A PLEA FROM A SOLDIER IN THE ARMY OF COMPASSION
Right now, I'm listening to Bush speak in Minnesota (he's in Minnesota--I'm not.)
As is his usual habit, he spoke first, and for several minutes, about a volunteer he met on his way in and the importance of the "soldiers in the armies of compassion" to the defense and health of this nation. The military is strong, and we'll keep it strong, and the economy is growing, but the true strength of America is in the hearts and souls of Americans who love a neighbor as they want to be loved themselves and are changing this nation one heart, one soul, one citizen at a time.
Not long ago, John Kerry told a bunch of leftist Hollywood radicals who had just spent the evening trashing the president that THEY represented the "heart and soul of America."
Personally, I'm voting for the man who wants America's soul to be healthy and free--not nasty, perverse, and sick.
As a soldier in the army of compassion, I and many of my fellows are worried about the possibility of a Kerry presidency. We don't want to go back to the days when the federal grant system was a closed door to those who dared to do their charitable work out of a heart for God. We don't want to go back to the time when start-up funds were available only to those willing to take the cross off the door. We appreciate the wisdom of the president who tells us that "government can't change the hearts of men and women. Faith can."
Under president Bush, we have seen faith-based institutions become competitive with other, less effective helping agencies. Dan Burton--who was the originator of the "charitable choice" legislation that started this whole ball rolling in the previous administration--believed that faith-based institutions would prove more cost-effective than those that ran primarily on paid staff. President Bush opened that door wider, took that chance, and he was right to do so.
Against long-standing competition, faith-based institutions have begun to win those funds, with millions of dollars now going to thousands of organizations and new programs to help children of prisoners, at-risk children, adults with substance abuse problems, the homeless, the hungry, the poor, and the disabled. These soldiers are doing their work in the way that only they can, with a cup of cold water and a kind word, with due regard for the dignity and worth of every human being as a child of God. And president Bush's projected 2005 budget asks for $350 million in new project funding, to continue the process of helping Americans by treating them as human beings, not projects, or numbers. It is a small number, as federal budget appropriations go, but we can do much more with it than one might think.
Moreover, we don't expect to stay on the government's dime. These funds are primarily start-up costs, and most have matching requirements. All we require is a chance to prove the viability of our programs. Once they're humming along, we expect to bring them to self-sufficiency. Our very nature is to take the little and watch it grow, to teach the man to fish, instead of just feeding him one. It is no different with the programs themselves. Just as we aim to train people to move off assistance and eventually return to help those newly in need, so we expect to use government funds to build the infrastructure needed to do the work of the long-term, work we will shoulder ourselves as the programs mature.
There are other faith considerations at stake this time, too. Under no other president in memory have people of faith felt they had an advocate in the White House, willing to protect their rights against the ever-increasing onslaught of ACLU and fringe-kook lawsuits bent on scrubbing every vestige of God from the public square. We have no reason to believe that all the gains we have seen under the Bush administration would be continued under a Kerry regime. In fact, Kerry's total unwillingness to apply the faith he claims to be his to anything in public life strongly argues otherwise.
And we are concerned as to the people who travel with Kerry on his ideological highway. Despite the token presence of Jesse Jackson, we are disturbed at the paucity of religious sensibility in the Kerry campaign. Their "religious advisors" have quickly been let go, as the campaign found their liberal brand of religion incompatible with the voters they were trying to court. Not quite as awkward as Dean, Kerry still presents his faith almost as if he is ashamed of it. "I was an altar boy" rings false to us, as false as Teresa's invocation of her late Republican husband. We don't understand a man who claims a core belief he won't act on. It's the very opposite of who we are.
The soldiers in this army have been pleased to have an earthly commander who knows his place under the Heavenly Commander in Chief. We understand a man who prays, who reads Oswald Chambers on a daily basis, who talks to God before he orders the instruments of battle aimed at human beings. We understand a man whose faith permeates his life, and who acts to do what he knows to be right even when he knows it will not be popular, here or abroad.
I can't give you the statistics. I know that, according to polls, the vast majority of Americans serving in Iraq favor the president. He is their commander in chief, and they seem pleased with him. In the armies of compassion, there are Democrats and Republicans, all races, all creeds. But my gut tells me, this year, we are standing behind the US commander in chief, because he knows he is commanded by OUR Commander-in-Chief.
May God bless the President and the United States of America.
Friday, October 22, 2004
SOME THINGS JUST ARE:
POLITICS IN THE RED ZONE
Every once in a while, I have to admit that it's good to be part of Red America. Questions that vex the nation as a whole are no controversy to us. We have certain shared values and assumptions that help to make even our politics a little less rancorous, a little more cooperative than the cutthroat world beyond.
Now, I am speaking here of a Red community, not a whole Red state. The Red/Blue thing is divisive within the states, but very often counties, towns, or voting districts are pure Red, while others are pure Blue. It makes it much easier to get to the local problems of tax abatement, zoning regulations, and budget priorities.
Let me give you a taste of this.
The state House seat in our district is up for grabs this year, the incumbent having decided she had been there long enough. The competitors for it come from two sides of the same town--the gentleman from where the University sits, the lady from where industry reigns. Our University breeds a fairly liberal lot who, for the most part, limit their political participation to protesting and grumbling; when push comes to shove, most of them don't even vote. The industrial side of town is largely sharply conservative, with a dash of union sentiment to dull the edges.
On Thursday night, the university hosted a debate between the two candidates. About 100 people showed up, mostly of the college type. In the back sat a few rows of nicely suit-and-tied College Republicans. The front row featured several women with pro-choice t-shirts or buttons. The rest of the crowd was in the 18-30 range, both sexes, several races, a smattering of international students.
Although the man insists that this race is about two things--jobs and education--the vast majority of questions concerned what we have come to refer to as issues of life and culture: abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, Planned Parenthood funding, and gay marriage. Indeed, the conversation was so heavily skewed to the "wedge issues" that I thought the pro-choice professorette in front of me was going to fly across the room, there was so much air coming out of her in the form of exasperated sighs.
What had her so upset was this. Though the man is a Democrat, and the woman a Republican, both are thoroughly pro-life. The woman has the endorsement of right-to-life and is a long-time local pro-life activist. The man is a Catholic who once considered the priesthood, and must have said a dozen times that he believes that "life begins at conception and should continue until natural death." This drove the pro-choice college students nearly insane.
The debate was polite, quiet, and respectful. The questions were pointed, but largely controversial only to the assembled audience. Both are against abortion, euthanasia, public funding of Planned Parenthood, public or private research on embryonic stem cells, and gay marriage. The woman is concerned that the state's version of the Defense of Marriage Act may be obliterated by court action, and therefore favors an amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The man believes the law will withstand court challenge, and is against such an amendment.
Both are concerned about the homeless and the budget, the $2 billion deficit the governor made out of a $2 billion surplus, and funding K-12 and university education. While the man supports funding for health care coverage for the uninsured, he admits there is little chance the state can provide it any time soon. The woman notes that many uninsured people choose to be uninsured, but concedes that we need to find a way to help those who don't. She points out that, in our district, we are blessed with hospitals that will not turn you away merely because you have no insurance, and suggests the need to spread that philosophy throughout the state.
The woman mentions God and the faith-based initiative more often than the man, but both are clearly unapologetic about basing their decisions as legislators on their faith as Christians.
The pro-choicers in the front row scribble furiously throughout the presentation, and when the questions from the audience are passed up, there are several challenging the candidates to define "life" and to say whether they could (you'll excuse the expression) conceive of a situation in which abortion should be legal. Both reluctantly cede the decision to a woman and her doctor when the physical health of the woman is in "grave danger." But that is the "physical" health--they are both still on the wrong side of the current Supreme Court.
Do they support parental notification legislation? Yes. Do they oppose partial-birth abortion? Yes. Would they propose or support legislation to provide more support and funding for adoption? Yes. Should the living wills and do-not-resuscitate orders of those who can no longer answer for themselves be honored? Yes. Would they block the University from offering RU-486? Yes.
It is likely that, if the students vote for either of the candidates, they will vote for the Democrat, because they will be obediently punching the one big hole that says straight party ticket. But they won't like it.
Here in the Red Zone, the idea that life begins at conception is uncontroversial. Our Democratic mayor came in first last year in the right-to-life 10K. Those who are pro-choice when in the statehouse have the sense not to mention it back home, and to spend a lot of time in the churches simply being seen.
It's a good place to be.
And the funniest part was that, after the debate was over, the two candidates found themselves in conversation with a member of the audience about abortion--and they were working together to present the pro-life position.
God bless Red America.
Every once in a while, I have to admit that it's good to be part of Red America. Questions that vex the nation as a whole are no controversy to us. We have certain shared values and assumptions that help to make even our politics a little less rancorous, a little more cooperative than the cutthroat world beyond.
Now, I am speaking here of a Red community, not a whole Red state. The Red/Blue thing is divisive within the states, but very often counties, towns, or voting districts are pure Red, while others are pure Blue. It makes it much easier to get to the local problems of tax abatement, zoning regulations, and budget priorities.
Let me give you a taste of this.
The state House seat in our district is up for grabs this year, the incumbent having decided she had been there long enough. The competitors for it come from two sides of the same town--the gentleman from where the University sits, the lady from where industry reigns. Our University breeds a fairly liberal lot who, for the most part, limit their political participation to protesting and grumbling; when push comes to shove, most of them don't even vote. The industrial side of town is largely sharply conservative, with a dash of union sentiment to dull the edges.
On Thursday night, the university hosted a debate between the two candidates. About 100 people showed up, mostly of the college type. In the back sat a few rows of nicely suit-and-tied College Republicans. The front row featured several women with pro-choice t-shirts or buttons. The rest of the crowd was in the 18-30 range, both sexes, several races, a smattering of international students.
