PROPAGANDA ON THE SYLLABUS

David Horowitz has a book coming out entitled Indoctrination U.—a sequel of sorts to last year’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

In the latter work Horowitz shows how leftist radicals—from Ward Churchill to Angela Davis—have ensconced themselves in campuses throughout the country. Indeed, Horowitz cites two prominent professors, Todd Gitlin and Richard Rorty, who openly declare that “the power base of the left in America is now in the universities”—or as Gitlin puts it, “We [the Left] lost…the politics, but won the textbooks.”

This observation is borne out in a survey conducted by Rothman, Nevitte, and Lichter—a study covering 1,643 faculty members from 183 colleges and universities. These investigators concluded that “over the course of fifteen years, self-described liberals grew from a slight plurality to a five to one majority on college faculties, while the ratio of liberals to conservatives in the general population remained relatively constant.”

One might add that the liberal-conservative ratios in newly-created “Studies” departments—Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Gender Studies—are considerably higher, assuming any conservative can be found at all.

This dearth of intellectual diversity transforms educational institutions that should be settings for open discussion and reflection into echo chambers ripe for ideological indoctrination. Such uniformity also pushes campuses further to the left—as junior faculty more and more reflect the political orientation of leftist hiring committees.

In such an environment it is a dereliction of duty to declare, as Palomar President Bob Deegan did recently, that his college has “no guidelines in course content” because it trusts the expertise of its faculty. Such an assertion is all the more troubling since a sizeable percentage of the school’s instructors are part-timers.

No responsible institution should look the other way while an instructor in an introductory English class transforms its reading list into a forum for Vagina Monologues politics. Nor should it, as a parent recently reported to me, exhibit no interest in reining in a teacher whose vulgarity and film selections allegedly made her classroom a hostile environment for conservative students.

Having taught in prep school and college for over twenty years, I know the difference between expressing a viewpoint and abusing one’s position of power. No one ever came out of my philosophy class without receiving the strongest of presentations in favor of three philosophers whose ideas I abhor—Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre. By contrast, leftists whose ideology stands in the place of religion seldom exhibit similar respect for students' autonomy.

It’s hard to say how many teachers at local schools abuse their positions by attempting to indoctrinate students. And it is unlikely that part-time instructors at a community college will be featured in Horowitz’s upcoming book.

What is beyond doubt, however, is that the current academic climate—in which Harvard’s President was forced to resign for raising a non-PC conjecture—isn’t one where administrators, parents, or students should blindly “trust” instructors with curriculum decisions.

SELF-ESTEEM, NARCISSISM, AND COMMON SENSE

Radio talk-show host Dennis Prager has a useful rule of thumb for judging studies: Either they confirm common sense or they’re wrong. The recently released study on narcissism, led by SDSU psychology professor Jean Twenge, falls in the first category.

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory used in this project solicits “agree more with” responses to statement pairs like following: “I am no better or no worse than most people. / I think I am a special person.” “I can live my life any way I want to. / People can't always live their lives in terms of what they want.” “I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve. / I will take my satisfactions as they come.”

After examining the answers of 16,000 college students who took the test from 1982 to 2006, Twenge and her colleagues concluded that “young people born after 1982 are the most narcissistic generation in recent history.” According to Twenge’s data, two-thirds of the students scored high on the narcissism index in 2006, 30% more than in 1982.

Such a result was predictable, given the self-esteem indoctrination that begins in preschool. There, the popular song “Frere Jacques” is now sung with the lyrics “I am special, I am special, Look at me….” This “loving yourself” motif continues throughout a child’s education. Even colleges frequently go out of their way to assure self-infatuated high school graduates that they deserve praise, and high marks, for work that suggests functional illiteracy.

Surprisingly, the NPI study also indicated to its sponsors (Brace yourself!) that being narcissistic is a bad thing that can even foster violence. A prime example of the latter connection, Twenge notes in a prior paper, is Columbine killer Eric Harris, who said on tape to his partner in crime, "Isn't it fun to get the respect that we're going to deserve?”

The critical terms in this convoluted, back-to-the-future confession are “deserve” and “respect.” The notion that kids “deserve respect” (and lots of it!) has been pounded into impressionable student and teacher skulls for the last three decades. Unfortunately, these entitlement lessons aren’t producing the promised results.

Instead of well-adjusted individuals who “love others because they love themselves,” we are getting maladjusted, loudmouth clones of those folks who set the standard for narcissism—celebrities. In the study’s own socio-jargon, narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

As a result of these “findings,” Twenge says that “We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back. Kids are self-centered enough already.” Who would have thought it! Children endlessly encouraged to declare how special they are, become self-centered—and when artificially bolstered egos confront reality, violence often results.

Where would we be without experts and studies? Perhaps we’d be teaching kids to be modest, work hard, and think of others—like we did before “experts” devised the bogus doctrine of self-esteem that permeates our narcissistic society.

THE ENEMY AT HOME: THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR 9/11 by Dinesh D'Souza

Osama bin Laden and the American left have forged a tacit agreement to secure the defeat of the United States in Iraq. That’s premise number one in Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The Enemy at Home. A second premise is that the global war against Islamic radicalism is linked to the Red-Blue culture war at home—and that success in the first struggle is linked to aggressive engagement in the second. A third proposition is that victory in the global war on Islamic radicalism requires an alliance between American conservatives and traditional Muslims—an alliance that deplores not only acts of terror but also the libertine culture that Blue America is exporting around the world.

D’Souza obviously knows that the American left and Muslim radicals have vastly different agendas. The former seek to make the U.S., and eventually the world, safe for pornography (i.e. for secular liberalism’s vision of individual autonomy), while the latter want to establish Sharia throughout the Middle East, then elsewhere. At present, however, a marriage of convenience exists between the atheistic left and Islamic terrorists—since both sides see their power enhanced by hanging a Vietnam-style defeat on President Bush in Iraq.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but this pairing rivals in cynicism the per-hour sexual unions employed by mullahs-in-heat to maintain de jure chastity (a curious practice described in D’Souza’s overview of Muslim mores). Still, the author’s thesis gains plausibility from the fact that OBL’s pre-election message in 2004 was largely indistinguishable from the rhetoric employed by leftists like Michael Moore. As D’Souza observes, “If you presume that [leftists] want Bush to win and bin Laden to lose the war on terror, their rhetoric and actions are utterly baffling. By contrast, if you presume that they want bin Laden to win and Bush to lose the war, then their statements and actions make perfect sense.”

But why would the American left want George Bush, and thus the U.S., to lose the war in Iraq? Put succinctly, because it “fears Bush more than bin Laden.” For leftists the “near enemy” threatens to tip the balance of judicial power, which has been employed for decades to impose liberal dogma on a reluctant public, back toward traditional jurisprudence. Consequently, a new foreign policy debacle is needed to discredit conservatives, unite liberals and leftists, and consolidate power in the hands of justices whose “sweet mystery of life” decisions consistently undermine traditional values. The left’s first priority is to defeat the “Christian fascists” in America—those folks who oppose abortion, abhor gay marriage, and embrace standards of propriety that (except for Europe and Blue America) are recognized around the globe. If countless Iraqis must die or suffer under an Iran-style regime to secure this domestic political objective, so be it.

Osama bin Laden, for his part, is happy to have American allies whose short-term foreign policy objectives coincide with his own—even if the secular left is precisely the group pushing a worldwide cultural agenda that is anathema to both Al Qaeda and traditional Muslims. The antipathy of traditional Muslims to secular hedonism is a fact largely ignored by conservatives seeking allies in the misnamed “war on terror.” D’Souza, however, far from viewing culture as a footnote, notes that Islamic radicals from Sayyid Qutb to Osama have fervently denounced the seductive power of American television, movies, music, and mores. Indeed, both radical and not-so-radical Muslims view this corrupt culture as a mortal threat to Islam. Moreover, the U.S., due to the quantity and prominence of its cultural exports, is seen as the focus of Western decadence in the world—“the head of the snake.” Neither “Western imperialism” nor (as it seems to Arabs) America’s puzzling support for Israel is viewed with similar existential dread.

