Tom Cruise and Valkyrie

I attended "Valkyrie" with my oldest son yesterday afternoon.

I've read three reviews so far, and we find a consensus in this limited sample that Valkyrie's strength is its grand scale and director Bryan Singer's skill in keeping things moving when little fast action fills the screen.

Manohla Dargis at the New York Times hits on the main theme I've heard from the man-on-the-street scuttlebutt: Tom Cruise's performance, with his American accent, falls short in its portrayal of German aristocrat and officer Claus von Stauffenberg. Dargis discounts the movie's historical benefits, but her mildly offhanded take on Stauffenberg makes an interesting comment on the film's fabulous cinematography:

He’s a complex character, too complex for this film, which like many stories of this type, transforms World War II into a boy’s adventure with dashing heroes, miles of black leather and crane shots of German troops in lockstep formation that would make Leni Riefenstahl flutter.

The reference, of course, is to Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," but actually we don't see Nuremberg-scale rallies in Valkyrie, rather instead are crisp troop line-ups, and especially an attention to detail in German military uniforms, and the combination together provides a panorama of historical significance that I'd like to see more at the movies.

At the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan make a grudging case for the movie's excellence, suggesting the offering's "a perfectly acceptable motion picture." Perhaps the Wall Street Journal's roundup up of late-year Oscar contenders puts it best, stressing the film's historical value:

Two dramatic arcs intersect in "Valkyrie," a big, old-fashioned action adventure starring Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic German army colonel who, in 1944, led the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In addition to the plot itself, there's the arc of Mr. Cruise's career, from "Risky Business" to the riskier business of embodying an authentic German hero in a lavish English-language production with limited suspense; the audience - at least some of it - knows that the plot failed. So how does the film work? Well enough, in the end. Mr. Cruise's performance turns out to be brisk and reasonably plausible, though unexceptional, while the production as a whole succeeds as an elaborate procedural, impressively staged in historical locations ....

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, "Valkyrie" becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson. Younger members of the audience may not have known that the Nazi army's officer corps contained nests of determined resistance to Hitler's madness.

Video Hat Tip: Great Satan's Girlfriend.

Christmas 2008

Here's to wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!

The painting is Sebastiano Ricci's, The Adoration of the Magi, 1726. The background on the work is here.

Ricci was one of the great Venetian artists of the late Baroque school. His Wikipedia entry indicates he had a rough personal life, although his influence on the development of Baroque painting and Rococo design was apparently substantial.

Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays?

My wife and I got back a couple of hours ago from last-minute Christmas shopping. We picked up a couple of more nick-knacks from Target, and we purchased some food for our Christmas Eve and Christmas dinners from Costco. On the way out the young doorman checked our receipt and thanked us, and wished us a Merry Christmas. I thought that was very nice, and I appreciate it.

My wife's in retail management and many stores wish their customers "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas." For some, the generic well-wishing is seen as a battlefront in the secular war on Christmas.

In any case, the "daily number" at Pew Research indicates that "a 45%-plurality have no preference for how they are greeted during the holiday season." But the Pew entry is oddly structured, even loaded in fact toward the "no preference" findings. The data are drawn from a poll in early December, which shows question wording and order playing an important role in determining greeting preferences:

When asked to choose between "Merry Christmas" and non-religious terms, most Americans (60%) say they prefer that stores and businesses greet customers by saying "Merry Christmas." Only one-in-four (23%) prefers the use of terms such as "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings," while 17% volunteer that they do not care which greeting is used.

But given the specific option of saying the choice of greeting really does not matter, a plurality does so. Asked a slightly different version of the question that, along with the two choices of preferred greeting, offers the alternative "or doesn't it matter to you?," 45% choose this last alternative. Only 42% say they prefer "Merry Christmas," while 12% prefer less religious terminology.

Most striking is the age difference in preferences for holiday greetings. Only among those ages 65 and over, does a majority (64%) opt for "Merry Christmas."

That preference declines across younger age groups with only 28% of those under age 30 opting for the Christmas greeting while roughly six-in-ten say the choice of greeting doesn't matter to them.

Several other groups stand out for their strong preference for the Christmas greeting. Even when explicitly offered the opportunity to say this issue doesn't matter, majorities of white evangelical Protestants (73%) and Catholics (53%) say they prefer "Merry Christmas." By contrast, a majority (64%) of seculars and nearly half (47%) of white mainline Protestants say this issue does not matter to them. Similarly, while more than six-in-ten Republicans prefer to be greeted with "Merry Christmas," nearly half (49%) of Democrats and a small majority (52%) of independents are unconcerned by stores' choice of holiday greetings.