Although the man insists that this race is about two things--jobs and education--the vast majority of questions concerned what we have come to refer to as issues of life and culture: abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, Planned Parenthood funding, and gay marriage. Indeed, the conversation was so heavily skewed to the "wedge issues" that I thought the pro-choice professorette in front of me was going to fly across the room, there was so much air coming out of her in the form of exasperated sighs.
What had her so upset was this. Though the man is a Democrat, and the woman a Republican, both are thoroughly pro-life. The woman has the endorsement of right-to-life and is a long-time local pro-life activist. The man is a Catholic who once considered the priesthood, and must have said a dozen times that he believes that "life begins at conception and should continue until natural death." This drove the pro-choice college students nearly insane.
The debate was polite, quiet, and respectful. The questions were pointed, but largely controversial only to the assembled audience. Both are against abortion, euthanasia, public funding of Planned Parenthood, public or private research on embryonic stem cells, and gay marriage. The woman is concerned that the state's version of the Defense of Marriage Act may be obliterated by court action, and therefore favors an amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The man believes the law will withstand court challenge, and is against such an amendment.
Both are concerned about the homeless and the budget, the $2 billion deficit the governor made out of a $2 billion surplus, and funding K-12 and university education. While the man supports funding for health care coverage for the uninsured, he admits there is little chance the state can provide it any time soon. The woman notes that many uninsured people choose to be uninsured, but concedes that we need to find a way to help those who don't. She points out that, in our district, we are blessed with hospitals that will not turn you away merely because you have no insurance, and suggests the need to spread that philosophy throughout the state.
The woman mentions God and the faith-based initiative more often than the man, but both are clearly unapologetic about basing their decisions as legislators on their faith as Christians.
The pro-choicers in the front row scribble furiously throughout the presentation, and when the questions from the audience are passed up, there are several challenging the candidates to define "life" and to say whether they could (you'll excuse the expression) conceive of a situation in which abortion should be legal. Both reluctantly cede the decision to a woman and her doctor when the physical health of the woman is in "grave danger." But that is the "physical" health--they are both still on the wrong side of the current Supreme Court.
Do they support parental notification legislation? Yes. Do they oppose partial-birth abortion? Yes. Would they propose or support legislation to provide more support and funding for adoption? Yes. Should the living wills and do-not-resuscitate orders of those who can no longer answer for themselves be honored? Yes. Would they block the University from offering RU-486? Yes.
It is likely that, if the students vote for either of the candidates, they will vote for the Democrat, because they will be obediently punching the one big hole that says straight party ticket. But they won't like it.
Here in the Red Zone, the idea that life begins at conception is uncontroversial. Our Democratic mayor came in first last year in the right-to-life 10K. Those who are pro-choice when in the statehouse have the sense not to mention it back home, and to spend a lot of time in the churches simply being seen.
It's a good place to be.
And the funniest part was that, after the debate was over, the two candidates found themselves in conversation with a member of the audience about abortion--and they were working together to present the pro-life position.
God bless Red America.
Saturday, October 16, 2004
TWO MORE REALLY STUPID IDEAS
THE COLORADO ELECTORAL COLLEGE INITIATIVE IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF THE FUN THIS YEAR
In Colorado, they will vote this time on whether to continue with the winner-take-all electoral system. The ballot initiative would allow Colorado to apportion its electoral votes among the candidates instead of using the traditional system. This may or may not be Constitutional, and threatens to disrupt the election, especially if the vote is as close as many expect.
The group opposing the measure is called "Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea." I like that.
But it's not the stupidest idea abroad in the world concerning our election. Here's two more:
The Associated Press is reporting that the Guardian of London (that's a newspaper, by the way) is giving its readers the names and addresses of Clark County, Ohio voters not affiliated with a party. With this information, the paper wants them to send letters to Americans, stressing how important the US elections are to Britons. Presumably, these letters will also give us dumb Americans the information we need to truly understand how we should be voting.
I've about had it with foreigners telling us what to do.
Europe is quaking in fear of what the American Cowboy might do in his next term. They're afraid he'll talk tough to the terrorists some more and they might have to quell uprisings in the huge and hostile Arab populations they stupidly allowed to proliferate in the past decades. They haven't been this hysterically perturbed since the Cold War, when they expressed their extreme fear of the Reagan Administration by having puppet shows and pouring blood on the ground at military installations.
Who cares?
John Kerry continuously refers to our "allies"--by which he means "people who hate us and think we are plotting with the Jews to take over the world." At the same time, he denigrates the "coalition of the bribed"--by which he means "nations who have sent men, money and arms to help us in the war in Iraq." He seems to think we should admire and emulate nations like France and Germany, but he fails to focus very clearly on what those countries are like.
The fact is that, while Kerry carps about our 5.4% unemployment rate, at least ours can be attributed to a slowly recovering economy. The socialist tendencies of those nations have given them both a semi-permanent unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent. People in France work less than those in any other industrialized nation. And I don't even want to talk about their military histories. I don't feel like laughing that hard.
The other part of this story I find disturbing (the second stupid idea, in case you're counting) is that the paper paid $25 for the voter rolls. The county officials say that anyone can buy the list and do whatever they like with the information.
WHAT?
The database that you HAVE to appear in, in order to exercise your CONSTITUTIONAL right to VOTE is for SALE?
I'm not sure which of these I find more disturbing--the presumption of a foreign media to meddle in a US election, or the gall of a state government to require your information and then sell it to anyone who wants it.
The whole thing is very, very disturbing.
In Colorado, they will vote this time on whether to continue with the winner-take-all electoral system. The ballot initiative would allow Colorado to apportion its electoral votes among the candidates instead of using the traditional system. This may or may not be Constitutional, and threatens to disrupt the election, especially if the vote is as close as many expect.
The group opposing the measure is called "Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea." I like that.
But it's not the stupidest idea abroad in the world concerning our election. Here's two more:
The Associated Press is reporting that the Guardian of London (that's a newspaper, by the way) is giving its readers the names and addresses of Clark County, Ohio voters not affiliated with a party. With this information, the paper wants them to send letters to Americans, stressing how important the US elections are to Britons. Presumably, these letters will also give us dumb Americans the information we need to truly understand how we should be voting.
I've about had it with foreigners telling us what to do.
Europe is quaking in fear of what the American Cowboy might do in his next term. They're afraid he'll talk tough to the terrorists some more and they might have to quell uprisings in the huge and hostile Arab populations they stupidly allowed to proliferate in the past decades. They haven't been this hysterically perturbed since the Cold War, when they expressed their extreme fear of the Reagan Administration by having puppet shows and pouring blood on the ground at military installations.
Who cares?
John Kerry continuously refers to our "allies"--by which he means "people who hate us and think we are plotting with the Jews to take over the world." At the same time, he denigrates the "coalition of the bribed"--by which he means "nations who have sent men, money and arms to help us in the war in Iraq." He seems to think we should admire and emulate nations like France and Germany, but he fails to focus very clearly on what those countries are like.
The fact is that, while Kerry carps about our 5.4% unemployment rate, at least ours can be attributed to a slowly recovering economy. The socialist tendencies of those nations have given them both a semi-permanent unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent. People in France work less than those in any other industrialized nation. And I don't even want to talk about their military histories. I don't feel like laughing that hard.
The other part of this story I find disturbing (the second stupid idea, in case you're counting) is that the paper paid $25 for the voter rolls. The county officials say that anyone can buy the list and do whatever they like with the information.
WHAT?
The database that you HAVE to appear in, in order to exercise your CONSTITUTIONAL right to VOTE is for SALE?
I'm not sure which of these I find more disturbing--the presumption of a foreign media to meddle in a US election, or the gall of a state government to require your information and then sell it to anyone who wants it.
The whole thing is very, very disturbing.
LISTEN, DO YOU HEAR IT?
THERE'S AN EARTHQUAKE COMING
I'm going to tell you a secret now.
There's an earthquake coming, and if you stand very still and block out the noise of Iraq and the economy and Scott Peterson and Bill O'Reilly and everything else that passes for news these days, you can hear it. The ground is humming softly, all over Red America. The sound gets louder on Sundays and Wednesdays, and mid-week Thursdays, but then it softens for a bit.
But it's still there. And on November 2, everyone will hear it.
There's a campaign out there--actually, probably thousands of them--among pro-family voters to register new voters and get them to the polls. And the issue isn't Bush. It isn't Iraq. And it isn't the economy.
The issue is gay marriage.
You can tell that the Democrats are starting to hear the hum, but they're not quite sure what it is or how dangerous. Lately, they've been trying to push it back into the ground, to cover our ears, and pretend it's not there by saying it's something else: "partisan politics," maybe, or "a wedge issue," or a "distraction." In two debates, the Democratic nominees tried to defuse the issue by dragging and dropping Mary Cheney into their Republican Hypocrisy file. But it didn't work.
Make no mistake: this is a grass roots movement if ever there were one. The Kerry nationals and the gay rights people are trying to spin this issue as something the Administration stirred up to shore up the base. But that's not what happened. What happened is that the culture got to be too much. What happened is that Christians got fed up. What happened is that Courts started doing things that Red Staters think the Court shouldn't be allowed to do--like overrun the will of 78% of the people of Louisiana and declare their desire to protect marriage illegitimate.
That won't stand.
Hundreds of independent Christian groups across the country, some usually political, others not, are emailing and snail-mailing alerts to their members. Pastors everywhere are preaching on the subject. Megachurches are mobilizing to hand out voter guides, informing their people as to where the candidates stand on the issue
Even in traditionally Democratic churches, pro-family voters are putting aside their concerns about the war and the economy. They are not forgiving on these issues, but those things are transitory and temporal. The question of marriage, they believe, touches on eternal truths that simply cannot be compromised.