To emphasize this point, D’Souza provides a penance-inducing portrait of American cultural depravity—an undertaking unprecedented among foreign policy analysts. For traditional cultures, entertainments like gangsta’ rap, Two and a Half Men, Howard Stern, and The Vagina Monologues are grossly offensive. (D’Souza gives details that transform vapid words like “explicit” and “mature” into “when I see it” obscenities that would curl Potter Stewart’s toenails.) Unlike Western liberals, Muslims in Iraq, Egypt, or Indonesia don’t equate freedom with flagrant violations of traditional morality. Indeed, for them, as for Red America, public laws that bolster families with a father, a mother, and children seem both natural and sensible—whereas a society that legalizes pornography, sexualizes children, makes abortion-on-demand a fundamental right, and puts a stamp of approval on homosexual unions seems positively demented. Yet this is the society that single-child leftists, via their Hollywood cohorts, are foisting on cultures around the world.

Moreover, because of popular resistance, leftists require the aid of U.N. agencies, Planned Parenthood, the Ford Foundation, George Soros, and various other NGOs to do to traditional cultures what they’ve already done to America. In this effort, pliable dictators often serve the left’s purposes better than democratic governments—a fact illustrated by war critics’ nostalgia for Saddam’s “equal rights for women” tyranny. (Indeed, as liberal author Thomas Frank notes, even Kansans can’t be trusted to vote as they should—thus the need for an imperial judiciary.) Liberalism and democracy, D’Souza observes, are distinct concepts, and leftists have always been willing to ditch democracy to achieve their ideological goals—social equality, lifestyle liberties, and dogmatic secularism.

The irony of this devilish compact between leftists and Islamic radicals is that Westerners who despise Islam as much as they hate traditional Christians, find themselves on the side of “redeployment”—a policy whose likely result will be the victory of radicals in Iraq. Conversely, Islamic radicals are content to empower abroad a group that sponsors aggressive global secularization. The upside of this deal for team-Osama, however, goes beyond the plum of Iraq, since its consummation highlights American weakness. Moreover, as secular liberals assume power in America, it becomes easier to convince traditional Muslims that the U.S., like the Soviet Union, is a drunken giant ready to collapse.

As D’Souza shows, leftist foreign policy has been extremely successful at conveying this impression of the U.S. to Muslim radicals. Jimmy Carter’s disastrous decision to undermine the Shah of Iran paved the way for the first Islamic state—a huge radical victory. Bill Clinton’s abrupt withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, after eighteen troops were killed in Mogadishu, inspired bin Laden to depict Americans as cut-and-run cowards. Five years later, the same President’s Monica-timed cruise missile response to devastating attacks against American embassies in Africa, led an Islamic activist to consider sending a chastity belt to the White House to help Clinton improve his aim “the next time.” D’Souza notes, poignantly, that for Clinton “there would not be a next time”—not even after an Al Qaeda orchestrated attack on the U.S.S. Cole blasted “a forty-foot hole in the ship’s hull and [killed] seventeen sailors.” Such self-defeating, feckless policies, D’Souza argues, confirmed the radicals’ belief that America, despite its wealth and military assets, had lost the will to fight. And that conviction paved the way for 9/11—thus earning the cultural left (because of its foreign policy failures and tawdry cultural exports) primary “responsibility” for those attacks.

Despite these withering cultural and foreign policy critiques, D’Souza repeatedly defends the left against charges of anti-Americanism. Leftists, the author notes, promote their beliefs, just as conservatives do. Indeed, they are even willing to employ military force, if necessary, to set up an ideological soul mate in Haiti. In the end, however, D’Souza’s defense is Pyrrhic—and is probably offered to deflect criticism of his own audacious analysis. The left’s “America,” as D’Souza shows, is a country where patriotism and religion are suspect, where loyalty rests with international organizations, and where governments exist to redistribute wealth and enforce whatever dictates du jour are issued by the gods of political correctness. Its America, in other words, is a nation that repudiates the traditional values cherished by almost all Americans up to, but not beyond, “the greatest generation.” To argue in its defense that “the left wants America to be a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill,” is no defense at all. Moreover, by D’Souza’s lax standard, even Americans who spied for the Soviets could be deemed patriotic, since they also wished to make the country better—in the image of Joseph Stalin. More to the point, leftists who now want America to lose the war in Iraq and become like Europe are cosmopolitans, not patriots. They “love America” the same way Howard Zinn does—with reckless contempt.

D’Souza’s proposals for defeating the Al Qaeda-Michael Moore axis include perseverance in the attempt to establish a democratic Iraq. Also needed, but at present woefully lacking, is serious political focus on the values that Red America shares with most Muslims around the world. Rather than demonizing Islam, defending the newly-minted right to blaspheme, and pushing Western cultural standards on reluctant Muslims, conservatives should denounce the corrupt culture promoted by the secular left and embrace the right of Muslims to configure democracies that reflect their religious and historical traditions. Instead of lecturing Arab women on the joys of chauffeurless driving, administration officials should join forces with them in conferences designed to showcase the devastation wrought by Western pop-culture. Only by highlighting the ideals cherished by Red America (natural rights and external moral standards) and repudiating the excesses of Blue America can conservatives hope to persuade traditional Muslims that at least half of the U.S. (the half despised by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins) isn’t intent on destroying their faith.

That “traditional Muslims are the only people who are capable of stopping radical Islam” is a notion that’s been bandied about in discussions of the “war on terror.” D’Souza’s book, however, fleshes out the stark implications of that thought. Moderate or liberal Muslims, the author jokes, are already on our side—all eight of them. The remaining billion-plus, however, won’t be won over by plaintive denunciations of terrorism or by rapturous paeans to freedom—not as long as they equate “freedom” with Western decadence and “terror” with the only practical means of resisting corruption. Nor will they sign up to fight against fellow believers when reckless statements about their religion are made by supporters of a war against “Islamic fascism.” To win the hearts and minds of Muslims, “democracy” and “freedom” must mean something other than MTV and rigidly enforced public secularism. And for this to happen, American rhetoric and policy, vis-à-vis traditional Islamic culture, must change.

Whether most Americans are capable of appreciating and adopting these intellectual distinctions is doubtful—as is also their willingness to publicly denounce, alongside Muslims, the decadent culture in which they have marinated for almost half a century. Certainly, American leftists and their cohorts in the media will dismiss these ideas as the ravings of a right-wing theocrat. (The author provides a list of prominent leftists and leftist groups at the end of his book.) Moreover, assuming D’Souza’s analysis of the traditional-radical split in Islam is accurate, it is far from clear that “traditionals” who are currently on the terrorism fence will put their faith in a divided-against-itself country whose cultural exports show no signs of changing in the foreseeable future.

Given these obstacles, D’Souza’s concession that his recommendations aren’t easy may qualify as the understatement of the post 9/11 century. Still, if traditional Muslims are, indeed, the key to stopping radical Islam, one wonders what other options are available to win their support.


Review by Richard Kirk

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer who lives in Oceanside, CA. He is a regular columnist for San Diego’s North County Times and has been published in several Southern California newspapers. His book reviews have appeared in The American Enterprise, First Things, Touchstone, The American Spectator Online, and the California Republic website. See his blog, Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer.

ANN COULTER VS BILL MAHER

Ann Coulter uses the term "faggot" in a joke about John Edwards. Her comment is publicized prominently on TV and rightly denounced. Fair enough.

Bill Maher says the world would be better off (a lot fewer dead people) if Dick Cheney were himself dead. MSM response? Almost non-existent.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11169

VAGINA MONOLOGUING WITH ISLAM: THE ENEMY AT HOME

A teacher of an entry-level college English class at Palomar College assigns a book, The Vagina Monologues, that glorifies the rape of a 13-year-old girl by an adult woman. One would think that this fact, when publicized, would generate a swell of indignation—especially in conservative North San Diego County. Not so.

