Ruth Bader Ginsburg's (Hot) Replacement

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was treated for early-stage pancreatic cancer on Thursday. Ginsburg, who is 75, recovered from colorectal cancer in 1999, but the prognosis for pancreatic malignancies is poor even with early detection.

So, naturally, speculation has turned to Ginsburg's replacement on the Court, and, wouldn't you know it, identity politics is already driving early speculation:

If Ginsburg is the next justice to retire, we'll no doubt hear a lot of nonsense about how her replacement should be the "best-qualified person" for the job, as if that concept were meaningful. It isn't, because there are thousands of people who would be fine SCOTUS justices, and whether any one of them in particular ought to be chosen depends on a myriad of factors, including the (in my view correct) judgment that it's not acceptable to have an all-male SCOTUS, any more than it would be acceptable to have an all-female one.

Okay, the Court is already down one "girl" seat with Alito's replacement of Sandra Day O'Connor in 2006, so the pressure is on. But, seriously, is identity politics and HOTNESS more important than merit? I guess so, since Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm's is already leading the list of possible replacements for Ginsburg (via Memeorandum).

Now that would be fun (see Jennifer Granholm as Sarah Palin?"). Having run Michigan into the ground, it would defy reason for President Obama to appoint the the former "Miss San Carlos." But hey, if Representative Hilda Solis can make the grade for Labor Secretary after 16 years of unpaid tax liens, anything's possible.

Neoconservative Derangement

Now this is what blogging's all about!

John Podhoretz, in "The Daily Dearborn Independent Dish," responds to Andrew Sullivan's anti-neocon hysteria:

Andrew Sullivan no longer is interested in winning in Iraq, in fact is probably quietly eager for a defeat there, doubtless out of a combination of a certain degree of conviction, a ravenous hunger for leftist Web traffic, and because having decided a few years ago he’d picked the wrong horse in supporting it, he finds it unbearable to imagine that the wrong horse may prove to be the right horse after all.

So he must hold the neoconservatives to blame, first, for gulling him into support — you know, we Jews are fiendishly clever, with our Svengali hypnotic powers overcoming the will of poor, weak-minded Catholic bloggers — and must now be held to account for holding views about Israel and Iraq and democracy we never held and have, in fact, been attacked by some of our oldest friends who do hold them. But of course, those attacks by our old friends aren’t real, nor are the divisions among neoconservatives real. Because we Jews are all in it together.

At least Henry Ford knew how to make a car.

The Ford reference is to the car manufacturer's anti-Semitic journal, "The Dearborn Independent," which published the English version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Sullivan long ago went over to the dark side, so I don't have a lot to add to Podhoretz. What's interesting is that Sullivan's post starts with a quote from E.D. Kain at the Ordinary Gentlemen, "The Democracy Fallacy."

E.D.'s current writing is of the kind that generates a lot of heat but little light, and that's too bad, considering his estimable talents.

Things didn't have to turn out this way, however. It's turns out that E.D.'s an intellectual hanger-on. He's joined up with the progressive nihilists at Ordinary Gentlemen for some fun and exposure, or so it seems. Up until a couple of weeks ago E.D. was the publisher of NeoConstant, which was originally an online magazine of neoconservative commentary and opinion. He had solicited essays from American Power for publication there, but E.D.'s apparently caught some strain of neoconservative derangement, with a special affliction of antiwar ideological recoil, so he deleted the entire blog a few days back. The domain name has remained the same (neoconstant.com), but the blog's new incarnation is the lame "New Constantine," whatever that's supposed to mean. I guess the name's a reference to the Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great (306–337), who relocated the heart of the empire to the "Second Rome" at Constantinople in 330 a.d. I think E.D.'s historical analogies are less precise than his single-minded effort to eradicate any evidence of his former neoconservative identification.

Note that E.D. deleted NeoConstant without a word of notification to those he had approached for syndication at the site, so his actions are not just unprofessional, but immature as well.

That's to be expected for someone who's been completley hoodwinked by folks like Freddie de Boer and the Young Turks of the Culture 11 fiasco.

I hadn't planned on engaging E.D. He's a nice guy, but like Sullivan, he too has gone over to the dark side. And now that he's instigating such supreme flame wars, well, the blogging gloves are coming off.

More later ...

Sarah Palin's Cultural Populism

I have to congratulate Yuval Levin, writing at Commentary, for his breathtakingly accurate analysis of Sarah Palin's vice-presidential candidacy, and especially the cultural prairie-fire she stoked with her rise to national prominence. The essay's entitled, "The Meaning of Sarah Palin."

There are a number of passages I'd like to quote at length, but Levin's discussion of the visceral revulsion to Governor Palin's candidacy, and her potential ascent to within a heartbeat of the presidency, is just priceless:

Palin’s social conservatism had never been the core of her political identity in Alaska. She always expressed general support for traditionalist views in interviews and debates, and it was widely known that she had also chosen to proceed with her fifth pregnancy after discovering the child had Down syndrome—a discovery that in about nine of ten cases leads parents to opt for abortion. But Palin never went out of her way to raise abortion or other social or cultural issues, and in her first two years as governor had not sought to change state policies in these areas. She was a good-government reformer with social conservative leanings, not the other way around.

But this was not how Palin was received on the national scene. Instead, her views on matters of cultural and social controversy very quickly became the chief focus of media attention, liberal criticism, and pundit analysis. Palin was assigned every view and position the Left considered unenlightened, and the response to her brought into the light all manner of implicit liberal assumptions about cultural conservatives. We were told that Palin was opposed to contraception, advocated teaching creationism in schools, and was inclined to ban books she disagreed with. She was described as a religious zealot, an anti-abortion extremist, a blind champion of abstinence-only sex education. She was said to have sought to make rape victims pay for their own medical exams, to have Alaska secede from the Union, and to get Pat Buchanan elected President. She was reported to believe that the Iraq war was mandated by God, that the end-times prophesied in the Book of Revelation were nearing and only Alaska would survive, and that global warming was purely a myth. None of this was true.

