The Infinite Value of Terri's Brokenness

Terri is gone. I'm late to that story, but that doesn't matter. I've been consumed these past two weeks, watching the spectacle of her all-too public, all-too tainted state-sanctioned killing, while waiting and watching too as my brother receives chemo for leukemia - diagnosed less than a week before they pulled Terri's feeding tube. Like her, my brother is young. He had no warning. Wham. His life is broken in a thousand pieces - plans scuttled, hair falling out, muscles wasting, IV dripping. His prospects are good; they're not 100%. I keep thinking - while trying not to think- about the horrible 'what-ifs' that face him down the road. I trust that God will make great things out of our family's struggle if we let Him.

Amidst this, I'm tending as lovingly as I can to our big 13-year-old family dog. He doesn't have any idea what's happening to him. He's confused at not being able to romp after tennis balls or squirrels anymore. He's not in pain, but he seems almost wistful for the days when we could let him stay in the house overnight. (His bladder won't allow it anymore.) He has no wishes to discern. We must put him down; I know that. These cases are not near the same, but imminent death in the house - even if only a beloved pet - only adds to my sadness.

Reading Anna Quindlen's column in Newsweek, and the many commentaries on it, I'm struck by a contrast that gets sharper the longer I look at it. It's not precisely about life versus death. It's more about individual life versus the 'life' of society and the state. This is not a new debate. It echoes back to Rome and Greece - gladiators and Socrates and Eskimo geriatrics set out on ice floes. Sacrifice for the greater good; moving on to save scarce resources. Some readers will be old enough to remember the late '70's pop culture phenomenon, Logan's Run (a book, a movie, and then a television series). It can be summed up as follows: "Nobody over 30 deserves to live."

In Quindlen's world, there are practical judgments to be made: science and the law and all of the tools of our intellect will be able to render a clear thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a person's worth and future prospects relative to those of the society in which s/he lives. The other world is not without judgments, but it is filled with hope, and tries (never succeeding) to err on the side of life when there may be doubt. Honest conservative Christians will acknowledge - should acknowledge - that sometimes it is utterly clear that the person did not want to live this way, the family is in total agreement, their motives are pure and free of conflicts of interest, and the evidence is overwhelming that death is imminent. Terri's case was never that clear-cut.

Smears of Tom DeLay aside, those situations have never been in dispute. While I would wish that suffering people could preserve hope, who am I to judge? It is their choice. We must have that freedom for ourselves if we are to love God. Compelled love is an oxymoron. Terri never had that choice. Her parents never had that choice.

All of this has brought me back again and again to book that I originally found on-line but has since disappeared: "Handling life's disappointments: Moving from desperation to celebration" (unfortunately out-of-print). In it, author David O. Dykes writes:

God allows us to carry an unbearable load at times [to] produce brokenness in our lives... In man’s economy broken things are less valuable. In God’s economy just the opposite is true. To God, broken things are of infinitely greater value. If you have a broken clock, it’s useless... We live in a culture that discards broken objects. Conversely, God uses broken things... The body of Jesus had to be broken for us so that we could know the joy of salvation. While we tend to throw broken things away, God delights to use them. Cooperate with God during your difficulties and allow Him to produce brokenness in you.

As Laura Ingram put it, "Terri has given us a gift". Yes. A gift of brokenness. A gift of reflection. A gift of improbable, faithful love that has spurred us all - no matter where we each came down - to search our heart, and search again. To search for God.

That gift is priceless. Thank you, Terri. Rest in Peace.

Other memorials of note include: JivinJehosephat, Michelle Malkin, and LaShawn Barber, (who has had the patience to assemble links to many many others.)

UPDATE 3/31: Mark Steyn never disappoints. His pre-memorial to Terri in The Spectator [since removed; see Malkin's excerpt instead] cuts to the nub of the case, starting with another from 1998 that's even more chilling, (if that's possible.) Evangelical Outpost is also good, considering the larger battle between utilitarianism and religiously-informed ethics.

UPDATE 4/2: Michelle Malkin gets around to the Steyn piece today, calling it "hands down, the best piece written on the case. Ever." I agree. Way to tell 'em Michelle! She adds this great comment: "[Steyn]... nails the apathetic/deliberately ignorant among us who refused to acknowledge the screaming evil in Terri's public execution." Indeed. A radio program here this morning seemed desperate to turn the focus to the supposed callousness and selfishness of Terri's parents. They may be human and fallible, but hello? Volunteering to care for an invalid indefinitely may be delusional (that's for them to decide), but it is the exact opposite of selfish.

What Do Iran and the D.C. Public Schools Have in Common?

They're both havens for terrorists.

Kifah Waed Jayyousi, the former facilities director for D.C. public schools, was ordered held in Detroit yesterday after he was arrested for providing material support to terrorists and plotting acts of terrorism... Mr. Jayyousi was hired as facilities director for D.C. public schools in July 1999 by Superintendent Arlene Ackerman. He held the position, which oversees capital improvements and maintenance, for more than two years until he was fired in April 2001 by Superintendent Paul L. Vance for "shoddy management." Mr. Jayyousi, 43, was charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources for terrorism and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure people or damage property in a foreign country... The affidavit says the federal investigation into Mr. Jayyousi began in late 1993.

So let's see if I've got this straight: This guy goes under investigation in 1993. Six years later the DC school system hires him. I won't even touch the affirmative action angle, or the fact that again the liberal academic establishment seems to play host to more than their share of these nuts. Well OK, I will touch that. Someone has to. Are we surprised that one of the most wacko-liberal dysfunctional school systems in the country is where this guy chose to hang out? And no, before my comments fill up with hate-mail, this is not per se about Muslims or racial profiling, or religious intolerance or any of that garbage. This is about terrorists. Yes, they come in many shapes and sizes. Let's move on.

Jayyousi presumably gets priveleged access to every school in the District for almost two years. Now granted, I know that an investigation is not an arrest, and an arrest is not a conviction, but did anybody check this guy out in any serious way in 1999? Criminal background check? FBI? Anything? Is it even possible to know that someone is under investigation for being a terrorist? (I recognize the dangers of the investigative part of the process being too open to public scrutiny, but c'mon. Six years?)

Was there really not even a hint accessible to DC hiring officials that he might not be the optimal choice to be entrusted with a top job overseeing the facilities within which D.C. residents allow their children to be cared for every day? "Kill, kidnap, maim or injure people or damage property in a foreign country"? Are we sure? Has anyone thought to check the walls, basements, HVAC systems, plumbing and electrical systems of the D.C. schools Mr. Jayyousi oversaw? Is it possible that he might have left a few nasty 'surprises' somewhere? I shudder to think about it. How many more Jayyousis are there embedded in important jobs like this?

More background here, and here.

The Journalist Manifesto

I'm too tired to write cogently about it tonight, but Jeff Jarvis has posted an elegant manifesto on the rediscovery (and redefinition) of journalism. I plan to give it more thought and blog on it in the morning. [Hat tip: LaShawn Barber.]

Pot and Kettle - Part II (aka Hypocrisy Watch)

The right is hardly immune from hypocrisy, but the left (particularly the aging, angry left) is taking it to new levels. I just ran across this ridiculous, superficial comparison between free speech efforts on college campuses and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Okey Dokey...

This unhinged wacko seems to equate efforts like FIRE's to defend First Amendment rights for students' minority opinions with forcibly relocating, shooting and starving millions. Yeah, that's a cogent argument. Particularly ironic in light of this report in yesterday's Washington Post.

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says. By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans. The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Repression of minority views by monolithically liberal faculty and administrators gets twisted into pity for those same self-appointed mandarins of political correctness. Somehow current, peaceful student revolts against such thought control are singled out as unsavory, whereas forcible blockades of college operations by dope-smoking tie-dyed long-hairs in the '60's are excused if not lauded by omission from this 'critique'.

Note to self: carefully regulate visits to left-wing-wacko sites to maintain sanity.

Brought Down by a Microbe?

The slowly evolving story of bird flu outbreak in North Korea raises the possibility for some interesting if familiar scenarios for Western access, erosion of confidence in Kim Jong-il, and complications (or opportunities) this may introduce into already silly 'talks' on nuclear weapons. Then there's the pity angle: MSM fixation (again) on poor suffering North Koreans, with few hard questions about the policies and 'leadership' that drove that country to a state of despotic desperation. The Washington Times notes:

Pyongyang's rare confirmation of the outbreak is considered [in Seoul] as its acknowledgement that it can hardly combat the epidemic without international aid... Many experts say extensive culling of poultry, the main source of protein for many North Koreans, would aggravate the impoverished state's food shortages. The country has relied on external food aid to feed its 23 million people for more than a decade..." The spread of bird flu and massive culling would deliver a fatal blow to North Korea, which has made efforts to breed more chickens to ease food shortages," said Kwon of the Korea Rural Economic Institute in Seoul. [emphasis added]

Hmm... "fatal blow". I like it. Not that I relish more North Koreans suffering. I don't. They have suffered mightily already. But if this can help move a perpetual high-stakes stalemate towards removal of Kim Jong-il, that's a positive thing. None of this appears to have stopped sporting events between targets, err, I mean members of the Axis of Evil. It must be Bush's fault.

Extremism Alert - Pot Calls Kettle Black

Hugh Hewitt (tipped off by Right Wing Nuthouse, whose satire I like already), pours well-deserved derision on Paul Krugman for this take on extremism in yesterday's NYT :

America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here.

Trust us Paul, we're on it. Thanks for the tip. That's why we're singling you out. Extremism comes in many flavors. But while we've got you here, maybe you can explain this quote for our reading audience:

There is a nationwide trend toward "conscience" or "refusal" legislation. Laws in Illinois and Mississippi already allow doctors and other health providers to deny virtually any procedure to any patient.

This is one of those points that seem to be really important and scary to Krugman's usual loony audience, but strikes the rest of us as, well... a good idea. Isn't conscience legislation exactly the opposite of what goes on in totalitarian regimes? In those places (e.g., Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and today's North Korea, among too many other repressive hell-holes), doctors are compelled to conform to 'one best way' - the state's big plan for exterminating unwanted citizens. Claiming personal conscience is the best way to be jailed or killed themselves. Is Mr. Krugman really concerned that we're a nation moving towards the expression of individual conscience rather than tightening dictates from the state? Wasn't that the entire point of the glorious American experiment?

Never mind. I must be getting lazy - wasting bits on Krugman and and Dowd. Too easy. Too fun.

UPDATE: Krugman's mini-rant about conscience legislation and pharmacies appears to be part of a broader liberal 'push' on this issue. Remember, we're not talking about banning birth control or even the more morally ambiguous 'morning-after' pill but merely the right of individual pharmacists not to be forced by the state to dispense them. Would liberals feel the same way if the product were cigarettes or guns? [Hat tip: Museum of Left Wing Lunacy]

Apology to Andrew Sullivan

In re-reading my post from earlier today, ("What Theocracy?"), I realize that I unfairly waded into questioning Maureen Dowd's and Andrew Sullivan's personal religious beliefs, while implying that their views on theocracy were the same. They are not. I am sorry. I stand by the rest. This brilliant piece by Sullivan on the Ashley Simpson episode ("Amazing Grace") should put to rest any thought that he is coming at this from the same perspective as Dowd.

When Extremism Becomes a Vice

I just found The Anchoress and this thoughtful, jaunty rant:

The 2004 elections and the "morality" meme that followed them served to tempt some Christians - a distinct minority - to the sin of Pride... It goeth before a fall.

Summary: However worthy their motivations, the extreme fringe of the Schiavo spectacle is providing easy ammo for the Dems in the next election. Worth reading in full. Hat tip: Professor Bainbridge.

UPDATE: Lest there be any doubt that the bedside antics surrounding Terri Schiavo are now beyond the pale - and hurting Republicans' larger credibility on moral issues - Jesse Jackson has shown up to hog the camera. It's over. We all lost. Turn the cameras off. Let us pray for wisdom while we let her go in peace.

What Theocracy?

Maureen Dowd and Andrew Sullivan each recently labeled the U.S. a "theocracy". They are hardly alone in that smear. It's an easy taunt - inviting comparisons with the Taliban and Iranian mullahs - a cute sound byte without meaning or substance. What do they think has changed in 200+ years since the founders, (most of whom voiced religious beliefs of one stripe or another), created a Constitution aimed specifically at ensuring that a theocracy could not take hold on these shores?

Webster's defines theocracy as: "government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided." That doesn't help much. Hitler thought he was acting on divine guidance, but so did Winston Churchill, George Washington, FDR, and Abraham Lincoln, not to mention JFK and pretty much every leader of any note in the history of this country and beyond. (For extra credit, guess which President referred to the deity more often in his inaugural address: George Bush, or liberal icon JFK?) The Kims in North Korea instituted themselves as national deities - assuming the right to pass along their 'guidance' to a famished people. Yet somehow they don't get labeled as a theocracy by the MSM.

And what are we to make of the heart-rending Terri Schiavo case, where the vast majority of Americans believe she should have a secular religion (law) imposed upon her despite a recent Newsweek poll showing that:

78 percent of Americans believe Jesus rose from the dead; 75 percent say that he was sent to Earth to absolve mankind of its sins. Eighty-one percent say they are Christians; they are part of what is now the world's largest faith, with 2 billion believers, or roughly 33 percent of the earth's population.

No, Americans, despite their own beliefs are still highly resistant to the kind of church-state alliance that the founders were trying to avoid. We are hardly moving towards theocracy when so many are able to make civic judgments this way. Instead, such commentary seems to take offense at something much more basic that the founders expressly sought to protect: the expression of religion itself. Dowd and Sullivan and others seem offended that they are exposed to the voicing of religious belief and that religious conviction might influence (as it always has) the mores that underpin our society. I have two words Maureen Dowd in particular: Grow up.

Having a leader who believes in God does not make for a theocracy. Having leaders who pray for guidance, (and publicly acknowledge doing so) does not make for a theocracy. Having a body of laws that are morally inspired by religious tradition is not a theocracy. (All but the Communist regimes do so in one way or another.) Even living as an atheist or agnostic in a nation full of believers who prefer to cast their vote for other believers does not automatically imply theocratic oppression.

No, theocracy becomes worthy of note (and concern) only when it imposes expressions (or non-expressions) of conscience on an unwilling population, and punishes them for doing otherwise. That definition comes a lot closer to describing monolithic secularism, Communism, and the whim of unelected judges than it does to the thousands of religions, denominations, sects, cults and voluntary associations that thrive in this free land.

Even so, the right of individuals to abstain from religion stands firm, as evidenced by the much lower numbers for regular church attendance (compared the number expressing belief), not to mention Ms. Dowd's right to say what she wants on this topic. What is at stake and at the root of much liberal and libertarian angst is the gradual, steady reversal of anti-religion as state-imposed creed. Dowd and Sullivan have it exactly backwards: galloping, monolithic secularism-as-religion and constraints on religious expression are what's under siege. As they should be. As they were at the founding of this country. As those founders intended.

Local Warming - Not!

I'm continually astounded by how much climate change reporting proceeds in lock-step:

1) Feed off easily understood local weather anecdotes and conventional wisdom ("It's hot!", "That storm was big!", "I don't remember the weather being like this before..."),

2) Misuse incomplete and conflicting data to show a trend ("look at this graph we've carefully skewed to make our point!", "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"),

3) Presume a human cause, even when the connection is tenuous, ("we're bad!", "corporate greed is bad!", "Bush must be at fault!"), and

4) Demand a radical solution, ("world government now!"),

Thus, as a New Englader, this piece caught my eye for breaking most of those rules. The use of graphics is rather clever.

Figure 1 is a 50-year temperature history for the region (using data from the New England Climate Change report). It shows a rather consistent warming that resulted in a rise in the average annual temperature of a bit more than 2.5ºF. While some might argue that this is a sure sign of human-induced global warming, they would be surprised to learn that the 50 year period depicted in Figure 1 is from 1904-1953 -- long before the era of rapid atmospheric composition changes. The complete record for the region, stretching from 1899-2004, is shown in Figure 2. The overall temperature rise is 1.9ºF, but all of it occurred during the first half of the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant temperature increase in New England during the past 75 years... [emphasis added]

Feeling Her Pain

The cynic in me isn't terribly surprised that this hunger strike for Terri Schiavo hasn't gotten more MSM coverage. When Dick Gregory and IRA terrorists do such things, they become overnight media causes celebre. When a blogger does it to find out firsthand what it what it feels like to starve, she must be an anorexic right-wing extremist. Those who blithely wear "Question Authority" T-shirts, take note:

If I wonder what it's like to be starved and dehydrated to death, and if the experts are telling me that it's just such a marvelous experience, why on earth would I take their word for it? I'm all for authority, but these "experts" have none. They have never thirsted, they have hardly ever hungered, and they aren't going to tell me what it's like if they don't even have a clue. Since they seem so intent upon introducing this into our lives, I think it's a good thing to question authority and just try it out for myself, within reason.