Rather, such response as there was focused largely on the bogus issue of academic freedom—as if academia weren’t, next to Hollywood, the most censorious institution in America, inundating students with politically correct dogma and marginalizing ideas that don’t conform to secular orthodoxy.

The duplicity of secular “freedom,” which vilifies all dissent as racist, sexist, religious, or homophobic, is among the topics discussed in Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home. (A prior work, Illiberal Education, focused exclusively on leftist hypocrisy on campus.) But the heart of D’Souza’s recent work involves the explosive effect of American decadence on Muslims abroad.

One of the first examples offered by the Hoover Institution scholar concerns the worldwide publication of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, a play that is “routinely performed in more than twenty countries.” Some of the “vagina occurrences” from the book version of the play that D’Souza offers his readers include Glenn Close getting “2,500 people to stand up and chant the word ‘cunt,’” Roseanne performing “‘What Does Your Vagina Smell Like?’ in her underwear for two thousand people,” and “Alanis Morissette and Audra McDonald sing(ing) the cunt piece.”

D’Souza grants that a book like this may embarrass many Americans, but adds, “one can only imagine how it is received in traditional cultures where the public recitation of such themes and language is considered a grotesque violation of manners and morals.” The author also notes that Pakistan and Egypt are among the countries in which the book version of the play is now sold in translation.

With PR of this stripe, it’s easy to understand why bin Laden can plausibly label America “the worst civilization in the history of mankind” and pin the name of Satan, the great Tempter, on a country whose decadence is spreading to cultures that American leftists despise only slightly less than they despise the “Christian fascists” in their own country.

D’Souza provides numerous examples of the emphasis placed by Islamic radicals on American licentiousness—a theme consistently ignored by liberals who insist that Muslim rage must coincide with their own political and economic critiques of U.S. policy. D’Souza further argues that successful prosecution of the war against radical Islam requires an alliance between social conservatives in the United States and traditional Muslims throughout the world—an alliance that assures Muslims that Americans are also appalled at the profound decadence routinely displayed in their popular and elite culture.

Unfortunately, judging from the response to my prior column, there seem to be few Americans willing to risk criticism for the sake of decency—certainly not enough to stem the tide of depravity that promises to engulf this country, with or without the aid of foreign radicals.

IMAGINE: SEX ORGANS 101

Imagine a college English course in which a male instructor assigns a book that focuses crass attention on the male reproductive organ—names men have for it, how it might dress, what it would say if it could talk? Imagine that this shallow piece of faux-literature was filled with ridiculous paeans to the godlike quality of the penis. And imagine this vile work having a chapter that romanticizes the molestation of a thirteen-year-old-boy by an adult male.

Can you see college administrators saying, in response to complaints, that it trusts the judgment of its instructors? Can you envision adults taking all this in stride and even noting that such a text is sure to spur interesting discussions? Can you picture in your mind someone comparing this tasteless tripe to a literary classic?

One can hardly imagine such an insensitive, politically incorrect course ever seeing the light of day. And if it did, outrage, firings, and lawsuits would follow posthaste.

Now imagine English 100 at a community college. Imagine a short reading list that includes Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues and a lurid essay by bell hooks called Penis Passion. Imagine a monologue called “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could,” that highlights a female’s fond recollection of being seduced at age thirteen by a “gorgeous twenty-four-year-old woman.”

Actually, one needn’t visualize such a course, since it was offered at Palomar College by an adjunct professor. Indeed, the course was thought sufficiently controversial to deserve a warning label—so it’s unlikely administrators were unaware of its content. Yet even after a public complaint, President Bob Deegan was satisfied to say, “There are no guidelines in course content because we trust professors to choose the right materials.”

To date, commentary on this incident has been decidedly ho-hum, and largely of the academic freedom variety. Any honest adult knows, however, that if the sex of the instructor, the offensive materials, and the complainant were reversed, there would be hell to pay. No one would be suggesting that academic freedom covers benign depictions of child molestation and gross, male-centered vulgarity. So why isn’t what’s sauce for the gander, sauce for the goose?

The truth is that higher education is on the cutting edge of societal decadence and that “academic freedom” is now an Orwellian concept used to sanction whatever immoral, intolerant, and conspiratorial lies are being proffered by tenured leftists. (Ward Churchill springs to mind.) Likewise, “diversity” is the term most employed to stifle dissent. Note the Arizona State University resident assistant who was put on probation after objecting to the school’s mandatory sensitivity training—a popular program that reeducates employees to the way white, heterosexual males and religious folk victimize every other grievance group in society.

Morality simply isn’t a component in the thought of elites who view The Vagina Monologues as feminist scripture. For them, politics trumps morality every time. That’s the sole reason this line was omitted from later editions of the play: “…if it was rape, it was a good rape.”

WANTED: ANOTHER REAGAN (Patriot Post 2/2/07)

Last month the Czech capital of Prague announced its decision to erect a monument to honor Ronald Reagan. And why not? Similar monuments to the man already exist in Budapest and Warsaw, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. http://PatriotPost.US/services.asp

It is entirely proper that our nation's 40th President bememorialized in cities once shrouded by the Iron Curtain. According to one Czech paper, after his 1983 "Evil Empire" speech, "President Reagan was probably the most hated and ridiculed of all the Western leaders by the former communist regime. The communist media relentlessly condemned what they called 'Reagan's war-mongering' and the arms race." Then again, these were state-run media whose leading insights on America came courtesy of CNN.

Following Reagan's death in 2004, Czech Senator Jan Ruml, a pro-democracy dissident imprisoned under the communist regime, recalled the significance of the U.S. President's staunch support for himself and his compatriots."

In the 1980s we placed our hopes in Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher," said Ruml. "The fact that someone out there called communism by its proper name and actually did something to promote freedom and democracy helped us a great deal. Ronald Reagan was the man instrumental in bringing down communism and we should all remember him with great respect as the man thanks to whom weare enjoying our present freedom." This is high praise, indeed, coming as it does from a man with a first-person perspective oncommunist tyranny.

Announcing the overwhelming public desire to honor Reagan, Prague's 6th-District mayor, Tomas Chalupa, agreed. Reagan's central place in Czech history is assured, he said, as "the most important personality that enabled the fall of communism."

Born in Tampico, Illinois, to Jack and Nelle Reagan on 6 February 1911, the Gipper would have turned 96 this Tuesday. It's a fitting occasion, then, on which to ponder an important question: To what extent have we honored the conservative ideals of the Reagan Revolution?

When the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan introduced conservative candidate Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican National Convention (and in so doing launched his own political career), he too understood the need to ask how freedom-loving Americans had honored their heritage:

"It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, 'We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind forself government.' This idea---that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power---is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

Today, Reagan's "A Time for Choosing" (http://Reagan2020.US/speeches/A_Time_for_Choosing.asp) is considered one of the defining statements of 20th-century conservatism, and the choice he outlined is no less vital in 2007.

In another seminal speech, "The New Republican Party," (http://Reagan2020.US/speeches/The_New_Republican_Party.asp on his birthday in 1977---two gubernatorial terms and one presidential bid later---Reagan had not altered his theme:

"When a conservative quotes [Thomas] Jefferson that government that is closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of empire... Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way---this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now,but from what has happened before."

As President, Ronald Reagan did not waver from the precepts of conservatism he'd laid out in those earlier years. He enacted Executive Order12612 (http://Reagan2020.US/federalism.asp) on federalism "to restore the division of governmental responsibilities between the national government and the States that was intended by the Framers of the Constitution and to ensure that the principles of federalism established by the Framers..."

"Constitutional authority for Federal action," the Order read, "is clear and certain only when authority for the action may be found in a specific provision of the Constitution, there is no provision in the Constitution prohibiting Federal action, and the action does not encroach upon authority reserved to the States." Freedom, Reagan understood, was dependent on the limitation and division of governing powers.