Her personal life came under withering assault as well. Palin’s capacity to function as a senior elected official while raising five children was repeatedly questioned by liberal pundits who would never dare to express such views about a female candidate whose opinions were more congenial to them. Her teenage daughter’s pregnancy was splattered all over the front pages (garnering three New York Times stories in a single day on September 2). Some bloggers even suggested her youngest child had not issued from her, but from her daughter instead, and that she had participated in a bizarre cover-up. I attended a gathering in Washington at which a prominent columnist wondered aloud how Palin could pursue her career when her religious beliefs denied women the right to work outside the home.

Palin became the embodiment of every dark fantasy the Left had ever held about the views of evangelical Christians and women who do not associate themselves with contemporary feminism, and all concern for clarity and truthfulness was left at the door.

To be sure, some criticisms of Palin were entirely appropriate. She had no experience in foreign or defense policy and very little expertise in or command of either. In a time of war, with a seventy-two-year-old presidential candidate who had already survived one bout with cancer, this was a cause for very real concern. And Palin did perform dreadfully in some early interviews. Some of her more level-headed critics did make their case on these grounds. But the more common visceral hostility toward her seemed to have little to do with these objections. Rather, the entire episode had the feel of a kind of manic outburst; it was triggered by a false understanding of who Palin was, and once it began, there was no stopping or controlling it.

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.

Don't even think about skipping the rest of this fantastic piece. Levin is equally penetrating on Palin's extraordinary impact on the conservative right, the raw, even primeval, partisan emotion she exposed among American conservatives in search of a savior.

I'm going to lean a little on Yuval in challenging his claims of Palin's faults and the McCain ticket's weaknesses (for one thing, I'd argue the GOP ticket had more of "core vision" than Yuval allows), but if nothing else, the essay's explication of the nation's social fissues across the economic and cultural realms is pure masterwork. So again, readers should be sure to take time for the whole thing.

Hat Tip: Conservatives for Sarah Palin.

Disillusionment With Obama

I'm still figuring it out, but Barack Obama's the first president in memory to have his "presidential honeymoon" come to an end before the second week of the new term.

Chris Bowers was throwing his hands up in frustration on Tuesday, asking "What Does Obama Want Us To Do?" Josh Marshall's reverted to the tried-and-true psychological escape, blame, asking "why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff?"

But especially interesting is the comments from Theda Skocpol:

Obama is, sadly, much to blame for giving the Republicans so much leverage. He defined the challenge as biparitsanship not saving the U.S. economy. Right now, he has only one chance to re-set this deteriorating debate: He needs to give a major speech on the economy, explain to Americans what is happening and what must be done. People will, as of now, still listen to him -- and what else is his political capital for?

Speaking as a strong Obama supporter who put my energies and money into it, I am now very disillusioned with him. He spent the last two weeks empowering Republicans - including negotiating with them to get more into Senate and his administration and giving them virtual veto-power over his agenda -- and also spending time on his personal cool-guy image (as in interview before the Super Bowl). The country is in danger and he ran for president to solve this crisis in a socially inclusionary way. He should be fighting on that front all the time with all his energies - and he certainly should give a major speech to help educate the public and shape the agenda. That is the least he can and should do. Only that will bypass the media-conserative dynamic that is now in charge.

Skocpol's a well-known Harvard political scientist (her name's pronounced "Scotch-pol"), so to see her admit to her own Obamessianism is striking. While she pins the responsibility on Obama for his own failings, notice that dig there at the end on the "media-conservative dynamic."

In any case, the president has apparently forsaken his cool-guy image-building momentarily with his essay this morning at the Washington Post: "The Action Americans Need" (via Memeorandum).

But for the political analysis of the administration's predicament, see Jeanne Cummings, "Obama Losing the Stimulus Message War."

Remembering Karen Carpenter

The Educated Shoprat has a great post tonight reminding us that today's another important "day the music died," in this case the loss of Karen Carpenter, February 4, 1983.

Shoprat writes:

I did not realize the magnitude of this tragedy until several years later when I began to realize just how incredibly talented this lady was.

Oh, I get sad thinking about how much I miss Karen Carpenter.

When "Close To You" was on the charts in 1970 I was 9 years-old. I dreamed that she was singing about me, and that the angels would sprinkle golden starlight in my hair and girls would love me. I don't know if that's strange to say it, but that's how I felt. Over the next few years The Carpenters were playing regularly on the family turntable. When Karen Carpenter died, like Shoprat, the impact of the loss wasn't immediately apparent. But nowadays, when I hear their songs, I'm transported back to an age of innocence in my own life that few other sounds of music can do. Very few other vocalists - living or dead - leave me so rejoiced as does the beauty of Karen's vocals. My favorite today is "For All We Know," not just for the incredible, quiet wonder of Karen's voice - and the song's simple essence affirming that our lives are bound by love - but also because my wife selected the Carpenters to play at our wedding. It was a church wedding, and our minister was reluctant, but it ended up okay after all.

Iraqi Women Raped Into Suicide Jihad

I'm interested to see how the left's peace advocates will spin this: Australia's Herald Sun reports that Samira Jassam, known as "the mother of the believers," orchestrated the rape and forced recruitment of 81 women into suicide martyrdom operations in Iraq:

A WOMAN suspected of recruiting more than 80 female suicide bombers has confessed to organising their rapes so she could later convince them that martyrdom was the only way to escape the shame.

John at Powerline responds: "Our enemies can sink to depths of depravity that most of us would be hard-pressed even to imagine ... This is the kind of thing that makes me skeptical that the solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism is diplomacy."

But check out Warner Todd Huston at RedState:

This is the sort of corruption that liberals and Barack Obama do not understand. In order to further “Jihad” these people are willing not only to kill themselves and others, but to rape even their own women in order to destroy their mental balance so that they are more easily brainwashed to become suicide bombers.

What sort of religion encourages the rape and death of its own children?