The Arrogance of Intellect

This short reflective piece by Ralph Kinney Bennett is worth reading with regards to God's purpose with Terri Schiavo - something we cannot presume to know but that just as surely, is mysteriously at work in this media circus.

Somehow this soul, its journey begun -- whether to perfect harmony with God, or an eternity without Him -- must remain in that God-designed physical envelope that has become known to all as Terri Schiavo. Accident, or disease, or mayhem -- the risks of existing in this physical world -- may destroy that envelope, but God has made it plain that such destruction is not the prerogative of an individual human being. The wisdom of this, the purpose of it, is often contravened or forgotten. But I believe that the whole force of Scripture points to one thing -- that God, in His sovereign wisdom, wishes it so. In this wish he confounds the wise, puzzles even the faithful, and yet brings to complete understanding -- however grudging or grateful -- all those souls who have long ago completed the fleshly part of their journey. As a believer in individual liberty, I am mighty uneasy about government's hand in this thing. But I do not see the cynical politics that others deride, so much as I see, at bottom, some instinctive western, Judeo-Christian impulse of common decency and defense of life.

Bloggers Feel a Chill

The Supreme Court took a 'pass' yesterday on a First Amendment case, effectively raising roadblocks for poli-bloggers. By letting stand the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's October, 2004 ruling in Norton vs. Glenn (pdf), bloggers may find it harder to call to task public figures who say outrageous things - something that blogs do rather well. A handful of MSM outlets are running with the story, including the LA Times:

The case turned on whether the 1st Amendment's protection of the freedom of the press includes a "neutral reporting privilege." Most judges around the nation have said the press does not enjoy this privilege. Lawyers for more than two dozen of the nation's largest press organizations, including Tribune Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times, had urged the court to take up the Pennsylvania case and to rule that truthful news reports on public figures deserved to be shielded. They said politicians have been hurling false and damaging charges at their rivals throughout American history. The press cannot do its duty to inform the public if it is not free to report what public figures say, they argued. But the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said the press has never "enjoyed a blanket immunity" from being sued over stories that print falsehoods that damage a person's reputation. The law "has placed a burden (albeit a minimal one) on the media to refrain from publishing reports that they know to be false," the Pennsylvania court said.

MSM reporters will be affected too, but they're better able to handle any increase in tactical libel cases by public officials trying to shield themselves from their own stupidity. Despite all of the mud that's been slung at Karl Rove, the party out of power seems likely to benefit more from a strategy of stoking the libelous rumor mill while suing those who report such statements directly (i.e., blogs). In such a climate, how far are we away from political speech restrictions that look like this?

The only other blog I can find covering this at the moment is Captains Quarters - a surprise and a disappointment given the number of excellent lawyer-bloggers out there and the magnitude of the First Amendment rights just lost. Where are Hugh Hewitt, Powerline and Professor Bainbridge when we need 'em? In light of comments like this from Democratic standard-bearer-of-the-moment John Kerry, conservatives have cause to worry:

...the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

UPDATE I: Michelle Malkin has this take on another front in the budding war against bloggers:

Even if we wanted to give fewer legal protections to bloggers than to "real journalists,"... it's not clear that such a policy could be implemented given the blurring between blogs and Big Media.

UPDATE II: Others are noticing this now, though I'm still hoping the blogger-lawyers weigh in. From Right Wing Nuthouse:

Does this mean I can’t call John Kerry a lying, sniveling, traitorous weasel anymore? Probably... Am I missing something here? Is it really this complicated? How can you interpret the First Amendment so narrowly? Politicians have been calling each other names for 217 years in this country.

UPDATE III: Right Wing News is now on the case as well:

So let me get this straight: members of the media are supposed to listen to what politicians say, apparently use some sort of super-power that allows us to determine whether a statement is libelous without the benefit of a court case, and then just black out any news that isn't true. That sounds fun and easy right? Moreover, whatever happened to the public's "right-to-know"? I find it ironic that every deeply personal detail of a politician's life is fair game for the press, but if that same politician stands on a stage full of reporters screaming that his political enemies are "liars," "queers" and "child molesters," that there are judges who think it should be ILLEGAL to let the public even know what was said.

UPDATE IV: Ace of Spades makes a good point, admitting that this is not a one-sided issue:

Yes, it is important for the public to know about even the false claims made by politicians -- and sometimes, of course, sunlight exposes those lies for what they are -- but on the other hand, just because someone libels you, should the press amplify that libel ten-thousand-fold by repetition and wide dissemination and take no responsibility for the additional injury to person's character?

Personally, I think there's more and more sunlight. Let the mud be slung. Let the sun dry it out.

From Someone Who Should Know

Powerline notes this piece by Harvard undergraduate Joe Ford on the Terri Schiavo case, and rightly so. We can all pontificate about this in theory. Here's someone qualified to know.

Besides being disabled, Schiavo and I have something important in common, that is, someone attempted to terminate my life by removing my endotracheal tube during resuscitation in my first hour of life. This was a quality-of-life decision: I was simply taking too long to breathe on my own, and the person who pulled the tube believed I would be severely disabled if I lived, since lack of oxygen causes cerebral palsy. (I was saved by my family doctor inserting another tube as quickly as possible.) The point of this is not that I ended up at Harvard and Schiavo did not, as some people would undoubtedly conclude. The point is that society already believes to some degree that it is acceptable to murder disabled people. As Schiavo starves to death, we are entering a world last encountered in Nazi Europe. Prior to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the Nazis engaged in the mass murder of disabled children and adults, many of whom were taken from their families under the guise of receiving treatment for their disabling conditions. The Nazis believed that killing was the highest form of treatment for disability.

UPDATE: The 2003 'exit protocol' for Schiavo that Joe Ford cites was obtained from Cheryl Ford, a Tampa RN who once cared for Terri - an interesting coincidence (?) of last names. The protocol is graphic and unpleasant - but that's the point.

Letting Terri Go, Part II

As I wrote last week, my concerns for Terri Schiavo have less to do with her than everyone else: those wanting her to die, as well as the rest of us complicit in a system that favors killing her under less-than-transparent circumstances and the fig leaf of a too-fallible legal process. Thus while I disagree with Neal Boortz's conclusion that Terri should be allowed to die without further consideration of the facts of her case, I concur with his larger thought (seconded by Andrew Sullivan.) That is, if we believe in God's promise that we will enjoy everlasting life (as I do), panicked efforts to keep Terri's body on this earth at all costs are signs of our own lack of faith in that ultimate grace. At the extreme, they sit at the edge of a slippery slope that leads towards Dorian Gray style, death-defying narcissistic pursuits such as botox, liposuction and cryogenics.

Terri Schiavo's First Amendment Rights - Grudgingly

Many think of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as being all about free speech, forgetting that it begins: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." Someone must have read the fine print Saturday night and reflected upon the armed police blockade of Ms. Schiavo's death chamber that her husband Michael had been insistent upon enforcing. A Catholic priest was finally allowed to administer Last Rites and partial Holy Communion to Terri yesterday - Easter Sunday. How magnanimous of Michael - and our government.

The Talented Mr. Sullivan*

Evangelical Outpost has a nice little thought piece this morning on Andrew Sullivan and his role in the conservative movement. (Given recent turns, I recognize that calling Sullivan a conservative may cause some to choke on their breakfast cereal - as I almost did - but before you do, read the EO piece.)

It has taken me years to recognize his genius but I finally have to admit that Andrew Sullivan is one of the most astute political thinkers of our day. Before last week I would have scoffed at the notion. But I had failed to recognize that like many profound theorists, Sullivan doesn’t always use words in their generally accepted usage, choosing instead to imbue them with his own nuance. Take, for example, his use of the term 'conservatism'... Sullivanism attempts to provide an intellectual foundation for the diverse groups known as South Park Republicans, Republican Party Reptiles, and Maxim-cons. Before Andrew Sullivan came along, there didn’t appear, as Jonah Goldberg claimed, to be “any such thing as a unifying set of beliefs among them.” But Sullivan is providing formal structure to this form of cafeteria libertarianism. He is providing a framework for people who aren’t really conservative but would still prefer to be associated with William F. Buckley, Jr. rather than with Michael Badnarik.

For years, Sullivan embodied my entire understanding of the blogosphere, while capturing perfectly my views on the war to liberate Iraq, and what had gone desperately wrong with 60's liberalism. Like many, I turned him off when he bailed on the President in the clutch last fall - even as I understand his personal reasons for doing so.

Sullivan may or may not be a good flag-bearer for a coalition that calls itself conservative; someone who actively supported Kerry last November is automatically suspect. (How much easier might it be, having done it once, to throw his weight behind a cynically right-tacking, power-hungry Hillary Clinton in '08?) But I know of many self-described liberals whose introduction to conservative ideas came exclusively from Sullivan's blog. He has made it acceptable for many to think beyond the MSM, (still a huge and scary leap for those caught in its thrall.) If conservatives are seeking new converts, we could do a lot worse.

*Matt Damon's character in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" offers imperfect but tongue-in-cheek-amusing parallels with Sullivan's intellectual journeys, past, present and potentially future.

Making the Connection: NoKo and the Nazis

With collective outrage (and its opposite) focused on the horrors of one woman's slow state-ordered killing in Florida, it's understandable that this piece in yesterday's Washington Post, about slow state-ordered killing of another kind, didn't get more notice:

A day after Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 8, 1941, German death squads in the Polish village of Chelmno gassed Jews in specially equipped vans for the first time. Far from generating banner headlines, the story did not appear in the New York Times until nearly seven months later, on Page 6. Like the Allied powers, the Times consistently ignored or buried such reports until it was too late for 6 million European Jews. In 2005, the civilized world seems to be deploying the same dismissive, deadly strategy again. I recently returned from debriefing North Korean defectors in Seoul who told me of their involvement in the Pyongyang regime's gassing of political prisoners, dating back to the 1970s and continuing into the 21st century... It took an hour into our debriefing for Dr. Lee to get around to the fact that he helped develop deadly agents at a secret underground poison and toxin research institute. In that connection, he matter-of-factly described how, in 1979, he was in charge of gassing two political prisoners. The victims' suffering was documented by scientists, who took notes outside glass-encased gas chambers that were also wired for sound. One prisoner died after 2 1/2 hours, the other after 3 1/2 hours of agony. Then a young scientist, Dr. Lee was rewarded with a medal and promotions for his role in these successful experiments. Twenty-five years later, he expressed no remorse, but his recall of details and dates make him a credible, if frightening, witness.

This is hardly the first or worst of such testimony. Why is it hard to understand that history can and does repeat itself? Hitler never had nukes.

Steyn & Sowell on Schiavo

These two intellectual giants deserve to be read in full.

Mark Steyn in today's Sun Times:

...for all I know, it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order her to be starved to death. But it is still wrong. This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of ''plaintiffs'' and ''petitions'' and ''en banc review'' and ''de novo'' and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and ''put her out of her misery'' after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile.

Thomas Sowell in two parts - here, and here last Friday:

People who say that the government has no business interfering in a private decision like removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube somehow have no problem with a squad of policemen preventing her parents (or anyone else) from giving their daughter food or water... Terri Schiavo is being killed because she is inconvenient to her husband and because she is inconvenient to those who do not want the idea of the sanctity of life to be strengthened and become an impediment to abortion. Nor do they want the supremacy of judges to be challenged, when judges are the liberals' last refuge... Liberals have repeatedly used the talking point of how many judges have heard the case of Terri Schiavo. But that is as misleading as most of the rest of what they and the mainstream media have been saying... no matter how many appellate judges rule one way or the other, that... does not mean that all these judges agreed with the merits of the original court's decision. It means that they found no basis for saying that the original court's decision was illegal. What the law just passed by Congress did was authorize a federal court to go back to square one and examine the actual merits of the Terri Schiavo case, not simply review whether the previous judge behaved illegally... That is precisely what the federal courts have refused to do. There is no way that federal District Judge James Whittemore could have examined this complex case, with its contending legal arguments and conflicting experts, from scratch in a couple of days, even if he had worked around the clock without eating or sleeping.

Mounting Strangeness at Google

Charles Johnson over at Little Green Footballs notes that Google has been running recruitment ads for Hamas. Yes that Hamas. No, I'm not joking. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin notes that Google - which changed its logo for UN World Water Day - did nothing today for Easter: not even a cute little secular bunny with colored eggs, as I recall them doing in previous years. (The Wayback Machine doesn't display Google's logo for past dates - I checked.) Nope, just an ordinary day. Wouldn't want to recognize the most important holiday in one of the most important traditions shaping Western Civilization, a philosophical cornerstone influencing the founding documents of this country and oh yeah, one other thing: the promise of eternal life and salvation for all mankind. No, World Water Day is definitely more important. After all, we wouldn't want to be counted as part of the metastasizing national theocracy that Maureen Dowd is all worked up about, now would we? And they say secularism isn't a religion. Well, I'm happy to wave a red flag in front of that bull:

Isaiah 5:20
Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.

UPDATE I: I fully recognize the irony of publishing this stuff on a Google platform - one of several problems looming for bloggers.

UPDATE II: Adding to the frustration of Michelle and Charles in getting listed on Google News, Captain's Quarters reports that it has disappeared from Google altogether - though the explanation is mundane - a bad advertiser.

UPDATE III: An archive of Google 'holiday' logos can be found here.

1st Peter 1:8

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with inexpressible and glorious joy...

Police Resonate With the Gestalt

Sometimes a song comes on the radio - maybe purposeful on the part of the DJ; maybe not - but it captures the mood of current events just perfectly. Sting had other things in mind when he wrote "Driven to Tears" in 1979 (going on to record it in 1980), but some things are sadly timeless. When I heard it this evening driving to a restaurant, the relevance to Terri Schiavo was startling:

How can you say that you're not responsible?
What does it have to do with me?
What is my reaction, what should it be?
Confronted by this latest atrocity

Driven to tears, driven to tears, driven to tears

Hide my face in my hands, shame wells in my throat
My comfortable existance is reduced to a shallow meaningless party
Seems that when some innocent die
All we can offer them is a page in a some magazine
Too many cameras and not enough food
'Cos this is what we've seen

Driven to tears, driven to tears, driven to tears

Protest is futile, nothing seems to get through
What's to become of our world, who knows what to do?

Driven to tears, driven to tears, driven to tears
Driven to tears, driven to tears, driven to tears

More Honest Wrestling With a Sad Situation

My views on Terri Schiavo should be apparent to regular readers. I'm not sure what more there is to say. I'll be the first to confess to being swept up in the passion of arguing for what appears clear-cut to me. Nonetheless, I've kept an eye out (and have deep respect for) those who can calmly lay out their reasoning ground it in some serious soul-searching and in doing so share some of the personal experiences that lead them there. Such is the case with this excellent if longish essay over at Hootsbuddy. The piece is worth reading in its entirety:

We need to back away from the discussion long enough to see what is happening to us [as] a population. There is no way in a representative government that any of us is allowed to claim that what our government does is not an extension of what each of us is doing as an individual. It’s like being part of a family... Like it or not, we are all in this together... The case of Terri Schiavo is presenting a lot of Americans with a dilemma that is old stuff for some of us: how do I reconcile my values as an individual with those of a citizen when those two values are in conflict? In the final analysis, we have to conclude that legality and morality will never be congruent. We are not, nor do we want to be, a theocracy. We must come to terms with the shortcomings of man-made laws and systems. Those of us who oppose capital punishment have lived with those shortcomings for a long time, and will continue to do so. My opposition to capital punishment is not based on what it does to the person executed, but on what it does to me as a citizen-participant in the execution.

And the Reason They Can't Starve Is...?