Later that same year, on 12 June 1987, despite the objections ofthe State Department and the National Security Council, President Reagan uttered these forceful and historic words before listeners at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin:

"General-Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open thisgate... Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

In this sense, our friends in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland honor this man for the same reasons that we in the United States honor him today: Ronald Reagan didn't simply stand for the dissolution of communism; he stood for the building up of a new edifice of individual liberty and limited government where that awful, all-powerful state once stood.

As the ostensible heirs of the Reagan Revolution, today'sRepublicans are committed to subsidizing prescription drugs, leaving no child behind, enlarging the federal footprint in the private sector and inventing government solutions to non-government problems. So we must ask the question once again: To what extent have they honored the Reagan Revolution? To what extent have they honored "the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers"?

Like Ronald Reagan's foes on both sides of the Berlin Wall, these Republican leaders seem all too willing, all too often, to expandthe state at the expense of liberty. With candidates aplenty andthe 2008 election just around the corner, let's hope and pray that a true conservative---a Reagan conservative---will soon emerge.

HOW TO PROMOTE GANGS

In December Superior Court Judge Joan Weber implored Oceanside’s Mesa Margarita residents to stand up against the gang violence that is ruining their community. Five days later Officer Dan Bessant was shot and killed during a traffic stop in that same neighborhood. Two alleged gang members have been charged with the crime.

This month the county District Attorney is seeking injunctions that would expand the size of Escondido’s anti-gang “safety zones” and increase the number of gang members subject to various activity, association, and dress restrictions.

Judge Weber’s cri de coeur is understandable. Yet it’s as unlikely to change the situation on the ground as Peter Finch’s famous “I’m as mad as hell” rant in the movie “Network.” By contrast, the anti-gang injunctions that civil libertarians decry have had some success—as when these measures were instituted in Oceanside in the late 90s.

But what is the remedy for Los Angeles, home to an estimated 700 gangs with 40,000 members? There gang-related crime increased 14 percent last year—while crime citywide fell. Meanwhile, gang-related crime jumped 42% in the San Fernando Valley.

It’s ironic that “big picture” folks are so willing to play small-ball when it comes to explaining the proliferation of gangs. More federal dollars for law enforcement and a few education programs is about all they come up with. Anyone seriously interested in the “big picture” should consider these three factors: family structure, popular culture, and illegal immigration.

Gangs are family surrogates that take the place of intact homes. When more than two-thirds of black children in America, and one-third of all children, are born out of wedlock, the number of young males desperately looking for someone to show them what it means to be a man is substantial.

Furthermore, these youngsters find in the popular culture numerous “artists” who glamorize gangbanging as the route to “respect” in a presumably hostile and racist society. Instead of encouraging kids to rise above their circumstances or cast down their buckets where they are, the Hollywood bling crowd promotes low-riding pants, tattoos, attitude, and street-cred. Poor government-monopoly schools reinforce these low aspirations.

Thirdly, illegal immigrants and their children are susceptible to the blandishments of gangs because their ties to the country in which they now live are tenuous and their educational prospects dim. It’s hard to feel a part of a society whose language and culture is different from your own and whose laws you and your friends are daily violating. Accordingly, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has noted that many powerful gangs in Southern California are composed mostly of illegals.

Unfortunately, instead of recognizing the crucial role played by intact families, we pretend that marriage doesn’t matter. Instead of vilifying rappers and their corporate sponsors, elites tout these pimps as authentic voices. And instead of taking immigration laws seriously, politicians erect a wall of separation between INS and local police. No wonder cities are reduced to defensive tactics and judges to pathetic pleas in the face of gang violence.

A RESPONSE TO TEN ATHEIST MYTHS

Dr. Gideon Rappaport responds poignantly to "Ten Atheist Myths" -- a post that concerns ten (presumed to be) myths about atheists.

THE COSTS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

It was atop the front page of Sunday’s January 7 North County Times: “40 percent of Medi-Cal births are to non-citizens.” Only substituting the word “illegals” for “non-citizens” could have made the headline more stark. And even as it was, a prominent 3-D graphic announced “The Cost of Illegal Immigration.”

The 40% figure concerned the 5,814 taxpayer-funded births in San Diego County in 2004. Statewide the figures were 42.6% and 105,665—numbers whose size partially explains why the government report was “quietly released last spring.”

Another reason is contained in Pat Buchanan’s book, State of Emergency—namely, that Los Angeles County, which was 82% non-Hispanic and white in 1960 is now home to a Mexican population that is “second only to that of Mexico City.” Meanwhile, the county’s Anglo population has “dwindled to 31 percent.”

Numbers like these (and the fact that since 1980 criminal aliens in state and federal prisons have grown from 9,000 to 125,000) make understandable local attempts to resist the wave of immigration that is changing the complexion of America from a nation that was 2.6% Hispanic in 1950 to one where that rubric applies to around 14.4% of the population.

Most illegals, and certainly most legal immigrants, are neither violent criminals nor regular welfare recipients. And Buchanan himself acknowledges that the desire of hard-working Mexicans to improve their lot north of the border is perfectly understandable. What isn’t so understandable is the willingness of Americans to believe that a massive migration of individuals from Mexico to the United States can occur without incurring costs more far-reaching than Medi-Cal dollars. As the economist Robert Samuelson has said, “No society has a boundless capacity to accept newcomers, especially when many are poor and unskilled.”

One consequence of America’s recent border policy has been an upsurge in the number of low-income Californians. Buchanan notes that as wealthy Californians proliferated in the 1990s, the state’s share of “people mired in poverty rose by 30 percent.” The result, according to Ruth Milkman, director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, is that LA County began “to resemble much more a Third World society where a class of people are stuck at the bottom.” Among San Diego’s fears of Los Angelization, this factor should be at the top of the list.

Another consequence of our border policy has been the creation of a large sub-culture whose roots are, as last year’s marches demonstrated, still planted in Mexican soil. The idea that two different cultures with two different languages will amicably inhabit the same land is a notion that anyone familiar with the history of Czechoslovakia, Quebec, or the Balkans should indulge with caution.

One reason this potential clash of civilizations hasn’t been taken seriously by American elites is that they themselves no longer value the nation’s historical traditions—as anyone who reads Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States can tell. Unlike most blue-collar Americans, many academic and corporate elites pledge allegiance to international flags—that is, to no country at all.

MT. SOLEDAD AND THE SECULAR SIEVE

The lawsuit centered on the Mt. Soledad cross will complete its 18th year in May without its initial litigant, Philip Paulson, who passed away in 2006. A great deal of time and passion has been expended on that suit (and on others) to make sure that religious expression is quarantined in a way that applies to no other set of ideas.

The pretext for this policy is recent, dating from around 1970. According to the “living document” school of constitutional interpretation, “establish­ment of religion” no longer means what it clearly meant in 1791—i.e. a government funded institution like the Church of England. Instead, it means any “excessive entanglement” of government with things religious.

“Excessive” entanglement was later revised to mean any government-affiliated religious expression whatsoever, including invocations at high school graduations, Christmas nativity scenes, and, according to some 9th Circuit judges, the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Indeed, our black-robed betters have decreed that the only religious trappings of our heritage that are “constitutionally” permitted are those with no religious significance. That is, as long as no one takes “In God We Trust” seriously, it can remain on our currency.

I doubt that this fingers-crossed jurisprudence is more than a way station to a religionless public square where the only exceptions are existing monuments that bear witness to a time when the Constitution wasn’t wax in the hands of secular sculptors.

It’s ironic that advocates of church-state separation (more accurately, religion-state separation) appeal regularly to Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists—as if that missive were scripture. Jefferson, after all, was a vocal opponent of what is today called “judicial activism.” And our third president issued frequent warnings about the Constitution becoming a mere scrap of paper subject to legal deconstruction.

