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Samuel Huntington & The Clash of Academics

Those familiar with the work of Samuel Huntington, the prescient but maligned historian who died last week, have an appreciation for how difficult it is to divine the future, a process at once subjective and vastly complex.  Yet, that's precisely what Huntington did, which is why he is scorned by establishment historians who inhabit the world of limitless nuance where the use of the 'historical algorithm' is promiscuously applied to render outcomes that comport with a predetermined political paradigm.

Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajama, the professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins, provides the details concerning Huntington's remarkable career, the unique challenges he faced in an academic world that effectively ignored him as a breathing anachronism, and, crucially, how he managed to correctly read and anticipate the threat of radical Islam.

Apologists for American exceptionalism, which Huntington clearly was, have a rough time of it these days because they're pre-stigmatized with the tandem stains of ideological imperialism and cultural hegemony, which, in the academic world, are tantamount to charges of treason.  Power projection, so their coda asserts, is an a priori self-defeating exercise because it's impossible to correctly handicap the geopolitical landscape.  Of course, the fact that their caveats and condemnations are issued from the airy, elitist confines of academia, where intellectual accountability is something of an oxymoron, is of no concern to them.

As Huntington acutely understood, ours is an age where 'academic balance' demands disparate treatment for the United States, which typically takes the form of at once holding it to higher standards of ethical purity and hobbling it internationally because its motives are deemed inherently cynical.  His skepticism of the Iraq war was predicated on an understanding that America's civic will was at an all-time nadir, and that the world itself had grown weary of power projection, even under the aegis of democratic principles.

Now, with the advent of America's first global president, the chances that the principles that united us through two world wars will be reanimated are too low to calculate.  Indeed, a President Obama is far more likely to apologize for America's alleged sins as he is to boldly acquit her historically unrivaled beneficence.  As Professor Ajami darkly observed, "The Davos men have perhaps won," a reference to the multicultural, egalitarianism popularized during the Clinton years.

All of this might not matter in a world less hostile to America and her allies.  But this is a world decidedly antagonistic to American interests, and, as the recently published report concerning terrorist threats to U.S. interest notes, the five-year forecast is one fraught with risks of biological and nuclear attacks.

Therefore, despite criticism from the left that this clash of civilizations is a xenophobic fiction, compliments of conservatives, Huntington's prognosis has, in fact, come to fruition, and the implications for American leadership in the next administration could not be clearer:  We must either continue aggressively degrading the threat, which is one of President Bush's few unambiguous legacies, or face the increased risk of another lethal attack on our soil.

Winning Americans' Hearts & Minds

It's a fascinating exercise in political prognostication to try to divine whether the fears of conservatives or liberals will come to fruition.  They're both convinced they may be losing their direction by not sticking to their core values, the kind of values they believe define what's great about America.  Two illustrative examples are Richard Viguerie, a champion of conservative principles, writing in today's Los Angeles Times, and Robert Kuttner, an apologist for liberalism, writing in The American Prospect.

In our December 11th post, we made the case that a results-oriented approach defending Republican governance has the greatest likelihood of succeeding in our current cultural environment, which so obviously favors the reanimation of New Deal and Great Society programs president-elect Obama is poised to support.  But, given the trepidation implicit in Kuttner's piece, which clearly reflects liberals' anxiety that, despite his hard left background, Obama may govern as a centrist, a meta-analysis is in order.

More than merely being correct on policy and principles, political strategy, as Ronald Reagan demonstrated time and again, is paramount.  Since the slow attenuation of the conservative revolution underwritten by Newt Gingrich et al in 1996, Republicans have been masters of political ineptitude, beginning, of course, with the fiscal profligacy of President Bush.  However, against our civic backdrop, which lionizes robust government spending, it's not enough to blithely talk about the virtues of tax cuts and restrained spending. 