Democrats cannot conceive of this sort of corruption of the soul employed for religious control and power over a people. So, instead of facing reality, they bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the enemy is really “just like us,” after all.

No lefties are commenting at Memeorandum, but Libby Spencer applauds such innovations, so I'll keep my eyes open.

Democratic Economic Incompetence

President Barack Obama warned the nation today of economic "catastrophe" if Congress fails to pass the disastrous economic stimulus package under consideration in Washington.

Perhaps we'll see more sky-is-falling desperation from the administration, given that the public is quickly souring on this larded-legislative boondoggle. Gallup's new poll finds huge public consensus on the need for government action, but only 10 percent of Americans believe Obama's plan "will improve the economy in 2009" (source). Nancy Pelosi's rank dishonesty certainly can't be helping the Democratic agenda either:

So, what's a hard-left partisan do? Why, cry wolf and blame the GOP, of course:

Behind all the back and forth over the Stimulus Bill is a simple fact: the debate in Washington is rapidly moving away from any recognition that the US economy - and the global economy, for that matter - is in free-fall ...

The other key into the current debate is that the Republican position is ominously similar to their position on global warming or, for that matter, evolution. The discussion of what to do on the Democratic side tracks more or less with textbook macroeconomics, while Republican argument track either with tax cut monomania or rhetorical claptrap intended to confuse. It's true that macro-economics doesn't make controlled experiments possible. And economists can't speak to these issues with certainty. But in most areas of our lives, when faced with dire potential consequences, we put our stock with scientific or professional consensus where it exists, as it does here. Only in cases where it goes against Republican political interests or economic interests of money-backers do we prefer the schemes of yahoos and cranks to people who study the stuff for a living.

Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don't believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed.

It's not too smart to deny the reality that this legislation is the Democrats' folly. They passed it in the House, and they'll be thanking the GOP from saving them from utter disaster if it fails in the Senate.

The real pleasure of seeing the extreme incompetence of this administration, and so soon, is only surpassed by the equally-extreme mortification on the radical-left that their historic moment of revolutionary transformation is evaporating faster than one of candidate Obama's ethereal post-partisan stump speeches.

No Male Heterosupremacy Outrage in Octuplets Case?

When I first saw the story of Nadya Suleman I was just fascinated by the medical science of multiple birth pregancies. Also particularly interesting was the mother's adamant prior refusal to "reduce" the number of fetuses during pregancy. Eight was enough, and she wasn't going to settle for less.

But then the Los Angeles Times ran some stories on the background of of the mother and the reproductive ethics of the case, and it's all turned out to be something of a tragedy of social commentary. Ms. Suleman is by no means a typical candidate for the aggressive fertilization she received, and her personal life - including six children already - has raised all kinds of questions of impropriety, to say the least.

I wasn't hip on the feminist angle, however. Via Robert Stacy McCain, it turns out the radical feminists have been silent on the ethics of Ms. Suleman's case, what Darleen Click calls "an unethical abdication of responsibility."

On Jan 26 when Kaiser Permanente announced the arrival of surviving octuplets the story has run from increasingly creepy details and outrage about the mother to sudden articles about ethical concerns. It has been interesting to note what, or who, has been fairly quiet on this event.

The radical feminist (aka Vagina Warrior) blogsphere.

Ace noted the lack of commentary, figuring since there was no male villain in the piece there was little for the VW’s to focus on.

But hints of what is really the core issue for VW’s - who have no problem with nasty mockery of Michelle Duggar - can be found with series of entries on Slate’s XX (as in female chromosome) blog space and then confirmed by Salon’s Judy Berman who curiously posits …

Meanwhile, feminists are asking serious questions about what Suleman and her octuplets mean for the future of women’s health.

… then immediately focuses on law and questions of racism.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women — “What I would check if I had the time is the extent to which coverage of this story — whether negative or positive — is framed as a question of ethics. When the pregnant woman is not brown or black and the drugs/technologies are provided by big pharma, the discussion focuses on questions of ethics. But if the issue is childbearing by low-income women of color, and the drug is homegrown/ illegal then the debate is a question of punishment through the criminal justice or civil child welfare system.”

Darleen links to Amanda Marcotte's post at Pandagon, "Not a Biological Clock Gone Haywire," which is worth reading for insight into the mindset of today's feminism. Even better, though, is this essay on Michelle Duggar (a mother of 18 and the subject of a reality show on TLC) over at Women’s Space, "Why is Michelle Duggar Fair Game?":

I think it might be a worthwhile exercise to do some thinking on why it is that Michelle Duggar seems to be fair game for pretty much everyone, including for feminists. It’s open season on the woman – mock her, make fun of her hair, her appearance, her clothes, her body, her reproductive organs, other of her internal organs, her vagina, attack her, depict her as a pig, call her brainwashed. (If you haven’t seen this, then look here for the latest, also here, here, here, and sadly, here and be sure to read the comments.) ...

Long discussion of other cultures, with pictures, then ...

Instead of scapegoating this one woman and targeting her as though she is the enemy, why not make it our business to critique the real enemy – systems and institutions of male heterosupremacy which make the choices Duggar and women like her have made the best deal they feel they can cut?

I thought I kept up with this stuff ... whew!

Obama Restart Hopes to Avert Self-Inflicted Meltdown

The Los Angeles Times reports that President Barack Obama, humbled by scandalous missteps, hopes to put the political spotlight back on his economic stimulus agenda:

In only his second week in office, Barack Obama is punching the restart button on his presidency.

On Tuesday, Day 14 of a tenure that began with high hopes and soaring promises of bringing a new competence to Washington, Obama essentially admitted that he had lost ground in confronting his biggest challenge - fixing the country's crippled economy - due to the "self-inflicted injury" of naming appointees who had failed to pay their taxes.

He shed two of those appointees and then took to the airwaves - conducting not one but five Oval Office network television interviews in which he sought to seize control over the economic stimulus debate. Republicans have found traction on the issue by painting themselves as defenders of taxpayers and homeowners, while portraying Democrats as frivolous big spenders.