Black democratic operatives like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (both illegitimate on the issue because they are pro-gay marriage) have been dispatched to calm the black evangelicals back into the barn. But that won't work either. Black pastors across the country are up in arms. They have already held their own rallies calling for support for the Federal Marriage Amendment. More than 40 national Black pastors recently signed an open letter to Congress, begging them to pass the FMA. Blacks and whites, Baptists, and Pentecostals, are all on the same team this year, and it's Team Bush. This year, even the Amish want to vote.
I can tell you that the ground forces of the right are activated and ready. This month, all over the nation, it's what's you might call "Marriage Preservation Month." It's going by a variety of project names and sermon series, but the idea is the same. The people of God have had enough. Get out and vote.
The only person I've seen in media that is catching on to this is marginalized Democratic strategist Pat Caddell---and nobody's listening to him. The other night on FoxNews, he said the gay marriage issue is "a category 5 hurricane," just about to make landfall.
And he's right.
In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton was warmly received at the annual meeting of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Black Pentecostal body in America. This year, COGIC pastors are telling their people that Bush may have screwed up the economy, but he's our only chance to save marriage in America.
The weekend before the election, watch the cable skies. Every evangelist from Jerry Falwell to T.D. Jakes to Juanita Bynum to Joel Osteen will be preaching some variation of the "Christian Patriotism" sermon. You may not know those folks, and that's okay. You don't have to. But you might want to know that Osteen's church is now leasing the 16,000-seat Compaq Center for their regular church services.
I remind you that the last election was decided by just over 500 votes in one state.
In the 1980 election, a force arose in the electorate that the media didn't know was coming. It was the force of moral anguish, and it was triggered primarily by abortion and the nascent gay rights movement. In that year, Ronald Reagan ascended from obscurity, and the evangelicals began their move into the center of the political world. This year, as in that, we, people of faith who have grown complacent with a fat and happy culture, are acting on our convictions and our guilt.
We didn't fight when Hollywood slid further and further toward the abyss, celebrating illicit sex, drugs, homosexuality, lesbianism, witchcraft, prostitution, gambling, and all manner of immorality. We slightly stirred when advertisers targeted our children with barely dressed models in incomprehensible ads for clothing. We slept on while public schools normalized gay sex and adoption.
But we are awake now.
We are looking around us and seeing degeneracy. We see Janet Jackson and the many sins of CBS. We see Michael Moore and the anti-war movement that, whatever one thinks of the war itself, reaches new lows in the unpatriotic and the crass. We see the media's rejection of The Passion of the Christ and clearly see the contempt the cultural gatekeepers have for people of faith.
We see, most of all, Gavin Newsom marrying men to men and women to women in illegal San Francisco ceremonies. We see the Massachusetts Court declaring it unconstitutional to restrict marriage to one man and one woman. We see the Supreme Court authorizing homosexual sodomy as a constitutional right. We see the society around us falling to pieces, and the culture aiming its poisonous relativism at OUR families, OUR communities, OUR nation.
No one expected Ronald Reagan to win the 1980 election. No one but the prophets of the religious right.
The prophets are back this year. And on November 3, we'll know if there's been an earthquake.
I'm going to tell you a secret now.
There's an earthquake coming, and if you stand very still and block out the noise of Iraq and the economy and Scott Peterson and Bill O'Reilly and everything else that passes for news these days, you can hear it. The ground is humming softly, all over Red America. The sound gets louder on Sundays and Wednesdays, and mid-week Thursdays, but then it softens for a bit.
But it's still there. And on November 2, everyone will hear it.
There's a campaign out there--actually, probably thousands of them--among pro-family voters to register new voters and get them to the polls. And the issue isn't Bush. It isn't Iraq. And it isn't the economy.
The issue is gay marriage.
You can tell that the Democrats are starting to hear the hum, but they're not quite sure what it is or how dangerous. Lately, they've been trying to push it back into the ground, to cover our ears, and pretend it's not there by saying it's something else: "partisan politics," maybe, or "a wedge issue," or a "distraction." In two debates, the Democratic nominees tried to defuse the issue by dragging and dropping Mary Cheney into their Republican Hypocrisy file. But it didn't work.
Make no mistake: this is a grass roots movement if ever there were one. The Kerry nationals and the gay rights people are trying to spin this issue as something the Administration stirred up to shore up the base. But that's not what happened. What happened is that the culture got to be too much. What happened is that Christians got fed up. What happened is that Courts started doing things that Red Staters think the Court shouldn't be allowed to do--like overrun the will of 78% of the people of Louisiana and declare their desire to protect marriage illegitimate.
That won't stand.
Hundreds of independent Christian groups across the country, some usually political, others not, are emailing and snail-mailing alerts to their members. Pastors everywhere are preaching on the subject. Megachurches are mobilizing to hand out voter guides, informing their people as to where the candidates stand on the issue
Even in traditionally Democratic churches, pro-family voters are putting aside their concerns about the war and the economy. They are not forgiving on these issues, but those things are transitory and temporal. The question of marriage, they believe, touches on eternal truths that simply cannot be compromised.
Black democratic operatives like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton (both illegitimate on the issue because they are pro-gay marriage) have been dispatched to calm the black evangelicals back into the barn. But that won't work either. Black pastors across the country are up in arms. They have already held their own rallies calling for support for the Federal Marriage Amendment. More than 40 national Black pastors recently signed an open letter to Congress, begging them to pass the FMA. Blacks and whites, Baptists, and Pentecostals, are all on the same team this year, and it's Team Bush. This year, even the Amish want to vote.
I can tell you that the ground forces of the right are activated and ready. This month, all over the nation, it's what's you might call "Marriage Preservation Month." It's going by a variety of project names and sermon series, but the idea is the same. The people of God have had enough. Get out and vote.
The only person I've seen in media that is catching on to this is marginalized Democratic strategist Pat Caddell---and nobody's listening to him. The other night on FoxNews, he said the gay marriage issue is "a category 5 hurricane," just about to make landfall.
And he's right.
In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton was warmly received at the annual meeting of the Church of God in Christ, the largest Black Pentecostal body in America. This year, COGIC pastors are telling their people that Bush may have screwed up the economy, but he's our only chance to save marriage in America.
The weekend before the election, watch the cable skies. Every evangelist from Jerry Falwell to T.D. Jakes to Juanita Bynum to Joel Osteen will be preaching some variation of the "Christian Patriotism" sermon. You may not know those folks, and that's okay. You don't have to. But you might want to know that Osteen's church is now leasing the 16,000-seat Compaq Center for their regular church services.
I remind you that the last election was decided by just over 500 votes in one state.
In the 1980 election, a force arose in the electorate that the media didn't know was coming. It was the force of moral anguish, and it was triggered primarily by abortion and the nascent gay rights movement. In that year, Ronald Reagan ascended from obscurity, and the evangelicals began their move into the center of the political world. This year, as in that, we, people of faith who have grown complacent with a fat and happy culture, are acting on our convictions and our guilt.
We didn't fight when Hollywood slid further and further toward the abyss, celebrating illicit sex, drugs, homosexuality, lesbianism, witchcraft, prostitution, gambling, and all manner of immorality. We slightly stirred when advertisers targeted our children with barely dressed models in incomprehensible ads for clothing. We slept on while public schools normalized gay sex and adoption.
But we are awake now.
We are looking around us and seeing degeneracy. We see Janet Jackson and the many sins of CBS. We see Michael Moore and the anti-war movement that, whatever one thinks of the war itself, reaches new lows in the unpatriotic and the crass. We see the media's rejection of The Passion of the Christ and clearly see the contempt the cultural gatekeepers have for people of faith.
We see, most of all, Gavin Newsom marrying men to men and women to women in illegal San Francisco ceremonies. We see the Massachusetts Court declaring it unconstitutional to restrict marriage to one man and one woman. We see the Supreme Court authorizing homosexual sodomy as a constitutional right. We see the society around us falling to pieces, and the culture aiming its poisonous relativism at OUR families, OUR communities, OUR nation.
No one expected Ronald Reagan to win the 1980 election. No one but the prophets of the religious right.
The prophets are back this year. And on November 3, we'll know if there's been an earthquake.
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
UNFIT COMMAND OF THE TRUTH:
TWO GROUPS, TWO BOOKS, ONE PREDICTABLE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
I don't often do this, but I'm about to comment on a book I've never read.
The reason I can do so is that its genesis is essentially the question at hand, not its contents, because I'm making a point here.
Concentrate.
There's a group of people who call themselves SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth. Every one of them was a swift boat commander during the Vietnam War, and they are on record accusing John Kerry of, essentially, various forms of dereliction of duty, fraud, and malingering. Their leader, John O'Neill, is the man who took over the boat Kerry was commander of when he bugged out of country 8 months early.
John O'Neill, a lawyer, knows the consequences of telling lies in print. He has even said publicly that if Senator Kerry can prove them false, he should sue them. So far, there have only been threats to block distribution of the book, but no lawsuits based on libel. The men quoted in the book by the veterans, "Unfit for Command," (a book I HAVE read) have signed affidavits concerning their contributions and eyewitness accounts of Kerry's conduct.
This book was number one on the amazon best-seller list before it was even released. Yet only FoxNews gave it any serious attention until Kerry himself made an issue of it while whining that the President (who has nothing to do with O'Neill--I'll get to that) was being mean to him. Then the mainstream press gave it just enough attention to dismiss it as a "pack of lies" and insist that there was no need to answer its charges. It was even compared to the Democrat 527s as an example of McCain-Feingold poisoning the political well.
The lefties insist that the Swiftees are creatures of the Bush campaign, despite the fact that John O'Neill has clearly been an adversary of the Senator since 1971, for reasons having nothing to do with politics. At that time, O'Neill was the chief spokesman for a veterans group that sought to match the visibility and credibility of Kerry's largely fantasist Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which was later proven to have included a surprising number of people who had never even been in the service, much less in Vietnam). They never told Bush what they were going to do, and Bush didn't see it coming.
Fast forward.
