A few items that I noticed or thought of while catching up on my reading:
In “The New Litmus Test”, Dean Barnett describes the most striking lesson in Democrat Paul Hackett’s near-win in the recent special election in Ohio’s 2nd District. “In spite of [his] being adamantly for gun owner’s rights, unequivocally against pulling out of Iraq until victory is achieved (‘We need to get it right, and we need to do it now,’ he said), and repeatedly disparaging his opponent for supporting Ohio’s tax-raising governor, the left-wing blogs who typically loath centrist Democrats adored Hackett.” The reason was his foul-mouthed invective against President Bush, which he prudently uttered only out of earshot of the people whom he hoped to represent. For the Angry Left, rhetoric outweighed policy. Daily Kos, MyDD and dozens of lesser lefty blogs raised lots of money for the Hackett campaign and now are eager for him to run for the Senate. If, as Mr. Barnett anticipates, this program of substance-free hatred comes to dominate the Democratic Party, American politics in the future will be even less civilized than at present. That the GOP is likely to emerge from that state of affairs as a permanent majority party will be little consolation.
A few days ago, the President fell into the bog of trying to give a politically soothing answer to a question about whether the “intelligent design” theory should be taught in schools. This is a pseudo-issue, kept alive by the media in hopes of generating tension within the Right. ID proponents have no hope of getting their doctrine into 98 percent of school districts, and, if they did, the detrimental impact on education would be trivial compared to such trends as Moslem propagandizing, neglect of foreign languages and politically correct arithmetic textbooks. To get rid of the controversy once and for all, let me offer a peace proposal:
The cornerstone of the ID movement is Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, which, in its publisher’s words, “focuses on five phenomena: blood clotting; cilia, oar-like bundles of fibers; the human immune system; transport of materials within the cell; and the synthesis of nucleotides, building blocks of DNA”. I propose that students be introduced to Dr. Behe as soon as they have mastered those topics well enough to read his book with understanding. If high school biology classes reached that level, the improvement over the status quo would be so spectacular that I doubt that any rational Darwinist would complain.
When I first saw this list of movies-in-the-works (via Midwest Conservative Journal), I took it for a parody. It isn’t. Think of how World War II might have gone if Hollywood had churned out a stream of films featuring self-sacrificing Nazis, heroic Japanese, villainous Anglo-American-Jewish plotters, and the horrors of war. Future historians, assuming that there are any, will find liberal loathing for the West as vast and perplexing a field as the Fall of the Roman Empire.
“Cheap Hope” by William Stuntz, a disabled Harvard Law professor, is about pain, hope and Heaven, and is too packed with insights to excerpt. As some guy says, Read the whole thing.
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