Actually, being greeted cordially and thanked sincerely when shopping seems like a rarity in itself nowadays; and I'm not too worked up over the Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays trade-off. I do think the larger secularization of society is a disaster, however, and the findings on the narrow demographic cohorts who express a strong preference for the traditional Christmas greeting will certainly be welcomed by the atheists and Christmas-bashers working feverishing to completely banish religious expression from the public sphere.

In any case, here's wishing all of my readers, and any others who happen along here by chance, a wonderful Christmas Eve.

I'm having an earlier-than-usual family dinner and then I'll be heading out for Christmas Eve services at our church.

Enhanced Interrogation's in the Charts Again

I'm getting tired of the "debate" on torture. So many people, especially on the left, see this issue in black and white terms, and the leftists are particularly bothersome as they don't really care about the nuance of enhanced interrogation in the war on terror, because, frankly, they think we had it coming on 9/11.

Thankfully, Rick Moran - always a perceptive commentator - recently offered a clear interpretation of some of the issues surrounding torture, where he basically questioned the propriety of maintaining an absolute prohibition on torture:

There is no other issue in my lifetime except Vietnam that has elicited such passion in both defenders and detractors. At least with Vietnam there was, if not a middle ground, a gradation of opinion about our involvement and its legality. No such wiggle room exists on the torture issue. You either excuse it or condemn it. You either see the administration as blameless, trying to elicit information that would save us from another terrorist attack, or you believe war crimes have been committed in our name. Perhaps you see the application of torture as a matter of indifference or even justified during war time. Maybe you view the “enhanced interrogation techniques” as falling short of torture. Or maybe you believe that only a full investigation into detainee treatment followed by war crimes trials is the way to redeem the American soul.

Added to the opinion war now is a report issued (PDF required) by the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Even for those familiar with most of the details regarding Bush administration decisions about “enhanced interrogation” techniques, there is some new information as well as confirmation of the involvement of certain administration officials that directly implicates them in violations of U.S. law.

Read the whole thing, here. Moran's key insight at the passage is to suggest that perhaps there's some middle ground on the issue. As you may have noticed, he cites the Levin report, the "Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody," available on PDF (here).

The Wall Street Journal argued last week that the issuance of the report was just a "formality," as the Bush administration's guilt has long ago been decided in left's Star Chamber of public opinion. But this passage on "the torture narrative" is worth citing at length:

Nearly every element of this narrative is dishonest. As officials testified during Mr. Levin's hearings and according to documents in his possession, senior officials were responding to requests from the CIA and other commanders in the field. The flow was bottom up, not top down. Those commanders were seeking guidance on what kind of interrogation was permissible as they tried to elicit information from enemies who want to murder civilians. At the time, no less than Barack Obama's Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, was saying that terrorists didn't qualify for Geneva protections.

This was the context in which the Justice Department wrote the so-called "torture memos" of 2002 and 2003. You'd never know from the Levin jeremiad that these are legal -- not policy -- documents. They are attempts not to dictate interrogation guidelines but to explore the legal limits of what the CIA might be able to do.

It would have been irresponsible for those charged with antiterror policy to do anything less. In a 2007 interview former CIA director George Tenet described the urgency of that post-9/11 period: "I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are going to be blown up, planes that are going to fly into airports all over again . . . Plot lines that I don't know -- I don't know what's going on inside the United States." Actionable intelligence is the most effective weapon in the war on terror, which can potentially save thousands of lives.

We know that the most aggressive tactic ever authorized was waterboarding, which was used in only three cases against hardened, high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, including Abu Zubaydah after he was picked up in Pakistan in 2002. U.S. officials say the information he gave up foiled multiple terror plots and led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11. As Dick Cheney told ABC this week, "There was a time there, three or four years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from one source" -- KSM.

Starting in 2002, key Congressional leaders, including Democrats, were fully briefed by the CIA about its activities, amounting to some 30 sessions before "torture" became a public issue. None of them saw fit to object. In fact, Congress has always defined torture so vaguely as to ban only the most extreme acts and preserve legal loopholes. At least twice it has had opportunity to specifically ban waterboarding and be accountable after some future attack. Members declined.

As for "stress positions" allowed for a time by the Pentagon, such as hooding, sleep deprivation or exposure to heat and cold, they are psychological techniques designed to break a detainee, but light years away from actual torture. Perhaps the reason Mr. Levin released only an executive summary with its unsubstantiated charges of criminal behavior -- instead of the hundreds of pages of a full declassified version -- is that the evidence doesn't fit the story. If it did, Mr. Levin or his staff would surely have leaked the details.