Now we are engaged in a great and uncivil war. A war testing whether this nation or any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal is willing to practice "equality" between political parties. The press has not pursued the questions of Kerry's service and his post-war treason with nearly the zeal it put into generating fake memos and chasing 30-year old dental records from President Bush.
Now there comes forth a group calling itself "Texans for Truth." Its goal is to focus America on the president's National Guard record and spread unsubstantiated rumors, while suppressing the actual evidence that Bush fulfilled his duty to the Guard in less time than he was enlisted for. It is not made up of National Guard members, but of Texans who hate Bush. (The Swiftees have limited their actual membership to people who were in swiftboats in Vietnam.) None of their number, as far as I know, claim to have been in the Guard with Bush (indeed, that is much of their complaint--that no one has surfaced that can confirm the lieutenant was there in the first place).
They, too, have a book (this is the one I haven't read). It is, cutely, called "Unfit Commander," and it recycles old stories about Bush's National Guard record. It has no affidavits, though I understand it contains reams of photocopies of the president's records, so perhaps they just don't know one kind of documentation from another. Its author is Glenn W. Smith, a longtime Democratic Party operative, founder of DriveDemocracy.org, a creature of Moveon.org, the George Soros-backed far leftist advocacy 527 that has helped cause all the trouble this election cycle. If voters are angry that there has been little discussion of "issues," they can thank Moveon for its cerebral discussion of such vital questions as whether President Bush is Hitler or just Mussolini with a funny mustache.
(Brief aside: For those who are curious, the top financial donors to the 527 groups are financier and currency manipulator George Soros, Hollywood producer Steve Bing, Progressive Insurance founder Peter B. Lewis, and…..(drum roll please)…Jane Fonda. Astonishing coincidence. I guess what goes around truly does come around. But do me a favor and spread that information to your favorite Vietnam Vet, especially if he's voting for Kerry.)
The Texans are clearly a politically-driven me-tooism from the innards of the Democratic left, the lowest form of imitation that the campaign silly season can devise. Yet since they have popped up, I have seen mention of them and their empty accusations on mainstream news media--a location in which John O'Neill and his many decorated heros were not welcome.
To review: one group is made up of eyewitnesses to what they consider John Kerry's chicanery surrounding the Vietnam War. These men--many of them multiply decorated war heros, both Democrats and Republicans--made themselves available to the media, which had no time to talk to them. When the media did discover them, it was to villify them--not far off from the "nuts and sluts" defense of the Clinton administration against all who would accuse the president of things that later turned out to be true.
This group is marginalized.
A second group is made up of Democratic operatives who have no knowledge of the president's National Guard record or of the president himself, yet presume to write a toss-off tell-all based on nothing but photocopies of records long in the public domain. This group is backed by a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, which itself was birthed through a start-up grant from a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, bankrolled by a man who has promised to spend his entire fortune, if necessary, to defeat Bush.
When this group makes itself available, the media is at home and receptive.
It is astonishing that anyone believes in the myth of an objective media anymore.
I don't often do this, but I'm about to comment on a book I've never read.
The reason I can do so is that its genesis is essentially the question at hand, not its contents, because I'm making a point here.
Concentrate.
There's a group of people who call themselves SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth. Every one of them was a swift boat commander during the Vietnam War, and they are on record accusing John Kerry of, essentially, various forms of dereliction of duty, fraud, and malingering. Their leader, John O'Neill, is the man who took over the boat Kerry was commander of when he bugged out of country 8 months early.
John O'Neill, a lawyer, knows the consequences of telling lies in print. He has even said publicly that if Senator Kerry can prove them false, he should sue them. So far, there have only been threats to block distribution of the book, but no lawsuits based on libel. The men quoted in the book by the veterans, "Unfit for Command," (a book I HAVE read) have signed affidavits concerning their contributions and eyewitness accounts of Kerry's conduct.
This book was number one on the amazon best-seller list before it was even released. Yet only FoxNews gave it any serious attention until Kerry himself made an issue of it while whining that the President (who has nothing to do with O'Neill--I'll get to that) was being mean to him. Then the mainstream press gave it just enough attention to dismiss it as a "pack of lies" and insist that there was no need to answer its charges. It was even compared to the Democrat 527s as an example of McCain-Feingold poisoning the political well.
The lefties insist that the Swiftees are creatures of the Bush campaign, despite the fact that John O'Neill has clearly been an adversary of the Senator since 1971, for reasons having nothing to do with politics. At that time, O'Neill was the chief spokesman for a veterans group that sought to match the visibility and credibility of Kerry's largely fantasist Vietnam Veterans Against the War (which was later proven to have included a surprising number of people who had never even been in the service, much less in Vietnam). They never told Bush what they were going to do, and Bush didn't see it coming.
Fast forward.
Now we are engaged in a great and uncivil war. A war testing whether this nation or any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal is willing to practice "equality" between political parties. The press has not pursued the questions of Kerry's service and his post-war treason with nearly the zeal it put into generating fake memos and chasing 30-year old dental records from President Bush.
Now there comes forth a group calling itself "Texans for Truth." Its goal is to focus America on the president's National Guard record and spread unsubstantiated rumors, while suppressing the actual evidence that Bush fulfilled his duty to the Guard in less time than he was enlisted for. It is not made up of National Guard members, but of Texans who hate Bush. (The Swiftees have limited their actual membership to people who were in swiftboats in Vietnam.) None of their number, as far as I know, claim to have been in the Guard with Bush (indeed, that is much of their complaint--that no one has surfaced that can confirm the lieutenant was there in the first place).
They, too, have a book (this is the one I haven't read). It is, cutely, called "Unfit Commander," and it recycles old stories about Bush's National Guard record. It has no affidavits, though I understand it contains reams of photocopies of the president's records, so perhaps they just don't know one kind of documentation from another. Its author is Glenn W. Smith, a longtime Democratic Party operative, founder of DriveDemocracy.org, a creature of Moveon.org, the George Soros-backed far leftist advocacy 527 that has helped cause all the trouble this election cycle. If voters are angry that there has been little discussion of "issues," they can thank Moveon for its cerebral discussion of such vital questions as whether President Bush is Hitler or just Mussolini with a funny mustache.
(Brief aside: For those who are curious, the top financial donors to the 527 groups are financier and currency manipulator George Soros, Hollywood producer Steve Bing, Progressive Insurance founder Peter B. Lewis, and…..(drum roll please)…Jane Fonda. Astonishing coincidence. I guess what goes around truly does come around. But do me a favor and spread that information to your favorite Vietnam Vet, especially if he's voting for Kerry.)
The Texans are clearly a politically-driven me-tooism from the innards of the Democratic left, the lowest form of imitation that the campaign silly season can devise. Yet since they have popped up, I have seen mention of them and their empty accusations on mainstream news media--a location in which John O'Neill and his many decorated heros were not welcome.
To review: one group is made up of eyewitnesses to what they consider John Kerry's chicanery surrounding the Vietnam War. These men--many of them multiply decorated war heros, both Democrats and Republicans--made themselves available to the media, which had no time to talk to them. When the media did discover them, it was to villify them--not far off from the "nuts and sluts" defense of the Clinton administration against all who would accuse the president of things that later turned out to be true.
This group is marginalized.
A second group is made up of Democratic operatives who have no knowledge of the president's National Guard record or of the president himself, yet presume to write a toss-off tell-all based on nothing but photocopies of records long in the public domain. This group is backed by a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, which itself was birthed through a start-up grant from a 527 dedicated to getting rid of Bush, bankrolled by a man who has promised to spend his entire fortune, if necessary, to defeat Bush.
When this group makes itself available, the media is at home and receptive.
It is astonishing that anyone believes in the myth of an objective media anymore.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
SOMETHING NEW IN THE LANDFILL THIS TIME
MEDIA HYPOCRISY AND THE UNBORN DEAD
As you may know, they have finally found the body of Lori Hacking, the unfortunate pregnant woman (no, not that one--another one) whose duplicitous husband decided to murder her rather than fathering a child.
But, wait, you say. That's not politics!
Bear with me. We'll get there.
I note on the television in connection with this pregnant woman case that everyone seems to be horrified that her monster of a husband, Mark (and all the more monstrous for having appeared previously so kind and good), not only murdered her in cold blood but put her body in a trash dumpster, like she was so much garbage.
But why be so amazed and outraged? After all, unborn children are consigned to the trash every day in this country, where we've developed a 4000-a day habit for the blood of unwanted babies. Every day, fetal tissue of the kind inside Lori Hacking is scraped and suctioned and sucked down the stainless steel drains of abortion clinics and hospitals across the nation.
America is hopelessly conflicted on abortion.
We accept abortion as a right on the flimsiest of legal reasoning--a function of the procedural due process right of privacy, an interesting inference by the Supreme Court discerned from the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights. Yet we recoil at the thought of late-term abortions, saline abortions, young girls having them without their parents' knowledge or consent, and women killing their children against the wishes of the father. The fact that Lori Hacking's own husband killed not just his wife--but his child, as well--leaves us trembling with rage and disgust. But if he'd convinced her to have an abortion first and murdered her later, would the case get as much play? Would we give it an honored position in the pantheon of the 24-hour news cycle, with Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson?
A dead woman is a dead woman, but a dead woman WITH CHILD--that's a story.
But why? This from the same news media in which the vast majority of correspondents believe in "a woman's right to choose." This from Katie Couric, who has marched in the annual March for Women's Lives--celebrating the right of women to choose to do what Mark Hacking (and Scott Peterson) effectively did to their children. Is it only okay to treat people like trash if we are women or doctors? Are the dead only trash when they've not been born yet?
John Kerry believes "life begins at conception." He is a father. He is a Catholic. Yet, he has never met an abortion expansion he didn't like--or at least vote for. He didn't even vote for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, to make illegal a procedure that more than 70% of the country finds abhorrent. And, as President Bush's ads have pointed out, he voted against the Laci Peterson law, making the murder of a pregnant woman a double homicide. Well, at least he's consistent in some things. His statements conflict, but his actions match perfectly.