"I'm frustrated with myself, with our team," Obama told NBC's Brian Williams in a comment that was typical for his afternoon of televised mea culpas. "But ultimately my job is to get this thing back on track, because what we need to focus on is a deteriorating economy and getting people back to work."

The frustration's not likely to end anytime soon, given the supercharged expectations the Obama campaign banked on during the election.

In fact, as Victor Davis Hanson argues, this administration's off to one of the worst starts ever, and without a downshifting of Democratic hype, a full-on political meltdown is practically inevitable:

Some of us have been warning that it was not healthy for the U.S. media to have deified rather than questioned Obama, especially given that they tore apart Bush, ridiculed Palin, and caricatured Hillary. And now we can see the results of their two years of advocacy rather than scrutiny.

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking ....

This is quite serious. I can't recall a similarly disastrous start in a half-century (far worse than Bill Clinton's initial slips). Obama immediately must lower the hope-and-change rhetoric, ignore Reid/Pelosi, drop the therapy, and accept the tragic view that the world abroad is not misunderstood but quite dangerous. And he must listen on foreign policy to his National Security Advisor, Billary, and the Secretary of Defense. If he doesn't quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.

Mark Thompson and the Scientific Falsification of God

It's certainly cliche to suggest that faith in the public square is in retreat. Of course, while polls show that Americans by a huge majority "believe in God or a universal spirit," there's nevertheless an extremely vocal and increasingly influential contingent on the progressive left that is intent not only to deny the potential epistemological basis for religious faith but to excoriate anyone who deigns to make a reasoned case to that effect.

I normally don't get involved in these tussles, but with the vicious neo-Stalinism we've seen on the left in response to California's Proposition 8 and the Warren invocation (and that's just for starters), it's pretty clear that the hordes have swept over the windswept passes of the barbarian steppes and folks of good standing need to stand a post and do battle in defense of eternal goodness and right.

What got me going on this is Mark Thompson's crudely pedestrian essay, "Falsifying the Unfalsifiable," over at the Ordinary Gentlemen.

Readers may recall that Mark is the publisher of Publius Endures. Once a staunch libertarian, Mark has sold out to the Obamessianism that has engulfed the land following "our national holiday from reason that was the Obama presidential inauguration" (to quote myself). In one of the strangest introductions to a blog post I've ever seen, Mark cites Homer Simpson - that's right, that Homer Simpson - as an authority on the ontology of religious faith and evangelical trust, arguing that the Simpson's get right to "the crux of the problem." And to think, Robert Stacy McCain generously called these guys "intellectuals." Go figure?

In any case, here's a key snippet of the point that Mark is trying to elaborate (and elaborate ... frankly, ad nauseum, at least 25 times at the piece):

For the religious person, there is simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as there is something in the universe that cannot rationally be explained, there is a basis for trusting in the existence of god. For the atheist, there is likewise simply no way to prove through science that god exists or does not exist - as long as a scientific or rational explanation for anything in the universe is theoretically possible, there is a basis to trust in the ability of reason to explain everything, and no basis to trust in the existence of god.

And this is why I think Chris - and E.D. - are absolutely correct in stating that the proper response to the question of the existence of god is “Who Cares?” The existence of god simply cannot be proven or disproven through pure reason, and neither side does themselves any favors when they insist otherwise.

I think Mark wants to say "there is no basis for trusting in the existence of God" in the first paragraph, but if it's not clear in the passage cited, we've got redundancies galore at the post to confirm the point.

And this is why I'm spending time to correct Mark, and, frankly, to reveal him even further as the rank nihilist that he is.

I'm still figuring out where Mark and his gang are coming from, but they certainly aren't conservative, despite the circle-jerk exclamations for Culture 11 found repeatedly at the blog. Think about this in the context of this essay from the Calgary Herald, "At Least Atheists Got Mentioned":

People appear very keen for a lot of things to change on the Obama watch. One of those hopes is that Christianity would revert more to a private choice rather than the state religion it often appeared to be under George W. Bush.

Now before I debunk this slimy palaver, I just came across Troy Anderson denouncing those of faith who respond to such bunk as "Christian apologists."

Really, Christian apologists?

So we've got those on the left hip to the "Age of Obama" who are looking to see Christianity revert to a "private choice" rather than a "state religion"? And those who debate in favor of the existence of God are "Christian apologists"?

Sometimes I doubt this is the same United States of America where I grew up?

When Mark Thompson slops out such intelletually deadening prose as " the lunacy of religion attempting to masquerade as science," I'm frankly at a loss at the metaphysical methodology of the enterprise.

The fact remains, and it has thus been, that there is no epistemological basis for asserting religion as science in the first place. It's a sickly straw man to posit intelligent design as threatening nearly fifty years of post-Engel secularism in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. If we see science as the scholarly generation of explanatory theory based on logically derived predictions based on observable phenonomen, it makes little sense to suggest religion is "masquerading as science." There is no data with which to subject the claim that "God exists" to falsification. Sure, we can debate the scientific legitimacy of the Gospels, but to find proof for the verity of the divine is nonsense. Perhaps Mark Thompson can clarify the point in a future post, but thus far he's been too busy playing ring around the rosie with Freddie and the rest of this nihilist gang.

The larger question in any case is the problem of Judeo-Christian ethics. When Christopher Hitchens argued early this decade for the morality of regime change Iraq, it's unlikely he was drawing on any other well of fundamental right outside of the Biblical narrative of Mosaic universality.

It is, of course, precisely this Western Judeo-Christian heritage that the progressive left seeks to destroy. Andrew Sullivan is no conservative when he promotes a gay radical licentiousness that knows no moral boundaries. Thus, the solution: just rebrand the model in your own image and label adherents to classic teachings as "Christianists." I mean really, Mark Thompson cites E.D Kain as suggesting "who cares"?

Well, excuse me, but damn! I'd think we all would. The West is best. QED.