And, therein lies the challenge, which, given the invertebrate nature of this Congress, seems all but insurmountable:  To wit, no amount of deft oratory can acquit conservative values when a majority of our elected officials don't act the part.  There are only a handful of true fiscal conservatives in Congress today, and their voices are routinely drowned out by the weak-kneed moderates who are more focused on retaining their seats (literally and metaphorically) than in vigorously defending conservative values.

It's ironic, because the obvious advantage conservatives enjoy is that the policies and programs the Obama team is currently crafting were tested many times in the past several decades, and, to put it kindly, were not found to be road-worthy.  Indeed, research by Amity Shlaes et al, convincingly demonstrates that the policies championed by Roosevelt actually protracted, rather than abbreviated the Great Depression.  Moreover, Johnson's Great Society, which drained $6.7 trillion since its inception, did nothing to lower the percent of children living in poverty, inhibit crime rates, drug use, or increase inner-city graduation rates, not to mention a host of other pet liberal causes.

The unequivocal truth is that massive, government-funded programs often do more harm than good, not merely because they're so clumsily operated, but because they do nothing to change the underlying behaviors that are the root causes.  Although increasing funding or throwing money at new programs may assuage our collective guilt concerning these vexing problems, the values that drive unproductive behavior, from a poor work ethic to producing children out-of-wedlock, aren't susceptible to change using government largess.

That's a truism that liberals still haven't come to terms with, because they continue to see capitalism as the culprit, they ignorantly believe they can regulate the free market to eliminate unethical and illicity behavior, they remain convinced we can 'green' our way out of our energy crisis, and that more money poured into the black hole of public education will result in higher graduation rates.

Conservatives instinctively know their values and principles hold the best promise for this Republic.  Their only charge is to passionately communicate that to the electorate.  Given the uphill nature of the challenge in this intellectually flaccid day and age, results, to use marketing parlance, aren't guaranteed.  But, as Viguerie correctly asserts, doing nothing is a recipe for failure.

Christmas 2008

Zanobi Strozzi (Italian, 1412-1468)

_____________________________________________

Anonymous Hymn

The King shall come when morning dawns,
And light triumphant breaks;
When beauty gilds the eastern hills
And life to joy awakes.

O brighter than that glorious morn
Shall this fair morning be,
When Christ, our King, in beauty comes,
And we His face shall see.

The King shall come when morning dawns,
And earth's dark night is past;
O haste the rising of that morn,
The day that aye shall last.

The King shall come when morning dawns,
And light and beauty brings:
Hail, Christ the Lord!  The people pray,
Come quickly, King of kings.

Word of God

Isiah 9:1, 5

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
Upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
For a child is born to us, a son is given us;
upon his shoulder dominion rests.
They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero,
father-Forever, Prince of Peace.

Colassians 1:12-16

Let us give thanks to the Father
for having made you worthy
to share the lot of the saints
in light.

He rescued us
from the power of darkness
and brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.
Through Him we have redemption,
the forgiveness of our sins.

He is the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creatures.
In Him everything in heaven and on earth was created,
things visible and invisible.

____________________________

May the blessings of Christ the King be with you and yours during this holy season, and throughout the New Year.

Religion & Journalism: Strange Bedfellows

Agnosticism. it's been observed, is the proving ground for would-be atheists, and secular humanism is the civic landscape on which their education reaches its zenith.  It's a process they've designed to peel away those certainties and absolutes that provide spiritual sustenance in an otherwise hostile world, while vilifying faith as an expendable relic of an oppressive past.

It's in that context that we link to Vincent Carroll's insightful piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which illustrates journalists' Achilles heel, or as he calls it, their blind spot, when it comes to dealing with religion.  You can ponder the remarkably circumscribed den of the intellectual left as described by Carroll, but we'll try to divine the predictable reticence they bring to this crucial aspect human existence. 

We begin with the premise that's so often overlooked, which is that for many on the left, post-modernism has settled the question of religion:  To wit, although they may concede that God exists, His influence in our lives is akin to a nebulous penumbra that makes no meaningful intrusions into the moral dimensions of our existence.  That translates into a role for God in earthly affairs that is contextually malleable, where we can trot him out when it's convenient, but when issues of good and evil arise, which is historically God's bailiwick, we can keep him quarantined. 