President Bush believes abortion is wrong. I don't know that he's ever phrased it the was Kerry has, that "life begins at conception." He is a father, as well. And he's a born-again Methodist. But he has the courage of his convictions. He stands against abortion every chance he gets. One of his first acts was to reinstate his father's "Mexico City Policy," an international ban on federal aid to organizations that promote or provide abortion in nations where the procedure is illegal. Clinton undid the ban on his first day in office. Would Kerry cancel it again?
President Bush stands with the unborn, from conception to birth, and with unwanted children into adoption wherever possible and best. He stands with the old and the weak and the sick, protecting them from those who would take their lives for convenience, or economics, or selfishness. He protects human embryos from experimentation, even though he earns the ire of diseased celebrities and even the opposition of Nancy Reagan for doing so. Kerry promises to strip that protection and harvest the unborn in the name of scientific progress, though the leader of the faith he has chosen to follow sees such research as an unspeakable crime against the innocent.
The President wants to see a nation where Lori Hacking and her child are protected from harm and avenged when it comes to them. He sees them both as victims. John Kerry wants abortion to be (according to the Democratic mantra) "safe, legal, and rare"--but is a "rare" murder less of a murder because it is unusual? Kerry would probably pursue policies to protect Lori Hacking from her husband, physically--but his policy on her child is to fund the instruments that could kill it and to ignore its death even when it occurs as part of an adult homicide. Mark Hacking saw his wife and his child as obstacles to the smooth path of his own life. He probably wouldn't mind repealing the law against murdering people who are in the way.
Yet, rhetorically, even the liberal media are taking the president's side--which shows what unconscionable hypocrites they are. Why are they all up in arms about poor Lori Hacking and her unborn child? Why are they incensed that someone would do such a dastardly thing to a pregnant woman?
The baby inside her is one in 45 million and counting. Every day we throw babies away, and CBS never blinks its eye.
They're just mad because Mark Hacking left the wrapper on this one.
As you may know, they have finally found the body of Lori Hacking, the unfortunate pregnant woman (no, not that one--another one) whose duplicitous husband decided to murder her rather than fathering a child.
But, wait, you say. That's not politics!
Bear with me. We'll get there.
I note on the television in connection with this pregnant woman case that everyone seems to be horrified that her monster of a husband, Mark (and all the more monstrous for having appeared previously so kind and good), not only murdered her in cold blood but put her body in a trash dumpster, like she was so much garbage.
But why be so amazed and outraged? After all, unborn children are consigned to the trash every day in this country, where we've developed a 4000-a day habit for the blood of unwanted babies. Every day, fetal tissue of the kind inside Lori Hacking is scraped and suctioned and sucked down the stainless steel drains of abortion clinics and hospitals across the nation.
America is hopelessly conflicted on abortion.
We accept abortion as a right on the flimsiest of legal reasoning--a function of the procedural due process right of privacy, an interesting inference by the Supreme Court discerned from the "penumbra" of the Bill of Rights. Yet we recoil at the thought of late-term abortions, saline abortions, young girls having them without their parents' knowledge or consent, and women killing their children against the wishes of the father. The fact that Lori Hacking's own husband killed not just his wife--but his child, as well--leaves us trembling with rage and disgust. But if he'd convinced her to have an abortion first and murdered her later, would the case get as much play? Would we give it an honored position in the pantheon of the 24-hour news cycle, with Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson?
A dead woman is a dead woman, but a dead woman WITH CHILD--that's a story.
But why? This from the same news media in which the vast majority of correspondents believe in "a woman's right to choose." This from Katie Couric, who has marched in the annual March for Women's Lives--celebrating the right of women to choose to do what Mark Hacking (and Scott Peterson) effectively did to their children. Is it only okay to treat people like trash if we are women or doctors? Are the dead only trash when they've not been born yet?
John Kerry believes "life begins at conception." He is a father. He is a Catholic. Yet, he has never met an abortion expansion he didn't like--or at least vote for. He didn't even vote for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, to make illegal a procedure that more than 70% of the country finds abhorrent. And, as President Bush's ads have pointed out, he voted against the Laci Peterson law, making the murder of a pregnant woman a double homicide. Well, at least he's consistent in some things. His statements conflict, but his actions match perfectly.
President Bush believes abortion is wrong. I don't know that he's ever phrased it the was Kerry has, that "life begins at conception." He is a father, as well. And he's a born-again Methodist. But he has the courage of his convictions. He stands against abortion every chance he gets. One of his first acts was to reinstate his father's "Mexico City Policy," an international ban on federal aid to organizations that promote or provide abortion in nations where the procedure is illegal. Clinton undid the ban on his first day in office. Would Kerry cancel it again?
President Bush stands with the unborn, from conception to birth, and with unwanted children into adoption wherever possible and best. He stands with the old and the weak and the sick, protecting them from those who would take their lives for convenience, or economics, or selfishness. He protects human embryos from experimentation, even though he earns the ire of diseased celebrities and even the opposition of Nancy Reagan for doing so. Kerry promises to strip that protection and harvest the unborn in the name of scientific progress, though the leader of the faith he has chosen to follow sees such research as an unspeakable crime against the innocent.
The President wants to see a nation where Lori Hacking and her child are protected from harm and avenged when it comes to them. He sees them both as victims. John Kerry wants abortion to be (according to the Democratic mantra) "safe, legal, and rare"--but is a "rare" murder less of a murder because it is unusual? Kerry would probably pursue policies to protect Lori Hacking from her husband, physically--but his policy on her child is to fund the instruments that could kill it and to ignore its death even when it occurs as part of an adult homicide. Mark Hacking saw his wife and his child as obstacles to the smooth path of his own life. He probably wouldn't mind repealing the law against murdering people who are in the way.
Yet, rhetorically, even the liberal media are taking the president's side--which shows what unconscionable hypocrites they are. Why are they all up in arms about poor Lori Hacking and her unborn child? Why are they incensed that someone would do such a dastardly thing to a pregnant woman?
The baby inside her is one in 45 million and counting. Every day we throw babies away, and CBS never blinks its eye.
They're just mad because Mark Hacking left the wrapper on this one.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
DEMOCRAT WAR POLICY
THE "PERSONAL" IS "POLITICAL"
Democrats often chant that they want abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare."
It seems that these are the touchstones of all Democratic policy. ("Moral" and "right" died with Jimmy Carter, it seems. Oh, isn't he dead? Sorry, my mistake.)
Take war, for example. They vote for it, but they don't want to practice it. They hesitate to be tough or to take risks. That's not "safe." They want our troops to be unmolested and instantly triumphant. They complain bitterly when soldiers are injured or killed, they cry for help from the international community because they don't want American blood shed for…well, for liberty.
They want their wars to be legally okayed by the United Nations. It's not good enough that the war enforces the very rules of the body itself--instead, we must pass the global test of convincing everyone to agree with their own resolutions when push comes to shove. They ignore the fact that the vast majority of United Nations nations are tyrannies, military juntas, kingdoms, and other types of government that can only hope to one day have the kind of legitimate government enjoyed by Coalition forces.
Finally, the Democrats want their wars to be rare. They don't believe in wars for anything but self defense. Liberty, freedom, pre-emptive security, economic interest, geopolitical reality--none of these mean much to Democrats. They do, however, enjoy calling people into "fake" wars, in order to undermine the real ones. For example, while we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, they frequently taunt the President about the dangers of Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, implying that we should also be in those nations.
Of course, this is a feint. Because it would alienate at least half the Democratic base (of which Michael Moore constitutes at least a quarter, by weight), no Democrat is going to authorize war against any of those nations.
Not until the Kerry Administration signs on to the Democrats' draft bill.
Democrats often chant that they want abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare."
It seems that these are the touchstones of all Democratic policy. ("Moral" and "right" died with Jimmy Carter, it seems. Oh, isn't he dead? Sorry, my mistake.)
Take war, for example. They vote for it, but they don't want to practice it. They hesitate to be tough or to take risks. That's not "safe." They want our troops to be unmolested and instantly triumphant. They complain bitterly when soldiers are injured or killed, they cry for help from the international community because they don't want American blood shed for…well, for liberty.
They want their wars to be legally okayed by the United Nations. It's not good enough that the war enforces the very rules of the body itself--instead, we must pass the global test of convincing everyone to agree with their own resolutions when push comes to shove. They ignore the fact that the vast majority of United Nations nations are tyrannies, military juntas, kingdoms, and other types of government that can only hope to one day have the kind of legitimate government enjoyed by Coalition forces.
Finally, the Democrats want their wars to be rare. They don't believe in wars for anything but self defense. Liberty, freedom, pre-emptive security, economic interest, geopolitical reality--none of these mean much to Democrats. They do, however, enjoy calling people into "fake" wars, in order to undermine the real ones. For example, while we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, they frequently taunt the President about the dangers of Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, implying that we should also be in those nations.
Of course, this is a feint. Because it would alienate at least half the Democratic base (of which Michael Moore constitutes at least a quarter, by weight), no Democrat is going to authorize war against any of those nations.
Not until the Kerry Administration signs on to the Democrats' draft bill.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
WELCOME TO OUR QUAGMIRE, MR. CHIRAC
OUTGOING WHITE HOUSE PHONE CALL 11:26 A.M., JANUARY 24, 2005
JOHN KERRY: Good morning. This is the president of the United States, John Francois Kerry. Would Monsieur Chirac be in just at the moment? Oui, merci, I'll wait.
(Humming the Marseilles) Da dum da da da--Oh, yes. Bonjour, Jacques, Je--what? Oh, yes, well, I know you speak English. I just thought that--oh, I see. Well, yes, I suppose my snotty boarding school French might not be quite up to your standards. Fine, we'll speak in English, then.