Not one of the 12 nonpartisan investigations in recent years concluded that the Administration condoned or tolerated detainee abuse, while multiple courts martial have punished real offenders. None of the dozen or so Abu Ghraib trials and investigations have implicated higher ups; the most senior officer charged, a lieutenant colonel, was acquitted in 2006. Former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger's panel concluded that the abuses were sadistic behavior by the "night shift."

Now that Mr. Obama is on his way to the White House, even some Democrats are acknowledging the complicated security realities. Dianne Feinstein, a Bush critic who will chair the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, recently told the New York Times that extreme cases might call for flexibility. "I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible," she said (our emphasis). Ms. Feinstein later put out a statement that all interrogations should be conducted within the more specific limits of the U.S. Army Field Manual but said she will "consider" other views. But that is already the law for most of the government. What the Bush Administration has insisted on is an exception for the CIA to use other techniques (not waterboarding) in extreme cases.

As for Mr. Levin, his real purpose is to lay the groundwork for war-crimes prosecutions of Bush officials like John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Jim Haynes who acted in good faith to keep the country safe within the confines of the law. Messrs. Obama and Holder would be foolish to spend their political capital on revenge, but Mr. Levin is demanding an "independent" commission to further politicize the issue and smear decent public servants.

As Mr. Levin put it in laying on his innuendo this week, a commission "may or may not lead to indictments or civil action." It will also encourage some grandstanding foreign prosecutor to arrest Mr. Rumsfeld and other Bush officials like Pinochet if they ever dare to leave the U.S. Why John McCain endorsed this Levin gambit is the kind of mystery that has defined, and damaged, his career. We hope other Republicans push back.

Mr. Levin claims that Bush interrogation programs "damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives." The truth is closer to the opposite. The second-guessing of Democrats is likely to lead to a risk-averse mindset at the CIA and elsewhere that compromises the ability of terror fighters to break the next KSM. The political winds always shift, but terrorists are as dangerous as ever.

Keep all of this in mind as you see the left ratchet-up its push for war crimes prosecutions in the weeks ahead. Vice-President Cheney's interview, not surprisingly, has been interpreted as fresh evidence against the "evil BushCo regime" among American antiwar communists. Democracy Now! has a new post up highlighting Representative Jerrold Nadler's call for for an independent counsel to investigate the administration, with quotations from Cheney's interview. But don't delay ... folks should go straight to Jonathan Karl's interview with Cheney at ABC News and read the facts for themselves. Not only has the U.S. violated no laws in domestic civil liberties, the international rights activists are using the outcry against American "human rights violations" as a nihilist cudgel to build the internationalization of law and the delegitimation of American great power sovereignty.

But note too: Even if we were to agree that rogue actions by aggressive U.S. service personnel were to fit the left's definition of torture, we must consider whether it's in America's national interest to condone and enforce an absolute prohibition against such practices. People must realize that there are circumstances in internationl life - times when a great many lives are placed at risk - when the question of enhanced interrogation efforts take on existential proportions. Why would any nation sacrifice its national survival, not to mention the protection of human life from the potentialities of enormous terrorist evil, when institutional structures are in place, and the bureaucratic regimes are capable, of establishing decision rules and procedures to regulate and legitimize the very procedures that are now being used to protect the homeland from the kind of destruction this country witnessed in 2001? To accept an absolute prohibition on such measures - which at this point have not been defined categorically as "torture" - would be to empower the antiwar forces who are de facto allies of America's most implacable enemies around the world.

This is the question that Barack Obama must consider upon taking office. People should get this straight in their minds right now: There will not be war crimes prosecutions against top-ranking members of the Bush administration. Even enthusiastic advocates of legal recourse against the administration realize that prosecutions are legally and political impossible (see Scott Horton, "Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration").

What we should see for the next phase of the U.S. terror war is how the new Democratic administration can implement an effective domestic regime of enhanced interrogation short of an exclusive resort to rendition of terror suspects to allied nations overseas. How this can be done is legalistically complicated. But whether it shoud be done is now only a matter of debate among the hard-left antiwar contingents. If Barack Obama's defense and foreign policy appointments are so far any clue, we may very well see the consolidation of the vigorous tactics of intelligence gathering under the Democratic policy establishment in 2009.

Training Palestinian Kids to be Suicide Bombers

Yesterday I read Walter Russell Mead's new essay at Foreign Affairs, "Change They Can Believe In: To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due."

I thought about writing a post on it earlier, but held off. I respect Walter Russell Mead, and I didn't feel like tearing down his essay for its disastrous moral equivalence. It's not as though he doesn't raise considerable questions of historical injustice facing the Palestinian diaspora. I'm more concerned with his legitimation of Palestian demands for the "right of return" (which are really demographic plans for the destruction of the Jewish state), and particularly the article's troubling omission of Palestinian jihad, which is a greater threat to peace than anything eminating from Tel Aviv.