All of this ignores the fact that good and evil have been the only predictable accompaniment over the centuries, and not always in equal measure.  We need only glance at the struggle between church and state, which, during the advent of the Reformation, ably demonstrates how susceptible power is to abuse.  In the left's view, however, evil is merely a metaphorical proxy for those with dark designs, from avarice to imperialism.  But the speciousness of their gloss becomes undeniable when it comes to radical Islam, which forces them to reduce this unambiguous evil to the social work level of economic inequality.

Indeed, we can be assured that victimhood, the liberals' stock character, will always make a cameo appearance in any argument for redressing the inequities they conveniently indict as the root causes for the evil acts committed by amoral men.

Liberal journalists reserve a special disdain for Catholicism, which is the only religion with a set of inviolable rules embedded in a hierarchy that purposely retains its authority because it's not a democratic entity.  That, in itself, is anathema to the left, which ignorantly imposes cultural mob rule onto every institution, from the military to the Catholic Church. 

Finally, to many on the left, the notion that adherents to religion generally and Catholicism specifically, actually believe their church's teachings is an intellectual affront of monumental proportions, because every dimension of human activity, from economics to war to government, should be free of a morality construed--narrowly, in their view--by religious precepts.  No, they prefer the situational ethics that the post-modernists fabricated to excuse every illicit behavior, from premarital sex to abortion.

The goal of these earthly elitists is a demand-free system of ethics, one that neatly dovetails with their uniquely secularized universe where happiness is a right, not the product of living a virtuous life.  Moreover, it's a world where government intervenes to correct every real or imagined ill, where wealth and income are state-owned and dolled out in stinting measures to the 'rich' and lavishly to all others.  And, since evil has been written out of the script, there's no need for military interventions because no nation, from North Korea to Iran, is beyond our diplomatic reach.

Time will tell whether journalists will begin taking religion seriously, but if the last election was prologue, we shouldn't be so naive as to expect a miracle.

The Death of Paul Weyrich & The Challenges of Conservatism

With the death of the gifted conservative, Paul Weyrich, the movement has suffered a serious intellectual and organizational loss.  Documenting that for us is Jennifer Rubin, who outlines the political contours of conservatism's challenges, while noting some of the strategic advantages liberalism enjoys.  She candidly concedes that conservatism is "a movement that is not just intellectually depressed but organizationally weak," which is generous in its analysis, indeed.

A more probing analysis reveals some unique civic and cultural conditions that gave rise to conservatism's tarnished image.  We begin with the novel observation that conservatism ought to be the default political philosophy in a Republic whose history is so clearly rooted in principles that effectively built Western civilization.  But, just as the Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich movement began to flourish, our nation began experiencing the noxious cultural aftershocks of the post-modern 60s.

Coming to a rich, if ignoble fruition was the entire gamut of anti-establishment thinking.  It was against authority, masculinity, tradition, Western thought, power projection, all in a context where conventional notions of absolutes were being insidiously questioned.  This intellectually daft but culturally potent movement took firm control of our public school system and worked its way into the groundwater of our thinking, in the arts, entertainment, and, of course, politics.

Although conservatives were able to persuade ample majorities to join their cause under the banner of Reaganism, the intellectual over-reach by Newt Gingrich et al, led to a backlash from which the left is still drawing political capital.  The last decade is a textbook example of how an intellectually insular and cosseted elite infected our educational system and permeated our culture with its post-modern relativism, such that liberalism's pieties are now accepted by the masses as the received wisdom of our modern age.

So, how, to paraphrase a line from Shakespeare's sixty-fifth sonnet, can conservatism hold a plea, whose action is no stronger than an idea?  There's a reason that conservatives are demoralized and downtrodden:  Their ideas, which they are convinced are sterling examples of Western thought at its finest, have been cravenly misrepresented and mocked in the public square, which dovetails perfectly with every message our children receive in our taxpayer funded schools, not to mention our popular culture.

