005
Big week for Uncle Sam. First, there was the referendum on the new Iraqi constitution, which, by the way, contains all provisions necessary for a Sharia-ruled state. Then, at the president's by-now annual Ramadan dinner, Bush announced, "For the first time in our nation's history, we have added a Koran to the White House Library."
Anything wrong with this undoubtedly historic picture? Freedom marches on in Iraq, and tolerance expands its reach at home, or so they say. But I would put it this way: Democracy marches on in Iraq, and the Koran expands its reach at home.
Same thing? Not at all. But no one is supposed to consider the difference. So what if Article 2 in the Iraqi constitution states, "no law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established"? If people participate in an election for anything -- including Sharia, including Hamas -- it's the Spirit of '76 all over again, or so our leaders say. Never mind that worried Iraqi Christians, concerned for religious freedom, say they're likely to ask Pope Benedict XVI to intervene. Meanwhile, according to the "Bush Happy Face Doctrine," if any religious book goes onto the White House shelf, including one that's uniquely venomous toward "infidel" non-believers, it's a Hallelujah moment.
Is it just me, or does the president's gesture of inclusion sock the rest of us in the head? Peaceful Muslims aside, the Koran is indisputably the favorite book to twist for the extremist agendas for Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the killers of Daniel Pearl, Hamas bus bombers, London Underground bombers, and anyone who has ever hidden an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) on an Iraqi road to kill or maim an American soldier -- none of which is the best recommendation for White House honors.
But maybe the president meant he would now be reading the Koran. He could start with Chapter 5, Verse 32, which he's taken to quoting as, well, chapter-and-verse evidence of Islam's aversion to bloodshed -- always skipping the fatal exception. Bush will say: Killing an innocent human is like killing all of humanity, and then leave it at that. My translation of the Koran says: "... whosoever kills a human being, except (as punishment) for murder or for spreading corruption in the land, it shall be like killing all humanity." Easy guess that among Bush's Ramadan guests were a few who consider Americans guilty of murder, Israelis innocent of nothing, and both, as non-Muslims, complicit in "spreading corruption in the land" -- and thus deserving death, dismemberment and banishment as outlined in Chapter 5, Verse 33.
But back to Bush's jarring gesture of inclusion, one unlikely to be reciprocated in Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia where Bibles are verboten. What does it mean? No known religious book besides the Koran seemingly inspires a religious vision of world political domination -- which, of course, includes America. Daniel Pipes, writing in Commentary magazine in 2001, reported on specific Muslim efforts to turn America into a Sharia-ruled caliphate. More recently, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) tells us, Ahmad Dewidar, the prominent imam of the Islamic Center in New York and a lecturer at Manhattan University, referred in an interview to mosque-talk of how the White House -- "through the domination of Islam and its ideas" -- would become the "Muslim House." Bush has begun to acknowledge such designs, as when in a recent speech he mentioned jihadists' goal of "totalitarian empire." But the president is still distorting history, both recent and ancient, by denying links between jihad war and Islamic teachings, derived in large part from the Koran.
After 9/11, Bush declared "Islam is peace." Now, he insists that "extremists" "distort the idea of jihad" into a rationale for terrorism. Maybe Bush will read his new Koran and discover that the idea of jihad is itself extreme. Better still, maybe Bush will go so far as to add another book to the White House collection: "The Legacy of Jihad" (Prometheus Books, 2005) by Andrew G. Bostom, MD. This extraordinary compendium of primary and secondary source material, much of it translated into English for the first time, elucidates the theory and practice of jihad over 1,400 years. With its chronological span across the centuries, "The Legacy of Jihad" goes a long way toward bridging the void in Western understanding of the institutional role of jihad within Islam.
The White House may have its own Koran now, but the president's reckoning with the legacy of jihad is still overdue.
Self-denial at the White House
By Diana West
Oct 24, 2005
Big week for Uncle Sam. First, there was the referendum on the new Iraqi constitution, which, by the way, contains all provisions necessary for a Sharia-ruled state. Then, at the president's by-now annual Ramadan dinner, Bush announced, "For the first time in our nation's history, we have added a Koran to the White House Library."
Anything wrong with this undoubtedly historic picture? Freedom marches on in Iraq, and tolerance expands its reach at home, or so they say. But I would put it this way: Democracy marches on in Iraq, and the Koran expands its reach at home.
Same thing? Not at all. But no one is supposed to consider the difference. So what if Article 2 in the Iraqi constitution states, "no law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established"? If people participate in an election for anything -- including Sharia, including Hamas -- it's the Spirit of '76 all over again, or so our leaders say. Never mind that worried Iraqi Christians, concerned for religious freedom, say they're likely to ask Pope Benedict XVI to intervene. Meanwhile, according to the "Bush Happy Face Doctrine," if any religious book goes onto the White House shelf, including one that's uniquely venomous toward "infidel" non-believers, it's a Hallelujah moment.
Is it just me, or does the president's gesture of inclusion sock the rest of us in the head? Peaceful Muslims aside, the Koran is indisputably the favorite book to twist for the extremist agendas for Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the killers of Daniel Pearl, Hamas bus bombers, London Underground bombers, and anyone who has ever hidden an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) on an Iraqi road to kill or maim an American soldier -- none of which is the best recommendation for White House honors.
But maybe the president meant he would now be reading the Koran. He could start with Chapter 5, Verse 32, which he's taken to quoting as, well, chapter-and-verse evidence of Islam's aversion to bloodshed -- always skipping the fatal exception. Bush will say: Killing an innocent human is like killing all of humanity, and then leave it at that. My translation of the Koran says: "... whosoever kills a human being, except (as punishment) for murder or for spreading corruption in the land, it shall be like killing all humanity." Easy guess that among Bush's Ramadan guests were a few who consider Americans guilty of murder, Israelis innocent of nothing, and both, as non-Muslims, complicit in "spreading corruption in the land" -- and thus deserving death, dismemberment and banishment as outlined in Chapter 5, Verse 33.
But back to Bush's jarring gesture of inclusion, one unlikely to be reciprocated in Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia where Bibles are verboten. What does it mean? No known religious book besides the Koran seemingly inspires a religious vision of world political domination -- which, of course, includes America. Daniel Pipes, writing in Commentary magazine in 2001, reported on specific Muslim efforts to turn America into a Sharia-ruled caliphate. More recently, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) tells us, Ahmad Dewidar, the prominent imam of the Islamic Center in New York and a lecturer at Manhattan University, referred in an interview to mosque-talk of how the White House -- "through the domination of Islam and its ideas" -- would become the "Muslim House." Bush has begun to acknowledge such designs, as when in a recent speech he mentioned jihadists' goal of "totalitarian empire." But the president is still distorting history, both recent and ancient, by denying links between jihad war and Islamic teachings, derived in large part from the Koran.
After 9/11, Bush declared "Islam is peace." Now, he insists that "extremists" "distort the idea of jihad" into a rationale for terrorism. Maybe Bush will read his new Koran and discover that the idea of jihad is itself extreme. Better still, maybe Bush will go so far as to add another book to the White House collection: "The Legacy of Jihad" (Prometheus Books, 2005) by Andrew G. Bostom, MD. This extraordinary compendium of primary and secondary source material, much of it translated into English for the first time, elucidates the theory and practice of jihad over 1,400 years. With its chronological span across the centuries, "The Legacy of Jihad" goes a long way toward bridging the void in Western understanding of the institutional role of jihad within Islam.
The White House may have its own Koran now, but the president's reckoning with the legacy of jihad is still overdue.
'SCRATCH-OFF' MIERS
by Ann Coulter
October 26, 2005
The Bush White House has turned into the Nixon White House — complete with Harriet Miers as its Rosemary Woods, with an 18-year gap in her credentials.
As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!
After five years of Nixon's ignoring conservatives — where else would they go? — when liberals came after him for Watergate, conservatives ignored Nixon. (As the details of Nixon's "dirty tricks" came out, conservative columnist Stan Evans reportedly told Pat Buchanan: "I want to apologize for all my attacks upon your administration. I would never have done that if I had known you were into all that good stuff we've been hearing about lately.")
For five years, Bush has initiated massive spending programs, obstinately refused to protect the borders and signed restrictions on political speech into law. His veto pen remains unopened and unused in its original shrink-wrapped case. Bush treats conservatives like the Democrats treat the blacks (which is to say, pretty badly).
Conservatives were unhappy, but we were confident Bush would never let us down on the two issues that mattered more than anything else: the war on terrorism and the Supreme Court.
And now, although Bush has been bold and strong against the terrorists, it is beyond question that he has betrayed conservative hopes for the Supreme Court.