Mead's essay is also noteworthy for its Obama-worship: The coming Obama administration has an historic opportunity "to improve the chances for peace and to align the United States with key Palestinian aspirations without moving away from or against Israel."

Move away from Israel?

Come on ... if the Obama administration really does align itself with "Palestinian aspirations" it would be essentially endorsing terrorism, since for Palestinian society jihad against Israel and the United States has become the defining element of the terrorists' "solution" to Middle East peace process since Yasir Arafat's renunciation of the Clinton administration's plan for a comprehensive peace in the early 1990s.

I'm returning to the Middle East peace process after reading Harold Evans' article at U.S. News, "Palestinians Training Kids to be Suicide Bombers: Teaching Children Murder and a Warped, Dangerous History":

Even when times are very bad, we take solace, irrespective of creed, in the hope symbolized by the Christmas story of birth and renewal. We indulge children and proclaim a season of peace and goodwill. Alas, this Christmas is darkened by a Bethlehem story that is not about peace, but about killing; not about how children may fufill their promise, but about how they should glory in their own extinction. There are no wise men on this horizon.

The Bethlehem that the New Testament tells us is the birthplace of Jesus is also the center of Palestinian culture and the headquarters of the Governorate of the Palestinian Authority. The Bush administration believed and hoped that the PA chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, cared enough about his people to make a decent peace with Israel, leading to a new, independent state of Palestine. Abbas has shattered those hopes. Worse, he and his associates are ensuring that the next generation of Palestinians will be incapable of making peace. They will be paralyzed by the hate and fear that they have been taught in their schoolrooms and by the national television controlled by the PA.

The extent of this corruption of children's minds was vividly exposed last week by the investigative journalist Gerald Posner, who produced a Web documentary (hosted by thedailybeast.com) based on videos culled from television by Palestinian Media Watch. It is deeply shocking to observe children being programmed for terrorism through the exaltation of suicide bombers as heroes. "Martyrdom is bliss," a child hostess says, referring to a 14-year-old suicide killer. The clips show incessant indoctrination that Islam wants the death of adults and children for Allah and will reward those who achieve Shahada, which Palestinian Media Watch equates with death for Allah. "I have let my land drink my blood, and I have loved the way of Shahada," intones a young boy.

Children being taught murder by rote is child abuse, a mental deformation more damaging than physical injury. Equally disgusting is the demonization of Jews based on a phony history of the Holocaust. Remember the Holocaust, in which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews? Well, take a look at the scene from a PA Fatah "educational video" in which children acting and singing about history recite: "They [Israel] are the ones who did the Holocaust, their knife cuts to the length and width of our flesh. They opened the ovens for us to bake human beings. ... When an oven stops burning, they light 100 [more]." A body called the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust organized an exhibit, one feature of which, according to al-Ayyam, one of the largest Palestinian newspapers, is "an oven and inside it small [Palestinian] children are being burned. The picture speaks for itself."

This endlessly fraudulent education has had devastating effects on the prospects for peace. The world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84 percent of Palestinians approved.

Evans suggests that Hillary Clinton, Obama's incoming Secretary of State, can start the administration's Middle East agenda by demanding an end to the indoctrination and incitement to killing.

This aspect of a movement toward a "comprehensive settlement" is not mentioned in Walter Russell Mead's essay at Foreign Affairs.

Political Correctness and the Fort Dix Jihadists

I was shaking my head this morning while reading my hard-copy of the Los Angeles Times and its story on this week's terror convictions in Camden, New Jersey. The piece quotes Ian Lustick, a highly-regarded expert in comparative politics, who suggests that the case represents the "politics of fear" and prosecutorial entrapment:

Ian S. Lustick, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, argued that the federal government has repeatedly overreached when investigating and prosecuting terrorism plots.

"We see a pattern across the country of almost no evidence of anything being done that is actually dangerous, but enormous amounts of evidence of the energy and resources put into entrapment," said Lustick, author of a book on domestic terrorism cases ...

The Times piece concludes with Lustick:

Lustick, the critic of the prosecution, said he was worried the New Jersey case could encourage more such trials unless the Obama administration takes steps to rein in the federal investigators in cases involving small-time groups.

"This is the same story we have seen many times," he said. "These are hucksters, big talkers and adolescents."

Unless Barack Obama "reins in such trials"? It's probably a good bet that he will, unfortunately.