Apologies if the sad connection with recent events isn't patently obvious:

Five stranded elk shot; they faced slow starvation... the five living bulls were shot to avoid a slow death from starvation... the condition of the animals was too poor to salvage the meat... the loss of the bulls would probably have no significant biological impact on the elk herd in the area. [Hat tip: NRO's Corner]

And a 10.0 From the Russian Judge

The Associated Press reports that:

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine study, hospice nurses rated the deaths of terminally ill people who voluntarily stopped eating and drinking. On a scale of zero to nine, with the highest number being "a very good death," their average rating was eight.

How nice. I'm sure Terri's parents are comforted by this. The key word here is voluntarily. As our culture of death 'matures' I'm betting that someone's family sues a care provider for a "below-average" death. For all I know, somebody already has. Also, why were the same kinds of medical experts widely reviled in the MSM when they testified to the harmlessness of so-called 'waterboarding' for the extraction of information from terrorist suspects?

Consistency Was Never Their Strong Suit

To listen to some left wing mouthpieces today, Congressional Republicans (and particularly Tom DeLay) are insincere, calculating opportunists while at the same time politically incompetent and doomed to fail due to their actions in the Schiavo case. Last Sunday, at Left Coaster Republicans were clever Machiavellians:

"Hypocrisy, Thou Art The Republican Party" - There has been a lot of media attention aimed at Terri Schiavo, and none at the opportunistic and hypocritical actions of the GOP trying to reestablish their domination of the nations Christians, now weakened by the neglect of the post-election period.

Today Republicans are (rather prematurely) being derided as complete screw-ups:

Start Playing "Taps" Karl [Rove] - Gallup Says Rising Oil Prices, And Schiavo Are Hurting Bush Greatly... the misplayed Schiavo debacle has cost Bush support from his base

Note to Democrats: Looking under rocks for pending failures to cheer about is not a viable political strategy. That much should be clear after last November.

Did it ever occur to these folks that some Republicans - including perhaps (gasp!) the President - were sincere about Terri Schiavo? Is it possible - just possible - that some of their reluctance - just some - in allowing a disabled woman to be slowly tortured and killed based on questionable testimony while her parents watch helplessly is based on heartfelt belief in enduring moral norms and not political calculation? Why is it that when a Democrat does something like this it is called 'principled' and when it fails politically they are held in even higher esteem by their compatriots for going against their political interests? This kind of crap is called projection: you must have base motives because I know deep down that I do. It's all Bush's fault. Or Karl Rove's.

Culture of Life; Culture of Choice

Dan Drezner muses:

...if [the Terri Schiavo] case has prompted a marked increase in the number of people specifying when they do not want heroic measures used to extend their biological life, then by their actions the Bush administration and both houses of Congress will have retarded rather than extended the culture of life. Just a thought.[Hat tip: Marginal Revolution]

Drezner is right that some - perhaps more - people will choose courses for themselves at odds with the larger hopes of their elected representatives for a life-centric culture. What Drezner misses however, is that longer term, a viable 'culture of life' can only flourish at the grassroots, planted in democracy and the hearts of individuals: an utterly libertarian concept. We are free to choose. That is our blessing, our curse - and our test. Imposition of 'norms' by unaccountable judges may change things for a time, but it does not define a culture. Gentle, persistent persuasion is our only legitimate tool for creating that culture of life - one heart at a time.

Letting Terri Go

The Schiavo case stopped being solely about her long ago. I have no doubt that whatever happens, she will be at peace. As I've said before, it's the rest of us I worry about. I like the honest Christ-centric thinking that Michael King does here, even as I disagree with his starting premise:

Should she be given a chance at life? If so, what kind of life are we talking about? Is there a chance at rehabilitation? Is Michael Schiavo an evil S.O.B., or is he simply a heart-broken man? Conversely, is she truly in a vegetative state? A virtual zombie with eyes open, and nothing inside? Are her parents and family in denial about her pain and suffering? Are the evangelicals coming to her aid getting so worked up that they are looking past the true nature of this situation? [emphasis added]

I cannot speak for all Christians, but I should hope that we could start instead from some other questions: What right do we have to kill her? What right do we have to judge her potential quality of life or her chance at rehabilitation when there remains significant dispute over her wishes and her current state? What right do we have to keep her parents from putting water on her lips when they are willing to care for her at their own expense?

Don't we want to err on the side of resolving those questions more fully before sealing this fatal action? The measures being taken are just passive enough to lull us into lumping them with removing much more heroic mechanisms of life support. Her condition is just ambiguous enough to lull us into judging her a 'vegetable'. Both are on a slippery slope of ambiguity that will lead inexorably to a debate ten years from now about a different case where removing less heroic measures from a less disabled person has started to seem 'OK'. This is not progressive. This is retrogressive - anaesthetizing and habituating us to a slow, steady downgrade in our collective ideals.

I think it is possible to forgive Michael Schiavo and others who see Terri's battle as fruitless, even as we hold to account our system's overall treatment of Terri, calling it what it is: as a sad and dangerous precedent. As Christians, we can accept that her battle for life may be ending, even as we recognize that her impact on our moral sense has already grown beyond measure.

Vermont = Mississippi Quip

If James Taranto ever wants to host a radio talk show, I'm all ears. Commenting on Jim Jeffords' political perfidy, he penned this 'keeper' yesterday: "Between [Jeffords] and Howard Dean, Vermont has become a laughingstock, the Mississippi of the 21st century."

Torture Double Standard

For the first time in awhile, I ventured over to the dark side to see what the loony-left was saying about Terri Schiavo. It didn't take long. I won't be back soon. With no hint of hypocrisy-awareness, DailyKos this morning is all concerned that the President is "not bothered by torture" - a few hours after railing against the integrity of Republican's heroic efforts to save Terri Schiavo from a multi-week death by starvation and dehyration. That's pretty weak in light of this.

The Big Three Go At It

No, not American automakers but uber-bloggers Hugh Hewitt, John Hinderaker and Glenn Reynolds on the Terri Schiavo case on CNBC's Kudlow and Company with Larry Kudlow. Fascinating transcript here, courtesy of Radioblogger. It sounded like three-on-one, but without too much apparent rancor. Morality versus rule of law - again. Money quotes:

LK: ...sometimes, when morality triumphs, it's untidy for the law. It's untidy for the politics. But at the end of the day, I still believe it's still a good thing for morality to triumph.

JH: To me, this is not all that hard a case. This is not a person who's on a ventilator or a respirator, consuming a lot of public funds, artificially keeping her alive. She's quite healthy as long as she eats and drinks. And she's got a family that is willing to care for her at their expense. And I just cannot understand why that's not the right result here.

HH: ...Congress directed the federal courts to take action, and the federal courts refused. That's nullification. I've been teaching con law for ten years. I've been practicing and studying the law for 25. I cannot see a single instance where Congress' expressed will has been nullified in this fashion, in the history of the Republic. I think it's a very dangerous precedent...

GR: If you don't like the Florida statute, that's one thing. But that's not a federal issue. That's not a Congressional issue. And I just think that Congress should have stayed out of it. I agree with Charles Fried who called it yesterday just an absurd departure from the principles of federalism.

HH: It's been 7 days since Terri Schiavo had a sip of water. The United States Congress came back under it's emergency authority to pass a statute. The president signed it. It called for a de novo hearing. That hearing has not been held. It would have been moral to hold the hearing. The failure is on the part of the federal courts. Mrs. Schiavo will die as a result, and that is tragic. And there's no way to explain it except by saying the courts could not be bothered.

(A Little) Intellectual Honesty on the Left

Forget whatever you thought you knew about political alliances:

Eleanor Smith of Decatur, Georgia, sat on Tuesday in a motorized wheelchair in front of the hospice, baking in the sun, with a sign on her lap reading, "This agnostic liberal says 'Feed Terri."' Smith, 65, had polio as a child and described herself as a lesbian and a liberal who had demonstrated before in support of the disabled... "What drew me here is the horror of the idea of starving someone to death who's vulnerable and who has not asked that to happen," Smith said. She said she thought that people who left written instructions to withhold medical treatment should have those wishes honored but that withholding water and nutrition from Terri Schiavo, who left no such written instructions, was tantamount to murder. "At this point I would rather have a right-wing Christian decide my fate than an ACLU member," Smith said. [Hat tip: Tomfoolery of the Highest Order]

No doubt she's been listening to fellow Georgian, Zell Miller. Both are old enough to remember when honest Democrats stood up for such values.

UPDATE: Ralph Nader joins the fight for Terri's life. When lambs lie down with lions...

Prevention of Cruelty to... People

I have a 13-year old dog. When I talk to him he makes friendly, happy noises and wags his tail. He looks at me directly when I scratch behind his ears. Being a large dog however, his hips are failing. He doesn't appear to be in pain, but we can't be sure. We have discussed putting him to sleep at some point, but not yet. Recently, he has become far less mobile to the point that we sometimes need to bring his food and water closer. In my wildest nightmares, I would never think of depriving him of those things. Yet that is what our system is doing to Terri Schiavo. Our law has come into irreconcilable conflict with our humanity - just as it did 2000 years ago.

UPDATE: Others are also on to the dog angle.

Do Not Avert Your Eyes

I understand the inclination to do so, but the nitty-gritty horribleness of Terri's pain and abuse are precisely what we must confront. Yes there are other stories, but this one is a test of our national character. It may also be Waterloo for 'compassionate conservatism'. It bears repeating: nobody knows what Terri 'would have wanted'. The sole testimony on that issue comes from a deeply suspect source. Why this case has not taken hold in the MSM as one of spousal abuse is lost on me.

The Boston Globe, after three days of clinically distancing itself from Ms. Schiavo's personhood finally relents today with the headline "Final Appeal in Schiavo Case". Now that she's about to die, they deign to give her a name while acknowledging - if unintentionally - similarities with headlines concerning death penalty appeals. On the other coast of the liberal media axis, the LA Times - redeeming itself slightly after the Barbara Demick flap - stands alone today in noting these horrendous details of Terri's condition and the poignant efforts to oppose her suffering:

"She has to start getting hydration; if she doesn't, she's not going to be with us much longer," Bob Schindler said. The Schindlers' lawyer, David C. Gibbs III, said they were watching her "skin crack, her nose bleed." He said Schiavo was having "pangs of hunger and thirst."... Authorities arrested 10 people — including three children — who allegedly tried to enter the facility in a symbolic attempt to bring her cups of water." It's the least I can do. I have experience with starving and dehydration, as I was in a prison camp in 1945," said Eva Edl, 69, of Aiken, S.C. Edl said she was separated from her parents at the end of World War II and interned in Yugoslavia. "I'm alive today because someone brought me food and water and I was later able to escape." [Hat tip: Michelle Malkin]

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter offers this tour de force today. Liberals will dismiss it because of who Ann is (i.e., a consistently articulate, hard-edged, truth-telling thorn in their side.) Libertarian-minded conservatives may dismiss it because of her appeal for the use of federal power in the most raw and direct manner imaginable. Nonetheless, her arguments are hard to ignore:

Democrats have called out armed federal agents in order to: (1) prevent black children from attending a public school in Little Rock, Ark. (National Guard); (2) investigate an alleged violation of federal gun laws in Waco, Texas (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms); and (3) deport a small boy to Cuba (Immigration and Naturalization Service)... In two of the three cases mentioned above, the Democrats' use of force was in direct contravention of court rulings... None of these exercises of military force has gone down in history as a noble moment, but that's because of the underlying purpose of the force, not the fact that force was used... It would be chaotic if public officials made a habit of disregarding court rulings simply because they disagreed with them. But a practice born of practicality has led the courts to greater and greater flights of arrogance. Sublimely confident that no one will ever call their bluff, courts are now regularly discovering secret legal provisions... Just once, we need an elected official to stand up to a clearly incorrect ruling by a court. Any incorrect ruling will do, but my vote is for a state court that has ordered a disabled woman to be starved to death at the request of her adulterous husband. Florida state court Judge George Greer - last heard from when he denied an order of protection to a woman weeks before her husband stabbed her to death - determined that Terri would have wanted to be starved to death based on the testimony of her husband, who was then living with another woman... The husband also happened to be the only person present when the oxygen was cut off to Terri's brain in the first place. [Hat tip: LaShawn Barber]

And not that it really matters, and I'm very late on this, but has anyone noted the irony of Terri's maiden name, (Schindler) and its association with the near saint who saved starving dehydrated Jewish refugees during WWII? Apparently someone has, as has someone else, though not all of the comparisons have been very kind. May she meet that Mr. Schindler in peace and fullness where such saints commune.

UPDATE I: Ouch. I did not notice this take on death culture and demographics the first time through LaShawn Barber's excellent post. Worth reading. Frightening, but plausible.

UPDATE II: Shouldn't this have been front-and-center fifteen years ago? Or five? Or one?

Engine Out on the Right Wing

As I noted earlier this week, the Terri Schiavo case has alienated libertarians from their socially-conservative cousins, causing those of us who hold both values dear to struggle with cognitive dissonance and a stark choice. As Professor Bainbridge puts it: culture-of-life vs. rule-of-law. Jesus Christ vs. Ayn Rand. The Bible vs. Atlas Shrugged. (Side note: Bainbridge continues thinking through another aspect of these contradictions here.)

Both books have rocked my world. But despite Ms. Rand's brilliance in showing the evils of state-enforced collectivism long before those evils were widely understood, I've always been uneasy with her unapologetic trashing of religion - in essence a form of voluntary, grassroots collectivism. Even before my return to the church a few years ago, that plank seemed to put her incomprehensibly in league with Karl ("religion is the opiate of the masses") Marx. Each world sounds great in theory. Both are pretty cold. Terry Schiavo would be long dead in either one.

I'm continually drawn back to Ronald Reagan, who was also influenced by both books. Somehow, he managed to weave these contradictions together with grace: free market principles and compassion (aka, the 'don't kick it' principle - as described by Peggy Noonan): "if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something's in it and you don't know if it's alive, you don't kick it, do you?" Unfortunately today, many might. Some do.

In a related vein, it's encouraging to see prominent conservatives re-thinking what I've always felt was a massive contradiction, (that liberals have been able to exploit, despite massive contradictions of their own) between opposition to abortion and support for the death penalty. Life is life. In cases where there is doubt (about guilt, about viability, about quality of life, about cognitive function) or doubt about whether there's doubt, how do we err?

Despite his earlier claim not to have an opinion on the Shiavo case, Glenn Reynolds weaves many of the political threads together in this Slate piece posted late last night:

A while back, I wrote about the problem of "fair-weather federalism," but judging by the past week things look to be getting much worse. So will the Republican coalition fracture under these pressures? Quite possibly. National security is the glue that has held Bush's coalition together... One may argue that libertarians and small government conservatives aren't a big part of Bush's coalition, but his victory wasn't so huge that the Republicans can surrender very many votes and still expect to win. So this is a real threat. (Some people are even writing articles with titles like Saving the Marriage: Conservatism and Libertarianism.)

As Rodney King might say, "Can't we all just get along"? Whatever else his faults, he knows a thing or two about being kicked in the head in the street.

Cruel Irony at the UN - Again

Earlier this month I wrote about the irony of International Women's Day (a UN-sponsored event) vis a vis gang rapes of young girls in Congo by UN personnel. Yesterday was World Water Day, also sponsored by the UN. As Michelle Malkin points out, the cruel irony vis a vis Terri Schiavo dehydrated to death is, well... cruel. The ironies aren't intentional, but they highlight the UN's shocking disconnectedness.

UPDATE: I should have predicted this angle. The DPRK thinks that UN World Water Day is just peachy. [Hat tip: Bloggodocio]

Some Critical Misconceptions

In speaking with a friend just now I realized that, as immersed in the Terri Schiavo story as I have become via the blogosphere, the MSM hasn't done much to communicate the context of the case. Here are a few relevant facts that have informed my views and that seem to be well accepted. Several of them can be found here. Others are pieced together from a variety of sources.

- Michael Schiavo has been living with another woman for a long time - long enough that, were he not still legally married to Terri, he would be common-law married to this other woman. They have had two children together. That at least complicates any assumption of Michael's good-faith role as Terri's husband and thus his standing to act in her best interests.

- Caregivers have observed Terri taking nourishment effectively by mouth without a feeding tube (e.g., water, ice chips, orange juice, pudding, etc.)

- Michael Schiavo has prevented caregivers from providing such nourishment, as well as from bringing cameras or recording devices into her room. Who has not spoon fed a baby? Or for that matter, an ill or elderly person? Terri's parents are legally prohibited from doing this.