The way Bush has been attacking his base lately, he better hope liberals start to love him. There aren't going to be a lot of conservatives left to defend him if someone in the White House gets indicted or something. (But at least he can always count on Fox News analysts!)
When conservatives erupted in pain and rage that the president had thrown away a Supreme Court seat on his personal lawyer — because she's a girl and Laura wanted a girl — administration flacks snippily informed right-wing activists that they didn't get a vote. Only senators vote on judicial nominees (that is, whenever Democrats allow it).
Next, the Bush White House accused conservatives of elitism and sexism for opposing the former Texas Lottery commissioner for the Supreme Court.
Then we discovered the White House actually believes everything liberals say about conservative Christians — that we are "uneducated" and "easily led." After administration officials snookered a few evangelical leaders into supporting Miers, they sat back and congratulated themselves on a job well done. But evangelicals are, at best, split down the middle on Miers. Apparently, Christians aren't so easily led. (That's what you get for believing The Washington Post!)
Now the White House is threatening Republican senators who are thinking of voting against the former lottery commissioner. To deliver this message, Bush chose Tom Rath, a Republican functionary in New Hampshire who brags on his Web page that he "actively assisted in the U.S. Senate process that confirmed David Souter as Supreme Court justice."
At least Bush found a man with impeccable credentials to promote the Miers nomination. Note to the promotions department: You can stop printing up those "Trust Me!" T-shirts. I don't think we're going to need them!
Finally, to throw us totally off balance, Bush did something weird and scary this week: He nominated Ben Bernanke for Fed chairman — A MAN WHO'S TOTALLY QUALIFIED FOR THE JOB. The White House has yet to explain how this happened.
Politicians and Fox News analysts afraid of upsetting the White House keep saying we need to wait for the hearings to see if Miers is qualified. This is like saying we need to wait for the hearings to see if Miers is a polar bear. We already know the answer! She's not a polar bear, and she's not qualified. The Kabuki theater of nomination hearings will not tell us anything new.
It's as if all Miers needs to do during the hearings is utter the magic words — say she opposes "judicial activism" — and conservatives will love her! I have news for you: Chuck Schumer claims he opposes "judicial activism," too.
In fact, the only two people who will derive any benefit from the hearings are Joe Biden, who will finally look like a constitutional scholar, and Harriet Miers, who might learn something about the Constitution from him.
Democrats are so happy at the mess Bush stepped in with the Miers nomination that they don't want to help him by opposing her. The NARAL ladies will have to take a back seat to Democrat dreams of an impotent George Bush. Yeah, maybe Miers will vote to overturn Roe, but that still won't create a majority to overturn it.
But if Miers gets on the court, Democrats can have their way with Bush. He will have exposed himself as a scaredy-cat. Most important, his armies will be gone. This isn't a game of kick the can, where Republicans fight for any idiot with an "R" on his shirt. Republicans support Bush because he's a Republican, not whether or not he is a Republican. With the Miers nomination, Bush has screwed his base, screwed Republican senators, screwed legal conservatives. Good luck with those indictments! Maybe Tom Rath can help you.
by Ann Coulter
October 26, 2005
The Bush White House has turned into the Nixon White House — complete with Harriet Miers as its Rosemary Woods, with an 18-year gap in her credentials.
As president, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, initiated race-based hiring schemes, signed SALT I with the Soviets and instituted rapprochement with the Red Chinese. All of this resulted in liberals ... despising him even more!
After five years of Nixon's ignoring conservatives — where else would they go? — when liberals came after him for Watergate, conservatives ignored Nixon. (As the details of Nixon's "dirty tricks" came out, conservative columnist Stan Evans reportedly told Pat Buchanan: "I want to apologize for all my attacks upon your administration. I would never have done that if I had known you were into all that good stuff we've been hearing about lately.")
For five years, Bush has initiated massive spending programs, obstinately refused to protect the borders and signed restrictions on political speech into law. His veto pen remains unopened and unused in its original shrink-wrapped case. Bush treats conservatives like the Democrats treat the blacks (which is to say, pretty badly).
Conservatives were unhappy, but we were confident Bush would never let us down on the two issues that mattered more than anything else: the war on terrorism and the Supreme Court.
And now, although Bush has been bold and strong against the terrorists, it is beyond question that he has betrayed conservative hopes for the Supreme Court.
The way Bush has been attacking his base lately, he better hope liberals start to love him. There aren't going to be a lot of conservatives left to defend him if someone in the White House gets indicted or something. (But at least he can always count on Fox News analysts!)
When conservatives erupted in pain and rage that the president had thrown away a Supreme Court seat on his personal lawyer — because she's a girl and Laura wanted a girl — administration flacks snippily informed right-wing activists that they didn't get a vote. Only senators vote on judicial nominees (that is, whenever Democrats allow it).
Next, the Bush White House accused conservatives of elitism and sexism for opposing the former Texas Lottery commissioner for the Supreme Court.
Then we discovered the White House actually believes everything liberals say about conservative Christians — that we are "uneducated" and "easily led." After administration officials snookered a few evangelical leaders into supporting Miers, they sat back and congratulated themselves on a job well done. But evangelicals are, at best, split down the middle on Miers. Apparently, Christians aren't so easily led. (That's what you get for believing The Washington Post!)
Now the White House is threatening Republican senators who are thinking of voting against the former lottery commissioner. To deliver this message, Bush chose Tom Rath, a Republican functionary in New Hampshire who brags on his Web page that he "actively assisted in the U.S. Senate process that confirmed David Souter as Supreme Court justice."
At least Bush found a man with impeccable credentials to promote the Miers nomination. Note to the promotions department: You can stop printing up those "Trust Me!" T-shirts. I don't think we're going to need them!
Finally, to throw us totally off balance, Bush did something weird and scary this week: He nominated Ben Bernanke for Fed chairman — A MAN WHO'S TOTALLY QUALIFIED FOR THE JOB. The White House has yet to explain how this happened.
Politicians and Fox News analysts afraid of upsetting the White House keep saying we need to wait for the hearings to see if Miers is qualified. This is like saying we need to wait for the hearings to see if Miers is a polar bear. We already know the answer! She's not a polar bear, and she's not qualified. The Kabuki theater of nomination hearings will not tell us anything new.
It's as if all Miers needs to do during the hearings is utter the magic words — say she opposes "judicial activism" — and conservatives will love her! I have news for you: Chuck Schumer claims he opposes "judicial activism," too.
In fact, the only two people who will derive any benefit from the hearings are Joe Biden, who will finally look like a constitutional scholar, and Harriet Miers, who might learn something about the Constitution from him.
Democrats are so happy at the mess Bush stepped in with the Miers nomination that they don't want to help him by opposing her. The NARAL ladies will have to take a back seat to Democrat dreams of an impotent George Bush. Yeah, maybe Miers will vote to overturn Roe, but that still won't create a majority to overturn it.
But if Miers gets on the court, Democrats can have their way with Bush. He will have exposed himself as a scaredy-cat. Most important, his armies will be gone. This isn't a game of kick the can, where Republicans fight for any idiot with an "R" on his shirt. Republicans support Bush because he's a Republican, not whether or not he is a Republican. With the Miers nomination, Bush has screwed his base, screwed Republican senators, screwed legal conservatives. Good luck with those indictments! Maybe Tom Rath can help you.
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
From The Dallas Morning News:
The president has betrayed his base just when he needs it most
By Rod Dreher
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
William F. Buckley, American conservatism's gray eminence, was recently asked by a writer for The New Yorker what he thought about the state of the movement he helped found 50 years ago. Said Mr. Buckley, "I'm not happy about it." More and more of us on the right feel his pain.
Conservatism, said Mr. Buckley, is "to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal."
He was talking about President Bush's grandiose wish to frog-march liberal democracy around the globe, but he could have been speaking of any number of unconservative things foisted upon the country by an ostensibly conservative president and a compliant Republican Congress.
American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.
Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?
There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president's intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism's claim to competent governance.
Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.
Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.
Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.
Can this marriage be saved? For Mr. Bush's sake, it had better be. His approval rating is in the ditch, and most Americans are rightly uneasy about the future. If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers an indictment of Karl Rove this week, this presidency will be close to flat lining – with three years left to go.
Movement conservatives have issued a rude altar call to the backslidden president. He has to replace Ms. Miers with a conservative jurist of the first intellectual rank (Michael McConnell, say).
Result: a unified base, fired up to rally for battle behind the president on this and other fronts.
He should also push Congress for big spending cuts. If framed correctly – as acts of courage and responsibility in the face of mounting fiscal adversity – they would signal bold leadership in changed circumstances and remind conservatives what we are supposed to be for.