What's curious about the liberal establishment that prevailed last month is that it is so thoroughly devoid of new ideas.  Indeed, the retreaded, recycled liberalism that Obama trotted out in drag led millions to rally behind him, almost exclusively because he's a charismatic and gifted man with a persona that exudes confidence and good will.  All that's to be commended, but it would also garner respect if he had posited even one original idea.  But, every policy recommendation reflected a larger government footprint underwritten by income redistribution in the obsolete manner of the Eastern Europe of yesteryear.

But since ours is a nation whose average voter has, to put it charitably, a fleeting understanding of history, and the ideas that informed the founding of this Republic, not to mention a press that is guilty of intellectual malfeasance, Obama glided to victory.

Therefore, our challenges as conservatives are unambiguous and daunting, and finding a replacement for Mr. Weyrich in this somewhat politically arid landscape, will take God's blessings or a miracle, but preferably, both.

Kennedy Redux: The Price of Intellectual Dishonesty

We all know the Kennedy legacy is legendary, that it carries the patina of civic virtue and public service, combined, of course, with the Camelot myth, all of which have conspired to convince Caroline that the New York senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton is hers by birthright.

Advantages of birth are typically scorned by Americans, in particular those that include wealth, which Caroline unquestionably has.  But, beyond her name, what has she accomplished in the public realm?  The average U.S. senatorial candidate has a lengthy resume of elective public service, often beginning at the municipal level and working its way to the regional and state levels.  Kennedy has never held elective office.  She's a non-practicing attorney whose remarkably truncated professional career is punctuated with activism.

Of course, the same could be said of Mrs. Clinton, who, in an ironic departure from feminist pedagogy, used her marriage to a president as justification for her own senatorial run.  But what does it say about our media, which instantly swooned at the prospect of a Caroline campaign, conveniently overlooking the fact that she's done nothing to merit consideration?  Well, it tells us that star power matters far more than heavy lifting, that perseverance and discipline are for the working folk but those with celebrity status are exempt.

We're obliged to take the analysis a step further by noting that, since Kennedy hails from the proper political pedigree, the media intoxication is as predictable as it is pathetic.  The Obama love-fest witnessed the demise of their last pretense of objectivity, so this latest adolescent crush just confirms what everyone right-of-center knows, which is that the media elite is infested with hard-edged liberals who have discovered they can flaunt their partisanship with impunity.

But what are the consequences when the nation's major newspapers fail to provide the due diligence and fall sheepishly into ideological line with the Hollywood elites, the hip upper-West siders, and Georgetown cocktail circuit crowd?  We know circulation at all the major papers has been on a downward trajectory for years, but what about the quaint notion of intellectual honesty, of truth in advertising, about honoring your professional commitment to report rather than create the news?

We can give thanks for the Internet for its multifarious news and information sources, but combing the major papers for news and editorials has always been an integral part of American life because they provided meaningful balance to our understanding of events.  Although many still consult them, it's typically with a jaundiced eye, one conditioned by the fact that they've earned their reputation for having a casual allegiance to the truth.

But that won't cause a reanimation of journalistic integrity, nor should we expect them to scrutinize Kennedy they way they certainly would were she a Republican.  Moreover, since New York voters have already been politically inured to the suspect idea of electing patent neophytes to high office (having been nearly unanimous in their support for Clinton over the years, and Obama last month), this drill will be just another subplot in their modern political novel, the one in which rewards have been successfully divorced from merit.

Are Americans Ready For A Depression-Era Sense Of Sacrifice?

It's been observed that a voluntary sacrifice is the height of virtue but produces lessons with an abbreviated half-life.  In contrast, a forced sacrifice requires little virtue but its lessons are nearly eternal, written as they are in our psyche with indelible ink.  With those caveats in mind, we examine Gregory Rodriguez' piece in today's Los Angeles Times, which makes the remarkable case that Americans are eager to prove themselves as worthy as the generation that struggled its way through the Depression.