- Other caregivers have reported what experts regard as telltale signs of neglect: basic therapies that have been withheld over many years (e.g., dental care, measures to prevent bedsores, etc.) This obviously affects Terri's current condition and the judgments being rendered from it.

- More than half of the $1M settlement earmarked explicitly for Terri's medical care has been spent on attorneys' fees instead.

- Michael Schiavo's widely reported offer to give the settlement money to charity was strictly time delimited (ten days) and made contingent upon Terri's parents withdrawing their claims to maintain her life and health. It expired long ago. If she dies, the money will not go to charity.

- A priest (Monsignor Thaddeus Malanowski) was prevented from offering communion to Terri. Terri is Catholic. This is a big deal. The MSM got all worked up about Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo not being given adequate time, facilities, or resources to pray. How is this different?

UPDATE I: One item I left off the list yesterday that's important to understand is that the only testimony to Terri Schiavo's wishes has come from Michael - seven years after she first fell into her current condition, and several years after Michael took up with another woman. I tire of commentary that speaks of Terri's 'wishes' to not live like this. What makes this case so difficult is precisely the fact that we do not know her wishes, and that the only 'evidence' presented about them has come from a deeply suspect source with conflicting motivations.

Darkness Over the Land

There is simply no reconciling these two statements:

From Terri Schiavo's father: "While she still made eye contact with me when I spoke to her, she was becoming increasingly lethargic. Terri no longer attempted to verbalize back to me when I spoke to her."

From a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling late last night: "[Terri's parents] failed to demonstrate a substantial case on the merits of any of their claims."

Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy continues his cutting analysis over at NRO:

Consider, say, a month ago, before Terri's plight took center stage, if you had asked someone in the abstract: "How would you feel about starving and dehydrating a defenseless, brain-damaged woman?" The answer is easy to imagine: "Outrageous, atrocious -- something that wouldn't be done to an animal and couldn't be done to the worst convicted murderer." But then it actually happens ... slowly... A woman's snail-like, gradual torture goes from savagery to just one of those sad facts of life. As is the case with other depravities once believed unthinkable, it coarsens us. We slowly, and however reluctantly, accept it... Of course, the physical needs of the body are not limited to food and water. There is also air. But no judge, even in Florida, would ever have had the nerve in Terri's case to permit "the medical procedure that opponents refer to as asphyxiation." Too crude. Too quick. Too obviously murder of a vulnerable innocent. Brazen, instant savagery might wake us from our slumber. For the culture of death, better that we sleep.

And to nobody's surprise for the third day in a row, the Boston Globe features a headline about a medical device rather than the starvation of a helpless woman named Terri Schiavo: "Parents Lose Appeal on Feeding Tube". Even less surprisingly, silence continues from the National Organization for Women. Oh, but I forgot - this is about a medical device, not a woman.

The NEJM on Terri Schiavo

Two early-release articles came out this evening from the New England Journal of Medicine on Terri Schiavo and medical ethics. The pdfs are here and here. It's late, and I haven't had time to review them in detail, but they seem to break little new ground. I detect a slight liberal bias, as the authors pine for something we don't have: clear intent expressed by Terri herself. This little intellectual gyration to claim the mantle of 'life' seemed more than a little bit strained:

“Erring on the side of life” in this context often results in violating a person’s body and human dignity in a way few would want for themselves. In such situations, erring on the side of liberty — specifically, the patient’s right to decide on treatment — is more consistent with American values and our constitutional traditions.

I can agree with the appeal to individual liberty, but the argument rests on a fallacious presumption. How do they know what "few would want"? I guess doctors aren't any better at this than lawyers.

A Higher Law; A Second Chance

I'm listening right now to the audio file of the dialogue between Terri Schiavo and her father, and as LaShawn Barber has expressed, it's hard to step back and write academically. An innocent woman is being killed. Right now. And we're all implicated. All I can feel is deep sadness. I have two young daughters; I can scarcely imagine what Terri's parents must be going through. Her father's unselfless love is obvious in the audio recording. Her awareness of his presence is equally obvious.

I am equally disturbed by the arrest of Lana Jacobs this afternoon - a woman who was attempting to bring Terri water. The eerie parallels continue: (see John 19:28-30). I am neither a physician nor an attorney, but as Professor Bainbridge put it:

In sum, the culture of life and the rule of law appear to be in unavoidable conflict. Both are central values of a free and just society. All of which makes it extremely difficult to decide where one stands on this issue.

This means that we have to choose: rule of law, or culture of life? Didn't we face this test once before and fail? Dispensing with liberal and conservative labels, I'm also uneasy with seductive and easy contrasts, such as Hugh Hewitt's, between Terri's case and those of violent criminals who 'deserve' the death penalty. It is also one that we've faced before. But a culture of life is just that. We have not been given the right to abrogate it in some cases and not others. That is up to God. Terri will be fine - in the next life if not in this one. It's the rest of us I'm worried about. Please pray for Terri. Please pray for humanity.

UN Depravity Update - Congo

It would seem like a good thing that the MSM is finally giving some coverage to the UN's beyond-deplorable behavior in Congo:

"Sometimes it happens in U.N. cars, other times at the camp. But at least they paid us. I was worthless anyhow. My honor was lost," [said 'Yvette'.] Her story is not uncommon. The United Nations is investigating 150 instances in which 50 peacekeeping troops or civilians in the Congo mission are suspected of having sexually abused or exploited women and girls, some as young as 12.

That is what the UN and the Washington Post are willing to admit: only fifty troops, borderline prostitution (as opposed to rape), nobody under an age at which some females marry in parts of Africa. In other words, dismissable - a difference in cultural norms. Not something we are qualified to judge. What crap.

As I noted earlier this month, that is hardly the whole story. Even as the UN tells it, the mess in Congo has involved tens of thousands of violent rapes, including gang rapes of children as young as three. Can we chalk that up to cultural misunderstandings? I'm betting that someone on the loony left will try. In any case, why are we trusting the UN as a source on this? They are party to it. Hello! The article gets a little more realistic later-on, but only slightly:

The United Nations is also investigating reports of rape or sexual assault in Congo, including one case in which a French logistics employee was found with hundreds of videotapes that showed him torturing and sexually abusing naked girls. Last week, U.N. officials announced they had fired one employee and suspended six others from among 17 civilian staff members being investigated in the Congo abuses.

The impression is of a past problem already contained. I'm not so confident.

The National Organization for Women at least mentions Congo, including the tens of thousands of rapes, but it's buried deep down in a four-month-old press release. No connection with the UN. That would be bad. After all, it's probably Bush's fault.

A 'Painless Procedure' & A Modest Proposal

Michael Schiavo on Nightline:

Terry will not be starved to death. Her nutrition and hydration will be taken away. This happens across this country every day. Death through removing somebody's nutrition is very painless. That has been brought to the courts many of times. Doctors have come in and testified. It is a very painless procedure.

I have a modest proposal for Michael and Judge Whittemore as regards their "procedure": try it. It's Tuesday. Try going without food or water for the next 3 days - coincidentally ending on Good Friday. (OK, maybe not so coincidentally.) See how it feels. Lots of people do it all the time. It won't kill you. It's less time than Terri has already endured. Determine for yourself whether this is painless. Determine for yourself whether this constitutes 'cruel and unusual' punishment.

We Cannot Wash Our Hands

One can hardly avoid the sad irony of Terri Schiavo's suffering and government-sanctioned persecution during Holy Week. Hugh Hewitt puts it succinctly: "In the Spirit of Pontius Pilate: Congress and the President be Damned, Terri gets no food or water":

Convicted felons don't get executed until all the appeals are heard. Their executions are stayed even when they haven't got a prayer of a chance of success. Not so in this setting.

Or as Laura Ingram put it the other night: "Terri has given us a gift." Indeed - a gift of moral clarity. Though earthly law is now clear, I thank God that our hope does not depend upon it. Pray for Terri - and the world.

UPDATE I: Michelle Malkin continues her excellent flood-the-zone coverage on Terri.

Politics Upside-Down

One remarkable thing about the Terri Schiavo case is how it has turned traditional notions of conservative and liberal completely upside-down, while fracturing the wary alliance between libertarian and social conservatives. On the one hand we have uber-liberal Congressman Barney Frank ('my' congressman and home district zip-code neighbor), saying:

The caption tonight ought to be, 'We're not doctors -- we just play them on C-SPAN.' This is a terrible, terrible personal situation. I cannot think of one less suitable for intervention by 536 elected officials -- the president of the United States, the Senate, and the House.

I eagerly await such principled logic, (i.e., states rights, defer to law, defer to individual rights, avoid state intervention, etc.) on other issues where the partisan interests cut the other way - a long list indeed. And yet on the other hand, we have 'conservative' Republican Congressmen and Senators (most notably the physicians), arguing passionately for intervention by the Federal Government. I'll admit to some dizziness in watching such gyrations by both parties. As Thomas Sowell has warned, it is dangerous to assume that constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature map perfectly to political parties. In this case, they are wildly at odds with them.

Meanwhile, local talk radio gadfly, gay-basher and Pat Buchanan disciple, Jay Severin seemed to take pleasure yesterday in toeing an intellectually pure libertarian-conservative line with a string of passionate callers. In doing so, he punched home the same points that Barney Frank had been making a day earlier: respect-for-legal-process, strict Constitutional interpretation, non-intervention, etc. Stranger bedfellows could hardly be found. But from a strict legal perspective, he had a point. Saving Terri is not about law. Saving Terri is about belief in a higher power and enduring set of humanistic moral norms - far far bigger than any earthly law. Our founders knew that. They stated it unambiguously in our most sacred national documents.

I can understand the fears of those who see this as religion grabbing hold of government. It is - but not without deep precedent, and not with mind-control as its objective. I would urge Jay, Barney, and others who harbor such fears to read the back of their paper currency: "In God We Trust". Then go read the Declaration of Independence: "...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights..." These national foundations are not compelled, but neither are they deniable. Expect more strange bedfellows as this all plays out. It remains a debate about one precious life, even as it becomes a debate about the most fundamental principles and roots from which our liberty blossoms.

UPDATE I: In light of how the process appears to be playing out this morning, the politics of this may not be as upside-down as I imagined. One judge has effectively stymied a majority of Congress plus the President. Where have we seen this before?

UPDATE II: To finish a thought from the Declaration of Independence (above): "...that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness..." In that order. What seems at issue in the Schiavo case is that Michael Schiavo's pursuit of happiness is at odds with Terri's right to life. The Declaration would have a very different flavor if it read in reverse. Imagine putting pursuit of happiness before liberty - or either one before life. And yet, that is what we are doing.

Why Terri is Unique

This Boston Globe headline caught my eye yesterday: "Feeding Tube Case Heads to U.S. Court." Feeding tube case? Can it get any more clinical? How about the Terri Schiavo case? She has a name. She is one of God's children. In de-personalizing her, we make it easier to kill her without a second thought - not unlike what the anti-war left likes to decry in reminding us of less-than-proud moments in U.S. history when soldiers de-personalized the enemy, (e.g., 'Japs', 'Krauts', 'Gooks')

UPDATE I: Tuesday's Boston Globe front page headline is just as bad: "No Quick Ruling on Feeding Tube". Her name is Terri. Shiavo. She is a person. She is not defined by her medical devices. She is being killed. Slowly and painfully. Right now. How does the following sound?: "Dateline 33AD - No reprieve in crucifixion case." Pretty cold. What's different here?

In that same vein, the 'let her starve' crowd seems to be taking refuge in the simplistic notion that Terri's case should be lumped in with that of terminal, elderly, pain-ridden people whose wishes are clearly known and unanimously agreed to by the person's family members. None of those things are true in Terri's case. She is no more 'terminal' than you or me. She is certainly not elderly. She is not in pain. Her wishes are not clear (we have the late-arriving testimony of one party - her husband - who is encumbered by clear conflicts of interest.) And her family is hardly unanimous in wishing her immediate demise. James Wilson puts it nicely in an editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Many people, myself included, have allowed life-support systems to be withdrawn from parents who have no hope of recovery. My mother was going to die from cancer, and after all efforts had been made to help her, my sister and I allowed the doctors to withdraw the devices that kept her alive. She was dead within hours.

My case, and that of countless other people who have made that decision, differs from that of Terri Schiavo in two important ways. First, the early death of my mother was certain, but no one can say that Ms. Schiavo will die soon or possibly at any time before she might die of old age. Second, all the relevant family members agreed on the decision about my mother, but family members are deeply divided about Terri.

These differences are of decisive importance. When death will occur soon and inevitably, the patient does not starve to death when life support ends. Since there was no chance of our mother living more than a few more days, what my sister and I did could not be called murder. When death will not occur soon, or perhaps for many years, and when there is a chance, even a very small one, that recovery is possible, people who authorize the withdrawal of life support are playing God.

And in Terri's case, they are playing God when they do not have to. Her parents have begged to become her guardians. Her husband has refused. We do not know for certain why the husband has refused. I doubt that he wishes to receive for himself the money that still exists from her insurance settlement and, apparently, he has offered to donate that money to charity. Perhaps, being a Catholic, he would like her death to make him free to marry the woman with whom he is now living. Or perhaps (and I think this is the most likely case) he does not want his wife to live what strikes him as an intolerable life.

The intolerable life argument has support from many doctors and bioethicists. They claim that a person can be "socially dead" even when their brains can engage in some functions. By "socially dead" they mean that the patient is no longer a person in some sense. At this point their argument gets a bit fuzzy because they must somehow define what is a "person" and a "non-person." That is no easy matter.

Terri and the DPRK

It occurred to me yesterday that Kim Jong-il's starvation of his own people has some parallels with the ongoing starvation of Terri Schiavo. In both cases, the life of an individual has been subordinated to an abstract, perverted notion of 'justice'. Societies throughout history have always run into trouble whenever they have set life and justice at odds. Terri's case catches attention because it's easy to focus on a single individual. The lives of millions in the DPRK do not; to grasp the true enormity of three million Terri Schiavos is beyond human comprehension. Her case is no less poignant for knowing that such sad dramas take place all the time in hidden places. God weeps for every one.

Climate Change - The Predator Solution

It seems to finally be dawning on the global-warming-is-destiny-is-evil crowd that not all climate change is catastrophic. When it suits their purposes, academic environmentalists are huge supporters of complex adaptive systems thinking. I.e., the world is complex and interrelated; we can't assume we know how it will respond. Thus, this obscure, grudging press release - out of UC Berkeley of all places - is rather remarkable in its admission that "Wolves alleviate impact of climate change on food supply".

"Few studies have really looked at the impact of global warming on a whole food chain," said Wayne Getz, UC Berkeley professor of environmental science, policy and management and co-author of the study. "We're finding that ecosystems that have lost a keystone predator may exhibit less resilience to the impact of climate change. Because wolves ameliorate the effect of weather, the scavenger community will be better able to adapt to changing conditions."

I especially like the first sentence, which admits that research is thin on what one would think should be a critical plank of the catastrophic scenarios we hear so much about in the MSM. The deliberately negative phrasing is also amusing (i.e., 'less resilience'). I'm not holding my breath for the press release that notes that man is a rather effective 'keystone predator'.

Choose Life

Michelle Malkin is all over the Terri Schiavo case (UPDATE I: with more here as of early Monday morning). She references - among other things - this excellent thought piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO. McCarthy points out how inconsistent it is to rail against torture for terrorists, while promoting worse when the victim is innocent - and inconvenient. Peggy Noonan's Friday piece in the Wall Street Journal carries forward philosophical koans from Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan in an equally strong argument for life. How ironic (but hardly coincidental) that this should transpire as Holy Week begins, amidst Lenten fasting and passion play reminders of another crowd 2000 years ago and its deliberate condemnation of an innocent. Will we pass the test this time?

UPDATE II: I awoke this (Monday) morning thinking about how Michael Schiavo's push to legally kill his wife, Terri differs from Scott Peterson's premeditated killing of his wife, Laci. Other than the 'legally' part, I couldn't think of any substantive differences. Each man was having sex with another woman when he killed his wife. Each man - it can be surmised - found the financial burdens of their marriage inconvenient. Sounds like domestic abuse to me. But is the National Organization for Women stepping up here? Not a chance. (I searched their site; check out the link.) Are we surprised? This is the same women's organization whose concerns stopped at our borders when the Taliban was crushing women in Afghanistan. I especially liked this take in the Manchester Union Leader yesterday:

Why not just shoot her? For that matter, why not stab her, slit her throat, or suffocate her with a pillow? What’s the difference? She’ll be no less dead if her husband does any of those things than if she starves to death after he removes her feeding tube. But there is a difference, isn’t there? Shooting leaves such a mess. So do stabbing and slashing. And we’ve all seen those movies where some poor victim grasps at the pillow or telephone cord in a vain struggle for one last breath before everything goes dark. Too gruesome. But starving her to death, now there’s the ticket. Nothing to clean up, no tense struggle... Terri Schiavo might be a woman, and a disabled person, but she is one the so-called women’s and civil rights movements are perfectly willing to sacrifice on the altar of “choice.”