Moreover, Jefferson was a strong advocate of limited government who would be appalled at the size and scope of the public sector today. Nowadays, government at all levels affects almost every segment of life—directly controlling about 35% of the nation’s GDP and indirectly leveraging (via loan and other programs) another chunk of our culture.

Were governments the size they were at the start of the 20th century, the religious cleansing of the public square would have “only” a symbolic impact. But since government, in accord with socialist inclinations, insinuates itself into vast areas of public life, the reinterpretation of the first amendment has had far-reaching consequences—functioning like a secular sieve to transform the dollars of God-fearing taxpayers into greenbacks that promote ever-expanding “god-free” zones. In these areas, ideas that presuppose a godless universe are regarded as “neutral” expressions of free speech not subject to the special restrictions put on religion.

Even an unorthodox theist like Jefferson would find such judicial-sponsored gag rules more odious than the reasonable reflection of religious belief in a government designed to represent those same individuals. At present, a largely religious nation must pay tribute to the “gods” of secularism while courts declare that this shell game is demanded by a “living” Constitution.

THE GRINCH THAT INVENTED KWANZAA

Who is Professor Ron Karenga? Karenga is the inventor of Kwanzaa—the tradition begun in 1966 that is now given respectful deference by educators and P.C. mediacrats. Part of the puffing up of Kwanzaa involves strict inattention to the biography of its creator—a man who not only boasts two Ph.D.s (one from the former U. S. International University) but who also spent four years in prison.

Details of alleged criminal acts are available under Karenga’s name in David Horowitz’s alphabetically arranged book, The Professors. Here’s a sample: “The victims Deborah Jones and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothing.” Other allegations, apparently convincing to jurors, involved putting a hot soldering iron in Davis’ mouth, tightening a vise on one of Jones’ toes, and holding the two women hostage at gunpoint.

The professor and his two “United Slaves” cohorts (an organization also founded by Karenga in the 60s) were convicted of felonious assault and false imprisonment. Karenga was sentenced to prison in September of 1971, and released in 1975. Shortly thereafter Karenga secured a faculty position at San Diego State University. (Horowitz notes, “Apparently a nationwide search for applicants was unable to turn up a better candidate.”)

In 1977, now at Cal State Long Beach, Karenga explained that Kwanzaa serves as an alternative to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim holiday traditions. He also wrote extensively about its seven principles: unity (umoja), collective responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), purposeful development of one’s people (nia), group autonomy (kujichagulia), communal creativity (kuumba), and faith in one’s people, parents, and teachers (imani). (Ann Coulter rudely noted that these seven principles are the same collectivist beliefs touted by the Symbionese Liberation Army—the 70s terrorist group that kidnapped Patty Hearst.)

Karenga has kept out of legal trouble since 1975. Indeed, in 1989 he became head of the Black Studies Department at Cal State Long Beach, making good on the Swahili title "Maulana" (Master Teacher) that he bestowed upon himself in the 60s. (Only in America’s university system can one go from prison to department head in less than fifteen years.) Nowadays, Karenga’s comments in support of Cuban Internationalism and against the “state terrorism” and “mass murder” perpetrated by “the U. S. and its allies” make him a team player in the academy.

With the mainstreaming of Kwanzaa, Karenga has toned down the separatist, anti-religious rhetoric that he employed when touting the “sevenfold path of blackness”—“think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black.” Indeed, Karenga now denies that Kwanzaa was created “to give a Black alternative to the existing holiday”—though those very words appear in his earlier writings.

What is clear is that Kwanzaa didn’t originate in any authentic African tradition or in ideas that transcend racial solidarity—ideas like “Peace on earth. Good will toward men.”

Prof. Rodney Stark on Evolution and the Origin of Species

Here's an article from The American Enterprise, September, 2004, that deals with the issues adumbrated in my review of Dawkins' book. An addendum by Freeman Dyson (in the TAE article) provides an intellectual dessert.

THE GOD DELUSION by Richard Dawkins: A HEAVYWEIGHT REVIEW OF A LIGHTWEIGHT BOOK

“Sublimely non-tendentious,” that’s the phrase I’ve always attributed to Alfred North Whitehead—a man who began his career as a Cambridge mathematician collaborating with Bertrand Russell and ended that career as a Harvard philosopher and metaphysician. Two things you can count on when reading Whitehead. First, he will look at the big picture. Second, he will generously give to all historical players the credit due to them. I make these points to contrast Whitehead’s modus operandi with the scattershot pettiness that pervades Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion.

Here’s a sample taken from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World—a stunningly insightful text based on the Lowell Lectures of 1925: “The Reformation and the scientific movement were two aspects of the [historical] revolt which was the dominant intellectual movement of the later Renaissance. The appeal to the origins of Christianity, and Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient causes as against final causes, were two sides of one movement of thought.”

And again: “I do not think…that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope…. My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology.”

To simplify, both the Reformation and modern science arose out of a “movement of thought” that, in the case of science, rebelled against final causes. Yet, ironically, the confidence that modern science displays in its intellectual project rests upon an unconscious faith in the universe’s detailed rationality that was derived from medieval theology.

Don’t look for anything like this kind of subtle analysis in The God Delusion. What you’ll find, instead, is page after sarcastic page of attacks against any foe Dawkins considers an easy target: Pat Robertson, Pastor Ted Haggard, Ann Coulter, a small fundamentalist school in Northeast England (to which 7 of Dawkins’ 374 pages are devoted), Pastor Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps, Dr. James Dobson, and, of course, G. W. Bush—who supposedly invaded Iraq because he was told to do so by God. Even poor Carl Jung is made into a kook by Dawkins for believing “that particular books on his shelf spontaneously exploded.” (I’ve read a number of works written by Freud’s unfaithful protégé and have yet to encounter the concept of spontaneous book combustion. Dawkins, however, as with the comment about President Bush and Iraq, doesn’t bother to provide references for these claims.)

When it comes to magnanimity, here’s a sample of the author’s generosity: “To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird.” This comment shows the contempt Dawkins consistently displays for ideas that don’t conform to his own—a bio-creed that includes the following affirmations: life emerged on earth due to random interactions of material elements; life evolved from its primitive forms to its current complexity because of natural selection; no god is needed to make sense of these (or any other) phenomena.

In truth, Dawkins’ entire book is an exercise in contempt—summarily dismissing Thomas Aquinas’ theological arguments and devoting less than 100 breezy pages to the whole issue of God’s existence. The rest of Dawkins’ book discusses—with the jaundiced eye of an H. L. Mencken in biological drag—how religious beliefs are given undue social deference, why Einstein’s references to God aren’t religious, why eastern religions aren’t religions, why religion developed (socio-biologically), how the Bible is a jumble of historical trash, how religion promotes intolerance and undermines science, how Hitler may have been Catholic, why Stalin’s atheism doesn’t matter, why society doesn’t need religion to be moral, why Jefferson was probably an atheist (the non-mentioned God-statements on the Jefferson Memorial to the contrary notwithstanding), why studying religion to understand literary references is ok, and why parents indoctrinating their children with religious beliefs should be viewed as child abuse. (The depth of Dawkins’ political thought is shown by his failure to ponder for one second the implica­tions of a government that can tell parents what beliefs they can and cannot transmit to their offspring.)

Far from being a serious philosophical book, this ill-edited and garrulous diatribe contains just about anything that crosses the author’s mind—including numerous quotes from that popular author, atheist, and graduate student, Sam Harris. What one won’t find in The God Delusion is serious curiosity about the essential nature of the universe. The billions upon billions of stars and galaxies that Carl Sagan invoked with semi-mystical awe, become, for Dawkins, a mere premise for his theoretical conceit that random interactions could have produced the phenomenon of life on earth. (With so many planets, it had to have happened somewhere!) Never mind the fact that scientists endowed with that mysterious chemical characteristic known as consciousness can’t, with purposeful intent, replicate that vital accident. And never mind that scientists like DNA-theorist Francis Crick were so baffled by the complexity of early life forms that they toyed with a panspermia hypothesis according to which space aliens brought life-seeds to earth. And finally, never mind the embarrassing fossil-record confession by the late Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, that “most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth” and that in any local area, “a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.’”