He should also surprise us with a get-tough policy on illegal immigration, including securing the southern border and imposing tough penalties on businesses that employ illegals. This will make his corporate backers and establishment elites howl, but would be popular, as Americans – even Democrats – oppose by wide margins policies coddling those in the country illegally.
Will the president do any of this? Well, what choice does he have? Mr. Bush has alienated both a significant portion of his base and all of his opposition, so he cannot hope to triangulate his way out of this one. With his political blood in the water and toothsome challenges making ever-tighter circles around his presidency, Mr. Bush should give his mutinous mates a reason to toss him a life preserver.
Conservatism is in an unhappy place now, but the movement is still bristling with intellectual ferment and ideological confidence and is beginning to look past the Bush era to new leadership.
Truth to tell, Mr. Bush needs conservatives a lot more than conservatives need him.
Back to basics, Mr. Bush. Show us some love.
The president has betrayed his base just when he needs it most
By Rod Dreher
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
William F. Buckley, American conservatism's gray eminence, was recently asked by a writer for The New Yorker what he thought about the state of the movement he helped found 50 years ago. Said Mr. Buckley, "I'm not happy about it." More and more of us on the right feel his pain.
Conservatism, said Mr. Buckley, is "to a considerable extent, the acknowledgment of realities. And this is surreal."
He was talking about President Bush's grandiose wish to frog-march liberal democracy around the globe, but he could have been speaking of any number of unconservative things foisted upon the country by an ostensibly conservative president and a compliant Republican Congress.
American conservatism is in crisis at the moment because the bizarre Harriet Miers nomination imposed a surreality check on the right, forcing us to consider just how much nonsense we had gone along with for the sake of party discipline.
Where to start? With the LBJ-level spending? The signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, which candidate Bush had denounced as unconstitutional? The race-preferences sellout in the University of Michigan cases?
There was also the cynical use of the federal marriage amendment, which the administration dropped after turning out the social conservative vote in 2004. And grass-roots conservatives cite the president's intent to liberalize immigration policy with Mexico.
Then there is the Iraq quagmire, which, even if initially a worthy cause, has become a rolling disaster.
On top of this came the Katrina debacle, which further damaged conservatism's claim to competent governance.
Conservatives, consciously or not, looked the other way for far too long, mostly because we felt it important to back the president in wartime and because nothing was more important to the various tribes of Red State Nation than recapturing the Supreme Court. For the first time in a generation, a conservative Republican president and a Republican majority in the Senate made that dream a real possibility.
Whatever else Mr. Bush might fumble, we trusted him to get that right.
Instead, he gave us a crony pick of no extraordinary constitutional expertise or discernible vision, except for love of Our Lord and George W. Bush, and support for racial preferences. This is what we drank the Rovian Kool-Aid for? The Miers selection was no isolated incident, but the tipping point in a series of betrayals.
Can this marriage be saved? For Mr. Bush's sake, it had better be. His approval rating is in the ditch, and most Americans are rightly uneasy about the future. If special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald delivers an indictment of Karl Rove this week, this presidency will be close to flat lining – with three years left to go.
Movement conservatives have issued a rude altar call to the backslidden president. He has to replace Ms. Miers with a conservative jurist of the first intellectual rank (Michael McConnell, say).
Result: a unified base, fired up to rally for battle behind the president on this and other fronts.
He should also push Congress for big spending cuts. If framed correctly – as acts of courage and responsibility in the face of mounting fiscal adversity – they would signal bold leadership in changed circumstances and remind conservatives what we are supposed to be for.
He should also surprise us with a get-tough policy on illegal immigration, including securing the southern border and imposing tough penalties on businesses that employ illegals. This will make his corporate backers and establishment elites howl, but would be popular, as Americans – even Democrats – oppose by wide margins policies coddling those in the country illegally.
Will the president do any of this? Well, what choice does he have? Mr. Bush has alienated both a significant portion of his base and all of his opposition, so he cannot hope to triangulate his way out of this one. With his political blood in the water and toothsome challenges making ever-tighter circles around his presidency, Mr. Bush should give his mutinous mates a reason to toss him a life preserver.
Conservatism is in an unhappy place now, but the movement is still bristling with intellectual ferment and ideological confidence and is beginning to look past the Bush era to new leadership.
Truth to tell, Mr. Bush needs conservatives a lot more than conservatives need him.
Back to basics, Mr. Bush. Show us some love.
Monday, October 24, 2005
From Human Events: Amen.
The Fall of National Review
By: Jack Langer
A monumental betrayal of trust over at the National Review blog; The usually stellar NR editor, Rich Lowry, has just put forward the baneful - nay, the SATANIC - proposal that major league baseball adopt the instant replay.
Thus, with one single blog posting, National Review has fallen from the heights of moral rectitude into an unending sea of noxious, vile depravity. I am now calling for a countrywide boycott of all NR products until we - the victims of Lowry's malfeasance - receive an appropriate apology.
The Fall of National Review
By: Jack Langer
A monumental betrayal of trust over at the National Review blog; The usually stellar NR editor, Rich Lowry, has just put forward the baneful - nay, the SATANIC - proposal that major league baseball adopt the instant replay.
Thus, with one single blog posting, National Review has fallen from the heights of moral rectitude into an unending sea of noxious, vile depravity. I am now calling for a countrywide boycott of all NR products until we - the victims of Lowry's malfeasance - receive an appropriate apology.
From VDare.com:
The Bush Bust: We (Ahem!) Told You So!
By Steve Sailer
The Bush Administration is currently imploding on multiple fronts.
After years of encouraging illegal immigration, President Bush has suddenly responded to the ever-increasing frustration of American citizens by announcing that he intends to deport all illegal aliens.
Well, either that or make them all legal aliens. Or something. The details haven't all been revealed yet. But, after all, if you can't trust George W. Bush to enforce the immigration laws …
Having burned his base on border security for nearly five years—and for over four years since 9/11!—nobody seems willing to give Bush any more credence.
The President clearly wants to start a wag-the-dog war with Syria and/or Iran over their failure to control their borders (while desiring to reward Mexico for the same thing). But the public's patience with Bush's grand strategy of Invite-the-World-Invade-the-World is at an all time low.
Bush’s approval rating continues its natural course downward, now descending into deeply negative territory.
Karl Rove, the alleged brains of the operation, and Scooter Libby, for 15 years a lawyer for international conman Marc Rich and for the last five years chief-of-staff for Vice President Cheney, are sweating out the possibility of indictment.
Bush's attempt to elevate his undistinguished former personal lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has been greeted with derision even by many of his most sycophantic supporters at outlets like National Review.
Here at VDARE.com we'd like to take this opportunity to mention:
We told you so.
For years, since well before 9/11, we've been a rare independent voice telling you that George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the whole gang were men of both poor character and poor judgment.
We knew that they were interested neither in what was good for the American people, nor knowledgeable about what was what was good for the Republican Party.
Why? Because their immigration policy has always been ludicrous.
But the mainstream media was too biased on the topic to notice.
The Washington press corps wants cheaper nannies, pool guys, and busboys. And if the laws of the land have to be spit upon and the American working class pauperized to get them, well, that's a sacrifice the media class is willing to make.
Here at VDARE.com, we immediately pointed out that Bush's Open Borders plan of January 7, 2004 was not just an amnesty for current illegal aliens, but an invitation to all six billion foreigners on Earth to move to America if they could obtain a job offer at $5.15 per hour. (The minimum wage…for now).
But the rest of the media barely mentioned the most radical plan to social engineering this nation ever proposed by a United States President.
The Bush Administration has presided over an unprecedented four consecutive years of increases in the poverty rate. But you'll almost never see the word "immigration" appear in articles about the economy. Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.com has been alone in documenting that a ridiculous fraction of the all the new jobs in the economy have gone to illegal immigrants.
And just wait for Bush's taxpayer-financed dollar rebuilding of New Orleans by illegal immigrants. That iconic American city will become a permanent outpost of Mexico.
But don't expect Bush to learn any lessons form his current travails. Even if he is forced to kick Rove to the curb, Bush's personal obsession with Mexicanizing America will continue.
The AP reported Friday:
"The consulting firm jointly headed by one possible Rove replacement, GOP strategist Ed Gillespie, has begun considering how Gillespie's clients might be reassigned if he were tapped for a White House assignment and how to handle the other ramifications of a White House move."
Gillespie is one of the chief bagmen for the campaign Bush launched this summer to shake down big corporations for up to $250,000 to fund his open borders campaign.
The Bush family has long been on terms of intimacy with their counterparts in Mexico's corrupt power elite.
Like many of us, they look to Latin America and see America's future.
Unlike the rest of us, the Bushes seem to like what they see.
Steve Sailer is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
The Bush Bust: We (Ahem!) Told You So!