UPDATE III: In light of Terri's innocence, her husband's stubbornness in wanting to see her die, and the timing of this whole drama over Palm Sunday weekend, I couldn't help but reflect on the rest of the passage I cited yesterday. From Matthew 10:35-37:

[Jesus said] ...I have come to turn
‘a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law
a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.’
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me...

UPDATE IV: I found this NOW press release particularly ironic. What's changed in four years? Is Terri not 'disabled'? Are her civil rights not being violated?

Matthew 10:34

Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.

Steyn on Bolton

Mark Steyn is always good. This weekend he is positively flippin' brilliant - and entertaining.

Diplomats are supposed to be 'diplomatic'. Why is that? Well, as the late Canadian prime minister Lester B. Pearson used to say, diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. In other words, you were polite, discreet, circumspect, etc., as a means to an end. Not any more. None of John Bolton's detractors is worried that his bluntness will jeopardise the administration's policy goals. Quite the contrary. They're concerned that the administration has policy goals that it isn't yet willing to subordinate its national interest to the polite transnational pieties. In that sense, our understanding of 'diplomacy' has become corrupted: it's no longer the language through which nation states treat with one another so much as the code-speak consensus of a global elite.

For much of the civilised world the transnational pabulum has become an end in itself, and one largely unmoored from anything so tiresome as reality. It doesn't matter whether there is any global warming or, if there is, whether Kyoto will do anything about it or, if you ratify Kyoto, whether you bother to comply with it: all that matters is that you sign on to the transnational articles of faith. The same thinking applies to the ICC, and Darfur, and the Oil-for-Fraud programme, and anything else involving the UN. It was at the heart of Clare Short's freaky objection to the Aussie American post-tsunami relief effort. 'I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,' she told the BBC. 'Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.'

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs

Speaking of John Bolton, I had to smile as Kim Jong-il weighed in on Friday:

"[a] most undesirable person... human scum... bloodsucker..."

Yelling 'Fire' on a Crowded Planet

Is it just me, or does this recent bit of 'news' about global warming strike anyone else as odd?

Even if people stopped pumping out carbon dioxide and other pollutants tomorrow, global warming would still get worse, two teams of researchers reported on Thursday. Sea levels will rise more than they have already risen, worsening the damage caused by extreme high tides and storm surges, and droughts, heat waves and storms will become more severe, the climate experts predicted. That makes immediate action to slow global warming even more vital, the teams at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado report in the journal Science. [emphasis added]

It's already out of our hands... so let's do something anyway.

Even if there were something to what these 'experts' predict, the shrill, tantrum-like quality of the message causes me to think that political agendas are irrevocably mixed in with the science - always a poor combination. Truth has a way of not raising its voice.

Since the precepts of global warming cannot - by definition - be tested in the span of one or even several human lifetimes, let's dispense with the fig leaf that this is hard science. Rather, it is about omniscience - and faith, and politics - subjects that should be familiar to those most animated by this subject. Why is the President held to a high standard of proof when the subject is threats from a sworn enemy of Western Civilization harboring terrorists and claiming to have WMD. Why is it that climate change 'experts' are not held to similar standards when the alleged crisis is far less easy to prove and the proposed solutions (e.g., top-down restructuring of the entire world economy over decades) are far more radical?

Virtually no one disagrees human activity is fueling global warming, and a global treaty signed in Kyoto, Japan, aims to reduce polluting emissions. But the world's biggest polluter, the United States, has withdrawn from the 1997 treaty, saying its provisions would hurt the U.S. economy. Meehl's team ran two computer simulations of climate change -- complex programs, he said, that took months to run on supercomputers. Those models included as many variables as the researchers could think of, such as human carbon emissions, other pollution, current temperatures and their rate of change, emissions from volcanoes, changes in solar radiation and shifts in the ozone layer.

"No one disagrees"... except for a respected Nobel laureate, several major publications, the guy whose numbers were twisted to launch this crusade. Not to mention the top advisors to the President of the United States - who we know is an illegitimate liar. Nobody that we know. Nobody whose opinion we should take seriously. Nobody that matters.

Did it ever occur to these researchers that "all the variables they could think of" might not be sufficient to plumb the mysteries of something as complex as the workings of the entire planet? Just maybe? Even a shred of doubt or caution or contrary opinion? Did it even cross their minds that such a claim of human omniscience is the very definition of hubris?

Canadian Steve Milloy has more. Hat tip: Joel Johannesen.

Fear and Loathing in North Korea

Attempts by Barbara Demick and Bruce Cumings to 'contextualize' North Korea have them running neck and neck for Kobayashi Maru's new Walter Duranty Prize for Deliberate Moral Obfuscation, (award date TBA). The winner will receive withering scorn, mixed with derisive laughter. The runner-up will be held out for public ridicule.

As I've been doing for weeks with regards to North Korea, I'd urge readers to look at primary sources - more of which are (thankfully) popping up every day. Those inclined to believe that what's going on there is simply reflective of a "different" culture that we're not fit to judge, or that NoKo horrors are marginal to the experience of most North Koreans will find it hard to main such a stance once they delve into the details. That in itself is a big reason, I suspect, why many choose to skim the surface instead - worrying about nukes while ignoring the demonstrable and ongoing evil that has motivated their creation. One of the more recent of those details is a grainy 20-minute video of a recent public execution in North Korea. It was shot clandestinely from the inside of someone's overcoat pocket, smuggled out of the country, and aired on Japanese television.

I'll nip in the bud some obvious objections by apologists such as Demick and Cumings: 1) China does this too and we don't object as strongly, and 2) the U.S. retains the death penalty so who are we to criticize?

As to the first, any comparison with China must take into account that North Korea's executions are not backed by even the thinnest skein of judicial process based in law, much less in a law rooted in democratic processes or traditional definitions of criminality. They happen because Kim Jong Il wants them to happen. They happen because he is scared for his own life should his people begin to rebel. They happen because North Korea believes itself to be at war. They must not be confused with punishment for murder or theft or anything else deemed criminal in most other parts of the world.

The individuals being executed on the video - factory laborers Choi Jae-gon and Park Myong-kil were 'convicted' for assisting in a defection. Others have been executed for speaking ill of the regime, attempting to defect themselves, or attempting to smuggle information in or out of the country. One has to ask as well: why would someone risk his life to shoot such a video, when the deadly cost was being played out right in front of him? His motivation must be strong indeed.

As for the criticism that the U.S. is morally tainted by its own death penalty, I can say two things: 1) We are a nation of laws, not of men. Those laws derive their shape and power from the democratic consent of those who must live under them - the governed. Though we do not always live up to those ideals and aspirations, they are ones that we constantly strive to achieve and perfect. The same can hardly be said for North Korea. 2) I personally object to the death penalty. That's an opinion which I must acknowledge is not the will of the majority of the American people, and thus I can believe that the death penalty is fair, even as I also believe it is wrong in a larger, religious sense. I.e., God's first commandment was that: "Thou shalt not kill." Period. Full stop. No qualifications. I suspect He meant it.

Free Healthcare!

Powerline today references a story with pictures on Babalu Blog about Cuba's "free" healthcare system. (To which the obvious rejoinder is: "you get what you pay for".) Some will point out that pictures can be misleading - particularly when we're talking about just three tight shots, selected to tell a particular story. But denying or marginalizing them begs the opposite bias.

In reading what after three pages seems to be the worst and most outrageous kind of apologist-for-tyranny book, ("North Korea: Another Country" - the title of which speaks volumes about the moral-relativism-as-religion bias of the author), I encountered a similar reference to "free" healthcare as a benefit of living under brutal repression:

An internal CIA study almost grudgingly acknowledged various achievements of [the Kim] regime: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular; "radical change" in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care, and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.

I don't have the time to fisk this one reprehensible sentence right now, but it contains enough deliberate moral blindness and bias to fill another long post. Watch this space for that. What's remarkable is the similarity of the bogus arguments that continue to be applied to Communism: it's just another way, it has some benefits that are worth the (heavily downplayed) costs, the U.S. has its own problems, etc. With my brother in the hospital for chemo right now, I can say with some conviction that the idea of sending him to Cuba or North Korea for care didn't really cross my mind.

God and North Korea

This "Open Letter to Christians" is one year old - but timeless.

When I visited the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, I frequently observed people shaking their heads and whispering with conviction, "Never again." It is this conviction that gave birth to Chosunjournal.com, which is an experiment to see if a virtual holocaust museum for North Korea set in real-time can actually help decrease the number of victims and increase the number of heroes that will be commemorated in the future museum made of brick and stone... But an elementary fear of God, evoked by Proverbs 24:11-12, has also played a part in compelling me to become the first curator of North Korea's online memorial museum. For it was only by this passage that I realized "Never again" was not merely conscience but God Himself speaking... So in addition to issuing daily news reports of ongoing atrocities, we raise funds to rescue N. Korean orphans into safe countries through underground railroads.

It is sad that so much of what is taught in schools these days takes a perspective that we are at the end of history - that the only underground railroads and refugee networks worth studying took place 60 or 140 years ago and that evil men are to be found exclusively in the corridors of American power. At home, great grassroots energy and earnestness (at least here in New England) is poured into helping a real but modest problem of homelessness in our own cities. Yet widely ignored, tens of millions suffer from malnutrition, homelessness, brutality and summary execution for listening to the radio, attempting to travel freely, or saying what's on their mind. Every week, I hear prayers for homelessness offered in my church. Last week I offered prayers for North Korea and got the strangest looks imaginable. The letter is worth reading.

The Awful Clarity From Iran

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page this morning features this short piece (subscription required) asking how clear a message we need from Iran before we accept that there is no chance of negotiated compromise over their nuclear ambitions.

Last week brought the announcement of an agreement between Europe and the U.S. on a package of carrots -- including aircraft parts and the prospect of World Trade Organization membership -- aimed at coaxing Iran to give up its nuclear program through further diplomacy. If nothing else, this tactical U.S. retreat ought to put to rest caricatures of the Bush Administration as cowboy unilateralists bent on war with the mullahs... Tehran quickly dismissed the offer as "insignificant" and, with the vocal support of visiting Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, again proclaimed Iran's right to all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle. The belief that there's a diplomatic solution to be had here is increasingly the triumph of hope over experience. Iran lied about its nuclear work to the International Atomic Energy Agency for two decades, and again and repeatedly when confronted and offered a chance to come clean. Just last week Pakistan confirmed that A-bomb salesman A.Q. Khan had indeed sold Iran uranium enrichment centrifuges, almost certainly as part of what has become known as "the package." No one doubts Iran has a bomb program.

Follow the bouncing ball: North Korea has nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them. The DPRK and Iran are buddies. Iran and Syria are buddies. Iran and Syria have declared openly their goal of obliterating not only Israel but Western Civilization itself. Bill Clinton endorses the current Iranian leadership. Why are we surprised that there is a 'debate' about whether we have enemies? Why are we surprised when domestic elements seem to be in league with them? They are - in all but name.

Change of Pace

Blogging may be a little lighter for a few weeks as I invest energy into caring for my brother. He became very ill very suddenly this weekend and started chemo last night. Please pray for him.

Psalm 25:2-3

In you I trust, O my God. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. No one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame, but they will be put to shame who are treacherous without excuse.

Whither Syria?

I've been ignoring the Syrian incursion into Lebanon and its larger implications not because it isn't important (indeed it may be a flashpoint), but because others have covered it so well. This piece over at Redstate provides a particularly good overview for anyone playing catch-up, (as I am). One item caught my eye:

...Syria’s doddering economy is completely isolated. Assad now has to consider whether his Lebanese adventure is worth the price of his regime. The short answer is probably no.

I'm inclined to hope that this is accurate, but another scenario ought to be considered. Call it the DPRK/Cuba scenario. However unlikely that may seem amidst the current Middle East momentum, it's worth remembering that pundits have spent almost a generation writing off the economies of those isolated nations - especially North Korea's. How that Stalinist government has persisted after the demise of its peers and benefactors is difficult to fathom. And yet there it is. Geography makes a difference, as does absolute military strength, but we've been surprised before. Assad's demise is hardly a fait accompli.

Bloggers, The First Amendment and Flawed Campaign Finance Law

Last week, a loony-left liberal acquaintance sent me this. Since we agree on virtually nothing politically, I delayed reading it. I shouldn't have. It is one of the few issues on which we can easily agree. The Federal Election Commission's duty to enforce campaign finance 'reform' laws (ill-advised to begin with) is on a collision course with the blogosphere. As one of the best hyper-democratic accelerants of free speech in recent memory, it would be a shame if blogging were quashed in its infancy while test cases wound their way through the courts. LaShawn Barber has posted links to several resources on this issue, including a petition for fans of the First Amendment - blogger, reader or just plain concerned citizen.

Yes, I recognize the irony vis a vis my last post. But Sowell would agree. The flaws in human nature that occasionally get written into law are all the proof we need that a "government of men" (in the non-gender sense of that word) would be far worse.

UPDATE: In my haste, I overlooked a critical part of the case: "In 2002, the FEC exempted the Internet by a 4-2 vote, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly last fall overturned that decision." In other words, the current crisis is precisely in line with Sowell's concerns about judicial activism. One judge's views have threatened a means of expression (blogging) so free the founders would surely have applauded it.

Judges vs. Democracy

In a three-column tour-de-force (one, two, three), Thomas Sowell highlights some of the more fundamental questions underlying three current fights over judges, i.e., confirmation by the Congress, activism on the bench and frivolous lawsuits. Although I personally disagree with some of the policies Sowell favors that are in the news right now (e.g., juvenile death penalty, on religious grounds), it's worth stepping back and listening to his larger argument. His view is much more sweeping: How is our government to operate? What is the role of the Constitution? How does judicial activisim impact a capitalist economy? Some memorable excerpts:

It is painfully ironic that we should be promoting the spread of democracy abroad when democracy is shrinking at home. Over the years, the outcomes of our elections have meant less and less, as judges have taken more and more decisions out of the hands of elected officials... The merits of the particular policies or expenditures is not the issue. The real issue is much bigger: Are the people to have the right to elect their own representatives to decide issues or are unelected judges to take over an ever-increasing share of the power to rule?

One of the big confusions in the impending Senate fight over the confirmation of judicial nominees is that this is an issue about "liberal" judges versus "conservative" judges. The vastly more important issue is whether people who go into court should expect their cases to be decided on the basis of the law or on the basis of the particular judge's own philosophy. The more we can keep judges' philosophy out of our legal system, the more we approach the ideal of "a government of laws and not of men"...

Liberals seem to be taking the same myopic view of judicial activism that they once took toward the institution of special prosecutors -- which seemed like a great idea to them when special prosecutors were going after Republicans but suddenly not so great when Bill Clinton became the target...

The issue of judicial activism is not just an issue of the moment. It is an enduring issue of great moment because it means the erosion of the American people's Constitutional right to govern themselves. If activist judges are allowed to continue to become increasingly our real rulers, what are elections for? Just to provide jobs for politicians?...

Once judges start disregarding the written law in favor of their own notions, ordinary citizens have no way of knowing in advance what decisions to expect from a given situation. We can read the written law but we cannot read judges' minds. This means that there is a large and growing gray area around our laws. That large gray area is a happy hunting ground for lawyers, who can threaten individuals, businesses, and even government agencies with frivolous lawsuits -- and get paid off to settle out of court, because nobody knows what is likely to happen in court.

In my experience as a consultant, the same basic question comes up frequently, i.e., "Who gets to decide?" It can be one of the toughest sticking points in corporate governance and strategy because it is all about power. Will power be vested in individuals, or rules? Which individuals? Which rules?