Citing A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life as the timeless transformational artworks that pressed the angels of our better nature into service, Rodriguez argues that our current economic woes offer a unique opportunity for us to "retrieve some moral clarity."  He also quotes Barack Obama, who, correctly recognizing a seminal political moment, has stated that "This country needs a sense of national purpose," and that "it's time for a new Greatest Generation."

All of this rhetorical hyperventilating, as any political exercise aficionado would tell you, can be hazardous for your civic health.  But before we run the forensics on whether or not Americans are up to a voluntary sacrifice of any magnitude, let's first look at what Obama has proffered.  Nothing in his campaign rhetoric, nor anything since he won the election, would suggest he subscribes to the civic virtues of sacrifice that was so in evidence in the 30s.  Indeed, one could argue that our era and the one some seven decades earlier are so different in degree as to constitute a different civic species.

To wit, beyond the fact that today's middle class enjoys a quality of life that would stun those who suffered the staggering penury of the 30s, those poor souls could only dream of the multi-tiered safety net that we take for granted, and, that gives rise to a misguided civic complacency regarding risk and economic misfortune.  And, isn't it the case that the nearly $1 trillion that Congress, our president, and president-elect are proposing to spend, is evidence that suffering has been consensually redacted from our civic lexicon?

Has Obama--or Bush, for that matter--outlined the contours of this collective sacrifice that Rodriquez apparently believes we're about to embark on?  Given his sense of political theater, which is admittedly uncanny, it's arguably the case that Obama correctly sees the Greco-Roman motif that's developed, one with obvious tragic dimensions, and is setting the stage for his own entrance next month.  But, consistent with the 'less is more' formula he so artfully developed during his campaign, his diagnosis of our economic challenges seems determined to leave us--the patient--out of the treatment plan.

That brings us to Obama's calculated motivation for effectively relieving us of the burden of sacrifice.  It's a dual-edged explanation, beginning with the fact that despite their policy differences, no presidential candidate, save Ron Paul, made any demands of the electorate.  Indeed, this election cycle has dramatically highlighted the grim fact that ours is the most unadultlike generation in modern history, so why should we expect our candidates to sternly lecture us about the virtue of sacrifice?

In truth, sacrifice for the modern sensibility amounts to a dial-up fate in a DSL universe, a cable menu with fewer than 100 channels, kids deprived of cell phones, or a house that's not Internet wired.  It's a view of life where failure and accountability have been rendered obsolete, where victims are omnipresent, and where excuses are minted at a brisk clip to ensure the rewards for phantom efforts keep coming.

Succinctly stated, Obama has lowered expectations for a Kennedyesque revival of sacrifice for a greater good, for kindling a national interest beyond the parochial self-interest that's as predictable as the lengthening queue, all of them waiting for their tax payer-funded handout.

We reap what we sow, so we best get used to it.

Letter Published: Auto Industry, Unions

Editor's note:  A letter submitted by ClearCommentary's editor was published in today's Colorado Springs Gazette.  Click, then scroll down to "Auto Bailout."

 

 

Which Party Truly Cares About The People

As the dust from last month's election settles and Republican angst begins to abate, a new political paradigm to reanimate conservative ideas appears to be evolving.  As has been the case historically, the most exciting activity seems to be happening at the gubernatorial level, which is the locus our Founders called the best place for policy experimentation.

Three such governors, Pawlenty from Minnesota, Jindal from Louisiana, and Barbour from Mississippi, offer promising ideas that begin with a result-oriented approach to public policy.  By side-stepping the ideologically driven arguments that shut down dialog and freeze political opportunities to win new adherents, these men are allowing the legitimacy of their arguments to become self-evident. 