By Steve Sailer
The Bush Administration is currently imploding on multiple fronts.
After years of encouraging illegal immigration, President Bush has suddenly responded to the ever-increasing frustration of American citizens by announcing that he intends to deport all illegal aliens.
Well, either that or make them all legal aliens. Or something. The details haven't all been revealed yet. But, after all, if you can't trust George W. Bush to enforce the immigration laws …
Having burned his base on border security for nearly five years—and for over four years since 9/11!—nobody seems willing to give Bush any more credence.
The President clearly wants to start a wag-the-dog war with Syria and/or Iran over their failure to control their borders (while desiring to reward Mexico for the same thing). But the public's patience with Bush's grand strategy of Invite-the-World-Invade-the-World is at an all time low.
Bush’s approval rating continues its natural course downward, now descending into deeply negative territory.
Karl Rove, the alleged brains of the operation, and Scooter Libby, for 15 years a lawyer for international conman Marc Rich and for the last five years chief-of-staff for Vice President Cheney, are sweating out the possibility of indictment.
Bush's attempt to elevate his undistinguished former personal lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has been greeted with derision even by many of his most sycophantic supporters at outlets like National Review.
Here at VDARE.com we'd like to take this opportunity to mention:
We told you so.
For years, since well before 9/11, we've been a rare independent voice telling you that George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and the whole gang were men of both poor character and poor judgment.
We knew that they were interested neither in what was good for the American people, nor knowledgeable about what was what was good for the Republican Party.
Why? Because their immigration policy has always been ludicrous.
But the mainstream media was too biased on the topic to notice.
The Washington press corps wants cheaper nannies, pool guys, and busboys. And if the laws of the land have to be spit upon and the American working class pauperized to get them, well, that's a sacrifice the media class is willing to make.
Here at VDARE.com, we immediately pointed out that Bush's Open Borders plan of January 7, 2004 was not just an amnesty for current illegal aliens, but an invitation to all six billion foreigners on Earth to move to America if they could obtain a job offer at $5.15 per hour. (The minimum wage…for now).
But the rest of the media barely mentioned the most radical plan to social engineering this nation ever proposed by a United States President.
The Bush Administration has presided over an unprecedented four consecutive years of increases in the poverty rate. But you'll almost never see the word "immigration" appear in articles about the economy. Ed Rubenstein of VDARE.com has been alone in documenting that a ridiculous fraction of the all the new jobs in the economy have gone to illegal immigrants.
And just wait for Bush's taxpayer-financed dollar rebuilding of New Orleans by illegal immigrants. That iconic American city will become a permanent outpost of Mexico.
But don't expect Bush to learn any lessons form his current travails. Even if he is forced to kick Rove to the curb, Bush's personal obsession with Mexicanizing America will continue.
The AP reported Friday:
"The consulting firm jointly headed by one possible Rove replacement, GOP strategist Ed Gillespie, has begun considering how Gillespie's clients might be reassigned if he were tapped for a White House assignment and how to handle the other ramifications of a White House move."
Gillespie is one of the chief bagmen for the campaign Bush launched this summer to shake down big corporations for up to $250,000 to fund his open borders campaign.
The Bush family has long been on terms of intimacy with their counterparts in Mexico's corrupt power elite.
Like many of us, they look to Latin America and see America's future.
Unlike the rest of us, the Bushes seem to like what they see.
Steve Sailer is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
Quite a story here. Going to be interesting to see how the MSM and Rice's wack job vampire fans react to this.
The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God—and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek: Oct. 31, 2005 issue:
Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.
They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.
Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
The Gospel According to Anne
The queen of the occult has been gone awhile. What's Anne Rice been up to? Getting healthy, finding God—and writing her most daring book yet.
By David Gates
Newsweek: Oct. 31, 2005 issue:
Sometimes Anne Rice won't leave her bedroom for days on end—and neither would you. Glass doors open onto a terrace that looks over the red-tiled roofs of La Jolla, Calif., to the Pacific Ocean. A live-in staffer brings meals to the table at the foot of her ornately carved wooden bed, which faces an ornately carved stone fireplace. She exercises in a huge bike-in closet. She's got two computers and enough books to last her a year. Splendid isolation? Splendid, sure. But she's often got family visiting in a downstairs guest suite, she reads The New York Times every morning—"Nicholas Kristof is a hero to me"—watches news "till I can't stand it anymore," and spends up to an hour and a half a day e-mailing with her extraordinarily faithful readers.
They've been worried about her. After 25 novels in 25 years, Rice, 64, hasn't published a book since 2003's "Blood Chronicle," the tenth volume of her best-selling vampire series. They may have heard she came close to death last year, when she had surgery for an intestinal blockage, and also back in 1998, when she went into a sudden diabetic coma; that same year she returned to the Roman Catholic Church, which she'd left at 18. They surely knew that Stan Rice, her husband of 41 years, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And though she'd moved out of their longtime home in New Orleans more than a year before Hurricane Katrina, she still has property there—and the deep emotional connection that led her to make the city the setting for such novels as "Interview With the Vampire." What's up with her? "For the last six months," she says, "people have been sending e-mails saying, 'What are you doing next?' And I've told them, 'You may not want what I'm doing next'." We'll know soon. In two weeks, Anne Rice, the chronicler of vampires, witches and—under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure—of soft-core S&M encounters, will publish "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," a novel about the 7-year-old Jesus, narrated by Christ himself. "I promised," she says, "that from now on I would write only for the Lord." It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's "Slow Train Coming" announced that he'd been born again.
Meeting the still youthful-looking Rice, you'd never suspect she'd been ill—except that on a warm October afternoon she's chilly enough to have a fire blazing. And if you were expecting Morticia Addams with a strange new light in her eyes, forget it. "We make good coffee," she says, beckoning you to where a silver pot sits on the white tablecloth. "We're from New Orleans." Rice knows "Out of Egypt" and its projected sequels—three, she thinks—could alienate her following; as she writes in the afterword, "I was ready to do violence to my career." But she sees a continuity with her old books, whose compulsive, conscience-stricken evildoers reflect her long spiritual unease. "I mean, I was in despair." In that afterword she calls Christ "the ultimate supernatural hero ... the ultimate immortal of them all."
To render such a hero and his world believable, she immersed herself not only in Scripture, but in first-century histories and New Testament scholarship—some of which she found disturbingly skeptical. "Even Hitler scholarship usually allows Hitler a certain amount of power and mystery." She also watched every Biblical movie she could find, from "The Robe" to "The Passion of the Christ" ("I loved it"). And she dipped into previous novels, from "Quo Vadis" to Norman Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins's apocalyptic Left Behind series. ("I was intrigued. But their vision is not my vision.") She can cite scholarly authority for giving her Christ a birth date of 11 B.C., and for making James, his disciple, the son of Joseph by a previous marriage. But she's also taken liberties where they don't explicitly conflict with Scripture. No one reports that the young Jesus studied with the historian Philo of Alexandria, as the novel has it—or that Jesus' family was in Alexandria at all. And she's used legends of the boy Messiah's miracles from the noncanonical Apocrypha: bringing clay birds to life, striking a bully dead and resurrecting him.
Rice's most daring move, though, is to try to get inside the head of a 7-year-old kid who's intermittently aware that he's also God Almighty. "There were times when I thought I couldn't do it," she admits. The advance notices say she's pulled it off: Kirkus Reviews' starred rave pronounces her Jesus "fully believable." But it's hard to imagine all readers will be convinced when he delivers such lines as "And there came in a flash to me a feeling of understanding everything, everything!" The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway: "It was time for the blessing. The first prayer we all said together in Jerusalem ... The words were a little different to me. But it was still very good." Yet in the novel's best scene, a dream in which Jesus meets a bewitchingly handsome Satan—smiling, then weeping, then raging—Rice shows she still has her great gift: to imbue Gothic chills with moral complexity and heartfelt sorrow.
Rice already has much of the next volume written. ("Of course I've been advised not to talk about it.") But what's she going to do with herself once her hero ascends to Heaven? "If I really complete the life of Christ the way I want to do it," she says, "then I might go on and write a new type of fiction. It won't be like the other. It'll be in a world that includes redemption." Still, you can bet the Devil's going to get the best lines.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Steve Sailer on Punk:
T.S. Eliot and punk rock:
Listening to a teenage band play Black Sabbath's 1970 song "Paranoid" today, I was reminded of how the history of punk rock in the 1970s provides an excellent example of a point made by T.S. Eliot around 1920 in his first volume of literary criticism: the innovative artist is a catalyst that creates his own tradition by highlighting common elements in various past works of art that nobody had previously noticed had much in common.