At one extreme - with power vested in individuals - the law of the jungle prevails. Whether the politics are corporate or national, stability and fairness may exist for a time, but only one small step from despotism and advantage for one group's rights over another's. There is total dependence on the 'enlightenment' of individuals in power - something that behavioral psychology plus thousands of years of history has taught to trust at our peril.

At the other extreme - with power residing in rules - liberals lament that the most 'progressive' ideas and individuals are checked, which is really the entire point. Progress implies agreement on a common goal. But absent a democratic process to provide such direction (i.e., as manifested in the legislature), such goals aren't necessarily common at all. They represent the self-evident views of an individual or an elite - about as undemocratic as you can get. 'Progressivism' can be democratic, but when an elite gets impatient to have its minority views put into action, democracy itself is at risk.

All of this goes a long way towards explaining why 'progressives' today seem utterly ambivalent if not hostile to the spread of democracy in the Middle East - and at home.

North Korean Crackdown - With Some Hopeful Signs

The Washington Times carries this story (from UPI) noting that Kim Jong-il appears to be taking out mounting anxiety on his people. Many commentators have remarked that KJI was 'spooked' by the Romanian uprising and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, taking exceptional measures to ensure his personal safety ever since (including increasing the size of his bodyguard contingent to that of a small city - about 70,000, according to Brad Martin). This time though, Kim's up against cell phones, plus an adjacent Chinese culture becoming more open and capitalist by the day. Plenty of North Koreans have guns. What are they waiting for?

With no signs of a revival of the country's tattered economy, cracks were starting to show in North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's dynastic control. Leaflets and posters against Kim's rule appeared in the nation. In the face of growing cracks in the system, North Korea amended its criminal code last year increasing penalties for expressing criticism of the government and other "anti-state" crimes. The revision, the fifth since 1950, also calls for tougher regulation on new crimes caused by infiltration of outside information. So far this year, North Korea has executed more than 60 citizens [in public] to warn its people against committing any "anti-republic" behaviors, such as illegal border crossing and information leakage... Chinese communication firms, which have rapidly expanded their cell phone services, recently installed relay stations along the border with North Korea, which has kindled a cell phone boom Despite the strict measures, mobile phones have served as conveyer belts of information from the outside world to help combat decades of state-sponsored propaganda and misinformation.

Reporting on North Korea - The Demick Flap

The furor over Barbara Demick's fawning treatment of North Korea in the LA Times (syndicated also in Boston) seems to have died out rather quickly. Too quickly, in my opinion. Hugh Hewitt carries the torch in the Weekly Standard today, but despite rich linkages to all the story's facets, regular blog readers will find little new material. I was motivated to dig further into Demick's background for something that might vindicate her. I was disappointed. Reflecting on the difficulties of covering a closed country, Demick wrote this (pdf) last fall for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. It makes her recent propaganda even less excusable. Why would a reporter who knows what she does write a piece like she did? She knows better, as she points out:

[The DPRK] admits journalists only with official delegations and, on those rare occasions, they are as closely chaperoned as many a girl at her first school dance...[Defectors] are a gold mine of information about what life is really like outside the showcase city of Pyongyang. Away from North Korean minders and informants, they tell of eating bark and bugs to survive during the years of famine and of faking tears at the funeral of North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung to feign loyalty to a despised regime. A retired chemist told me recently about watching political prisoners gassed to death with a cyanide compound as part of an experiment with chemical weapons. Others have told us about youth leagues enlisted to grow opium poppies for North Korea’s illicit drug trade... One couldn’t help but notice how the villages seemed to magically disappear from the landscape once night fell because of no electricity or even oil lamps to alleviate the darkness.

Darkness indeed. The DPRK may be a "riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma" (as Churhill famously quipped about the Soviet Union), but such testimony is enough to see its darkness. What's disappointing if predictable is that elsewhere in the Nieman article Demick equivocates badly, contorting herself in ways that would put Cirque du Soleil to shame. Even as her bias becomes obvious, one wonders if she knows what she thinks [emphasis added]:

The coverage opportunities are even worse for those of us holding U.S. citizenship, especially since February 2002, when President George W. Bush famously lumped North Korea into his "axis of evil."

There’s not much that is positive to say about North Korea, and the country gets absolutely awful press.

[With defectors], one gets a glimpse of the flesh-and-blood people behind the caricatures. The difficulty is that it is often hard to substantiate the claims... they have a powerful incentive to embellish... Even in South Korea, North Korean defectors do not feel completely free to speak out. Many worry about the impact on their family members back home if their names appear in a U.S. newspaper.

[Aide workers] tend to present a more positive and less caricatured portrait of North Korea than outsiders. If I were to generalize, I would say they describe not an “axis of evil,” but a flawed country trying to cope with a failed ideology and economy, desperately seeking a place for itself in the world.

Some of this is nuance. Most of it is simply evasive. The country is 'flawed' because of explicit choices made and enforced by Kim Jong-il and his father to benefit themselves and a small elite. The North Korean people aren't inherently evil. It's the totalitarian system that is crushing them. They are the victims. When will the MSM stop equivocating and look at the root causes? President Bush's calling North Korea evil isn't the problem. Kim Jong-il's evil actions surely are.

Cheney Talks to Hewitt

Reading the transcript of Hugh Hewitt's Thursday interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, I was struck by the few simple ways in which this administration's style is so vastly different from that of their immediate predecessor. Boldness, consistency and inclusiveness go a long way towards explaining why the President was re-elected, why he's likely to continue being effective, and why history should treat him well. (Hugh has more on his blog.)

The interview focused mainly on Social Security reform, the boldness of which is intrinsic. It's been the proverbial elephant in the living room for decades. Left alone, it will only keep getting bigger, crowding out other things and leaving an awful mess. The Clinton administration talked about it - a brief flurry of worry - then closed the door on the elephant. Like Louis XIV, they moved on to the next room and the next subject once the magnitude of the mess (and the effort required to fix it) became all too apparent. The Bush administration is re-opening that door - making sure that everyone sees the elephant and the mess it's continuing to make. Boldness. And they're prepared to keep pressing this domestic front on the administration's freedom theme - consistency. Some highlights from the Vice President's remarks:

Well, first of all, is to get people to understand there's a problem. You know, we've got a few people running around, most of them tend to be Democrats, who want to say there's no problem. But, in fact, there is, and they know it. And if they'll sit down, they'll admit it. And so you've got to get the issue on the table. You've got to get people to focus on it, think about it and talk about it... [Mr. Bush's] responsibility as president is to put it on the table and start the debate... if you go back and look at Harry [Reid's] track record, 1999 he was calling for personal accounts. Bill Clinton, when he was president in the late 90's was talking about the looming crisis in social security if we didn't address it. The fact of the matter is many Democrats are on record calling for the importance of addressing this problem we are talking about... the president is fond of saying, "We're not here to play small ball." Why would you run for president of the United States, or for the Senate, or the House of Representatives and put up the effort that goes with that, and then come back here and not want to address important problems? [Hewitt: So not to play small ball, does that mean you'll stay on this subject all spring, and summer, and fall if it takes that to get something moving?] That certainly is what we intend to do. People should know by now after four years that this president means what he says.

Again, boldness and consistency. Calling a spade a spade. There is evil abroad. There is a mess at home. It's our responsibility to fix them. That attitude - that frankness and courage - is what attracts a lot of people to this administration. It scares those who prefer a fantasy world where everything is fine and boldness and honesty must be painted as recklessness and fabrication. What this administration gets even less credit for though, is inclusiveness. Think back to Hillary Clinton's 'my-way-or-the-highway' approach to health insurance reform in contrast with the Vice President on Social Security:

...there's a lot of other ideas now starting to be floated. As you mentioned, Chuck Hagel's put forward a program. Senator Lindsey...Lindsey Graham from South Carolina has put forward a program. A number of ideas are starting to be surfaced out there that would address the issues that need to be addressed. And we want to encourage that debate, get as many people involved as possible, ultimately get everybody sitting down around the table to put together a solution... [The] notion of an ownership society, we think is very important. It shouldn't be limited just to upper income whites in New York City. This is something that ought to be available for any American who wants it... We're a long way yet from being able to go to the floor with a package. A lot of work is going to have to be done in the Finance Committee and also the House Ways and Means. I'm going to spend some time with Bill Thomas in his district the week after next out in Bakersfield, California. We're going to hold a town hall on this subject.

We don't claim to have the final answer. The deliberation process is important. Everybody is invited to the table. But something must be done. It's easy to see how this administration could get a populist wind at its back on this very quickly, even as the MSM and the Democrats dig in their heels. Boldness, consistency and inclusiveness used to be characteristic of Democratic administrations (think FDR and his 'New Deal', think LBJ, Civil Rights and the 'Great Society'.) Zell Miller likes to point out how today's Democrats are far from that ideal. He's right. My grandfather (coincidentally an acquaintance of Zell Miller's mother) worked for six years without a Social Security payroll tax. At the other end of his life (he just turned 97), and despite pulling almost thirty-five years more in benefits from the system than the actuarial odds would have predicted, he's behind the President's reforms. Tell that to the AARP.

Natural Allies: Academia and the Axis

I don’t want to trivialize violent government tyranny in places like North Korea and Iran, but abuses like this on U.S. college campuses go a long way towards explaining why academia is in natural sympathy with them, as well as with domestic defenders and appeasers of such regimes.

Dissolving the student government for any reason is a virtually unprecedented step… Kent State at the height of the riots and violence did not even dissolve its student government. What kind of example does [Occidental College] want to give to its students? Is Oxy trying to prepare students for life in a pluralistic democracy, or a puppet dictatorship with contempt for the rule of law? Oxy’s despotic decision apparently came after a year of the student government’s trying to gain independence from the administration. In fact, the student government tried to incorporate itself, reportedly with much resistance from the administration. The administration wasn’t content with merely dissolving the student government. It decided that any future student government should have a whole new constitution and put together a committee of unelected students to draft the new document. The dissolution of the student government was presented as a “temporary” step, to allow for a “cooling off” period, but nearly one year later there is still no student government at Oxy. Pretty long cooling off period, huh?

Ward Churchill is just the tip of a very large iceberg that desperately needs to be thawed.

More on Bumper Stickers

Recently I was in Atlanta. Georgia is a ‘red state’, but as home to Jimmy Carter, its ‘redness’ is hardly unanimous. Nonetheless, I saw very few bumper stickers – either left or right. The sentiment seemed to be: “An election happened. One of the candidates won. The other guy lost. Now let’s lead our lives.” Not so back home in New England, where Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and my ultra-liberal (though intellectually honest) congressman Barney Frank, are favorite sons.

Some deep-seated insecurity seems to plague my liberal neighbors. As I noted a few weeks ago, it's almost impossible to drive more than a block around here without encountering an angry-left bumper sticker whose underlying message seems to be: "I'm living under foreign occupation and I want you to know it!" Of course these are the same people who instantly raise their hands as being totally on board with status quo America if the issue is what they're going to get from Social Security - the same people who talked loudly about of moving to Canada last November, then decided it was too much trouble.

Two bumper stickers struck me as particularly ironic yesterday: 1) “You can have my civil liberties. I wasn’t using them anyway.” Begging the question of how this driver was able to voice such sentiments if her civil liberties had really been taken away. 2) “Selected, not elected.” No doubt surfing off of Theresa Heinz Kerry’s wild accusations last Saturday that the election was rigged by omniscient and dastardly Great Right Wing Conspiracists. I.e., if it didn’t turn out my way, then it must logically follow that someone cheated. Get over it. My bumper remains bare.

Dan Rather Goes to the Dustbin of History

So many have piled onto Dan Rather lately that I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the guy. Or not. Especially harsh is an assessment by the one man qualified to know best. Walter Cronkite noted on Monday (with an uncharacteristic hint of sarcasm in his voice):

I would have liked to have seen [Bob Schieffer] there a long time ago... He would have given the others a real run for their money... It surprised quite a few people at CBS and elsewhere that, without being able to pull up the ratings beyond third in a three-man field, that they tolerated his being there for so long...

Indeed. Maybe 42 years too long?

[Right after Kennedy's assassination], Rather went on the air with... a stunning claim: Children at Dallas's University Park Elementary School had cheered when told of the president's death. The tale was perfect for the moment, reinforcing the notion among distant media elites that Dallas was a reactionary "City of Hate."... Except that it wasn't true... Because of the shooting, which took place at 12:30 p.m., the principal had decided to close the school early, though without telling the students why. The children at the school... were merely happy to be going home early... There couldn't have been any spontaneous cheering at the news of Kennedy's murder, because no such news had been announced.

UPDATE I: Sean Hannity is all over the Rather thing this afternoon, taking the offensive by picking up on an article in Human Events Magazine that asks why there has been no investigation into the felonies committed in the forging of federal documents (i.e., National Guard records). I suspect that the reason is political, but in reverse - i.e., in a cautionary sense. Even though the case could be made on its face (a forgery happened; a forgery is a crime), it would undoubtedly be spun by the MSM as heavy-handed Bush-Gestapo tactics. Bush's fault. Again. Where’s the rule of law when we need it?

UPDATE II: Two great quotes about the blog phenomenon from Powerline writers Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker at a dinner in Minneapolis Wednesday night, as quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and re-published in this Powerline post. Johnson: "I don't think CBS would have made the mistakes that it rushed to make to expose a liberal Democratic candidate for president." Hinderaker: "[The MSM] are going to have to start saying to their reporters, and to their columnists, that it's not acceptable anymore to just say something. You've got to do what the bloggers do, you've got to link to your source. And I think that's going to have a tremendously beneficial impact on journalism."

UPDATE III: More internal recriminations at CBS. This is rich. And sad. "A veteran '60 Minutes' staffer sued CBS on Wednesday for alleged age discrimination and defamation, charging that the network used the flawed report on President Bush's National Guard service as an excuse to try to ease her out."

Social Security - With Authority

Thomas R. Saving (yes, that's his real name), is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds. He knows what he's talking about. Thus it's hard to ignore when on the editorial pages of today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required), he says the following:

It has become de rigueur for opponents of Social Security reform to say that President Bush has "manufactured a crisis" so that he can introduce personal accounts into a system that is already solvent, and will be so for decades to come... I say it is these critics who are confecting an alternate reality... the present value of the additional revenues required by Social Security and Medicare total almost $74 trillion. To put that number in perspective, obligations to the elderly are more than six times the size of the economy and 18 times the size of the outstanding federal debt... What does it mean to have a $74 trillion revenue shortfall? It means that in order to pay benefits to current and future generations without using general revenues or cutting benefits, we need $74 trillion on hand right now, invested at the government's borrowing rate. Because we don't have $74 trillion invested today, next year the liability will be even larger. The year after that it will be larger still. [emphasis added]

What he's up against are head-in-the-sand socialists who coin cute phrases like this. Yes, my grandfather was right. How deep a hole are we prepared to dig?

A Principled Stand

With so much else going on around the world with so much higher stakes, it would be easy to understand if the Bush administration chose to keep a low profile on the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Thus it's encouraging to hear Bush envoy to Northern Ireland Mitchell Reiss quoted as saying:

"You can't sign up for the rule of law a la carte."

That one's definitely a keeper. This reminds me of Rudy Giuliani's zero-tolerance policy on petty crime in New York City. Lefty critics said it wouldn't work and would distract resources from more important crimes. Instead, it worked brilliantly by sending a strong message to outlaws: these are our principles; they're right, and we're sticking to them. That scares a lot of people. That scares a lot of moral relativist liberals who wouldn't know a principle if it hit them in the head. Hat tip: New Sisyphus

What's Wrong With Hollywood

My family and I have recently gotten hooked on DVD re-runs of Fox's '24' - a nail-biting star vehicle for Keifer Sutherland that the show's own producers candidly describe as "never good but never boring". The plots have holes one could drive a truck through, but some of the characters can be interesting. Last night we watched the supplemental "making of" material from season two (2003), including interviews with the actors. We'd enjoyed the steady moral centeredness of 'President Palmer' (played by Dennis Haysbert), but Haysbert's off-camera remarks left me disgusted as he cited Bill Clinton as one of the major inspirations for his character's "morality". "I think it's possible to be moral and be president", he said, pining for the Clinton years while ignoring the current Commander in Chief. It never ceases to amaze me at how utterly partisan and out of touch Hollywood, academia and the media have become. Bill Clinton as a moral beacon? What is this guy smoking?