In the realm of taxation, that means dismissing liberal class warfare as counterproductive and talking about the evidence for economic mobility across the entire income spectrum.  It means a cohesive economic message that telegraphs genuine concern for those struggling in the lower income quintiles and providing relief where necessary.  But it needn't mean abdicating the intellectual high road when it comes to the virtues of low taxation and restrained spending, as well as a candid discussion at the state and national level that demonstrates exactly how stifling high taxes and profligate spending can be for an economy.

This approach, whether for economic issues or foreign policy implicitly recognizes that most Americans aren't interested in ideological or academic arguments, they want results.  More precisely, they want results that make sense from their perspective, not that of politicians.  What's the best way to achieve energy independence?  By not drilling off-shore?  How can we produce superior students, by not allowing parents to choose which school best suits their children's needs?

Conservatives have the unflattering tendency to cede policy real estate to liberals because they mistakenly believe their ideas can't be translated into the kind of language palatable to the man in the street.  But that's because they're always playing defense rather than talking directly to the American people on a level that includes them in the planning stages as opposed to the authoritarian approach which presupposes they know what's best for them.

Ronald Reagan had a marvelous knack for stepping over the media and talking directly to the people, and they instantly liked what they heard because it resonated common sense.  If Republicans can find their policy footing and construct a national agenda of renewal that focuses on defined deliverables, there's a chance they can reaffirm their party as the one that truly cares about the people.

Bush, Congress: Tax Payers Must Save The Unions

When observers of the auto industry meltdown suggest that unions have played a key role in mapping their downward financial trajectory they're lectured about the purity of union motivations.  An apt example is Marie Cocco's piece in the Washington Post which artfully and with a straight face holds unions harmless in the current debacle.

It's the predictable kind of class warfare we've come to expect from the left, which is predicated on the cynical notion that middle- and lower-middle class workers are permanently frozen in their current income quintile, a specious argument, but one that helped get Obama elected.  There are many quotes we could cull from this gem of misinformation, but we'll use just one, by Vanderbilt University history professor, Gary Gerstle:

If you are a man with only a high school education ... your chances of making a wage or salary as good as what your father was making in the late 1970s are not good.

A friend of ours did some research regarding union employee expenses and found the following:

Union labor cost per hour, wages and benefits:

Ford: $70.51 ($141,020 per year)
GM: $73.26 ($146,520 per year)
Chrysler: $75.86 ($151,720 per year)
Toyota, Honda, Nissan (in U.S.): $48.00 ($96,000 per year)

According to AAUP (American Association of University Professors), the average annual compensation for a college professor in 2006 was $92,973 (average salary nationally of $73,207 + 27% benefits).

Bottom Line: The average UAW worker with a high school degree [emphasis added] earns 57.6% more compensation than the average university professor with a Ph.D., and 52.6% more than the average worker at Toyota, Honda or Nissan.

One uniquivocal result of the recent election is that capitalism will take a beating in the next four years under Obama.  If you don't believe that popular culture is riding a wave that won't crest, read Joseph Stiglitz's piece in Vanity Fair, which is transparently titled Capitalist Fools.  It's a selective itemization of alleged free-market crimes, predictably tainted with the kind of unique liberal spin for which Stiglitz is famous.  A reliable champion of draconian anti-capitalism, income redistribution, and a host of other leftist nostrums, Stiglitz nonetheless reflects the apparently broad belief that an activist government is the one that governs best.

That unions once served a laudable purpose can't be questioned, but they've long since become nothing more than extortion rings, willfully demanding more of the fiscal pie without bringing a hint added value to the deliverables.  It's a study in economic avarice, one which denies the right of an employer to negotiate a contract with a prospective employee.  The unions insert themselves into the negotiations, artificially driving up costs to the consumer.

The good news is that ours is a global economy and consumers will continue to vote with their wallets, which is to say they purchase the best product for their money.  In the case of cars, the unfortunate fact is that foreign vehicles are a better value.  The temerity of those CEOs to petition Congress for tax payer financed loan guarantees, which will support, among other injustices, the so-called 'job banks,' which allow laid-off workers to enjoy full salaries and benefits, is as astounding as it is insulting.