Punk rock emerged as as a distinct genre in 1976-77, primarily due to The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. But once you knew what punk rock was, you would also notice older songs, such as "Paranoid" and Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown" that were clearly punk rock before the word existed, in that they followed the much more linear riffing style enshrined by The Ramones. And for English working class thuggishness of the Sex Pistols style, there's a remarkable predecessor in the 1973 song "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting" by Bernie Taupin and ... Elton John, of all people.
Until The Ramones and the Sex Pistols came along, though, nobody noticed that these isolated songs, which are uncharacteristic of the artists that made them, were part of a genre.
T.S. Eliot and punk rock:
Listening to a teenage band play Black Sabbath's 1970 song "Paranoid" today, I was reminded of how the history of punk rock in the 1970s provides an excellent example of a point made by T.S. Eliot around 1920 in his first volume of literary criticism: the innovative artist is a catalyst that creates his own tradition by highlighting common elements in various past works of art that nobody had previously noticed had much in common.
Punk rock emerged as as a distinct genre in 1976-77, primarily due to The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. But once you knew what punk rock was, you would also notice older songs, such as "Paranoid" and Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown" that were clearly punk rock before the word existed, in that they followed the much more linear riffing style enshrined by The Ramones. And for English working class thuggishness of the Sex Pistols style, there's a remarkable predecessor in the 1973 song "Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting" by Bernie Taupin and ... Elton John, of all people.
Until The Ramones and the Sex Pistols came along, though, nobody noticed that these isolated songs, which are uncharacteristic of the artists that made them, were part of a genre.
From Beliefnet.com:
What Intelligent Design Is—and Isn’t
The more scientifically sophisticated we get,
the stronger the argument for intelligent design.
By Jay W. Richards
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros.
The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the classroom.
Control-alt “Conspiracy” and, presto, a paragraph about the religious right and its scheme to smuggle Bibles into the science class as the first step toward establishing a theocracy. Next comes a quotation supposedly representing the view of all “serious scientists,” with the phrase “overwhelming evidence” thrown in for good measure. The story practically writes itself, and it possesses this virtue: it saves the reporter the bother of actually investigating what design theory really is.
Victor Victorian
So what is ID, really? ID is not a deduction from religious dogma or scripture. It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause. ID is thus a tacit rebuke of an idea inherited from the 19th century, called scientific materialism.
Natural science in the Victorian Age, or rather, its materialistic gloss, offered a radically different view of the universe: (1) The universe has always existed, so we need not explain its origin; (2) Everything in the universe submits to deterministic laws. (3) Life is the love child of luck and chemistry. (4) Cells, the basic units of life, are essentially blobs of Jell-O.
Onto this dubious edifice Charles Darwin added a fifth conjecture: All the sophisticated organisms around us grew from a process called natural selection: this process seizes and passes along those minor, random variations in a population that provide a survival advantage. With this, Darwin explained away the apparent design in the biological world as just that—only apparent.
Each of these 19th-century assumptions has been undermined or discredited in the 20th century, but the materialist gloss remains: There is one god, matter, and science is its prophet. It hides behind its more modest cousin, methodological naturalism. According to this tidy dictum, scientists can believe whatever they want in their personal lives, but they must appeal only to impersonal causes when explaining nature. Accordingly, any who discuss purpose or design within science (the founders of modern science generously excepted) cease to be scientists.
The Universe Strikes Back
There was one problem with this tidy rule. Nature forgot to cooperate. The trouble started in the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was “red-shifted.” It had stretched during the course of its travels. This suggested the universe is expanding. Reversing the process in their minds, scientists were suddenly confronted with a universe that had come into existence in the finite past. Who knew! Hubble’s discovery, confirmed by later evidence, flatly contradicted the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing cosmos. The universe itself had re-introduced the question of its origin to a community bent on avoiding the question altogether.
This was just the beginning. In the 1960s and ’70s, physicists found that the universal constants of physics (e.g., gravity, electromagnetism) appeared finely tuned for complex life. To astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle, this fine-tuning suggested the work of a “superintellect.”
Still more recently, growing evidence in astronomy has revealed that even in a finely tuned universe, dozens of local conditions have to go just right to build a single habitable planet. This growing list of unlikely requirements is only half the story. In "The Privileged Planet," astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and I argue that those conditions for habitability also provide the best overall conditions for doing science. The very places where observers can exist are the same places that provide the best overall conditions for observing. For instance, the most life-friendly region of the galaxy is also the best place to be an astronomer and cosmologist. You might expect this if the universe were designed for discovery, but not if, as astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “The universe is all there is, ever was, or ever will be.”
Information Plantation
Of course, even with a suitable environment, you don’t automatically get man or even amoebas. Before the Darwinian mechanism can even get started, it needs a wealth of biological information as part of the first self-reproducing organism. For instance, there’s the information encoded along the DNA molecule, often described as a sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. These, in turn, need the right cellular hardware to function.
In recent years, philosophers William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have turned this evidence into a formidable argument for intelligent design. Dembski, also a mathematician, applies information and probability theory to the subject. Meyer argues that the usual aimless processes of chance and chemistry simply can’t explain biological information and that, moreover, our everyday experience shows us where such information comes from—intelligent agents.
Moving up a level, we find complex and functionally integrated machines that are out of reach to the Darwinian mechanism. Biochemist Michael Behe immortalized some of these in his bestselling 1996 book, "Darwin’s Black Box."
Behe argues that molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum are “irreducibly complex.” They’re like a mousetrap. Without all of their basic parts, they don’t work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, where each step provides an immediate survival advantage for the organism. It can’t select for a future function. To do that requires foresight—the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. That’s the positive evidence for design: Such structures are the sort produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function. If you get this point, you’ve already comprehended more than most journalists writing on the subject.
The New Zoo Review
Moving to the macroscopic world, we see the three-dimensional complexity of many diverse animal body plans (phyla). In the fossil record, these show up suddenly. The problem for Darwinism is not that there are “gaps.” Of course there are. Rather, it’s the entire fossil record’s pattern of sudden appearance of new phyla and persistent morphological isolation between them. This is not the gradually branching tree of life the Darwinian story leads us to expect.
Nor is this an argument from ignorance. In our experience, sudden innovations and massive infusions of information come from intelligent agents. The primary innovations come first (e.g., car, airplane, a new Cambrian phylum) followed by variations on the original form. This is the story the fossil record tells.
The Definition or the Evidence?
At the beginning of the 21st century, we have new evidence and new intellectual tools at our disposal. Standing in the way is the materialistic definition of science inherited from the Victorian Age. If a definition of science conflicts with the scientific evidence, should we go with the definition or the evidence?
To ask the question is to answer it. "Scientia" means knowledge. If we are properly scientific, then we should be open to the natural world, not decide beforehand what it’s allowed to reveal. Either the universe provides evidence for purpose and design or it doesn’t. The way to resolve the question isn’t to play definitional games but to look.
The G-word
Recently, Nobel-prize winning physicist Charles Townes asked, “What is the purpose or meaning of life? Or of our universe? These are questions which should concern us all.... If the universe has a purpose, then its structure, and how it works, must reflect this purpose.”
Townes continues: “Serious intellectual discussion of the possible meaning of our universe, or the nature of religion and philosophical views of religion and science, needs to be openly and carefully discussed.”
Unfortunately, few are willing to follow Townes’ advice. If we talk about ID, we’re warned, someone, somewhere, will start talking about God.
But certain ideas in science will always have theological implications. As arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins so memorably said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Right.
Both Dawkins and Townes agree that ideas in science can have theological implications. Isn’t that obvious? Yet in our current climate, even the bare rumor of God causes some to reach for their stash of derisive terms—“theocrat,” “fundamentalist,” “creationist”—they don’t require much imagination.
But that response rings increasingly hollow. The genie is out of the bottle, and name-calling and misinformation won’t put him back. The mandarins can no longer control the flow of information to those who seek it. The implications can take care of themselves. It’s time to discuss the evidence.
Jay Wesley Richards, Ph.D., is Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of 'The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery' (Regnery, 2004), and contributes to the blog idthefuture.com .
What Intelligent Design Is—and Isn’t
The more scientifically sophisticated we get,
the stronger the argument for intelligent design.
By Jay W. Richards
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros.
The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the classroom.
Control-alt “Conspiracy” and, presto, a paragraph about the religious right and its scheme to smuggle Bibles into the science class as the first step toward establishing a theocracy. Next comes a quotation supposedly representing the view of all “serious scientists,” with the phrase “overwhelming evidence” thrown in for good measure. The story practically writes itself, and it possesses this virtue: it saves the reporter the bother of actually investigating what design theory really is.
Victor Victorian
So what is ID, really? ID is not a deduction from religious dogma or scripture. It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause. ID is thus a tacit rebuke of an idea inherited from the 19th century, called scientific materialism.