This morning's Wall Street Journal indicates why that would be a disaser for U.S. security:

The jury's verdict is notable because media coverage of the plotters' arrest and trial traveled a familiar arc: After a round of stories noting that a terrorist plot had been rolled up, the media followed up with skepticism and suggestions that the suspects were small-timers or just messing around. The word even went out that, in effect, the government's man on the inside had put them up to it. The implication, as with the Lackawanna Six and Jose Padilla, is always the same: The Bush Administration was advertising phantom threats to justify the trampling of civil liberties and to create a "climate of fear."

Lest we forget, the Fort Dix plotters were finally arrested last year after they moved to buy AK-47s and fully automatic M-16s -- not exactly the stuff of innocent imaginings and idle chatter. Every plotter is an amateur until he pulls off a spectacular attack. This has created a permanent PR problem for the fight against domestic terror plots: If you move too soon, the conventional wisdom comes to doubt that anything serious was averted. But of course, waiting too long means running the risk of another attack on American soil, something we have avoided since 9/11.

The jury found the government had made its case against the Fort Dix crew, with the help of one conspirator who pleaded guilty and cooperated with the prosecution. The other five were not convicted on all counts, but the crimes of which they were convicted are serious enough to remind us that real domestic terror threats exist.

Robert Spencer has more on the poltically-correct reaction to the terror convictions:

The Fort Dix jihad plotters are guilty, and Muslim spokesmen in America are outraged – not at the plotters who have ostensibly "hijacked" their religion, but at the officials who secured the convictions ....

In any case, it is useful to pause and consider how Muslim leaders could be reacting to the verdicts. Instead of hurling reckless charges of "entrapment," they could be taking the hard steps necessary to clean their own house. All these years now after 9/11, most Americans still have no idea that they need do any such housecleaning – even outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently told USA Today that "what we’re confronting is an ideological conflict with an extremist world view that I don’t think is an accurate representative of Islam, but uses the language or hijacks Islam for an extremist agenda." Yet while Muslim and non-Muslim spokesmen have spilled oceans of ink since 9/11 asserting that Islam condemns "terrorism" and the killing of "innocents," without defining what is meant by either term, no one has ever produced any examples of authoritative and orthodox Islamic religious scholars rejecting, on Islamic grounds, jihad violence against non-Muslims; rejecting the idea that Sharia law should be instituted in the Muslim and non-Muslim world; and teaching the idea that non-Muslims and Muslims should live together indefinitely as equals.

Thus the Fort Dix verdicts give American Muslim groups who claim moderation an opportunity to demonstrate the genuineness of the claim, or to be further exposed in the eyes of the public. Now is the time for law enforcement and government officials to call upon the Muslim community to institute comprehensive and inspectable programs teaching against the jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism. If they don’t – and they won’t – one thing is certain: there will be more jihad plots like this one in America.

And no doubt we'll see more prestigious academics blathering away about stuff that's "not actually dangerous."

Where's the Outrage Over Mumbai?

Cinnamon Stillwell, in her recent essay, "The Mumbai Atrocities: Where is the Outrage?", demonstrates once again why she exemplifies the tradition of moral clarity that has historically made this nation great:

It was often said after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that everything had changed. And for a few years afterwards, indeed it had. After decades of denial, America and its allies went on the offensive against Islamic terrorism, both militarily and morally. Most importantly, there was no hesitancy to name the enemy or to condemn his inhumanity.

But if the lack of outrage over the Islamic terrorist assault on Mumbai, India last month was any indication, everything has changed back.

The obfuscation that characterized much of the early reporting on Mumbai is partially to blame. Watching a number of television reporters go through visible pains not to use the word "terrorist" to describe a four-day reign of terror that would eventually kill more than 170 people and injure hundreds was a surreal spectacle. Initial articles described "militants," "gunmen," and "extremists," but rarely terrorists, and rarer still, Islamic terrorists. So-called experts prattled on vaguely about the perpetrators' motivations, as if the ideology fueling a group called the Deccan Mujahedeen was a complete and utter mystery. ("Deccan" refers to a historic Islamic claim on the Deccan Plateau, the territory which stretches between Mumbai and Hyderabad, while "mujahedeen" are Muslim fighters engaged in jihad.) Links to the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba added further confirmation and yet still, many of the talking heads remained stubbornly ambiguous. Indeed, the attack was largely presented as if it were occurring in a vacuum.

Perhaps they were taking a cue from last year's Departments of State and Homeland Security internal memorandum forbidding employees from using Islam-specific terminology to discuss Islamic terrorism or the British politicians who earlier this year adopted the phrase "anti-Islamic activity" to describe it. In any case, Orwell would have been proud.