Yet, President Bush, falling in line behind an embarrassing line of political lemmings, including many Republicans (at least in name), will sign the bill, pushing us closer to socialism while setting the stage for Obama to launch his version of the New Deal.  It's a travesty of monumental proportions, one which would make our Founding Fathers blanch.  But in this age of intellectual indolence, it's just what the electorate ordered.

The Threat of WMD At Home

Amid the din of whining by the big-three auto CEOs calling for tax payer-funded bailouts, a little noticed report was issued this week.  It's ominous title, "World at Risk:  The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism", might bring chills to citizens nationwide, but recall that the somnolence that has descended since the left scolded Republicans about being alarmists has all but eliminated the risk of another terrorist attack on our soil, at least in our minds.

We've been among those who have argued that the measures President Bush took after 9/11, from the Patriot Act to FISA reforms, meaningfully reduced the risk of a subsequent attack.  Given Osama bin Laden's stated aim to destroy America and other Western nations, and in light of the fact that there have been dozens of attacks in the past thirty years, some pin-pricks, some abominably lethal, it takes a leap of liberal faith to conclude, as so many of them have, that the threat is a convenient political fiction spun out of thin air by conservatives.

Yet, since the report became public earlier this week, many on the left have made that case:  Indeed, Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) opined that, in advance of the Obama Administration's start next month, Congressional Republicans are playing the "fear card," which ignores the fact that it was produced by a bipartisan commission.  We wonder if she's read every word of the 160 page report, which provides substantive evidence that the United States will be attacked within the next five years, with biological or nuclear weapons.

However, more profoundly, what kind of evidence would the Harmans of the world need to convince them that this threat is real?  Does their cynicism run so deep that they question the credibility of a report that is exhaustive in its sweep and convincing in its suasion?  Apparently it does, because the past seven years are replete with examples of Democrats grandstanding, charging Republicans with inciting Americans with the threat of another attack by radical Islamics.

It's a study in political opportunism because they can exploit the emotionalism by charging Republicans with incendiary rhetoric and, as they years have gone by since 9/11 without another attack, their claims begin to have the ring of truth.  Yet, if we were attacked again on Bush's watch, they could--and would--have claimed he didn't do enough to keep us safe.

This highlights the theme we raised some time ago, that a peculiar trait of modern liberalism is that all of this seems to be a game, some kind of national contest, with the prize being the acquisition and retention of power.  The integrity and cogency of their ideas is glossed over, it's how it all makes you feel that matters.  So when they tell us the threat is a political prop used by conservatives, a stunning number of Americans seem to believe them.

No one knows what the next five years will bring, but as the barbaric acts in Mumbai have demonstrated, in an age where radical Islam is a growing around the globe, with very little planning and even less money, these savages can wreak considerable carnage.  Add to the mix biological or nuclear weapons and the death count is multiplied exponentially.

Yet many Democrats are content to game this for political advantage.  Our only hope is that Obama has the sense to appreciate the truth in these threats.  If he does, we have a reasonable chance of degrading the threat; if not, we can almost be assured of a catastrophic attack somewhere in America within five years.

A Kinder, More Statist America

The deficit-spending apparatus of the upcoming Obama presidency is in full swing.  The message working its way through the political cognoscenti is that we can expect a multi-year stimulus program that will easily exceed the trillion dollar mark.  For some this is desperately needed relief from the Bush years where government and public investments have supposedly been starved, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 

Writing in the Huffington Post, Robert L. Borasage presents the argument for the left, but consistent with the liberal mantra of treating symptoms, he fails to make the intellectual argument for the Keynesian economics that underlies his premise.  The predicate the left uses is the divisive dichotomy between "Main Street" and "Wall Street," conveniently blurring the fact that bifurcating them only has utility in the political realm.  In the real world, expanding the percent of Gross Domestic Product consumed by government has been positively correlated with inhibited economic growth, from productivity to job creation.