Say, I just called to see if--what? Oh, well, thank you. That's very nice. I'm quite pleased to have beaten that lying cowboy moron, as well. Thanks for your kind words.
I was just calling you to--excuse me? The what? Oh! What am I planning to do about the oil for food thing? Well, I was rather planning to let it play out, you know, see what the investigation comes up with, and--well, I suppose we could talk about something else. I'd have to mull that over for a while. What? No, no, that's not some kind of code. No, Jacques, please don't offer me money.
But, say there. Speaking of offering, I was just calling to invite you to a little summit I'm putting together for next week. I know it's short notice, but I'm sure you'll want to come when you find out what the topic is.
Oh. Well, yes. That's right. Can't put anything over on you, then, eh? Yes, it's about Iraq. I'm having a few world leaders over for a nice big summit, full of important nuanced discussion and good, rich food--oh, I don't know. I'd have to ask the White House chef, I suppose.
Well, Jacques, I really don't know the chef's name. I kind of just got here. I'd ask Teresa, but I haven't seen her in a kitchen in--yeah, ha ha! You read my mind. I wouldn't want to try anything she cooked, either. That's what cooks are FOR, right? Ha ha ha!
Now, look, Jacques. I need to get an answer on this thing. Who else is coming? Oh, well, I was going to invite all the allies we haven't quite had around for a while, maybe some we lost more recently, the ones who are already--oh, my, Jacques. I don't think that's a very nice thing to say about Prime Minister Blair! I haven't heard language like that since this morning, when I made Teresa's coffee too hot.
Anyway, look--what? Oh, well, no. I haven't actually--well, you're the first I called because of the special relationship our two nations have always had--are you still there, Jacques? What? Oh, yes, I suppose it is very important to make sure you don't miss the French re-runs of Dallas. Are they--oh, finished now?
Okay. Now, how much of an entourage will you be bringing? We'll have to figure out which room--what?
Oh, you have something else to do? Well, yes, I know you're a very important world leader, but so am I now, Jacques, and as you know you have a stake in Iraq, too--well, not, I didn't mean a steak you eat, I meant--well, no. Stop laughing, Jacques. I know you don't have anything there right now. Oh, I--and you don't plan on…yes, I see.
Well, don't you think it would be a good idea to at least sit down and talk about it?
Jacques? I think we've--
[dial tone]
Is there something wrong with this line?
Hello?
JOHN KERRY: Good morning. This is the president of the United States, John Francois Kerry. Would Monsieur Chirac be in just at the moment? Oui, merci, I'll wait.
(Humming the Marseilles) Da dum da da da--Oh, yes. Bonjour, Jacques, Je--what? Oh, yes, well, I know you speak English. I just thought that--oh, I see. Well, yes, I suppose my snotty boarding school French might not be quite up to your standards. Fine, we'll speak in English, then.
Say, I just called to see if--what? Oh, well, thank you. That's very nice. I'm quite pleased to have beaten that lying cowboy moron, as well. Thanks for your kind words.
I was just calling you to--excuse me? The what? Oh! What am I planning to do about the oil for food thing? Well, I was rather planning to let it play out, you know, see what the investigation comes up with, and--well, I suppose we could talk about something else. I'd have to mull that over for a while. What? No, no, that's not some kind of code. No, Jacques, please don't offer me money.
But, say there. Speaking of offering, I was just calling to invite you to a little summit I'm putting together for next week. I know it's short notice, but I'm sure you'll want to come when you find out what the topic is.
Oh. Well, yes. That's right. Can't put anything over on you, then, eh? Yes, it's about Iraq. I'm having a few world leaders over for a nice big summit, full of important nuanced discussion and good, rich food--oh, I don't know. I'd have to ask the White House chef, I suppose.
Well, Jacques, I really don't know the chef's name. I kind of just got here. I'd ask Teresa, but I haven't seen her in a kitchen in--yeah, ha ha! You read my mind. I wouldn't want to try anything she cooked, either. That's what cooks are FOR, right? Ha ha ha!
Now, look, Jacques. I need to get an answer on this thing. Who else is coming? Oh, well, I was going to invite all the allies we haven't quite had around for a while, maybe some we lost more recently, the ones who are already--oh, my, Jacques. I don't think that's a very nice thing to say about Prime Minister Blair! I haven't heard language like that since this morning, when I made Teresa's coffee too hot.
Anyway, look--what? Oh, well, no. I haven't actually--well, you're the first I called because of the special relationship our two nations have always had--are you still there, Jacques? What? Oh, yes, I suppose it is very important to make sure you don't miss the French re-runs of Dallas. Are they--oh, finished now?
Okay. Now, how much of an entourage will you be bringing? We'll have to figure out which room--what?
Oh, you have something else to do? Well, yes, I know you're a very important world leader, but so am I now, Jacques, and as you know you have a stake in Iraq, too--well, not, I didn't mean a steak you eat, I meant--well, no. Stop laughing, Jacques. I know you don't have anything there right now. Oh, I--and you don't plan on…yes, I see.
Well, don't you think it would be a good idea to at least sit down and talk about it?
Jacques? I think we've--
[dial tone]
Is there something wrong with this line?
Hello?
YOU CAN KEEP IT
WHAT THE PRESIDENT REALLY WANTED TO SAY
Much has been made of the President's demeanor in the first debate. Against a clearly unfair set of questions (Jim Lehrer: "Mr. Kerry, please tell us what would make you such a good president." "Mr. Bush, why are you such a liar?" Don't look it up. It's exaggeration for effect.), the President appeared testy, nasty, bored, and exasperated.
I'm not going to say that's not true. In fact, it's something I actually found refreshing. It's just what I would have felt like doing, if I were the president of the United States and some idiot Frenchman disguised as an American war hero decided he should tell me what to do.
And after giving it some thought, I think I know just why it came out that way. So, here, if you will indulge me (and you will, because you can't stop me; you can only reply) is my version of what the President was holding back but really, in his heart of hearts, wanted to say to John Flip-flop Kerry, Jim Demshill Lehrer, and the whole nation during the first debate:
JIM LEHRER: Mr. Bush, you have a two-minute closing statement.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, thank you for having me, Jim. I hope the nation has learned a lot about my opponent and myself tonight. I'd also like to thank the good people of Florida, because they've been through-- I'm sorry. I just can't-- (Sighs). Okay, look. I have to be honest with you, Jim, and with the American people. You may have noticed that I've been a little--well, maybe a little exasperated tonight. And it's not the flashing lights. My team likes those. And it's not even the biased questions you're throwing at me. I'm used to that.
(Turning to face Kerry): Senator Kerry, do you know what I spent my day doing? While you were getting your hair and your nails done? Do you know what I've been doing and thinking about while you were covering up your weird orange skin so you didn't scare the viewers? Do you?
I was all over this state, looking at the unbelievable damage those hurricanes have done to our people and property. I saw people whose houses are destroyed, people who haven't had electricity in weeks. I saw those kids your witch of a wife thinks should be going naked through the streets of Florida--I still don't know why she said that or what she meant.
Anyway, I, uh, oh, yeah--I looked at all this devastation, all this destruction, and I came back to the hotel room with my brother, Jeb, and I looked him in the eye. "Jeb," I said, "I'm the President of the United States, and I can't even make sure that those people have something to eat tonight. Do you realize that? It kills me to have to leave here and go play footsie with that met-er-o-sexual hack tonight. I just want to smack him around. It's times like these I almost wish I could have a drink, but I know that wouldn't even help."
(To the camera) I look at America and I see a lot of good news. A lot of good people helping their neighbors and living right and raising kids to love this country. But I also see a lot of pain. A lot of people are hurting. A lot of jobs were lost after 9/11. My opponent talks like I took all those jobs away from all those Americans. He and his friends act like I personally blew up the twin towers. They want to sit on the sidelines and laugh because I chose not to panic a bunch of schoolkids and stayed seven minutes to read a book about a goat. I suppose they'd prefer I sat in the Senate, or the Hamptons, reading Jean-Paul Sartre--yeah, I know who he is. I'm not a moron, you know.
Or maybe you don't, because Mr. Kerry's friends have made a big point of saying how stupid I am, how uneducated, how I'm not "intellectually curious." They get mad at me because I don't read the papers. Well, why should I read the papers? I'm the president of the United States! There's nothing in the paper I don't know first! The reporters spend half their time trying to find out what I already know, and the other half interviewing people who don't know the answers. I don't READ the New York Times because I'm IN the New York Times!
So, look. I'm going to level with you.
I didn't really know much about being president when this thing started. I just knew there was something in my soul, my spirit, that said I should try. I knew God had a plan, and I thought I was part of it. Then, when 9/11 happened, it seemed that was why He'd put me there. For such a time as this. And I did that job. I became the commander in chief. I was a uniter. I held widows (not the way the last president did--the decent, God-fearing American way). I encouraged first responders. I hugged little kids whose parents would never come home again.
And then the time came and we had to hit Afghanistan. And I knew what I had to do, and I did it. And once again I found myself the Mourner-in-Chief of the United States of America. I held people up. I prayed for them. They prayed for me. We wept together. And we rejoiced together that their loved ones had gone on to a better place for a noble cause.
And then every intel source in the world said Saddam has WMDs. Saddam is going to strike. Saddam is a crazy murdering tyrant. The people of Iraq are suffering. Saddam is shooting at our planes every single day. He's taking the oil-for-food money and buying solid-gold cars and ostentatious palaces while his people starve in the street and get raped and thrown in prison---(choking up)--and I said, "Not on my watch. This no-count rat isn't going to flout UN resolutions and murder people and plot to destroy the United States of America on MY watch. Not after 9/11. Not on your life. Lock and load. It's showtime."
And so, as my opponent likes to say, I "took us to war." A war Senator Kerry authorized and then didn't want to pay for. Didn't want to supply the troops, if he couldn't get his way on the economy to do it. Didn't care then whether folks had to have a bake sale to buy body armor--suddenly now he cares? Do you believe it? I don't.