When it was learned that the terrorists had attacked a Chabad center in Mumbai, the only specific target other than hotels and restaurants catering to Western tourists and wealthy Indians, the coverage become stranger still. No context was provided for the torture and murder of the Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, and four other Jews, although it was obvious why they were targeted. The Holtzberg's surviving toddler son, Moshe, who was rescued by his Indian nanny, was certainly not the first Jewish child orphaned by Islamic terrorism. No connection was made to the virulent anti-Semitism fueling jihadist ideology. Nor to the Nazi-like propaganda promulgated throughout the Muslim world and fed to children so that they too will grow up to hate Jews, whether Israeli or not.

Similarly unexamined were the implications of the terrorists' barbarism. Witnesses described victims being lined up and shot execution-style and terrorists spraying bullets indiscriminately into crowds of men, women and children. Some survived by feigning death for hours under the weight of countless dead bodies. If not for the heroism of the hotel and restaurant staff, as well as others who rose to the occasion, more lives would have been lost. But lacking analysis, these horrific details were soon forgotten. Is it any wonder that the world no longer grasps the utter depravity and cruelty of the formidable opponent it's facing?

This is the same enemy who held hostage and slaughtered Russian children in Beslan; who lobs rockets at schools, uses women and children as human shields, preys upon the weakest in their own societies - women and children -- to mold them into suicide bombers, targets mosques and plans attacks on Muslim holidays, murders school teachers and aid workers, commits beheadings, hangings, stonings and honor killings, puts children and pregnant women into car bombs so they can more easily pass through checkpoints, indiscriminately targets civilians the world over, and who seeks to squelch all human achievement and progress.

Should not this grave threat to human rights be called what it is? Should not the world rally against this cancer within its midst and spare no expense or effort to stop it from metastasizing? Should not human rights groups make defeating this ideology its chief priority? Should not women's groups make the oppression of Muslim women, both within and without the Muslim world, its first priority? Should not gay rights groups turn their attention to the hangings of young men across the Muslim world? Should not Jewish groups condemn the hateful, anti-Semitic propaganda that is brainwashing Muslim youth? Should not those who believe in religious freedom denounce the persecution of religious minorities, apostates, and atheists in the Muslim world? Should not those who advocate free speech condemn the campaign to silence journalists and activists in the Muslim world, as well as attempts to do the same in the West? Should not the international community do everything in its power to prevent fanatical Islamist regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons and wreaking unprecedented havoc on the planet?

Read the whole thing, here.

Respecting Christmas

Via Wordsmith at Flopping Aces, here's an interesting cartoon-take on the war on Christmas:

It turns out that some leftists celebrate Christmas anyway, even though it's a "Holiday of Hate":

Back before Christianity was coopted by those who play to the stupid and ignorant and hateful; back before Fox News and the Aryan Nation, it was an inclusive holiday. As a non-Christian and an atheist and someone who knows all too much about Christian history, about early Christian, Greco-Persian, Roman and Norse practices that form the basis of Christmas: as someone who knows how the holiday (and yes, it's a goddamn holiday) owes more to Coca-Cola, Hallmark and Charles Dickens than to some Jewish baby born to a teenage mother in April of an indeterminate year about 2000 years ago, I've always celebrated it anyway. After all Christmas as we know it is an American holiday and one that used to bring about a spirit of tolerance, brotherhood and generosity to a unique degree. It was a holiday that brought out the liberal in most of us ....

Of course if their were any real Christians in this country they might propose at least to ignore this attempt to make it a holiday of hate ...

This commentary is in response to this article and this video, featuring Michelle Malkin on Fox and Friends.

And that's one angry comment for someone arguing that Christmas is about tolerance.

Obama to Use Lincoln Inauguration Bible

The Politico reports that Barack Obama will take his oath of office with President Lincoln's Bible, the same Bible the 16th president used at his inauguration in 1861:

On January 20th, President-elect Barack Obama will take the oath of office using the same Bible upon which President Lincoln was sworn in at his first inauguration. The Bible is currently part of the collections of the Library of Congress. Though there is no constitutional requirement for the use of a Bible during the swearing-in, Presidents have traditionally used Bibles for the ceremony, choosing a volume with personal or historical significance. President-elect Obama will be the first President sworn in using the Lincoln Bible since its initial use in 1861.

Here's an interesting historical tidbit about Lincoln's Bible:

The Bible was originally purchased by William Thomas Carroll, Clerk of the Supreme Court, for use during Lincoln's swearing-in ceremony on March 4, 1861. The Lincoln family Bible, which is also in the Library of Congress's collection, was unavailable for the ceremony because it was packed away with the First Family's belongings, still en route from Springfield, IL, to their new home at the White House.