Dawkins’ treatment of that mathematical genius and 17th century philosopher, Blaise Pascal, is typical of his general approach. Dawkins seizes on Pascal’s weakest argument, the wager, and ridicules its obvious flaws. Ignored are the well-known passages that ground Pascal’s (oft-wavering) faith in the inadequacy of the human mind to deal with the enormity of the universe—both the infinitely large and the infinitely small. In Pascal’s words, “The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short, it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God that imagination loses itself in that thought.”

Had Dawkins bothered to cite this assertion, he would doubtless have countered it with replies that recur throughout his book. First, the awe that Pascal discusses has nothing to do with religion. Rather, it’s the kind of atheistic wonder that’s typical in scientists like Einstein. Second, this “God of the gaps” argument simply fills in the blanks of our ignorance with a destructive, curiosity-impeding concept. Third—and this is Dawkins’ favorite argument—the complexity of a God who created the world requires explanation. Put simply: Who made God?

Worshipful humility in the face of mind-boggling (possibly parallel) universes is an emotion foreign to Dawkins—though the academic pugilist does admit to feeling very lucky. As for the “Who made God?” argument, this retort (convincing to any skeptical freshman who hasn’t read Aristotle or Kant) ignores the fact that philosophical explanations, as Wittgenstein and others have noted, have to end somewhere. The real question is whether one’s explanation terminates with a meaningless cosmos or with a being who provides a reason for things. Dawkins, without further ado, assumes that the former alternative is the only rational choice. In this way he gives tacit expression to the point of view that Whitehead criticized some 80 years ago:

“There persists…throughout the whole [modern] period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. It itself, such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also, it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.”

Whitehead continues, displaying the non-tendentiousness to which I previously referred, “It [scientific materialism] is not wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once.”

In other words, once we look for a rational ground for complex development, self-consciousness, aesthetics, morality, and the universe itself, Dawkins’ brute facts (which in the world of quantum physics are neither brutish nor facts) look extremely lame. This lameness, I should add, comports nicely with the pleasure-based ethical system to which Dawkins appeals with no particular rigor.

Overall, Dawkins’ “philosophy” amounts to little more than this unintentionally humorous observation by Dr. Edward Tryon that was quoted in a Time-Life book on cosmology, “Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.” That’s reason according to Dawkins—a man whose cultural and philosophical observations are predictably au courant, consistently dogmatic, and largely unreflective. He is the un-Whitehead, a man who will never (barring divine intervention) appreciate this sublime comment by my philosophical mentor: “In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

37% ILLEGITIMACY RATE -- HO HUM

37% of all children born in the United States are “illegitimate.” I use the now-banished term to emphasize the coincidence of our kinder, gentler linguistic habits and the devastating increase in “out-of-wedlock” births.

In 2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 1.5 million of the 4.1 million births in this country were to unmarried women—most in their 20s. Fifty years ago, when “illegitimacy” still existed as a social stigma, the number of children born without the benefit of married parents was about 5%. Apparently the progressive policy of social sensitivity hasn’t been a boon to those children for whom it was supposedly instituted.

Despite the rationalizations of 60s and 70s sociologists, it eventually became clear that what ails most children with one parent isn’t a social stigma, but rather the fact that they have only one parent—usually a mom. Unfortunately, our post-Murphy Brown society now casually accepts even the actions of terminally selfish women who deliberately deprive their children of a father—just as it casually ignores the consequences.

One study, for example, found that 90% of the rise in violent crime between 1973 and 1995 could be related to out-of-wedlock births. Another found that cohabitation is 10 times more prevalent now than in 1980, and that kids in these homes are twice as likely to see mom and dad split up than children whose parents have that “meaningless scrap of paper”—a marriage certificate. Indeed, fewer than half of cohabiting couples stay together more than five years—the typical duration being 18 months. Most depressingly, kids in these “test drive families” are vastly more likely to be abused. (See data at cwfa.org and at divorcereform.org.)

As these statistics show, the destigmatizing of America has coincided with the demoralization of America. Indeed, one has to tune in Dr. Laura to get a taste of the phrases most folks would have employed fifty years ago—“shack-up honey,” “unpaid whore,” and “do it for the kids.” (The last statement is perhaps the one that’s most despised today.)

It isn’t unusual for irresponsibility and selfishness to parade around in respectable linguistic garments. I’m confident that most of the effort to destigmatize illegitimacy arose not from a deep concern for the welfare of children but rather from an unstated desire to normalize promiscuity. The latter goal was quickly accomplished by substituting the term “sexually active” for the p-word and by illustrating, ad nauseam, the pain-free joys of extramarital sex on the boob tube.

No more does our tolerant culture make individuals feel bad about doing bad things. We’re more “mature” than our judgmental grandparents. Ignored is the other side of the equation—including the millions of unlucky kids whose egg- and sperm-donors take parenthood less seriously than driving an automobile. The latter activity, at least, requires a license.

WHO'S KILLING JFK?

James Joyce once remarked that Rome reminded him of a man who made his living “by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” It strikes me that this observation applies more aptly to the commercial exploitation of President Kennedy’s assassination. After more than four decades, no scrap of evidence is immune from being dislodged, mutilated, and reconstructed so as to fit more securely into the imaginative web of an aspiring conspiracy theorist.

Did Oswald act alone? Was there a gunman on the grassy knoll? Did the doctors at Parkland Hospital alter their autopsy report? Was Kennedy’s body transferred to another coffin? Was the assassination a military coup d’etet “with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings”?

This last theory—concocted by Oliver Stone for the movie JFK—surpasses all previous efforts in combining ideological rigidity, factual manipulation, and commercial exploitation. The truthfulness of this assessment is open to any reader willing to peruse the writings of lawyer David Belin (Final Disclosure), writer Gerald Posner (Case Closed), and Brandeis Professor Jacob Cohen (“Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” June, 1992, Commentary).

The sad fact is that the dead president has entered the marketplace as a salable item. His death is not a question of historical interest but an exploitable commodity that may be packaged with impunity. Is it really a desire to get at the truth that motivates the never-ending publication of conspiracy books and the periodic production of television specials commemorating that fateful November day?

Why—if the media are really interested in the truth—are most Americans ignorant of even rudimentary facts about the case? When, for example, can you remember any prominent member of the Fourth Estate mentioning these critical facts: Oswald worked at the book depository; eyewitnesses actually saw someone shoot at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the building; a witness 110 feet from the window provided police a description that fit Oswald quite well; no one else was with Oswald at the time of the shooting; most aural witnesses heard three shots; Oswald brought some “curtain rods” wrapped in brown paper to work with him that morning; that brown paper, three cartridge cases, and a recently fired rifle were all found on the sixth floor of the depository; this rifle had been mail-ordered by Oswald a few months earlier; Oswald alone left the building after the assassination and later murdered a police officer in front of several eyewitness; Oswald kept an “Historic Diary” that made clear his radical political views and mental instability.

I could go on and on. I mention only a few highlights from the mountain of evidence that convinced three government committees that Oswald alone killed the president. The sad conclusion to which I must come is that most people involved in the mass dissemination of information are not really interested in these facts. They want an angle.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Information constantly rewrote history to fit the party’s ideological requirements. Our reality is more crass. History today has become a victim of the marketplace. Truth and decency are the casualties. In such a society, lusting for scandal, some people are obviously slain in perpetuity.

LIBERTY FILM FESTIVAL: CONSERVATIVES AND MEDIA

The third annual Liberty Film Festival opened Friday, November 10, with a minor galaxy of Hollywood conservatives in attendance. Comedy producer David Zucker and 24’s Joel Surnow began the festivities with an hilarious screening of a pilot that may actually become the right-wing alternative to The Daily Show. In this slick Oval Office skit, the deficit-size laughs attending President Rush Limbaugh were only topped at the entrance of Vice-President Ann Coulter. If the pilot is picked up, it would constitute a huge comedic counterattack in the media wars.