I'll have more on this later, so I'll close with Licia Corbella's rebuttal to the privileging of atheism over religion in the public square:

The atheist ethic has killed more people than any religion by a staggering margin. Fascism, Nazism and Communism have murdered many tens of millions of people. Think of the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Nazis, Communist China etc. Mao Zedong's regime alone murdered 70 million countrymen. Stalin, 20 million. Their successors millions more. To this day, Falun Gong and Christians are jailed in China and then killed to harvest their organs.

It's no coincidence the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are virtually all Christian-based, not atheist or even Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. As the Bible says: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

With the exception of Japan, which had its democratic system imposed on it by the U. S. after the Second World War, and Israel, which is Jewish, no non-Christian country is truly free.

Atheists make up a very small minority of the "believers" in our society and yet it is their religion that is constantly being rammed down the throats of the majority.

They better be careful what they wish for. So should all people who love freedom, regardless of what they believe.

Obama's Ethical Performance Breakdown

What does a "chief performance officer" do? Well, according to the Washington Post's analysis of the new position created by the Barack Obama presidential transition, one of the responsibilities is governmental transparency and accessibility:

Releasing information publicly will help engage the general public in the work of government, as well as allowing measurement experts in academia and business to parse data and offer ideas to improve federal management. Transparency also creates an incentive for agencies to do a better job of collecting and using data.

The Post's essay is dated January 7, 2009, and the article specifically mentions by name Nancy Killefer, President Obama's nominee for the position.

So today's news that Ms. Killefer has withdrawn from consideration as the chief performance nominee ought to really tell us something about both the competence and integrity of the new boss in Washington and the Democratic "values" that have taken over the town.

Was Ms. Killefer taking the appointment seriously when the transparency of her very own credibility was at stake, her credibility as the administration's top officer charged with governmental transparency? Did it take the media's amazing snap from its Obamessianic slumber - with the growing attention in the press this last week to the slew of ethical fiascos among a host of Obama appointees - for her to see the light?

It seems not too long ago that the Democratic congressional majority was championing a new ethics of responsibility in Washington, and throughout campaign 2008 the online left routinely scourged the GOP for its corruption, starting with Vice President Dick Cheney on down to the lowest congressional backbencher. But now where is the left on what's emerging to be a banana republic's version of governmental propriety?

Tim Geithner got a pass at Treasury, but his chief of staff's a long-time lobbyist doing deals inside the Beltway. So much for those lobbying standards President Obama established when he announced a new day on the Potomac? Maybe the Geithner Treasury's ethical end-run was a bit much, as it now seems that Thomas Daschle's bid for health secretary is sailing into some stormy waters. With the New York Times editorial board calling for Daschle's name to be withdrawn, it's pretty obvious that the bloom is off the roses along the corridors of power of the new Democratic era.

Actually, it's breaking that Daschle's now withdrawing himself (and I wasn't going to bet on it), so perhaps folks on the left are noting the clarity of hypocrisy that's now finally coming into focus just a couple weeks after our national holiday from reason that was the Obama presidential inauguration.

George Packer, at the New Yorker, is warning that President Obama "can’t afford hypocrisy." But that's a bit like saying Kurt Warner can't afford to throw an interception. What's done is done now, and the country's already living with a reign of impropriety, and the train's barely left the station. There's no second chance for Warner's Hall of Fame bid, and we're barely into the first 100 days and Obama will be lucky to win a second term the way the Democratic scandals are already rocking the administration.

No worry for the online fever swamps of the left, naturally. They'll just give the finger to anyone who's got the temerity to point out the hypocrisy of the president, his campaign, and his party. Meanwhile, that much touted "transparency and accessibility" is going down the memory hole faster than you can say Zoë Baird.

The Left's Normalization of Evil

I was reading Kathy's essay at Comments from Left Field yesterday, which is a response to Michael Yon's "How Can the World Be Blind to Israel’s Existential Threats?"

My first inclination was to write a post rebutting her main argument. But there really wasn't one. Kathy doesn't respond to Yon's case for Israel. She scourges him for standing up for freedom and right while elevating Hamas terrorists to the level of beknighted freedom figthers. I've debated and denounced these horrendous leftists before. Kathy might as well have been storming the hallways of hotels in Mumbai, killing the innocents, and it would have been days before the media began to focus on the true intent of death and destruction - the murder of the Jews. People like this elevate evil above the standards of democracy and freedom. It's hard sometimes to continuously, endless, debunk and repudiate this godless insanity, but it needs to be done.

Thank goodness then that Judea Pearl keeps up the good fight. This week is the seventh year since the death of his son Daniel, and it's a world that the former Wall Street Journal reporter would barely recognize:

Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny's murder would be a turning point in the history of man's inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.

But somehow, barbarism, often cloaked in the language of "resistance," has gained acceptance in the most elite circles of our society. The words "war on terror" cannot be uttered today without fear of offense. Civilized society, so it seems, is so numbed by violence that it has lost its gift to be disgusted by evil.

The entire essay is must reading.

Professor Pearl offers one explanation for the normalization of evil: the glorification of leftist indocrination of America's college campuses.

I'll have more later ...

Rendition, Extraordinary Rendition, and Leftist Hypocrisy

It's a sure sign of political hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy: The more feverishly the left works to discredit and spin the news that the Obama administration will continue the Bush-era policy of terrorist renditions, the more close real world events have shown their messiah to be a normal politician who campaigned on a bill of falsehoods and ethereal platitudes.

Scott Horton's going on the offensive, for example, alleging that Greg Miller of the Los Angeles Times got punked. Apparently, there are "renditions," then there are "extraordinary renditions," and never the twain shall meet:

There are two fundamental distinctions between the programs. The extraordinary renditions program involved the operation of long-term detention facilities either by the CIA or by a cooperating host government together with the CIA, in which prisoners were held outside of the criminal justice system and otherwise unaccountable under law for extended periods of time. A central feature of this program was rendition to torture, namely that the prisoner was turned over to cooperating foreign governments with the full understanding that those governments would apply techniques that even the Bush Administration considers to be torture. This practice is a felony under current U.S. law, but was made a centerpiece of Bush counterterrorism policy.