But the worst part is that while I'm trying to run all this--win two wars, put down insurgencies, chase terrorists all over the world, deal with North Korea and Libya and Iran and Africa and Mexico, visit world leaders and international summits and meet with families of the dead and plan strategies for global trade and international police cooperation and African AIDS relief AND tax policy and health care, prescription drugs, unemployment, steel tarrifs, no-call lists, child pornography laws--I could go on.
While I'm doing ALL this--some nutbag named Moore is making a movie about what an international menace I am. Saddam Hussein cut people's hands off and cut their tongues out--and I'M supposed to be the bad guy? Some creep named Soros who I don't even think is an American, I don't know--is putting millions of dollars up to tell America and the troops that Iraq is Vietnam and we're going to lose and I'm the devil. This guy wants to make heroin legal--and I'M the devil? And the Democrats and my opponent are all over the country telling everyone I'm doing a lousy job and I don't care about them.
Well, you know what? He's half right. Most days, I'm proud to be the president of this great country. It's an honor and a privilege, and I love the people of America and the meaning of America.
But when folks like him start spouting off about how he'd do this different, and that different--and eventually EVERYTHING different--that's when he's right. I'm doing a lousy job.
Because when you look into the eyes of a woman whose husband or son isn’t coming home, and all you can do is pray and hug her, this is a lousy job.
And when you watch the stock market go up and down no matter what you do about it, this is a lousy job.
And when half the American people don't even understand that their very lives and families would be in terrible danger if we didn't have my Homeland Security and Defense Departments slaving away to keep them safe--didn't you people see 9/11? It was on tv--I don't know how you could have missed it! When half the American people are MAD at me for PROTECTING them--you're darn right, it's a lousy job!
And, Senator Kerry, if you think you can do better, if you really think that you can call up your pal Jacque and convince him to bring in troops, do it! In fact, if I win, I'll appoint you and Jimmy Carter as a special delegation--maybe with Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen or something--to go over there to France and summitryize all you like. See if you can get them in. Go ahead. I'll wait.
If you think you can get the terrorists to stop beheading people on the Internet and blowing things up, go ahead! Try your hand! I won't stop you.
I'm telling you, if you really think you can run a multi-billion dollar budget--and not just talk about appropriating the people's money, but actually managing it and deciding what to do about 80 million different issues with half your mail calling you names and wanting you dead and the other half asking for your wife's cookie recipe and how's your dog--if you think you can do this lousy job, well, you can HAVE it!
(To camera) And I want to talk to you undecideds right now. Get off the fence and make a decision. This is America, and you better figure out what your opinion is, or you're going to get run over by the train of history. Make a choice and stick with it. If you think Senator Kerry can do a better job after 20 years in the Senate without an important piece of legislation to his name--a divorced Catholic who says he thinks life begins at conception and then votes every time to kill it, a man who voted to go to war and not to fund the troops fighting it, who says he's against gay marriage but won't lift a finger to stop it, who voted against every important weapon we used to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and are now using to maintain the peace, who can't even debate me without spending half his day getting primped and primed and bronzed and waxed--if you think a man like that is fit to run this country, go ahead and vote for him.
But if you like your morals and your marriages straight, vote for me. If you want your soldiers to finish the job they started and bring Iraq and Afghanistan into the world of civilized nations, vote for me. If you follow the faith you claim to believe in, and you want the terrorists busy in some other country than this one, vote for me.
I personally don't care who you vote for. If God gives me this job again, I'll do the very best I can, because I love the American people, and the stakes are too high to do anything less. If that's not in the Plan, I'll go home to Crawford and love my wife and ride my horses and pray that the President is listening to God, just like the rest of you do every day. But I'm done with this debate. I'm not even staying to wave at people. I've been up all day, since early morning, and I've been doing my job.
So, if you'll excuse me, Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Kerry, people of America, I'll be leaving now. I'm going home with my wife now to NOT watch the CBS news. Good night.
Much has been made of the President's demeanor in the first debate. Against a clearly unfair set of questions (Jim Lehrer: "Mr. Kerry, please tell us what would make you such a good president." "Mr. Bush, why are you such a liar?" Don't look it up. It's exaggeration for effect.), the President appeared testy, nasty, bored, and exasperated.
I'm not going to say that's not true. In fact, it's something I actually found refreshing. It's just what I would have felt like doing, if I were the president of the United States and some idiot Frenchman disguised as an American war hero decided he should tell me what to do.
And after giving it some thought, I think I know just why it came out that way. So, here, if you will indulge me (and you will, because you can't stop me; you can only reply) is my version of what the President was holding back but really, in his heart of hearts, wanted to say to John Flip-flop Kerry, Jim Demshill Lehrer, and the whole nation during the first debate:
JIM LEHRER: Mr. Bush, you have a two-minute closing statement.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, thank you for having me, Jim. I hope the nation has learned a lot about my opponent and myself tonight. I'd also like to thank the good people of Florida, because they've been through-- I'm sorry. I just can't-- (Sighs). Okay, look. I have to be honest with you, Jim, and with the American people. You may have noticed that I've been a little--well, maybe a little exasperated tonight. And it's not the flashing lights. My team likes those. And it's not even the biased questions you're throwing at me. I'm used to that.
(Turning to face Kerry): Senator Kerry, do you know what I spent my day doing? While you were getting your hair and your nails done? Do you know what I've been doing and thinking about while you were covering up your weird orange skin so you didn't scare the viewers? Do you?
I was all over this state, looking at the unbelievable damage those hurricanes have done to our people and property. I saw people whose houses are destroyed, people who haven't had electricity in weeks. I saw those kids your witch of a wife thinks should be going naked through the streets of Florida--I still don't know why she said that or what she meant.
Anyway, I, uh, oh, yeah--I looked at all this devastation, all this destruction, and I came back to the hotel room with my brother, Jeb, and I looked him in the eye. "Jeb," I said, "I'm the President of the United States, and I can't even make sure that those people have something to eat tonight. Do you realize that? It kills me to have to leave here and go play footsie with that met-er-o-sexual hack tonight. I just want to smack him around. It's times like these I almost wish I could have a drink, but I know that wouldn't even help."
(To the camera) I look at America and I see a lot of good news. A lot of good people helping their neighbors and living right and raising kids to love this country. But I also see a lot of pain. A lot of people are hurting. A lot of jobs were lost after 9/11. My opponent talks like I took all those jobs away from all those Americans. He and his friends act like I personally blew up the twin towers. They want to sit on the sidelines and laugh because I chose not to panic a bunch of schoolkids and stayed seven minutes to read a book about a goat. I suppose they'd prefer I sat in the Senate, or the Hamptons, reading Jean-Paul Sartre--yeah, I know who he is. I'm not a moron, you know.
Or maybe you don't, because Mr. Kerry's friends have made a big point of saying how stupid I am, how uneducated, how I'm not "intellectually curious." They get mad at me because I don't read the papers. Well, why should I read the papers? I'm the president of the United States! There's nothing in the paper I don't know first! The reporters spend half their time trying to find out what I already know, and the other half interviewing people who don't know the answers. I don't READ the New York Times because I'm IN the New York Times!
So, look. I'm going to level with you.
I didn't really know much about being president when this thing started. I just knew there was something in my soul, my spirit, that said I should try. I knew God had a plan, and I thought I was part of it. Then, when 9/11 happened, it seemed that was why He'd put me there. For such a time as this. And I did that job. I became the commander in chief. I was a uniter. I held widows (not the way the last president did--the decent, God-fearing American way). I encouraged first responders. I hugged little kids whose parents would never come home again.
And then the time came and we had to hit Afghanistan. And I knew what I had to do, and I did it. And once again I found myself the Mourner-in-Chief of the United States of America. I held people up. I prayed for them. They prayed for me. We wept together. And we rejoiced together that their loved ones had gone on to a better place for a noble cause.
And then every intel source in the world said Saddam has WMDs. Saddam is going to strike. Saddam is a crazy murdering tyrant. The people of Iraq are suffering. Saddam is shooting at our planes every single day. He's taking the oil-for-food money and buying solid-gold cars and ostentatious palaces while his people starve in the street and get raped and thrown in prison---(choking up)--and I said, "Not on my watch. This no-count rat isn't going to flout UN resolutions and murder people and plot to destroy the United States of America on MY watch. Not after 9/11. Not on your life. Lock and load. It's showtime."
And so, as my opponent likes to say, I "took us to war." A war Senator Kerry authorized and then didn't want to pay for. Didn't want to supply the troops, if he couldn't get his way on the economy to do it. Didn't care then whether folks had to have a bake sale to buy body armor--suddenly now he cares? Do you believe it? I don't.
But the worst part is that while I'm trying to run all this--win two wars, put down insurgencies, chase terrorists all over the world, deal with North Korea and Libya and Iran and Africa and Mexico, visit world leaders and international summits and meet with families of the dead and plan strategies for global trade and international police cooperation and African AIDS relief AND tax policy and health care, prescription drugs, unemployment, steel tarrifs, no-call lists, child pornography laws--I could go on.
While I'm doing ALL this--some nutbag named Moore is making a movie about what an international menace I am. Saddam Hussein cut people's hands off and cut their tongues out--and I'M supposed to be the bad guy? Some creep named Soros who I don't even think is an American, I don't know--is putting millions of dollars up to tell America and the troops that Iraq is Vietnam and we're going to lose and I'm the devil. This guy wants to make heroin legal--and I'M the devil? And the Democrats and my opponent are all over the country telling everyone I'm doing a lousy job and I don't care about them.
Well, you know what? He's half right. Most days, I'm proud to be the president of this great country. It's an honor and a privilege, and I love the people of America and the meaning of America.
But when folks like him start spouting off about how he'd do this different, and that different--and eventually EVERYTHING different--that's when he's right. I'm doing a lousy job.