Natural science in the Victorian Age, or rather, its materialistic gloss, offered a radically different view of the universe: (1) The universe has always existed, so we need not explain its origin; (2) Everything in the universe submits to deterministic laws. (3) Life is the love child of luck and chemistry. (4) Cells, the basic units of life, are essentially blobs of Jell-O.
Onto this dubious edifice Charles Darwin added a fifth conjecture: All the sophisticated organisms around us grew from a process called natural selection: this process seizes and passes along those minor, random variations in a population that provide a survival advantage. With this, Darwin explained away the apparent design in the biological world as just that—only apparent.
Each of these 19th-century assumptions has been undermined or discredited in the 20th century, but the materialist gloss remains: There is one god, matter, and science is its prophet. It hides behind its more modest cousin, methodological naturalism. According to this tidy dictum, scientists can believe whatever they want in their personal lives, but they must appeal only to impersonal causes when explaining nature. Accordingly, any who discuss purpose or design within science (the founders of modern science generously excepted) cease to be scientists.
The Universe Strikes Back
There was one problem with this tidy rule. Nature forgot to cooperate. The trouble started in the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was “red-shifted.” It had stretched during the course of its travels. This suggested the universe is expanding. Reversing the process in their minds, scientists were suddenly confronted with a universe that had come into existence in the finite past. Who knew! Hubble’s discovery, confirmed by later evidence, flatly contradicted the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing cosmos. The universe itself had re-introduced the question of its origin to a community bent on avoiding the question altogether.
This was just the beginning. In the 1960s and ’70s, physicists found that the universal constants of physics (e.g., gravity, electromagnetism) appeared finely tuned for complex life. To astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle, this fine-tuning suggested the work of a “superintellect.”
Still more recently, growing evidence in astronomy has revealed that even in a finely tuned universe, dozens of local conditions have to go just right to build a single habitable planet. This growing list of unlikely requirements is only half the story. In "The Privileged Planet," astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and I argue that those conditions for habitability also provide the best overall conditions for doing science. The very places where observers can exist are the same places that provide the best overall conditions for observing. For instance, the most life-friendly region of the galaxy is also the best place to be an astronomer and cosmologist. You might expect this if the universe were designed for discovery, but not if, as astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “The universe is all there is, ever was, or ever will be.”
Information Plantation
Of course, even with a suitable environment, you don’t automatically get man or even amoebas. Before the Darwinian mechanism can even get started, it needs a wealth of biological information as part of the first self-reproducing organism. For instance, there’s the information encoded along the DNA molecule, often described as a sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. These, in turn, need the right cellular hardware to function.
In recent years, philosophers William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have turned this evidence into a formidable argument for intelligent design. Dembski, also a mathematician, applies information and probability theory to the subject. Meyer argues that the usual aimless processes of chance and chemistry simply can’t explain biological information and that, moreover, our everyday experience shows us where such information comes from—intelligent agents.
Moving up a level, we find complex and functionally integrated machines that are out of reach to the Darwinian mechanism. Biochemist Michael Behe immortalized some of these in his bestselling 1996 book, "Darwin’s Black Box."
Behe argues that molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum are “irreducibly complex.” They’re like a mousetrap. Without all of their basic parts, they don’t work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, where each step provides an immediate survival advantage for the organism. It can’t select for a future function. To do that requires foresight—the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. That’s the positive evidence for design: Such structures are the sort produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function. If you get this point, you’ve already comprehended more than most journalists writing on the subject.
The New Zoo Review
Moving to the macroscopic world, we see the three-dimensional complexity of many diverse animal body plans (phyla). In the fossil record, these show up suddenly. The problem for Darwinism is not that there are “gaps.” Of course there are. Rather, it’s the entire fossil record’s pattern of sudden appearance of new phyla and persistent morphological isolation between them. This is not the gradually branching tree of life the Darwinian story leads us to expect.
Nor is this an argument from ignorance. In our experience, sudden innovations and massive infusions of information come from intelligent agents. The primary innovations come first (e.g., car, airplane, a new Cambrian phylum) followed by variations on the original form. This is the story the fossil record tells.
The Definition or the Evidence?
At the beginning of the 21st century, we have new evidence and new intellectual tools at our disposal. Standing in the way is the materialistic definition of science inherited from the Victorian Age. If a definition of science conflicts with the scientific evidence, should we go with the definition or the evidence?
To ask the question is to answer it. "Scientia" means knowledge. If we are properly scientific, then we should be open to the natural world, not decide beforehand what it’s allowed to reveal. Either the universe provides evidence for purpose and design or it doesn’t. The way to resolve the question isn’t to play definitional games but to look.
The G-word
Recently, Nobel-prize winning physicist Charles Townes asked, “What is the purpose or meaning of life? Or of our universe? These are questions which should concern us all.... If the universe has a purpose, then its structure, and how it works, must reflect this purpose.”
Townes continues: “Serious intellectual discussion of the possible meaning of our universe, or the nature of religion and philosophical views of religion and science, needs to be openly and carefully discussed.”
Unfortunately, few are willing to follow Townes’ advice. If we talk about ID, we’re warned, someone, somewhere, will start talking about God.
But certain ideas in science will always have theological implications. As arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins so memorably said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Right.
Both Dawkins and Townes agree that ideas in science can have theological implications. Isn’t that obvious? Yet in our current climate, even the bare rumor of God causes some to reach for their stash of derisive terms—“theocrat,” “fundamentalist,” “creationist”—they don’t require much imagination.
But that response rings increasingly hollow. The genie is out of the bottle, and name-calling and misinformation won’t put him back. The mandarins can no longer control the flow of information to those who seek it. The implications can take care of themselves. It’s time to discuss the evidence.
Jay Wesley Richards, Ph.D., is Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of 'The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery' (Regnery, 2004), and contributes to the blog idthefuture.com .
From Beliefnet.com:
What Intelligent Design Is—and Isn’t
The more scientifically sophisticated we get,
the stronger the argument for intelligent design.
By Jay W. Richards
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros.
The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the classroom.
Control-alt “Conspiracy” and, presto, a paragraph about the religious right and its scheme to smuggle Bibles into the science class as the first step toward establishing a theocracy. Next comes a quotation supposedly representing the view of all “serious scientists,” with the phrase “overwhelming evidence” thrown in for good measure. The story practically writes itself, and it possesses this virtue: it saves the reporter the bother of actually investigating what design theory really is.
Victor Victorian
So what is ID, really? ID is not a deduction from religious dogma or scripture. It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause. ID is thus a tacit rebuke of an idea inherited from the 19th century, called scientific materialism.
Natural science in the Victorian Age, or rather, its materialistic gloss, offered a radically different view of the universe: (1) The universe has always existed, so we need not explain its origin; (2) Everything in the universe submits to deterministic laws. (3) Life is the love child of luck and chemistry. (4) Cells, the basic units of life, are essentially blobs of Jell-O.
Onto this dubious edifice Charles Darwin added a fifth conjecture: All the sophisticated organisms around us grew from a process called natural selection: this process seizes and passes along those minor, random variations in a population that provide a survival advantage. With this, Darwin explained away the apparent design in the biological world as just that—only apparent.
Each of these 19th-century assumptions has been undermined or discredited in the 20th century, but the materialist gloss remains: There is one god, matter, and science is its prophet. It hides behind its more modest cousin, methodological naturalism. According to this tidy dictum, scientists can believe whatever they want in their personal lives, but they must appeal only to impersonal causes when explaining nature. Accordingly, any who discuss purpose or design within science (the founders of modern science generously excepted) cease to be scientists.
The Universe Strikes Back
There was one problem with this tidy rule. Nature forgot to cooperate. The trouble started in the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was “red-shifted.” It had stretched during the course of its travels. This suggested the universe is expanding. Reversing the process in their minds, scientists were suddenly confronted with a universe that had come into existence in the finite past. Who knew! Hubble’s discovery, confirmed by later evidence, flatly contradicted the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing cosmos. The universe itself had re-introduced the question of its origin to a community bent on avoiding the question altogether.
This was just the beginning. In the 1960s and ’70s, physicists found that the universal constants of physics (e.g., gravity, electromagnetism) appeared finely tuned for complex life. To astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle, this fine-tuning suggested the work of a “superintellect.”
Still more recently, growing evidence in astronomy has revealed that even in a finely tuned universe, dozens of local conditions have to go just right to build a single habitable planet. This growing list of unlikely requirements is only half the story. In "The Privileged Planet," astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and I argue that those conditions for habitability also provide the best overall conditions for doing science. The very places where observers can exist are the same places that provide the best overall conditions for observing. For instance, the most life-friendly region of the galaxy is also the best place to be an astronomer and cosmologist. You might expect this if the universe were designed for discovery, but not if, as astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “The universe is all there is, ever was, or ever will be.”