The earlier renditions program regularly involved snatching and removing targets for purposes of bringing them to justice by delivering them to a criminal justice system. It did not involve the operation of long-term detention facilities and it did not involve torture. There are legal and policy issues with the renditions program, but they are not in the same league as those surrounding extraordinary rendition. Moreover, Obama committed to shut down the extraordinary renditions program, and continuously made clear that this did not apply to the renditions program.

This is pure bull of course. Not even Hilzoy's painstaking attempt to deflate the issue can hide the key point: Barack Obama will preserve a central anti-terrorism tool that served as the key antiwar cudgel to demonize the Bush administration as the reincarnation of the Third Reich.

It does not matter what it's called: The ideological left - on principle - considered torture AND enemy rendition as one and the same. For the past seven years the nihilists have excoriated the "evil BushCo" regime for its state-sponsored terror-regime, but now that the policy shoe's on the other foot, it's time for the left to parse and twist itself out of hypocritical jam. Andrew Sullilvan's the worst. In a post last year, two days after Obama was elected, he cites Alex Massie, who is quoted saying:

The Iraq War was ... unpopular across much of the world, but its Guantanamo and rendition and secret CIA prisons around the world that have done far more damage to the United States' reputation.

To the left, it's obviously all of a piece, which is why the hordes of the nihilist fever swamps, as noted, are working overtime to square the new administration's policy with the Democratic campaign's outlandish promises from all last year.

As QandO shows (citing Progressive Justice), Human Rights Watch, the leading progressive NGO for international human rights, called for a blanket abolition of the Bush administration's policy of enemy rendtions. The group called on the U.S. government to "repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA's rendition program ..." But according to Greg Miller's report at the Times, Human Rights Watch now says under "limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions.

The problem is that those "limited circumstances" are in essence simple assurances by the Obama administration that the U.S. will not render suspected terrorists abroad if the possibility for coercive interrogation exists. It's a classic double standard. CIA Director Michael Hayden guaranteed in 2007 that the U.S. was not rendering suspected terrorists to foreign governments for torture. He said renditions were being conducted "lawfully" and "responsibly," which is now what leftists say the Obama administration will do with its continuation of the previous government's policy.

Andrew Sullivan, who has gone through fits of hysteria over the Bush adminstration's "torture" policies, pulls a play out of Hayden's book when he says:

What some on the far right seem not to grasp is that opposition to torture is not about being soft on terrorism. It is about being effective against terrorism - ensuring that intelligence is not filled with torture-generated garbage, that we retain the moral high-ground in a long war against theocratic violence, and that we can better identify, capture, kill or bring to justice those who threaten our way of life. Rendition and temporary detention are tools in that effort - tools that now need to be as closely monitored and assessed as they were once recklessly abused.

These people are not only hypocritically bankrupt, but their comprehensive program of leftist relativism is designed to destroy this country. Now that Barack Obama's in power the left can do no wrong. Bush hatred has been transformed to Obamessianism. Those on the "far right" will be demonized and ostracized for their previous policies, facts and logic be damned. Meanwhile, previously reviled policies will be continued.

It's a shameful situation we're in with the Democrats, but to be expected after the most dishonest media-enabled Democratic presidential campaign in history.

James Harrison Didn't Think He'd Score on Interception

James Harrison, who scored in yesterday's incredible 100-yard interception return, says of the play: “To be honest, I really didn’t think I’d make it all the way back” ... “My teammates threw some vicious blocks.”

Here's Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times:

From a stirring national anthem to a tingling late finish, the Steelers' 27-23 victory over the Cardinals was the greatest Super Bowl ever, one whose Roman numbers should have been XXL for its double-extra-large helping of theatrics and dramatics.

Are we agreed on this? Cardinal fans aren't too thrilled, obviously. How about the "Boss time" of the halftime show? Did that performance contribute to the "greatest Super Bowl ever"? Jeralyn's totally floored. Dan Riehl not so much ...

Family Values at American Power

I thought some folks might grumble at bit at yesterday's post on Ann Althouse.

Cracker asks in the comments:

Professor you have referred to this blog as a "family blog".

You have recently commented on the suspect "values" of Family Broadcast Companies.

If my daughter is studying "Civics" in her 7th grade class.....and I recommended not only to her, but other classmates of hers that "American Power" has a good take on "conservatism" as it stands right now in our country and there is No indicator that you have to be 18 to view its content.

How do you suggest I respond to her, and her classmates, and perhaps her instructor ..... questions about the blog authors obsession with another blog authors breasts (nipples, tube tops, farrah etc etc.) ... as related to family values, content responsibility, and of course any hypocracy indicators that could possibly be applied not only to the "American Power" blog, but in a wider net, the entire conservative movement right now....

Check the comments for my response at the post.

I'll add further here that I'm not for one moment "obssessing" with Althouse's breasts. In fact, I'm not sexually objectifying Althouse at all. Like perhaps millions of adolescent boys in the mid-1970s, I had a poster of Farrah Fawcett on the wall in my bedroom. Does that disqualify me today, as late-40s heterosexual male observer of popular culture from commenting on a fellow blogger's dress and sexuality in a picture from the 1970s?

Check Althouse's comments if you want sex talk, where one visitor says: "Those some nice looking tits. Great rack. You could serve dinner on those things." This commenter also suggests when he meets Althouse "we are definitely going to get to 2nd base."

Althouse responds: "Not if you keep chickening out."

And besides, as noted yesterday, Althouse is a notorious breast blogger, and she's instigated some of the web's greatest flame wars with her observations on Jessica Valenti's breasts. By posting pictures of herself in a tight-fitting shirt, does Althouse succumb to same self-objectifying promotion as other women whom she's criticized? Valenti didn't like it when Althouse accused her of poking her breasts out while standing for a photo opportunity with former president Bill Clinton:

Last year I had my own run-in with online sexism when I was invited to a lunch meeting with Bill Clinton, along with a handful of other bloggers. After the meeting, a group photo of the attendees with Clinton was posted on several websites, and it wasn't long before comments about my appearance ("Who's the intern?; "I do like Gray Shirt's three-quarter pose.") started popping up.