Following this opening, festival directors Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murry noted that LFF was now sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and that together they constitute “the premier conservative film and cultural organization in America.” Some weeks ago Apuzzo gave substance to that impressive description by distributing early copies of Cyrus Nowrasteh’s The Path to 9/11 to conservative talk radio hosts—a move that allowed them to preempt and counter leftist demands of ABC to pull or heavily edit the film. Bill Clinton’s Fox-News meltdown and Madeline Albright’s recent disappearing act are evidence for the success of Apuzzo’s strategy and for the impact achieved by films that are seen by millions of people.

In tribute to ABC’s refusal to crack under withering political pressure, the Liberty Film Festival presented a Freedom of Expression Award to the production team of The Path to 9/11—the honors being done by Frank Price, former Chairman of both Columbia and Universal Pictures. Nowrasteh, who was present to accept the award, noted in an interview with Human Events that, because of his work on The Path to 9/11 the Los Angeles Times had done hit pieces on him and that defamatory misinformation about him had even been disseminated on Wikipedia. The two-time Pen Award winner downplayed, however, possible threats to his life—which in view of his Iranian heritage and Muslim roots, can’t be taken lightly.

Opening night also saw the screening of the documentary that won the LFF award for best feature film—Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration. Co-produced by Kevin Knoblock and David Bossie (the same duo that collaborated on Celsius 41.11) this documentary approaches the border issue by focusing on, in Knoblock’s words, “interesting characters.” While the film covers aspects of the immigration debate one would never see on PBS, it doesn’t provide any easy answers. In interviews, both Bossie and director Knoblock concurred on that score.

Compared to Knoblock, Bossie is the new kid on the block. The former Watergate investigator and Congressional aide has a handful of documentaries under his belt, including another festival entry, ACLU: At War With America. As this title shows, Bossie isn’t afraid to deliver a very unnuanced conservative message. That approach shouldn’t change with his next subject—Hillary Clinton. Assisting in that effort will be the man who ranks as the Clintons’ most prominent nemesis—Dick Morris.

Also in attendance at the festival, which had over 3,500 admissions, was producer-director Pierre Rehov, whose From the River to the Sea won honors for best film under 60 minutes. This documentary focuses on Palestinian refugees whose obsession with a “right of return” has been exploited both by Arab governments and by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Rehov’s other festival film, Suicide Killers, provides chilling footage of “martyrs” in training and of the proud mothers of suicide bombers.

Rehov, a French-Algerian Jew, told Human Events he didn’t feel threatened while making these documentaries since he was viewed as French. He also offered the opinion that “love” (as distorted by a sexually repressive society) is the ultimate motivation for suicide bombers. Given this belief, most conservatives won’t be sorry to learn that Rehov describes himself as an “independent.” Nor will they be surprised by the slew of psychoanalytic explanations in his films.

The festival award for best film under 30 minutes went to Cynthia Graner’s The Manual, a story that devotes loving visual attention to military funeral rites and to the notification procedure for soldiers killed in action. Like another festival film, Rex Pratt’s Between Iraq & A Hard Place, this work focuses on the psychological vulnerabilities of men in uniform rather than on courage and dedication to noble ideals.

Another media luminary, Michael Medved, moderated a Sunday panel discussion on “Hollywood, Israel, and the Middle-East” that included Frank Price, David Zucker, and the Emmy award winning screewriter Robert Avrech. In a subsequent interview, Medved was eager to slam Pat Buchanan as “a disgrace”—in spite of the fact that he “personally like(s) Pat.” Medved also called Michael Savage a “phony,” citing as evidence the latter’s political contributions to now California Attorney-General elect, Jerry Brown. Neither Buchanan nor Savage attended the festival.

AMERICA ALONE: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT by Mark Steyn

Two things set Mark Steyn apart from dystopian naysayers like Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. First, Steyn is an irrepressible bon vivant—an odd trait in a journalist touting “the end of the world as we know it.” Linguistically, no turn of phrase is too banal, risqué, or obscure to be included in Steyn’s repertoire of fin de siecle ripostes. If Western civilization is going down the tubes, Steyn will at least get in a few bon vins, bonbons, and bon mots before the Eiffel Tower becomes the world’s most prominent minaret.

Second, Steyn has a drawer-full of hard data at his disposal—not cherry-picked computer models whose calculations are amazingly dependent on the speculative formulas fed into them. On an LP sold contemporaneously with Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, the late comedian Don Adams mimics an incompetent defense attorney who protests how easy it is for the prosecutor to accuse his client of murder. After all, “He’s got proof. All I have are trickery and deceit.” Ehrlich and Gore may have imaginary numbers up their sleeves, but like the comic’s legal adversary, Steyn has a briefcase of persuasive exhibits: moribund European birth rates, unsustainable social welfare systems, growing Muslim immigration, high Muslim birth rates, the murder of Theo van Gogh, deadly bombings in London and Madrid, the nightly torching of Renaults and Citroens by French “youths,” craven acts of multi-culti cowardice in the face of sharia demands, and a future-be-damned philosophy that coincides perfectly with plunging birth rates.

For Europe, Steyn notes, this is “The Gelded Age”—with Spanish women reproducing at a rate that will halve the nation’s population in a generation or so. Almost as dire, demographically, is the 1.3 births per woman ratio that prevails in Greece—a figure that belies the image of fecundity in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Indeed, it seems that uptight red-state Protestants are doing a better job of being fruitful than Italians who, if current trends continue, will live in a nation where 60 percent of them “have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, (and) no uncles.” Dinner tables filled with pasta and relatives will be replaced by pizza for one.

This population bust spells disaster for Ponzi-shaped welfare schemes that depend on young bodies to support generational transfers to oldsters who neglected the primary task of regeneration. Greece’s pension liabilities, for example, are projected to reach 25% of GDP by 2040. More immigration from people-rich Muslim nations is the clear “solution” to this demographic vacuum—a solution that’s already altered the habits of women in Amsterdam and London who “cover up” to avoid jeers in increasingly Muslim neighborhoods. Such examples show how, in Western Europe, assimilation has come to mean (as Kofi Annan implied when commenting on the Danish cartoon violence) a nation adjusting its ways to accommodate new arrivals.

Steyn’s term, “Eurabia,” suggests the future he foresees for a continent flirting with a “demographic death spiral” and brooding in the lounge of that “old ennui.” Rotterdam, where the Muslim population is 40%, may presage the shape of things by 2050—or sooner if “white-flight” out of “Eutopia” accelerates. In such an environment, “Pre-modern Islam beats post-modern Christianity.” Put more dramatically, it’s unlikely that “Pornistan” will peacefully co-exist with “the Islamic Republic of Holland.” And in the struggle between those two, the strong horse doesn’t belong to those who take pride in the fact that they aren’t prepared to die for anything.

To fend off charges of Islamophobia, Steyn issues periodic caveats that acknowledge what “of course” everyone knows—that most Muslims aren’t Wahhabists, that many have assimilated to Western ways, and that not every baby named Mohammad (the most popular boy’s name in Belgium) is destined to strap explosives to his chest and blow up a Brussels bus. Still, the author makes a convincing case that neither demographics nor cultural clout favor the continued existence of Europe as we know it. In the meantime, Western women in the EU are producing an average of 1.4 children while the Muslim EU rate is 3.5. At least one North African tyrant is on record predicting that the “Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.” The official number of Muslims now living in Europe is 20 million. Colonel Gaddafi’s figure is 50 million. If Muammar isn’t right today, he soon will be.