Information Plantation
Of course, even with a suitable environment, you don’t automatically get man or even amoebas. Before the Darwinian mechanism can even get started, it needs a wealth of biological information as part of the first self-reproducing organism. For instance, there’s the information encoded along the DNA molecule, often described as a sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. These, in turn, need the right cellular hardware to function.
In recent years, philosophers William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have turned this evidence into a formidable argument for intelligent design. Dembski, also a mathematician, applies information and probability theory to the subject. Meyer argues that the usual aimless processes of chance and chemistry simply can’t explain biological information and that, moreover, our everyday experience shows us where such information comes from—intelligent agents.
Moving up a level, we find complex and functionally integrated machines that are out of reach to the Darwinian mechanism. Biochemist Michael Behe immortalized some of these in his bestselling 1996 book, "Darwin’s Black Box."
Behe argues that molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum are “irreducibly complex.” They’re like a mousetrap. Without all of their basic parts, they don’t work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, where each step provides an immediate survival advantage for the organism. It can’t select for a future function. To do that requires foresight—the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. That’s the positive evidence for design: Such structures are the sort produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function. If you get this point, you’ve already comprehended more than most journalists writing on the subject.
The New Zoo Review
Moving to the macroscopic world, we see the three-dimensional complexity of many diverse animal body plans (phyla). In the fossil record, these show up suddenly. The problem for Darwinism is not that there are “gaps.” Of course there are. Rather, it’s the entire fossil record’s pattern of sudden appearance of new phyla and persistent morphological isolation between them. This is not the gradually branching tree of life the Darwinian story leads us to expect.
Nor is this an argument from ignorance. In our experience, sudden innovations and massive infusions of information come from intelligent agents. The primary innovations come first (e.g., car, airplane, a new Cambrian phylum) followed by variations on the original form. This is the story the fossil record tells.
The Definition or the Evidence?
At the beginning of the 21st century, we have new evidence and new intellectual tools at our disposal. Standing in the way is the materialistic definition of science inherited from the Victorian Age. If a definition of science conflicts with the scientific evidence, should we go with the definition or the evidence?
To ask the question is to answer it. "Scientia" means knowledge. If we are properly scientific, then we should be open to the natural world, not decide beforehand what it’s allowed to reveal. Either the universe provides evidence for purpose and design or it doesn’t. The way to resolve the question isn’t to play definitional games but to look.
The G-word
Recently, Nobel-prize winning physicist Charles Townes asked, “What is the purpose or meaning of life? Or of our universe? These are questions which should concern us all.... If the universe has a purpose, then its structure, and how it works, must reflect this purpose.”
Townes continues: “Serious intellectual discussion of the possible meaning of our universe, or the nature of religion and philosophical views of religion and science, needs to be openly and carefully discussed.”
Unfortunately, few are willing to follow Townes’ advice. If we talk about ID, we’re warned, someone, somewhere, will start talking about God.
But certain ideas in science will always have theological implications. As arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins so memorably said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Right.
Both Dawkins and Townes agree that ideas in science can have theological implications. Isn’t that obvious? Yet in our current climate, even the bare rumor of God causes some to reach for their stash of derisive terms—“theocrat,” “fundamentalist,” “creationist”—they don’t require much imagination.
But that response rings increasingly hollow. The genie is out of the bottle, and name-calling and misinformation won’t put him back. The mandarins can no longer control the flow of information to those who seek it. The implications can take care of themselves. It’s time to discuss the evidence.
Jay Wesley Richards, Ph.D., is Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of 'The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery' (Regnery, 2004), and contributes to the blog idthefuture.com .
What Intelligent Design Is—and Isn’t
The more scientifically sophisticated we get,
the stronger the argument for intelligent design.
By Jay W. Richards
Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ve heard of “intelligent design” (ID) and some of its leading proponents—Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski. Unfortunately, you probably got the mainstream media’s spin. It’s so predictable, I sometimes wonder if reporters aren’t using computer macros.
The reporter types control-alt "CE" and out pops the witty headline: “Creationism Evolves.” Control-alt "Scopes Trope" and out pops a lead referencing the old Spencer Tracy film "Inherit the Wind," a cartoon-like caricature of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial over evolution in the classroom.
Control-alt “Conspiracy” and, presto, a paragraph about the religious right and its scheme to smuggle Bibles into the science class as the first step toward establishing a theocracy. Next comes a quotation supposedly representing the view of all “serious scientists,” with the phrase “overwhelming evidence” thrown in for good measure. The story practically writes itself, and it possesses this virtue: it saves the reporter the bother of actually investigating what design theory really is.
Victor Victorian
So what is ID, really? ID is not a deduction from religious dogma or scripture. It’s simply the argument that certain features of the natural world—from miniature machines and digital information found in living cells, to the fine-tuning of physical constants—are best explained as the result of an intelligent cause. ID is thus a tacit rebuke of an idea inherited from the 19th century, called scientific materialism.
Natural science in the Victorian Age, or rather, its materialistic gloss, offered a radically different view of the universe: (1) The universe has always existed, so we need not explain its origin; (2) Everything in the universe submits to deterministic laws. (3) Life is the love child of luck and chemistry. (4) Cells, the basic units of life, are essentially blobs of Jell-O.
Onto this dubious edifice Charles Darwin added a fifth conjecture: All the sophisticated organisms around us grew from a process called natural selection: this process seizes and passes along those minor, random variations in a population that provide a survival advantage. With this, Darwin explained away the apparent design in the biological world as just that—only apparent.
Each of these 19th-century assumptions has been undermined or discredited in the 20th century, but the materialist gloss remains: There is one god, matter, and science is its prophet. It hides behind its more modest cousin, methodological naturalism. According to this tidy dictum, scientists can believe whatever they want in their personal lives, but they must appeal only to impersonal causes when explaining nature. Accordingly, any who discuss purpose or design within science (the founders of modern science generously excepted) cease to be scientists.
The Universe Strikes Back
There was one problem with this tidy rule. Nature forgot to cooperate. The trouble started in the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light from distant galaxies was “red-shifted.” It had stretched during the course of its travels. This suggested the universe is expanding. Reversing the process in their minds, scientists were suddenly confronted with a universe that had come into existence in the finite past. Who knew! Hubble’s discovery, confirmed by later evidence, flatly contradicted the earlier picture of an eternal and self-existing cosmos. The universe itself had re-introduced the question of its origin to a community bent on avoiding the question altogether.
This was just the beginning. In the 1960s and ’70s, physicists found that the universal constants of physics (e.g., gravity, electromagnetism) appeared finely tuned for complex life. To astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle, this fine-tuning suggested the work of a “superintellect.”
Still more recently, growing evidence in astronomy has revealed that even in a finely tuned universe, dozens of local conditions have to go just right to build a single habitable planet. This growing list of unlikely requirements is only half the story. In "The Privileged Planet," astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and I argue that those conditions for habitability also provide the best overall conditions for doing science. The very places where observers can exist are the same places that provide the best overall conditions for observing. For instance, the most life-friendly region of the galaxy is also the best place to be an astronomer and cosmologist. You might expect this if the universe were designed for discovery, but not if, as astronomer Carl Sagan put it, “The universe is all there is, ever was, or ever will be.”
Information Plantation
Of course, even with a suitable environment, you don’t automatically get man or even amoebas. Before the Darwinian mechanism can even get started, it needs a wealth of biological information as part of the first self-reproducing organism. For instance, there’s the information encoded along the DNA molecule, often described as a sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. These, in turn, need the right cellular hardware to function.
In recent years, philosophers William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have turned this evidence into a formidable argument for intelligent design. Dembski, also a mathematician, applies information and probability theory to the subject. Meyer argues that the usual aimless processes of chance and chemistry simply can’t explain biological information and that, moreover, our everyday experience shows us where such information comes from—intelligent agents.
Moving up a level, we find complex and functionally integrated machines that are out of reach to the Darwinian mechanism. Biochemist Michael Behe immortalized some of these in his bestselling 1996 book, "Darwin’s Black Box."
Behe argues that molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum are “irreducibly complex.” They’re like a mousetrap. Without all of their basic parts, they don’t work. Natural selection can only build systems one small step at a time, where each step provides an immediate survival advantage for the organism. It can’t select for a future function. To do that requires foresight—the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. That’s the positive evidence for design: Such structures are the sort produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function. If you get this point, you’ve already comprehended more than most journalists writing on the subject.