One website, run by law professor and occasional New York Times columnist Ann Althouse, devoted an entire article to how I was "posing" so as to "make [my] breasts as obvious as possible". The post, titled "Let's take a closer look at those breasts," ended up with over 500 comments. Most were about my body, my perceived whorishness, and how I couldn't possibly be a good feminist because I had the gall to show up to a meeting with my breasts in tow. One commenter even created a limerick about me giving oral sex. Althouse herself said that I should have "worn a beret . . . a blue dress would have been good too". All this on the basis of a photograph of me in a crew-neck sweater from Gap.

Perhaps folks take all of this a bit too seriously. There's was a personal context to my post that didn't need elaboration, or so I thought. It doesn't matter anyway. While this is a "family blog," what I wrote last night is hardly disqualifying. My earlier reference to being a "family blog" was to crude vulgarity, which I do not employ. Plus, every once in a while I'm going to shake it up around here and discuss off-topics that are completely germaine to the blogging medium. In any case, I'm a man, and as Little Miss Attilla notes, "There is a marked tendency for heterosexual men to be interested in women." For some proof of that maxim, see Robert Stacy McCain, breast-blogger extraordinaire, who pronounced last November "International Natalie Portman Cleavage Day in the blogosphere."

Look, I often have young students sitting in the front row in my classrooms showing so much cleavage it's as if their endowments are about to burst out on their desktops. Actually, I think it's a bit much. I will, of course, continue to write about these things as a participant in the web's social commentary. I would think folks would find this much more acceptable than the Democratic Party's agenda of providing abortion services to 15 year-old girls or Disney-ABC's "family" programming that glorifies teenage pregnancy and underage drinking.

Ann Althouse: Bangs and Nipple

Ann Althouse has scanned some pictures of herself from the 1970s. The second one caught my eye, not just for Ann's beautiful hair and bangs, but also for her left nipple straining to poke through her chemise:

Ann's in her late '50s, so she's about 25 years-old according to the date of the picture (1976). I was just entering high school about that time, and I'm trying to remember how women presented their sexier sides back then. Nowadays on campus (circa 2006-2009), it seems deep-cleavage bustier-types of tops are de rigeur. I think young women today who normally wouldn't be pumping themselves up as "totally hot" nevertheless dress in a tone that is more expressly sexy than the girls I dated as an adolescent young man.

That said, although "tube tops" or some variation were popular back in the seventies, I think Ann captures the more wholesomely-hot look of Farrah Fawcett's 1976 superstar "red swimsuit" poster.

Anyway, Ann's one of the very best bloggers out there, and I meant to do something about the really dumb attack on her last week at Media Matters (Ann's not at all dogmatically conservative as her detracters allege), but never got around to it.

Oh yeah ... commenters will please save the sexist slurs against me and this post. Althouse is a well-known breast-blogging specialist herself, and I'm sure she can understand the aesthetic blogginess of my current entry into the genre.

Sweet Nothings of Civility at Ordinary Gentlemen

The phrase "effete snobs of the Democratic Party" popped into my head recently when reading Freddie de Boer's rambling twaddle over at the Ordinary Gentlemen. Not that such drivel is unexpected from the denizens of the nihilist left, but with a new chief executive snob in town, there's a special obnoxiousness to Freddie's long-winded puffery. Freddie's the kind of Democrat who takes Obamessianism to a whole new level of intolerant bombast foisted off as intelligently uplifting progressivism.

Anyway, I've previously smacked down Freddie on his ignorant gay marriage absolutism. Today I'm interested in this little tussle between Freddie and Robert Stacy McCain, and the follow-up incoherencies served up by Scott Payne in his extraordinary post.

First note Freddie's update to his post excoriating McCain's alleged fealty to "Bushite dead-enderism" and the sounds of "bat-shit talk radio" conservatism:

Helen Rittelmeyer, I’m sorry to say, chimes in with a “Hear, hear” for McCain in his comments. This, I take it, is a function of Helen’s lamentable opinion that it’s more important to stick up for your side than to value intelligence, principle, democracy, morals or logic. I’m afraid that the McCains of the world are the inconvenient hole in Helen’s philosophy of loyalty; some people, and their opinions, do not deserve your loyalty, no matter how much they tell you they are on your side. That Robert Stacy McCain is a tedious nothing will come as no surprise to those of us with a Web browser and the ability to read. Stranger still, Helen likes precisely the kind of faggy thinkers and writers– you know, those guys who care about, like, good arguments, and stuff – who McCain would consider a part of the damnable pretentious elite. But Helen’s philosophy, I think, doesn’t permit her to give anyone who is ostensibly on her side the heave hoe. Her position on party and loyalty threatens to leave her like the person who, out of loyalty, refuses to take the keys from her drunk friend, right before he drives her off of a cliff.

Folks can see what I mean by obnoxious snobbery, and in fact, I'm not the first to notice. Sonny Bunch takes issue with Freddie's "low-level snark," and then as noted Scott Payne takes to the keyboard to put in his two cents:

... I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture ... but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

Gosh, that's simply wonderful. I don't know what to say at this lost promise of online sweet nothings, except it's rather interesting that Payne spends more time calling out the rude witless hacks of the blogging chat boards than his own extraordinarily hare-brained co-blogger.

That's not surprising, either, as it turns out, since the whole enterprise so far over at Ordinary Gentlemen is a ramshackle edifice of erstwhile libertarians and neoconservatives who have succumbed to the pull of Obamessianism. (True though, Freddie's apparently a "movement" progressive who's sipped a little too deeply at the well of Democratic victory. Maybe he'll anchor this Edsel's progressive creds, as that's where things there are headed anyway.)