Unlike native Europeans, the birth rate in the United States is still at replacement level, 2.1—1.85 among whites. And while the nation has its immigration issues, those problems don’t involve large percentages of Muslims or the gradual introduction of sharia. Still, many Europhiles find the continent’s dance-macabre enchanting. And, like elites on the other side of the pond, these blue-state sophisticates despise their “self-righteous, gun-totin’, military-lovin’, sister-marryin’, abortion-hatin’, gay-loathin’, non-passport ownin’” redneck cousins. Steyn observes, however, that these pejoratives can be translated more positively as “culturally confident, self-reliant, patriotic, procreative, [and] religious.” And judging from census figures, such traits are more productive of a viable culture than the infantilizing statism to which Europeans have become addicted. “Over there” servile selfishness has spawned a continent of non-spawners.

Unfortunately, Steyn laments, the United States hasn’t exported self-reliance and limited government half as well as Terminator movies and Madonna concerts. If it had, some viable national partners would be standing alongside it. Instead, America subsidized social irresponsibility after World War II by taking upon itself more than the lion’s share of Western Europe’s defense. Simultaneously, America lessened its political influence by puffing up international institutions like the United Nations. This diplomatic courtesy didn’t win America the support of nations to whom it graciously ceded bits and chunks of power. It’s now time, Steyn avers, for the U.S. to speak with a voice commensurate with its strength and to tout its best cultural ideals. If it doesn’t, the only thing the rest of the world will associate with America will be cheeseburgers, tawdry films, and weak knees.

Steyn also devotes attention to two other major nations, Japan and Russia. The former is entering a period of population decline but doesn’t face the identity crisis that arises with mass immigration. Russia, by contrast, appears to be a basket case—with a per woman birth rate of 1.2, a male life span of 59 years, and an abortion rate of 70%. That’s a demographic trifecta whose winners will be the new Islamic countries on Russia’s southern border and (in the Siberian East) China. While China has its own demographic challenges, with 19% more boys than girls, that nation still numbers well over a billion and might provide a pool of frustrated males to rectify the Y-chromosome dearth in (what is now) Russia. The bottom line for Russia is this: “the world’s largest country is dying, and the question is how violent its death throes will be.”

The title of Steyn’s final chapter, The Falling Camel, refers to the weakness that, in an Arab proverb, “attracts many knives.” This maxim is cited to deplore the multicultural rituals regularly performed by Western leaders after terrorist attacks. Instead of these craven antics, what is needed in our civilizational war is “more will.” And the key to victory in that struggle is reforming Islam. This objective, Steyn concedes, is ultimately up to Muslims. America can, however, facilitate change by supporting free Islamic societies, by transforming the energy industry and defunding oil dictatorships, by ending the Iranian regime, and by “strik[ing] militarily when the opportunity presents itself.”

At least two things are unclear about this multi-pronged strategy. First, where will the resolve come from to accomplish these daunting tasks? Second, why should growing, confident Muslim cultures alter their ways based on advice, threats, and bombs from foreigners who aren’t even keen on reproduction? With respect to American fortitude, the most plausible motivator that Steyn notes involves falling European camels. If the knives that appear during their descent don’t open eyes and stiffen backbones, nothing will.

So much for Mr. Bon Vivant.

FOLEY VERSUS STUDDS

“The past is a foreign country,” said British author L. P. Hartley, “they do things differently there.” True enough, but I wouldn’t have thought 23 years was long enough to get a time traveler out of state, much less to a different continent.

Twenty three years is the time that separates the censure of the late Democrat Congressman Gerry Studds and the resignation from Congress of Republican Mark Foley. Both cases involved sex scandals with Congressional pages.

In 1983 Studds was censured for having sex with a 17-year-old male page. This particular violation of Congressional decorum, not Washington D.C. law, had occurred ten years earlier. Studds conceded that intercourse with a minor page was “an error in judgment” but insisted that what happens in Congressional bedrooms should stay in those bedrooms.

Not only did Studds continue to serve in Congress (over the objection of Rep. Newt Gingrich), he was also reelected by his Massachusetts constituents—six times. There was no frenzied media demand to know what Speaker Tip O’Neill knew and when he knew it. (Ten years is a long time between indiscretion and punishment.) And there were certainly no serious calls for O’Neill’s resignation.

In 2006 Mark Foley immediately resigned after the outing of his instant message come-ons to pages. No physical relationship between Foley and the pages was alleged. A great hue and cry then ensued over Speaker Dennis Hastert’s oversight of the page program, and numerous calls were made for his resignation.

What happened in the two-plus decades that separated these incidents that accounts for the different responses?

One partisan observer suggested that the nation has become more sensitive about the safety of children in light of 24/7 news-channel stories featuring pedophile priests and on-line predators. If so, those sensitivities still aren’t applied to Representative Studds—who was recently eulogized as the first openly-gay Congressman and was repeatedly returned to office till he retired in 1996.

A more realistic assessment would point to 1994 as the watershed event that separates then and now. In November of that year Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. That historical observation is another way of saying that “politics” is behind the moral indignation that has been expressed in the last six weeks.

I’m sure most folks will be “shocked, shocked!” at the thought of politics taking place on Capitol Hill and in the media. A more important point is that so many politicos now view morality as a mere tool to secure what they really prize—political power. Unfortunately, “realists” who view moral principles this way have nothing but the “will to power” to guide them once they are in office.

That’s a phrase from the past that was popularized by Nietzsche and exhibited in spades by the Third Reich and Stalin.

DADS AT A DISTANCE: A POST FOR DR. LAURA LISTENERS

[Below is an article that was published in a few Southern California newspapers a couple of years ago on Father's Day. The sentiments reflect the priorities emphasized by Dr. Laura.]

FATHER’S DAY FROM A DISTANCE

“Happy Father’s Day.” It’s a greeting that sends pangs of regret through the guts of millions of American males, a greeting that echoes forlornly in the empty spaces of the heart.

Instead of memories of daily life--meals together, nightly routines, school visits—there stands a punctuated set of visits. A seamless web of association has been transformed into a series of photographs. Disneyland stands in place of, not beside, trips to the dentist. Like fabric with stitching embarrassingly stretched out, the tenuous threads call attention to themselves. Like pictures with no background, recollections of days together become two-dimensional--almost cartoonish in character.

Though “Happy Father’s Day” is a bittersweet greeting for the 15 million men who do not live with the children that bear their own traits, I cannot imagine what those words mean to the substantial fraction of that cohort (up to 50%) who haven’t seen their offspring in the last year. Nor can I conceive what the phrase might mean to the 15% of male divorcees who, according to author and philosopher Christina Sommers, see their progeny only once a year.

What I do know is that the promises that flowed so glibly from the mouths of sixties radicals appear naive and stupid in retrospect. A society where autonomy and self-actualization inevitably lead to happiness has proven to be a cruel mirage masking an emotional desert--a world in which more and more Americans have become, in the chillingly prescient phrase of Alexis de Tocqueville, “shut up in the solitude” of their hearts.

Unfortunately, American pundits seem unwilling to confront this truth. “Ozzie and Harriett” continues to be the derisive epithet employed by elites who refuse to admit the devastation that has been wrought by our reckless pursuit of personal goals. Indeed, a 50% rise in single-father homes is even praised for “tear(ing) down a long-standing conception that single fathers tend to abandon their kids.”

The truth, pointedly ignored by the Associated Press article cited above, is that abandonment and alienation are much more common than continued involvement by dads at a distance. The truth is that there is no substitute for being there--day-in and day-out. The truth is that “quality time” is a lie devised for Americans who are unwilling to face the real costs of their determination to put career and personal goals above everything else. The truth is that children, more often than not, suffer from our contempt for “Ozzie and Harriett” households.

It is no consolation to me that more mothers now feel the pangs of remorse that affect conscientious nonresident dads. Instead, I grieve for kids raised only by Ozzies, just as I commiserate with and encourage the millions of fathers who know how hard it is to sew together lives that are physically separated.

And to youngsters growing up in a society obsessed with individual success, I offer you this bit of grief-laden advice: There is a good reason why so many tombstones bear this eternal witness--LOVING HUSBAND AND FATHER.