Because when you look into the eyes of a woman whose husband or son isn’t coming home, and all you can do is pray and hug her, this is a lousy job.
And when you watch the stock market go up and down no matter what you do about it, this is a lousy job.
And when half the American people don't even understand that their very lives and families would be in terrible danger if we didn't have my Homeland Security and Defense Departments slaving away to keep them safe--didn't you people see 9/11? It was on tv--I don't know how you could have missed it! When half the American people are MAD at me for PROTECTING them--you're darn right, it's a lousy job!
And, Senator Kerry, if you think you can do better, if you really think that you can call up your pal Jacque and convince him to bring in troops, do it! In fact, if I win, I'll appoint you and Jimmy Carter as a special delegation--maybe with Jane Fonda and Bruce Springsteen or something--to go over there to France and summitryize all you like. See if you can get them in. Go ahead. I'll wait.
If you think you can get the terrorists to stop beheading people on the Internet and blowing things up, go ahead! Try your hand! I won't stop you.
I'm telling you, if you really think you can run a multi-billion dollar budget--and not just talk about appropriating the people's money, but actually managing it and deciding what to do about 80 million different issues with half your mail calling you names and wanting you dead and the other half asking for your wife's cookie recipe and how's your dog--if you think you can do this lousy job, well, you can HAVE it!
(To camera) And I want to talk to you undecideds right now. Get off the fence and make a decision. This is America, and you better figure out what your opinion is, or you're going to get run over by the train of history. Make a choice and stick with it. If you think Senator Kerry can do a better job after 20 years in the Senate without an important piece of legislation to his name--a divorced Catholic who says he thinks life begins at conception and then votes every time to kill it, a man who voted to go to war and not to fund the troops fighting it, who says he's against gay marriage but won't lift a finger to stop it, who voted against every important weapon we used to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and are now using to maintain the peace, who can't even debate me without spending half his day getting primped and primed and bronzed and waxed--if you think a man like that is fit to run this country, go ahead and vote for him.
But if you like your morals and your marriages straight, vote for me. If you want your soldiers to finish the job they started and bring Iraq and Afghanistan into the world of civilized nations, vote for me. If you follow the faith you claim to believe in, and you want the terrorists busy in some other country than this one, vote for me.
I personally don't care who you vote for. If God gives me this job again, I'll do the very best I can, because I love the American people, and the stakes are too high to do anything less. If that's not in the Plan, I'll go home to Crawford and love my wife and ride my horses and pray that the President is listening to God, just like the rest of you do every day. But I'm done with this debate. I'm not even staying to wave at people. I've been up all day, since early morning, and I've been doing my job.
So, if you'll excuse me, Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Kerry, people of America, I'll be leaving now. I'm going home with my wife now to NOT watch the CBS news. Good night.
Monday, October 04, 2004
EATING THE FUTURE
KERRY'S STEM CELL POSITION BOTH HYPOCRITAL AND INHUMANE
When John Kerry talks about stem cell research, he says "science" and "scientists" so often, you would think you were listening to Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
In a way, you are.
As you may recall, Dr. Frankenstein was so interested in finding out if he could re-animate dead tissue, he didn't think through the consequences of his pursuits to his subject or to the society. Mary Shelley's classic horror story is the quintessential man/monster question--who is really the monster? The re-animated corpse, forced into a new life it is neither ready for nor desirous of--or the Doctor himself, playing God without the heart of God for the creatures he creates?
For Kerry, there is no consideration of the consequences of pursuing a line of research that uses discarded human embryos. Although they have been conceived, and he claims to believe that "life begins at conception," he seems not to notice that--by his own words--such research requires that human beings be murdered.
President Bush came to this question with the genie half out of the bottle. There are existing stem cell lines, and he did not order them destroyed. Like the early medical experimenters who dissected corpses culled from the graveyard, he decided that what's already dead is already dead, so let's find out if there's any medical good to be had of them. But he forbade the federal government from paying for the creation of new lines, without interfering with the private sector's right to do such research.
After all, if George Soros can spend 10 million dollars trying to defeat the president, why can't he pay for some research? There's no shortage of money on the embryo-killer side. If they want to rob the graves, let them pay for it.
This is a sensible and moral position for several reasons. First, to put the federal government in a position to make it profitable to harvest embryos leads inevitably to the deliberate creation of more. We will, in the name of the people, create life with the express intention of destroying it.
Second, it is a culturally schizophrenic position to both encourage infertile couples to conceive because they have a right to be parents, treating the embryos as proto-children, and to encourage researchers to treat the same entities as disposable and experimental. It is fundamentally illegal to sell people--at least at the moment. It must remain illegal for the government to pay for the creation of doomed life.
Finally, this question cuts at the very heart of human nature, of worth and value, of good and evil. Would it be right to torture and kill one person to save many? It is an ancient philosophical dilemma. On the one hand, every individual has worth and value, and it would be wrong to "trade" their life for the lives of others. On the other, the collective good can be served by the sacrifice of one.
But the sacrifice of a human life can only be honorable when it is voluntary, as in the case of a soldier who gives his life for his country and its security. Only an individual can sacrifice his life--for another to do so on his behalf is murder, plain and simple.
And so we must say, to Christopher Reeve and Nancy Reagan and Michael J. Fox--we love you. You are special and unique and of infinite worth. But you were once an embryo, too. And each of those you seek to kill to bring about the cure you crave is also an individual of infinite potential and infinite worth. We can ask you--but not compel you--to sacrifice yourself for that one, but we cannot in the name of science sacrifice that one for you.
This self-absorbed culture is not in desperate need of cures for diseases and ways to grow new organs outside the human body and more money for increasingly amoral research projects. More urgently we need to re-assess our attitude toward human life, what it is and what it's worth.
Today they ask us to breed children to cure the ills of their parents and grandparents--not a surprising request from the generations that introduced and perfected abortion on demand for the sake of convenience. But tomorrow, if science finds, or even theorizes, that the blood of the old may be useful to the health of the young, or if in mapping the human genome we have uncovered the genetic markers for character flaws and behavioral quirks--then all bets are off. For we will have already erased the line that separates cutting edge science from ghoulish experimentation.
If we proceed on the path John Kerry recommends and the president is seeking to close off--then we are no better than the nazis experimenting on camp victims, than Saddam torturing his prisoners for fun, than--more keenly--the witch fattening Hansel and Gretel so she can eat them.
When human life is negotiable then everything--and everyone--is on the table.
When John Kerry talks about stem cell research, he says "science" and "scientists" so often, you would think you were listening to Dr. Victor Frankenstein.
In a way, you are.
As you may recall, Dr. Frankenstein was so interested in finding out if he could re-animate dead tissue, he didn't think through the consequences of his pursuits to his subject or to the society. Mary Shelley's classic horror story is the quintessential man/monster question--who is really the monster? The re-animated corpse, forced into a new life it is neither ready for nor desirous of--or the Doctor himself, playing God without the heart of God for the creatures he creates?
For Kerry, there is no consideration of the consequences of pursuing a line of research that uses discarded human embryos. Although they have been conceived, and he claims to believe that "life begins at conception," he seems not to notice that--by his own words--such research requires that human beings be murdered.
President Bush came to this question with the genie half out of the bottle. There are existing stem cell lines, and he did not order them destroyed. Like the early medical experimenters who dissected corpses culled from the graveyard, he decided that what's already dead is already dead, so let's find out if there's any medical good to be had of them. But he forbade the federal government from paying for the creation of new lines, without interfering with the private sector's right to do such research.
After all, if George Soros can spend 10 million dollars trying to defeat the president, why can't he pay for some research? There's no shortage of money on the embryo-killer side. If they want to rob the graves, let them pay for it.
This is a sensible and moral position for several reasons. First, to put the federal government in a position to make it profitable to harvest embryos leads inevitably to the deliberate creation of more. We will, in the name of the people, create life with the express intention of destroying it.
Second, it is a culturally schizophrenic position to both encourage infertile couples to conceive because they have a right to be parents, treating the embryos as proto-children, and to encourage researchers to treat the same entities as disposable and experimental. It is fundamentally illegal to sell people--at least at the moment. It must remain illegal for the government to pay for the creation of doomed life.
Finally, this question cuts at the very heart of human nature, of worth and value, of good and evil. Would it be right to torture and kill one person to save many? It is an ancient philosophical dilemma. On the one hand, every individual has worth and value, and it would be wrong to "trade" their life for the lives of others. On the other, the collective good can be served by the sacrifice of one.
But the sacrifice of a human life can only be honorable when it is voluntary, as in the case of a soldier who gives his life for his country and its security. Only an individual can sacrifice his life--for another to do so on his behalf is murder, plain and simple.
And so we must say, to Christopher Reeve and Nancy Reagan and Michael J. Fox--we love you. You are special and unique and of infinite worth. But you were once an embryo, too. And each of those you seek to kill to bring about the cure you crave is also an individual of infinite potential and infinite worth. We can ask you--but not compel you--to sacrifice yourself for that one, but we cannot in the name of science sacrifice that one for you.
This self-absorbed culture is not in desperate need of cures for diseases and ways to grow new organs outside the human body and more money for increasingly amoral research projects. More urgently we need to re-assess our attitude toward human life, what it is and what it's worth.
Today they ask us to breed children to cure the ills of their parents and grandparents--not a surprising request from the generations that introduced and perfected abortion on demand for the sake of convenience. But tomorrow, if science finds, or even theorizes, that the blood of the old may be useful to the health of the young, or if in mapping the human genome we have uncovered the genetic markers for character flaws and behavioral quirks--then all bets are off. For we will have already erased the line that separates cutting edge science from ghoulish experimentation.
If we proceed on the path John Kerry recommends and the president is seeking to close off--then we are no better than the nazis experimenting on camp victims, than Saddam torturing his prisoners for fun, than--more keenly--the witch fattening Hansel and Gretel so she can eat them.
When human life is negotiable then everything--and everyone--is on the table.
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