Ungrateful Hosts

Will South Korea go the way of Turkey - a once-staunch ally that didn't come through when we really needed them? (Turkey refused to allow U.S. and allied forces to to use facilities there as a launching pad for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.) Left-wing dunce parties seem to share a lot the world over: This still represents a minority opinion in South Korea, but the audacity of the argument is startling, even as we've been hearing similar sentiments from Europe for decades:

The progressive Democratic Labor Party (DLP) [of South Korea] Wednesday [3/9] called for a system requiring parliamentary ratification from South Korea on the occasion of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) being deployed outside the Korean Peninsula. In recent months, reports on the global posture review (GPR) of U.S. troops overseas have indicated a role expansion of USFK to a regional force, which also includes the possibility of intervention in regional conflict... The DLP also claimed that the deployment of USFK outside the peninsula is illegal according to the agreement between South Korea and the U.S., which states that U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea for the purpose of protecting the peninsula.

In other words, they'd like us to stay to protect them, but they want to dictate the terms under which we do so. "Please be my bodyguard. I won't pay you an exclusive, but I don't want you taking other clients." Such friction is hardly new, but the level of audacity is reaching new highs. The net effect of accepting such demands, of course, would be a need for more total troops and funding to protect our interests around the world. With all due respect to South Korean blood expended in Iraq, neither they nor any other foreign power - particularly one that has asked for and benefited from our protection for nearly 55 years - is going to tell us how to run our military. Over 1.1 million highly trained North Korean troops remain poised in offensive forward positions near the border, just a few miles from Seoul. Do they really want to push us on this?

The UN's Moral Tarpit

The Wall Street Journal's editorial board is running a piece today entitled "Tough Love for the UN". Money quote:

Right now, the U.N. is beset by two great crises. The first is of efficacy. Over the past few years, the world has seen a depressing series of demonstrations of everything the U.N. can't do... Up to a point, these failures can be blamed on inadequate resources--although so far that hasn't prevented the U.N. from spending more lavishly on its staff than the average American corporation. Up to a point, too, the failures are the fault of U.N. member states and not the organization itself. But the deeper reason for these failures is that the U.N. is beset by a moral crisis. This league of nations makes no distinction, and takes no sides, between democrats and dictators, between the civilized and the barbaric.

This is reminiscent of a piece I wrote two years ago for another venue on the eve of the invasion of Iraq that I'll re-post here:

Some speak of the United Nations as if it were always the preferable place to work out international disputes. Unfortunately, that assumption has been confused with, (and ultimately corrupts) any notion of a higher, more enduring, (and yes, absolute) set of moral norms. What's dangerous is that without such ideals, we are just so many savages, afloat on a turbulent sea of political fashion. (Does anyone remember how fashionable Communism seemed to be during the 1930's? Or how much hope was initially placed in Fascists who 'made the trains run on time'?)

Both at the Security Council level and in the General Assembly, the UN is a mix of liberal democracies, less-than-liberal quasi-democracies, police states, dictatorships, colonial relics, monarchies (benign and not), and almost everything in between. The only criteria for membership in the much-lauded Security Council is either chance (e.g., Cameroon) or economic and/or military fortitude as of the middle of the Twentieth Century (thus France, not India.)

The UN by its very nature also gives no consideration (moral or otherwise) to how a particular country's economic or military position was achieved - through brute force and slavery, or a free, liberal, open society, based on market principles. And by definition, the UN cannot possibly be a moral compass. It is, rather, a set of control rods on any position - immoral or moral, that deviate from average across the world. And in our time, as well as 2000 years ago, average remains pretty foul.

Had there been a global UN two thousand years ago, it would have been made up of Rome, Egypt, and the Chinese empire plus various tribes of Huns, Visigoths, Celts, Native Americans, Mayans, Aztecs, and a bunch of other minor fiefdoms and potentates (King Herod anyone? How about Ghengis Khan?) Would that kind of body have been something to be lauded as a moral compass in its time? Hardly.

Run this same thought exercise for any particular time in history. The result is the same; only the names and borders change. What's different about human nature today that makes such a body more worthy at the dawn of the 21st century? Not much. The intended deliberative quality of the body has probably diminished when posturing for the television is taken into account.

The UN can do good - in theory - but there's nothing intrinsic about such a body that makes it always better than all of the alternatives. Broad consensus for action and change typically lag moral leadership (see Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, etc.) This is not to say that all iconoclasts are moral leaders. But we shouldn't seek or expect moral leadership or righteous action to emerge from a broadly constructed democratic body of nations (as distinct from democracy itself). When it does, there is usually a moral leader somewhere in the picture. That's why the U.S. has a President and a Congress. And it's why a world that looks solely to its "congress" (the UN) is bound to go adrift in dangerous moral waters.

The UN, Congo, Rape, and International Womens Day

Perhaps I harbor some terrible misogynist bias that my wife and daughters haven't noticed, but until a liberal acquaintance brought it to my attention in an e-mail, I was unaware that today is International Womens Day, sponsored by the UN. Too bad nobody told this to the UN troops in Congo: "UN troops fail to stop 'tens of thousands' rapes in Congo".

UN peacekeepers in the area have failed to prevent the rapes and some have been accused of sexual attacks and exploitation themselves... Marauding gunmen gang-raped children as young as three years old, and often raped women and young girls - some to the point of death - as their families helplessly watched.

The details are set out in a 52-page report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch. When will the MSM point out that the UN isn't a neutral actor?

The Question of Evil

Continuing with the Demick story, Captain's Quarters dices Hugh Hewitt's interview with her, getting right to the heart of the matter:

If Demick refuses to take a stand on whether Kim Jong-Il is evil, despite admitting that he caused a famine that killed 2 million people (10% of the population) and forces pregnant refugees to abort their babies if they get caught, then it explains why she can allow her byline to get hijacked for the purposes of allowing an admitted North Korean government agent to broadcast pro-Kim propaganda on the pages of the West Coast's biggest newspaper.

What I suspect is at the heart of liberals' reluctance to use the 'E-word' is simply that Bush has used it. Partisan vitriol amongst my neighbors is so strong in this hyper-liberal corner of New England that an un-thinking, knee-jerk reaction ("If Bush against it, I'm for it" and vice versa) has almost become the norm. The world may be painted in shades of grey (as liberals like to point out), but those colors are derived from darkness and light. Kim Jong-il's regime is about as dark as it gets. To equivocate on calling it such is to take sides.

Race, Culture, and Political Affiliation

LaShawn Barber just posted a thoughtful perspective piece entitled: "Black Conservatives and Black Liberals: What’s the Difference?" It's worth reading in its entirety. Some highlights:

Whenever unpleasant facts are presented, whether the subject is blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, criminals, etc., the reaction is always defensive. “Racist” and “homophobe” often follow criticism of certain behavior. One of the reasons I write what I write and say what I say is that I am not afraid of getting people angry. As long as truth emerges, I consider myself a mere messenger, expendable for a greater good... Certain blacks have convinced themselves and will try to convince anyone who’ll listen that the scourge of racism is a hovering dark cloud that will forever impede the black man from success. I know people who think and talk this way, to varying degrees; the underlying message is the same. Whites will not “allow” blacks to achieve... Here is where we get to the meat of what separates the black conservative from the black liberal. The concept of self-help is prevalent in conservative thought. Smith writes that conservatives also believe the individual is not created by his race category, that America is a land of opportunity, that whites are not an omniscient power, that knowledge comes from individual reasoning rather than collective awareness

Go read it.

A Sad Boston-LA Sycophancy

The Boston Globe continues to periodically throw a copy of its Sunday edition on my lawn. I throw it directly in the trash. I cancelled my subscription years ago. Thus it was no surprise to see that the Globe had carried Barbara Demick's North Korean pander-piece verbatim last Sunday. (It appears to have been the only major paper to have done so outside of the LA Times itself.) The headline ("Former envoy for North Korea defends nuclear program") was slightly less pandering than the original ("North Korea Without the Rancor"), but - if it's possible - more misleading: Former? Former? 'Envoy' may be his previous job, but the implication of the headline is that the interviewee/mouthpiece enjoys the freedom to speak his mind in retirement as much as our former officials are free to speak a little too much of theirs.

The only ways to be a former anything in North Korea are to defect, to be sent to hard labor and/or a prison camp, or to die. Failure at the first invariably leads to the second, and often a rather nasty version of the third. The reason that Demick met with two North Koreans was so that one could watch the other. George Orwell pretty much nailed it in 1934 when he wrote 1984. What's more, North Korea has subscribed for decades to a systematic form of collective punishment that would make the worst Mideast or mafia blood feuds look like children's sandbox games.

North Koreans know that to act or speak without the explicit authority of the regime is to have one's entire extended family suffer. Those who have spoken out, even in trivial ways (and speaking to a Western reporter is hardly trivial), have seen grandparents, children, brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles, and even cousins forcibly removed from their homes, demoted to hard-labor jobs and gradually starved - or worse. Countless talented (but naive) young North Koreans with otherwise strong prospects have found themselves consigned to a subsistence life in the mines because an uncle said something critical of the regime back in the '50's or '60's. The foreign venue for Demick's meeting (China) didn't matter. Had they been interested in doing so, the North Koreans she met with were at no more liberty to speak there than they would have been in downtown Pyongyang. If your family is being held hostage, they've got you, wherever you are.

The Boston Globe is (not surprisingly) a subsidiary of the New York Times Company. If you haven't already done so and have a subscription to either of those publications, you should think very hard about what your subscription dollars are enabling. It's also worth writing to the New York Times' Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.: publisher@nytimes.com and to President and General Manager Scott H. Heekin-Canedy: president@nytimes.com.

Compelling Statistics

I'm generally inclined to distrust the UN on policy, (not to mention ethics, implementation, financial controls and just about everything else), but World Food Program statistics out today on childhood nutrition in North Korea are interesting, even as they demand extreme skepticism. The UN website doesn't seem to have a copy of the actual survey, and they make it impossible to link to a specific press release. Here's a link to all UN press releases (the sheer quantity of which speaks volumes.) A few things jumped out at me:

• "The large-scale, random sample survey covered both child and maternal nutrition and was carried out last October by the government’s Central Bureau of Statistics and Institute of Child Nutrition, in collaboration with UNICEF and the World Food Programme." Yes, that's right: the 'statistics', as bad as they are, were compiled by the North Korean government itself. Who knows what "in collaboration" really means, but it's awfully hard to imagine it meaning truly unfettered access. The idea of this being a random sample is a bad joke. Past experience would indicate that any voluntary revelations by the Kim regime are calculated to hide much worse.


• "the proportion of young children chronically malnourished, or stunted (height-for-age), has fallen from 42 percent to 37 percent; and - acute malnutrition, or wasting (weight-for-height), has declined from 9 percent to 7 percent." Unlike Africa, it's pretty easy to play the "what if" game with North Korea. They were comparable with South Korea in terms of GDP and basic living standards in the 1960's and possibly even into the early '70's. The rest cannot be attributed to bad luck, bad weather and a loss of sugar-daddy communist sponsors (as the DPRK, the UN, and the MSM would all have us believe.) The Kim regime made a choice to be the way it is. The North Korean people never had such a choice. Thirty seven percent. And that's just the kids, who presumably get treated better. Think about that over dinner.
• "WFP and UNICEF attributed the improvements in part to the significant levels of support provided by the international community in recent years." In other words, the tiny improvement seen in this highly suspect survey, done in cahoots with the DPRK regime itself is sufficient to justify a failed policy of continuing to put resources in the hands of those on whose watch this modern holocaust continues. How's that again?

Predictably, the MSM, (most notably the Washington Post) is passing along the UN spin almost verbatim. I.e., more aide will solve the problem. It won't. Many respected NoKo watchers have documented over many years how Kim Jong-il and his cronies systematically divert aide to personal and military use while holding a veto over aide workers' access to 'sensitive' regions (read: prision camps). The rest falls into a black hole of corruption in a society falling apart. Where have we seen this before?

This may be hard for the UN Kleptocracy to understand, but let me try to put it simply: you're being had - again. Not that they should care. As soon as the last dictator falls, they'll be largely out of business. More to the point: we're being had so long as we continue to trust an organization whose role involves helping tyrants with their PR - all so they can divert scarce resources to nukes.

Putting aside the too-obvious comparisons with other UN-facilitated messes, I'm reminded of Indonesia in the 1960's, as chronicled in The Year of Living Dangerously:

Through most of the movie, we see Billy trusting in Sukarno’s leadership for structural change, and at the same time being involved in personal acts of compassion as he supports a young prostitute and her child. It is only when Billy’s “family” is destroyed—the child dies from drinking polluted water—that he questions his role. He sobs as he pounds out on his typewriter “WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?!” and decides he himself must challenge the government. He hangs a sign which reads, “Sukarno feed your people,” only for the president’s police to murder him. When Guy and Jill find him dead on the street, they once again begin to “see.”

Definition: Tyranny

Note to Kim Jong-il: the art of public relations with free peoples is more subtle than what you may be accustomed to in communicating with those under your 'care'.

North Korea Wednesday demanded an apology from the United States for labeling it as one of the "outposts of tyranny" and said Washington must withdraw the comment before Pyongyang would consider attending nuclear talks.

From Webster's:
tyr-an-ny (n) - 1. a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler 2. oppressive power (every form of, over the mind of man), specifically oppressive power exerted by government. Hmm... let's see if this fits: Upon his father's death in 1994, Kim Jong-il was 'elected' to office with 100% of the 'vote' (no Florida squeaker that one!) He has remained unchallenged since. Sound pretty straightforward to me. It must be Bush's fault.

But wait, it gets better. Under DPRK law (such as it is), the Constituency that registered KJI to the Supreme Peoples' Assembly (SPA) as a candidate in that 'election', was number 666. No, I'm not making this up: see here, as well as Brad Martin's book. And if your spidey-sense is tingling just a little right now, you might check this out as well. (Those who understand a bit more about the continuing cult of KJI's father, NoKo's past relationship with China and Russia, the assassination attempt on KJI himself, and the restrictions on buying and selling placed on North Korean citizens will understand why I linked to the larger verse rather than just the better-known last line; they are now excused if they'd like to go change their pants.)

Destination: Pyongyang!

Forget vacationing in Havana. The weather and the smokes may be better, (and the flight dramatically shorter - for Americans anyway), but if this Flash video is any indication, Cuba can't match the rockin' revolutionary spirit of their comrades in the DPRK. (Be sure your speakers are on. Another copy is here.) If I hadn't seen it, I would not have believed it. I'm still half expecting this to be revealed as a clever promotional troll for "Team America II".

Boing Boing is all over the story, including hosting the video after the original DPRK-backed sponsor lashed out in petty frustration at extra bandwidth charges. Hat tip: Michelle Malkin The video is a series of colorful if unintentionally ironic photo stills, intended to showcase North Korea for a tourist junket this July. That's mildly encouraging in that it's probably inconsistent with a concrete plan for committing nuclear suicide - at least in the near term. But aside from the deliberate moral ignorance that one would have to muster to go on such a 'tour', (more on that in a moment), the video itself is simultaneously hilarious, ominous and revealing. Some highlights:

• The mysterious sponsors ("Korea Friendship Association") call this a "solidarity event for the reunification of the peninsula in July, 2005". This may be simply bad English, but wouldn't "solidarity event in July 2005 in support of reunification" make more sense? Do the KFA (and KJI) know something about a date for reunification that the rest of the world does not?

• The tour pitch plays directly to a bleeding-heart liberal mindset by offering participants the chance to "help the citizens in their daily affairs and share them work, dances and meals." [sic] (Sean Penn, are you listening?) But hey, why not? Perhaps a little slave-labor mining to reorient one's mind to revere the Dear Leader, or maybe cleaning a factory shut down due to lack of power? And about those meals, would those be the weeds, pine bark, rats and bugs that ordinary citizens have been forced to eat for years? Or would it be the 100-gram per person per day rice ration from the government? (All of this well documented in Brad Martin's recent book.)
  

• The passive-aggressive juxtaposition of water lilies and misty mountains against military parades and revolutionary monuments is disturbing, to say the least, but not out of character with a tyrant who has behaved precisely that way since he started having influence over 40 years ago, during his father's regime. KJI's stylistic fingerprints are all over this - not that that's a big surprise.

• At one point, we see a still of what appears to be an archery tournament. I couldn't help but look at the three targets set up on a grassy field and imagine some starved political prisoners being dragged out and summarily executed in the next frame. (Again, read Martin's book if you want all the gory details.)