In any case, I've written already about the very issue at base of this whole dust-up, so I'll save the heavy intellectual firepower for later. It's not like I'll be needing to dig too deeply into the stockpiles, in any case, especially given Mark Thompson's intellectual impotence demonstrated during previous go-rounds in a preview outing as one extraordinary cohort of the League.

More later, then ...

Republicans Are the New Punks

From the comments at Helen Rittelmeyer's post, "'Conservatism for Punks' for Punks":

Punk Rock is not conservative. True conservative movements (and not just those calling themselves such ...) have a core of stability and continuity. This stability and continuity is not characterized by the characteristics of the movement, but by the the stability and continuity of the characteristics.

Well, speaking of punk rock, stability, and continuity, Doug TenNapel argues "Republican is the New Punk (prefaced by a photo of Johnny Ramone):

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air.

But rock cannot be both establishment and anti-establishment. It can’t be a rebellious underdog while endorsing and distributing the status quo. And yes, President Obama is the status quo of unlimited spending and government expansion he supposedly opposed during the election … then again, he also said he would fight to reduce abortion but couldn’t wait three days in office before throwing the pro-life useful idiots who voted for him under the bus. No change there. If this is what he meant by “reducing abortions” I can’t we to see what he meant by “reducing taxes.”

This is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties. Hope and Change was nothing more than a repackaging of policies that have no right to be associated with hope or change.

Lefty politics are no longer the fringe and no matter if the voters knew it or not they carved lefty politics into stone. Bill Ayers became the system he once fought against. Sure, they still wear the earring and say “fuck” a lot to maintain street-cred among the academics, but now rock has taken sides — it is for the establishment. Same with journalism, the university and pop-culture. The left has become a cliché. They’re not “Arrested Development” they’re “Golden Girls” with a soul patch. Snore.

Now that the art nerds and punks just became the football jocks and prom queens, a new rebel is emerging from the wilderness. They are the new anti-establishment. One minority force bands together against every other branch of government swallowed by the Democrat octopus. The last evidence of a check or balance against the popular people are now the Conservative Republicans.

As a longstanding skate-punk, I find most of this amusing. When I was really punk, punk was anti-culture, seek-and-destroy against the establishment. As Johnny Rotten sung famously:

Dont know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!

Or in Darby Crash's gutteral screams:

I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established
Joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc
On the rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something
Even if I'm killed...

Helen Rittelmeyer and her visitors can wax around poetically about what it's like to be punk or conservative, but some of the greatest punk rockers back in the day are now nihilist mouthpieces for the new age establishment currently proceeding to tear down the wisdom of the ages.

In any case, I miss Joe Strummer.

The Secret Life of ABC's Family Network

The Los Angeles Times reports that Disney's ABC Family cable channel is offering sexually mature material to a core audience that includes a third of viewers who are 12 to 17 years-old.

Is it just me, or is something terribly wrong with that picture? According to the article:

"The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic," said Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group. "And you're only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, 'I see you.'"

Being "authentic" apparently includes programs featuring "sex, underage drinking, absentee parents and the challenges of growing up today."

A look at the article suggest that American family life is so disfunctional that the premiere network for "wholesome" kids' programming is now and outlet for the hits-and-misses of 15 year-old home pregnancy testing. Here's more:

I'd love for these shows to be 'Little House on the Prairie,' but that isn't going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics," said Pat Gentile, a top ad buyer for P&G and co-chairman of the Alliance for Family Entertainment, a coalition of major advertisers that advocates for family programming.

I was just finishing up my undergraduate training in 1992 when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the portrayal of Murphy Brown, of the comedy series starring Candace Bergen, as "a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice'."

Quayle is often said to be one of history's worst vice presidents, but few in high public office have been as clear and morally right on the heaviest social questions facing the country. And that was almost 20 years ago. It's even worse today. Where perhaps then society had accepted that women's independence, including single-parenting by successful career women, was a natural outgrowth of civil-rights advances and sociodemographic change at the family level, it can't be that we've moved to a social equilibria in which kids who cannot legally drive a car are getting knocked-up and mainstream family channels on cable television portray this as "credible" programming for today's children's television markets.

It makes all-too-much sense though, unfortunately, in today's upside-down world where "progressive" values include the glorification of teenagers chugging-back cold ones like Friday afternoon construction workers on payday.

As I noted the other day in the "Deceptions of Democratic Family Planning," the Democratic-left wants us to think that the "family planning" provisions in the Obama administration's gargantuan spending spree are about expanding Medicaid coverage to more families. Perhaps. But a close look at the expansion of eligibility shows that family planning coverage will extend to unpregnant minors receiving services without the knowledge of their parents. The bill, in other words, not only accepts teenage behavior that in the past would have been seen not only as socially inappropriate, but destructive to the life chances of teenage girls and facilitative to the whimsical evisceration of traditional parental model of moral teaching of children.

If there's a bright lining to the Times piece is that some parents are outraged at the Family Channel's fare:

"I thought it was going to be more like Disney Channel, a little more grown-up but less provocative," said Mary Alden, a Pasadena mother of 14-year-old twins. She became alarmed when she heard dialogue from characters in "Secret Life" who were discussing whether one of them should end her pregnancy. "I didn't think that would be on a Disney channel," she said.

Michele MacNeal, a mother of three who lives in La Crescenta and heads a local branch of the powerful watchdog group Parents Television Council, agreed.

"It's kind of a misnomer to call ABC Family a family channel," she said. "When you call something 'family,' it gives the impression that it's safe for all members of the family, even young children."

Another possible upside to all of this is President Barack Obama's presidency. The president's daughters, Malia and Sasha are 10 and 7, respectively. If President Obama really doesn't want his daugthers "punished" with an unexpected pregnancy, then perhaps he might use the tremendous power of the presidential bully pulpit to help restore a little more sanity to the direction of social norms by lobbying Hollywood for the same kind of appropriate social behavior that he'd expect from his own kids.

Of course, considering that Hollywood is one of the Democratic Party's main financial benefactors, I'm not holding my breath.