The Bible itself is bound in burgundy velvet with a gold-washed white metal rim around the three outside edges of both covers. All its edges are heavily gilded. In the center of the top cover is a shield of gold wash over white metal with the words 'Holy Bible' chased into it. The book is 15 cm long, 10 cm wide, and 4.5 cm deep when closed. The 1,280-page Bible was published in 1853 by the Oxford University Press.

This is a grand gesture. Obama's decision to use the Lincoln Bible is a strong affirmation that the President-Elect seeks to confirm the American religious heritage, and by using the Lincoln Bible, Obama also hopes to convey some kind of parallel between the historical circumstances of 1861 and 2009.

Perhaps the shared Illinois background was key to Obama's decision on the Lincoln Bible, but historically, the economic situation today - and the demands for governmental action - have much more relevant analogies in the circumstances surrounding Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inauguration in 1933. Roosevelt would lead a nation that had reached the depths of the Great Depression. In his inaugural address, the 32nd president is most powerfully remembered for these words:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

There's always a supreme majesty in the words of a president's inaugural address. By choosing to launch his administration so closely aligned to Abraham Lincoln, Obama will inevitably invite comparisons of historical greatness. This is especially so as Obama's rise to the office rests largely with the power of his oratory. But Lincoln's an incomparable act to follow, as seen for example in the words from his second inaugural address, March 4, 1865:

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil-war. All dreaded it - all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war - seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and others would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came ....

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we will be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh! If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting piece, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Reading this one is struck by the Biblical grandeur inspiring Lincoln's gift to historical memory. Indeed, reading Lincoln seems to preview Obama's historical insignificance in comparison. Obama's moment seems diminished, moreover, by the intraparty rancor seen in the United States today, in his decision to select a controversial pastor to deliver a spiritual invocation on January 20. Not only does the battle for gay marriage seem almost trivial in light of the defining war to free the slaves, there's an anti-American, anti-religious component to current recriminations on the left that would have made Lincoln and his contemporaries shudder. In his recent comments on the debate over Warren, Steve Benen went beyond the gay controversy to attack religion directly:

The real problem isn't with who will give the invocation, but rather, the fact that there's going to be an invocation in the first place.

Such sentiment perhaps illustrates two things: One, the tremendous importance and promise of Obama's gesture to reach back into the American past to lay his hand on the Holy Book on which Lincoln swore his oath of office, but two, Obama's gesture, this act, with a great unfortunateness, may not be recognized to be as large a consecration of our profound Judeo-Christian inheritance as it is. Should Obama, in his coming address, go on to invoke explicit passages from the Bible, he may well be excoriated by the hard-left Democratic Party base for capitulating to the "Christianism" that's allegedly seeking to marginalize those of a homosexual orientation. If so, the epochal majesty of the moment of this new dawn - our new birth of American civilization - could very well be frittered away in the modern cancer of politically-correct polarization.

Obama's Wars

Jason Corley's launched a new blogging journal of ideas, The Western Experience. If the forthcoming commentaries match those published at the blog so far, this should be not only quite a project, but a must read as well.

Head on over there and check out Jason's essay, "America’s Wars and the Next Administration":

The long awaited decision on Iraqi troop withdrawal has all but ended. The Bush administration began hammering out SOFA agreements in the past months and the soon-to-be-arriving Obama administration added urgency to the process. The troop reduction will begin sometime in 2009 and is scheduled to be complete by 2010 or 2011 ....

There will be an estimated 70,000 to 90,000 troops still remaining in Iraq. Withdrawal used in the language of the SOFA agreement is purposely misleading and leaves a large amount of leeway for both governments to remain flexible.

We may consider this phase two or the Iraqi project. The forces left in place will help provide for training, logistics, and security and to ensure that democracy has the opportunity to take root and blossom. Furthermore, Iraqi has always been a bold longterm project. Their government has ambitions in becoming a prosperous, powerful and free nation. Nuclear ambitions are not out of the question, though, it is doubtful if it would mean anything other than peaceful purposes. These goals take time and it takes security for the infant democracy to grow. Americans can expect a longterm presence in Iraq with tens-of-thousands of troops scattered in various bases around the country.

This will undoubtedly come as a disappointment to some Americans who expected and rather naively believed that U.S. troop presence would vanish 16-months into the new Obama administration. It also may cause a backlash to Obama in Iraq itself. Since violence has been reduced, but likely to continue on some scale, a lot of Iraqis are expecting the presence of the U.S. to be gone soon.

It will be interesting to see what agreements and decisions will be made on Iraq after January 20, 2009.