Lest anyone start thinking that there couldn't be harm in a summer jaunt to take a firsthand peek at the Hermit Kingdom, note that there will be no rental cars for hopping spontaneously around the countryside among quaint B&Bs and Zagat-rated NoKo bistros. You will be seeing only what the government wants you to see. Barbara Demick, are you listening? And your dollars (or more likely, your francs), will be going directly to the same government, and the same man, who has made all this possible. Here's a happy fun tidbit to ponder over lunch:

...details are also what make this report so powerful. Some, of course, will avoid reading it, fully knowing that if they do read it, they will have to change their tactics, or at least think differently about the political problems posed by North Korea. Certainly after absorbing such details, it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to sit down and negotiate, coldly, with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans, when they know the details of life in the North, will also find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime...

There are... some 150,000 to 200,000 prisoners throughout North Korea. Both perceived wrongdoers and up to three generations of their extended families are “arrested,” or, more accurately, abducted by police authorities and deposited in the kwan-li-so [prison camp], without any judicial process or legal recourse whatsoever, for lifetime sentences of extremely hard labor in mining, timber-cutting, or farming enterprises. The prisoners live under brutal conditions in permanent situations of deliberately contrived semi-starvation....

In 1994, Lee fled to China hoping to defect to South Korea. However, he was discovered missing, and because of his personal knowledge of the “Dear Leader,” North Korean security agents chased after him. Entrapped in Beijing and wrongly thinking he was talking to a South Korean diplomat who could assist with his defection, Lee confessed his true opinions about the North Korean regime. Under the impression that he was being escorted to the South Korean Embassy, he was whisked instead into the Embassy of North Korea, where he was bound, drugged, and put on a plane to Pyongyang. Lee was held in Pyongyang for six months in an underground detention cell by the bowi-bu (National Security Agency) police. He was subjected to kneeling torture (made to kneel motionless, not even turning his head, for hours at a time) and water torture (held down by five or six agents who poured water into his mouth and nose until he gagged and suffocated) and was severely beaten on the shins, eyes, ears, head, and mouth. Six of his teeth and one of his ear drums were broken. Years later, he still suffers double vision in his left eye and his shins are still black and blue.

UPDATE More on the technical aspects of the video from Japanese blogger Joi Ito

Psalm 3:5-6

I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not fear the tens of thousands drawn up against me on every side.

Clinton Endorses Axis of Evil

I won't even attempt to duplicate the thorough research that Powerline and Little Green Footballs have put behind this story, but as a teaser, here are two recent quotes from Bill Clinton on the subject of Iran:

1) “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.” [emphasis added]

2) “Iran is the only country... where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections... In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.” [emphasis added]

I thought I'd heard and seen it all from him, but this reaches new levels of incredulity, especially in light of this. More generally, when the term 'progressive' starts being applied to reactionary theocrats who jail those who disagree with them (and worse, and much worse), the world has truly turned on its head. Scott Ritter, you've got competition.

A Perennial Debate

As I noted earlier this week, Thomas Sowell has done some amazingly insightful thinking in his prolific career. Most insightful IMHO, is his timeless distinction in "A Conflict of Visions" (1987), between a 'constrained' and an 'unconstrained' vision - of history, society, human nature, economics, and politics - explaining why political opponents often talk past each other, as they have for centuries. (DC-area blogger 'Katie' has devoted herself to to looking at the constrained vision via an excellent blog by the same name.) But this recent example from a debate between Victor Davis Hanson and Ronald Edsforth, highlights the distinction as sharply as any I've seen.

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war, especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. “Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact... We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.”

Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed significantly in the past several thousand years. “Human nature is set,” he said—it was “primordial, reptilian,” adding that man is always “governed by pride and fear and envy.” He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is unchanging. “We have not reached the end of history.” Whether human opinion changes is irrelevant to the question of human nature, Hanson said...

(Hat tip: Belmont Club)

More Ominous Rumblings on the Peninsula

Lest any LA Times reporters still harbor thoughts that the ‘D’ in DPRK might stand for anything, this development should put them to rest.

North Korea has abruptly postponed a regular session of its parliament slated for March 9... This is the first time a regular session of the tightly controlled North Korean parliament has been postponed indefinitely... the move might be aimed at putting the country's people on their guard and thus ensure internal unity... A remote possibility is that the move is linked to some shift in North Korea's power structure. [emphasis added]

On guard for what?

Yes Virginia, There is an Axis of Evil

Not exactly breaking news, but then again the MSM doesn't go out of its way to feature this kind of story, does it? It comes from Reuters and AP, but the Turkish Daily News is the only news outlet that's carrying the specific quotes. (Yahoo Asia's coverage has apparently been removed - cache here.)

"The people of the DPRK (North Korea) and Iran have established friendly and cooperative ties, and supported, and closely cooperate with each other on the road of the struggle for independence against imperialism," KCNA reported a top North Korean official saying at a reception with Iran's ambassador to the reclusive state. The statement follows in a series of comments on the warm ties between the two countries that have been reported in North Korean media since Feb. 10, when Pyongyang officially announced for the first time it had nuclear weapons.

Note again how the terms favored by our enemies ('imperialism') and those favored by the domestic left are precisely the same. Either they're both right, or... they're both completely whacked. Hmm, let's see...

The Undisciplined European Teenager

With two teenagers in the house and European in-laws, this piece by Victor Davis Hanson struck me as particularly brilliant. Come to think of it, most of his stuff does.

...in all of our own lives — especially in the case with beloved teenagers — we have endured such immaturity: the 16-year old who demands "her" allowance and the freedom to use it as she wishes, but calls at midnight when she is broke; the 21-year-old who comes in at 3 A.M., but apparently chooses not to entertain such hours in his own home at his own expense.These are the natural contradictions in the evolution from childhood to maturity. Europe may be old, but its union is young. It wants to be independent and powerful, but given its past bloody history and present utopian ideology it's not sure quite what that entails.

I'm currently halfway through VDH's 'Carnage and Culture'. Great historical perspective to balance out an often-myopic rapid-fire news cycle.

Barbara Demick Weighs In

Why does it take a personal letter for Barbara Demick to explain her credentials and motives for her recent shill piece for North Korea? Just a sentence or two of such context would have substantially changed the tenor of the article. The LA Times chose not to include that context. That's called bias.

The Missing Link: Social Security and North Korea

Earlier this week I visited with my grandfather, helping him to sort through his mail. He turns 97 next week - still living on his own, his mind as sharp as ever. I opened and began reading to him an AARP petition aimed at stopping Social Security privatization. It was crude and loud and one-sided and I told him so. But I knew he wouldn't hesitate to voice his opinion if it differed from mine. I expected that it might. After all, here's someone who has been drawing from the system for over 33 years - not a bad deal.

Silence. He was thinking. Then his one remaining good eye lit up: "You know", he said "I'd already been working for several years when they started that system. And when it did start, I didn't much understand the sense in it - I was just giving more money to the government."

Here's a man who never made much, having inherited nothing but values. He was a schoolteacher and then a principal - the sole breadwinner through some very lean years. But having survived the Depression, he sure knew how to save - cautiously, steadily, at the expense of immediate comfort - attitudes that used to be seen as universal virtues. He has contributed significantly to the college educations of five grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. He could live to 120 and still support himself without a dime from Social Security. This is up and down the profile of a guy who's supposed to be the core constituency of a government dependency racket so entrenched that few even remember things being any different. But he does.

Meanwhile, over in the DPRK (you knew I'd get to that), millions once blindly believed that their government would provide everything for them. It didn't, and they've starved because of it. My grandfather never bought those kinds of promises from any government. Those who are inclined to believe Kim Jong-il's propaganda, or who started working after FDR shouldn't either.

Partial-Birth Abortion: Too Tame for Kim Jong-il

Hugh Hewitt has pointed his readers to this report on two consecutive days, and with good reason: It's highly credible - full of firsthand testimony. It's chillingly detailed. And it outlines a decades-long, and continuing pattern of what can only be described as systematic depravity. I read it when it first came out in 2003 and found it difficult to sleep for days. I'll spare readers the 122 pages, but not the lost sleep. This is just one small and sadly typical excerpt:

Choi Yong Hwa assisted in the delivery of babies, three of whom were promptly killed, at the Sinuiju do-jip-kyul-so (provincial detention center) in mid-2000. Former Detainee #8 witnessed six forced abortions at Chongjin do-jip-kyul-so in mid-2000. Former Detainee #9 witnessed ten forced abortions at Onsong ro-dong-danryeon-dae (labor-training camp) in mid-2000. You Chun Sik reported that four pregnant women at the bo-wi-bu (National Security Agency) police station in Sinuiju were subjected to forced abortions in mid-2000. Former Detainee #21 reported two baby killings at the Onsong In-min-bo-anseong (People’s Safety Agency) police station in late 1999. Former Detainee #24 helped deliver seven babies who were killed at the Backtori, South Sinuiju In-min-bo-an-seong police detention center in January 2000. Former Detainee #25 witnessed four babies killed at Nongpo In-min-bo-an-seong police detention center in Chongjin in late 1999, and another six pregnant women subjected to forced abortion. Former Detainee #26 witnessed three forced abortions and seven babies killed at the Nongpo jip-kyul-so (detention center), Chongjin City, in May 2000.

It's often been asked, with regards to the Nazi Holocaust, "Why didn't the Allies bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz?" or "How could the world have ignored the situation for so long?" And in the early 1940's, amidst an active war, with far more constrained global communications and media, the world could almost be excused for not understanding fully until the shattering pictures came out after liberation of the camps. But there's no excuse in the 21st century. This is real, and it's happening NOW - while folks like Barbara Demick watch Oprah and sip latte.

The MSM and the DPRK

Philosophical sympathy between the MSM and Kim Jong-il seems to be fresher and more blatant than I'd imagined. John Hinderaker over at Powerline has done a superbly thorough fisking of Barbara Demick's outrageous LA Times article that I won't even attempt to summarize. Go read it. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has assembled a truly impressive set of links and resources that could turn this into a firestorm of outrage virtually overnight. Based on my recent reading about the abuses of the DPRK regime over the past 60 years, such outrage is well deserved - a far better use of time and energy than many of the petty domestic political squabbles that are dominating the news of late. Quick synopsis: the Demick piece could pass for a North Korean press release - if only we'd stop being angry at this well-intentioned leader, everything would be OK. Yeah right. Where have we heard this before?

NoKo Exporting Death

Chemical warfare where the victims volunteer?

At a street stall in a traditional market in Dongdaemun, Seoul, tons of cigarettes from North Korea were piled up in red-cartons Wednesday afternoon. The packs are marked, “Ryongsong Cigarette Company, MADE IN DPR KOREA.” The cigarettes from North Korea, which cost only half as much as South Korean cigarettes, are selling like hot cakes in Seoul... The biggest buyers of Pyongyang cigarettes are the elderly... An official at the [South Korean] Ministry of Finance and Economy... said it wasn't recommended to smoke cigarettes made in North Korea, firstly because... we are unaware of how harmful North Korean cigarettes can be...

Ironies abound.

Good News... With a Notable Exception

Well this is a nice counterpoint to that last story. (Hat tip: Drudge)

There seems to be a growing consensus around the globe that godlessness is in trouble. Two developments are plaguing atheism these days. One is that it appears to be losing its scientific underpinnings. The other is the historical experience of hundreds of millions of people worldwide that atheists are in no position to claim the moral high ground... The only exceptions to this rule... are the former East Germany and the Czech Republic, where, as the saying goes, de-Christianization has been the only proven success of these regions' former communist rulers.

Unfortunately, the Kims of North Korea may have been even more effective in brainwashing their population, drawing explicitly and cynically on Kim Il-Sung's knowledge of Christianity from his exposure to it as a child. (More on that later. Brad Martin covers it nicely in 'Under the Loving Care...') Thomas J. Belke in "Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea's State Religion" notes with regards to 'Juche', or the uniquely North Korean ideology of a closed totalitarian society:

...Juche's approximately 23 million adherents, who worship their current and former dictators, outnumber those of more well-known world religions such as Judaism...

Hmm... Judaism... Israel... Enemies... Hold that thought. Anyone happen to remember to whom NoKo was selling missiles and related expertise when it was caught last year?

Adding It Up On NoKo Moves

Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun broke this story today, about fresh nuclear activity detected in North Korea last December. The article cites unnamed senior U.S. officials in Washington.

U.S. spy planes flying near North Korea have detected traces of a radioactive gas emitted during the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods, which could be a possible sign of a secret nuclear facility... the krypton 85 detected in December likely came from one of two sources, the sources said. One is that North Korea might possess a secret facility unknown to outsiders. The other is that North Korea has encountered problems with its reprocessing operations at the Yongbyon facility.

The first possibility is pretty scary in that it implies poor Western intelligence and/or effective North Korean cloaking of their program. The second possibility is at least as bad:

North Korea claimed it was preparing to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods. The plutonium extracted from all of its 8,000 fuel rods would be enough to build six to eight nuclear warheads. [emphasis added]

Alongside this (from Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo), I'm thinking that stockpiling canned goods and bottled water in the basement may not be such a bad idea after all.

The (North) Korea Central News Service (KCNA) quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying the U.S. needed to prepare the environment for a new round of negotiations by "quickly restoring the basis for the six-party talks." It said North Korea in 1999 suspended missile tests, but dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang had been blocked since U.S. President George W. Bush assumed office. The statement said North Korea was not now bound to stick to the moratorium on missile tests - a broad hint that it could restart tests if its demands are not met.

Yep. It's all Bush's fault.
UPDATE re. that last quip: Why am I not surprised that the MSM and KJI are taking the same line?

The Amazing Thomas Sowell

The author of over 50 fascinating, thoughtful books, Thomas Sowell is one of those highly accomplished, super-intelligent individuals of African American descent whom the left would rather forget because he's both articulate and conservative. (Not that he cares to feature his ancestry as deterministic of his political identity one way or the other.) After reading his timeless and insightful 1987 book "A Conflict of Visions", I've become even more of a fan. The gist: current political fault lines have been around for centuries, rooted in fundamentally different world views that render the meanings of common political terms (e.g., 'justice') completely differently depending on who is speaking or listening.

He writes a regular column that can be found here; well worth bookmarking, IMHO. Some highlights on social security from last week's column - which is about much more than that one issue:

Raising Social Security taxes today will not leave a dime more to pay pensions to future retirees. Right now there is more money coming into the system than is going out -- and the difference gets spent on other things. Higher taxes now would mean a bigger excess to be spent on other things, leaving nothing more for the future... People who oppose the privatization of Social Security call it "a risky scheme." But is anything more risky than turning money over to politicians and hoping that they won't spend it before you retire? They have been spending the "trust fund" for decades.

Attention Turns East

North Korea. Nukes. A Stalinist totalitarian cult of personality. Massive, almost unspeakable human rights abuses on par with Hitler. Chemical weapons locked and loaded for a massive (8-figure) killing spree. David Koresh and Waco writ large. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

I'll be harping on the topic of Kim Jong-il and the seemingly unwinnable North Korean situation in the near future not because it's new (it's almost 60 years in the making), but because: a) I just finished reading an excellent 868 page book on the subject, b) it's hugely frightening once you dig into the details, and c) it's hugely important and not getting as much attention as it deserves.

This article in Tuesday's Washington Post gives a small taste of the psychology of Kim Jong-il (whom I'll refer to with deliberate disrespect as 'KJI' from here on out.)

...the war that North Korea has prepared for is not some future theoretical contingency. In the view of North Korean leaders, their country is at war today... committed to an unconditional victory, however long it might take and however much it might cost... To achieve this goal, North Korea must possess nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles capable of delivering them into the heart of the American enemy. This central strategic fact explains why North Korea has been assiduously pursuing its nuclear and missile development programs for more than 30 years -- at terrible expense to its people and despite all adverse repercussions for its international relations... those who hope for a "win-win" solution to the current nuclear impasse must recognize the plain fact that North Korea does not engage in "win-win" bargaining and never has. The historical record is clear: Pyongyang believes in zero-sum solutions, preferring not only victories but also face-losing setbacks for its opponents. To Pyongyang, "win-win" solutions are not only impractical but immoral... the achievement of "complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization" would consign North Korea to a world measured by the metrics of peaceful international competition -- and thus to a role more in consonance with the size of its gross domestic product. No current North Korean leader is likely to regard such a proposal as a bargain.