But liberals brush off those those concerns, not unlike the facts in arguments concerning the Iraq war, because their goal isn't a thriving economy but rather a fundamental reconfiguration of our economy, to selectively support politically sacred public projects and programs.  All of this, Borasage and his leftist brethren would have us believe, can be done without compromising our economic recovery.  But whether it's the financial or the auto sector, when you protect companies from the consequences of their poor judgment you skew their incentives to recover.

What you will never see in these kinds of paeans to public profligacy is a candid discussion concerning spending.  We can stipulate that the genetic marker in our body politic that justifies a spendthrift government has been bred by the Statist liberal sensibility over decades, but when it begins to infect Republicans, as it so obviously has, spending becomes a kind of badge of political courage.

That's where we find ourselves today as we contemplate President-elect Obama's agenda.  Having won seats in both houses, a revitalized Democratic Party correctly senses the theatrics of the moment and seems perfectly prepared to prove to the few skeptics among us that theirs is the party of large government.  Beyond the unhealthy economic impacts, the more latent, cascading effects include a blunting of civic accountability and a loss of individual liberty, which inevitably results from government incursions into erstwhile personal problems.

This is the liberals' idea of a kinder, more Statist America.

Mumbai: Of Course, It's America's Fault

As the world mourns the barbaric attacks in Mumbai, the political forensics teams are amassing to perform their dark duties of assigning blame.  For the vast majority of Americans, this was yet another example of  radical religious and political elements externalizing their apparently endless list of global grievances against the West, in particular the U.S.

However, if you're part of the victim elitist club, you see this through a dramatically different prism, one which indiscriminately indicts American foreign policy, which is a kind of cabal for the intellectual adolescents among us.  For the best example of this we turn to Deepak Chopra, the enlightened one who is something of a cult hero among the advanced wing of the human race.  Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz provides an entertaining, if manifestly disturbing portrayal of Dr. Chopra's recent appearances on CNN and Larry King.

The reflex to blame America for empirically unprovoked violence is now hard-wired into the liberal sensibility, and the artful ignorance they bring to the challenge never fails to astonish those of us who still cling to a modicum of common sense.  We can only ponder the special loathing the likes of Chopra must have for America, which is most certainly predicated on a faithfully misguided understanding of its history, principles, and, dare we say, its exceptionalism. 

But since idle speculation is not our charge, we are inclined to conclude that his motivation rests on a thoroughly misconstrued theory of both America and the nature of evil.  In the case of the former, Chopra and his ilk must cull from American history both its founding documents and its conduct on the global stage.  Those documents reflect an unprecedented respect for individual and property rights, a tripartite system of government which provides an exquisite balance of power to check hegemonic designs.  As for America's conduct as the world's premier moral exemplar, we need only look to last century's two world wars, in which it selflessly sacrificed thousands of its citizens to aid allies in desperate need.

But now we're faced with a new and unique challenge.  During the past three decades a quiescent lethality called radical Islam began growing, expressing itself in grotesque ways, from the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut to last week's massacre in Mumbai, with numerous examples of savagery in between, including, of course, 9/11.  In any world which featured a nominal consensus concerning good and evil, there would be a universal and unequivocal condemnation of this demonic group, but since distorted notions of imperialism and twisted conceptions about victimhood have been bred in our post-modern culture, a small but vociferous part of the world blames America for these heinous acts.

There are two ignoble legacies that will one day be documented in our the history books, both of which are irrefutable charges against modern liberalism:  The first, abortion, is a profound moral crime, an ethical lapse of monstrous proportions--about 52 million and counting.  The second is its utter failure to recognize evil in our midst, to conflate the perpetrators of unprovoked horrors with those who have legitimate grievances.

It takes a remarkable leap of ignorance to reach the conclusion that America is to blame for the despicable attacks in Mumbai, but liberals such as Chopra seem to excel in this regard, as it requires that special sense of enlightenment which is apparently their birthright.