The New Zoo Review
Moving to the macroscopic world, we see the three-dimensional complexity of many diverse animal body plans (phyla). In the fossil record, these show up suddenly. The problem for Darwinism is not that there are “gaps.” Of course there are. Rather, it’s the entire fossil record’s pattern of sudden appearance of new phyla and persistent morphological isolation between them. This is not the gradually branching tree of life the Darwinian story leads us to expect.
Nor is this an argument from ignorance. In our experience, sudden innovations and massive infusions of information come from intelligent agents. The primary innovations come first (e.g., car, airplane, a new Cambrian phylum) followed by variations on the original form. This is the story the fossil record tells.
The Definition or the Evidence?
At the beginning of the 21st century, we have new evidence and new intellectual tools at our disposal. Standing in the way is the materialistic definition of science inherited from the Victorian Age. If a definition of science conflicts with the scientific evidence, should we go with the definition or the evidence?
To ask the question is to answer it. "Scientia" means knowledge. If we are properly scientific, then we should be open to the natural world, not decide beforehand what it’s allowed to reveal. Either the universe provides evidence for purpose and design or it doesn’t. The way to resolve the question isn’t to play definitional games but to look.
The G-word
Recently, Nobel-prize winning physicist Charles Townes asked, “What is the purpose or meaning of life? Or of our universe? These are questions which should concern us all.... If the universe has a purpose, then its structure, and how it works, must reflect this purpose.”
Townes continues: “Serious intellectual discussion of the possible meaning of our universe, or the nature of religion and philosophical views of religion and science, needs to be openly and carefully discussed.”
Unfortunately, few are willing to follow Townes’ advice. If we talk about ID, we’re warned, someone, somewhere, will start talking about God.
But certain ideas in science will always have theological implications. As arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins so memorably said, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Right.
Both Dawkins and Townes agree that ideas in science can have theological implications. Isn’t that obvious? Yet in our current climate, even the bare rumor of God causes some to reach for their stash of derisive terms—“theocrat,” “fundamentalist,” “creationist”—they don’t require much imagination.
But that response rings increasingly hollow. The genie is out of the bottle, and name-calling and misinformation won’t put him back. The mandarins can no longer control the flow of information to those who seek it. The implications can take care of themselves. It’s time to discuss the evidence.
Jay Wesley Richards, Ph.D., is Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. He is the co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of 'The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery' (Regnery, 2004), and contributes to the blog idthefuture.com .
From The Arizona Republic:
Harriet Miers, a time bomb for conservative progress
By Doug MacEachern
Oct. 23, 2005
In the old days, whenever I bantered politics with my liberal friends, they very often would fix me with their most sincere "How did you escape from Planet Zog?" look.
"How can you believe that stuff?" they would ask, genuinely puzzled.
I had a standard rejoinder. Candidly, it dripped with the sort of disarming insincerity for which I had gained some small bit of fame. It went like this:
"I understand your pain. Here you are, a devoted liberal all your adult life, and now you find yourself incapable of penetrating my inscrutable logic and reason. It must be frustrating for you."
At this point, I would laugh, wickedly. And my friends would mutter something about buying a tofu pie to launch in my face.
But those were the days we now call Conservative Past. We now are in a period of retrograde called "The Harriet Miers Era," where logic is judged "elitist," and reason is mocked by blow-dried preacher men.
What irony that President Bush would choose to ram a cork in the era of conservative ascension just when some of the pillars of conservative argumentation are celebrating big anniversaries. The National Review magazine is happily (till now) flogging its 50th year in print, and The Weekly Standard its 10th.
And what further irony that it would be the deepest anchor of American conservatism, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, that would explain why the sorry saga of Ms. Miers is far, far worse than anyone had thought.
On Monday, John Fund, editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal, wrote about a telephone meeting.
On one end of the conference call was a group of people whose claim to "conservatism" pretty much begins and ends with the cause of abolishing Roe vs. Wade as law.
They included many of the names that people of the Left dredge up whenever they want to assert that America is a raging theocracy: the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association; former presidential candidate Gary Bauer; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a conservative Black minister.
On the other end were two long-time associates of Miers who the White House had rounded up for one purpose. Well, two, really, but both so tightly connected that they amounted to a distinction without a difference.
The first purpose was to assure the mostly religious men on the line that Harriet Miers, as a candidate for the Supreme Court, was steadfastly religious.
This was noxious business in its own right, especially considering how loudly conservatives have howled when anyone would dare suggest that deeply held religious faith makes you ineligible for the court. If it shouldn't matter to the other side, what business has the White House using it as a sales tool for supporter?
Worse, however, was that both the Miers defenders effectively - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - guaranteed Miers' vote on the issues that mattered to the parsons: opposing gay marriage, for one; overturning Roe vs. Wade for a very big other.
I can't really blame the parsons for wanting such assurances. Religious conservatives only became a force in American politics after Roe vs. Wade became law. They don't seek much intellectual justification for policies. They just want a Supreme Court decision to be overturned.
But I can blame the White House for playing the fool's game that says results count for all. As though a Supreme Court justice's vote counts for everything, and her arguments count for nothing. How perfectly Bushian.
What an insult that is to William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, and the late, great Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal.
The timing is so perfectly destructive it is difficult to call it a mistake.
For 50 years, the conservative movement has been arguing its case, making powerful arguments for placing legitimate, positive-minded limits on government.
For 30 years, the most important venue for making those arguments hasn't been Congress or the White House. It has been the Supreme Court.
And now, to carry that almighty water, Bush gives us Harriet Miers.
God help us is right.
Harriet Miers, a time bomb for conservative progress
By Doug MacEachern
Oct. 23, 2005
In the old days, whenever I bantered politics with my liberal friends, they very often would fix me with their most sincere "How did you escape from Planet Zog?" look.
"How can you believe that stuff?" they would ask, genuinely puzzled.
I had a standard rejoinder. Candidly, it dripped with the sort of disarming insincerity for which I had gained some small bit of fame. It went like this:
"I understand your pain. Here you are, a devoted liberal all your adult life, and now you find yourself incapable of penetrating my inscrutable logic and reason. It must be frustrating for you."
At this point, I would laugh, wickedly. And my friends would mutter something about buying a tofu pie to launch in my face.
But those were the days we now call Conservative Past. We now are in a period of retrograde called "The Harriet Miers Era," where logic is judged "elitist," and reason is mocked by blow-dried preacher men.
What irony that President Bush would choose to ram a cork in the era of conservative ascension just when some of the pillars of conservative argumentation are celebrating big anniversaries. The National Review magazine is happily (till now) flogging its 50th year in print, and The Weekly Standard its 10th.
And what further irony that it would be the deepest anchor of American conservatism, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, that would explain why the sorry saga of Ms. Miers is far, far worse than anyone had thought.
On Monday, John Fund, editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal, wrote about a telephone meeting.
On one end of the conference call was a group of people whose claim to "conservatism" pretty much begins and ends with the cause of abolishing Roe vs. Wade as law.
They included many of the names that people of the Left dredge up whenever they want to assert that America is a raging theocracy: the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association; former presidential candidate Gary Bauer; Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a conservative Black minister.
On the other end were two long-time associates of Miers who the White House had rounded up for one purpose. Well, two, really, but both so tightly connected that they amounted to a distinction without a difference.
The first purpose was to assure the mostly religious men on the line that Harriet Miers, as a candidate for the Supreme Court, was steadfastly religious.
This was noxious business in its own right, especially considering how loudly conservatives have howled when anyone would dare suggest that deeply held religious faith makes you ineligible for the court. If it shouldn't matter to the other side, what business has the White House using it as a sales tool for supporter?
Worse, however, was that both the Miers defenders effectively - wink, wink, nudge, nudge - guaranteed Miers' vote on the issues that mattered to the parsons: opposing gay marriage, for one; overturning Roe vs. Wade for a very big other.
I can't really blame the parsons for wanting such assurances. Religious conservatives only became a force in American politics after Roe vs. Wade became law. They don't seek much intellectual justification for policies. They just want a Supreme Court decision to be overturned.
But I can blame the White House for playing the fool's game that says results count for all. As though a Supreme Court justice's vote counts for everything, and her arguments count for nothing. How perfectly Bushian.
What an insult that is to William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, William Kristol, publisher of The Weekly Standard, and the late, great Robert L. Bartley of The Wall Street Journal.
The timing is so perfectly destructive it is difficult to call it a mistake.
For 50 years, the conservative movement has been arguing its case, making powerful arguments for placing legitimate, positive-minded limits on government.
For 30 years, the most important venue for making those arguments hasn't been Congress or the White House. It has been the Supreme Court.
And now, to carry that almighty water, Bush gives us Harriet Miers.
God help us is right.
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