In the meantime, we can judge for ourselves what the new Obama administration plans to do in Afghanistan. Admiral Mike Mullen announced that the Pentagon could double the existing forces there by 20,000 – 30,000 troops bringing the total up to 60,000. This comes on the heels of the report that showed this year was the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001. Admiral Mullen also stated, the 31,000 troops already in place were plenty combat efficient but more troops were needed to control and pacify the territory that had been cleared of Taliban.

Althouse on Transcendent Blogging

I like Ann Althouse and I consider her to be one of the more interesting bloggers on the web.

That said, her take on today's Matthew Yglesias drama is a bit soft and squishy. Althouse wrote a post, "One of the Great Lessons of the Blogosphere: Never Palmieri on an Yglesias," where she noted:

I'd never heard of "Third Way" until I read this post. Now, I think it sucks. Not because of something Matt once wrote about it - which I hadn't noticed - but because of this completely creepy intrusion into Matt's space. Why didn't Palmieri email Matt and ask him to quote a statement from the Center for American Progress Action Fund? Maybe she did and he refused. But either way, the invasion of a man's blog is unjustified, wrong, and also stupid. It's stupid, because even if you don't mind pushing around a respected blogger, you're doing it where everyone can see.

That sounds fine, but Althouse - who's friendly with Yglesias - goes soft on the ideological component of Matt's primitive discourse, to which I replied in the comments:

Ann: You're way too nice to Yglesias. Who cares about a fellow blogger's plight when he's so hip to slam every moderate-to-conservative under the sun with the most filty language imaginable?

Althouse responds:

He is an important blogger, and this problem transcends the political slant of his blog. But I like Matt and have done 2 Bloggingheads diavlogs with him. He had a great position with The Atlantic that most bloggers envy, yet he gave it up supposedly to become more politically active, and look what happens. I'm interested in the dynamics and ethics of blogging. And I want to be part of the outcry so that people learn a lesson - and it's the lesson that I've stressed here, not Matt's personal plight.

There is a lesson here, but it's probably not the one Ann has in mind. That's neat to be doing Bloggingheads, and I suppose, no offense, there's something heuristic about video talking-heads mutually stroking their egos during obscure online performances.

I just think it'd be extremely difficult to have a friendly conversation with someone who's one of the nastiest hard-left commentators online. But's that's me. Folks sometimes praise my writing as akin to William Buckley's, and I'm humble in gratitude. But I don't have Buckley's apparent ability for amiacable repartee. Besides, I find Yglesias' blowoff of the Third Way - his slur on the org's "hyper-timid incrementalist bullsh*t" - to be neither enlightening nor classy (more on that in my essay, "Matt Yglesias, Jennifer Palmieri, and the Third Way").

Althouse is classy, though, and for someone who refrains from hyperpartisan demonization of political enemies, she's mighty tolerant of those who engage in it.

Winter Storms Slam U.S., Tigerhawk Hits the Snow

USA Today reports on the blizzard of storms blanketing the nation, "Winter Storms Slam USA From Coast to Coast."

Meanwhile, Tigerhawk and his family headed out into the whiteness yesterday:

More pictures at the link, and this one too.

It's raining today in Southern California, but the snow levels aren't as low as last week. Still, this is one of the more "White" Christmases we've seen in a while, and not just in around these parts.

Have a wonderful holiday dear readers, and stay warm!

Barack Obama, Most Powerful Person of the Year

On the heels of being named Time's "Person of the Year," Barack Obama has been named Newsweek's most powerful member of the global elite: "The Story of Power":

The beginning of 2009, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century, is a good time to consider the nature of power, and of the powerful, because the world is being reordered in so many ways—broadly by what my colleague Fareed Zakaria calls "the rise of the rest," the emergence of powers such as India, China and Brazil, and specifically by the global recession. The cultural, political and economic consequences of the financial meltdown cannot be overestimated. Unthinking trust in unfettered markets has evaporated, and the concern appears to be more than a temporary fit of worry that will pass when things start to get better. The demise of titans on Wall Street has elevated bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and Beijing and Brussels. And there is one politician in particular whose exercise of power will affect all of us for years to come: the president-elect, whose victory in November and transition—accompanied by the virtual disappearance of President Bush—have marked a resurgence of confidence in America. A senior European diplomat recently marveled to me about the American capacity to change course with rapidity and apparent ease: the shift from Bush to Obama —from the scion of one of America's noblest families to the child of a brief marriage between a young Kansan and a Kenyan academic, who proceeded to see his son exactly once—was simply astonishing ....

In Latin the word for power is imperium, which is largely evocative of the state, and we tend to think of power in political terms—that is, in terms of our relation to one another in the public sphere (power dynamics within families are usually confined to the private sphere, except when those families play political roles—see the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons). Very roughly, political power in America has moved from being the monopoly of the landed elite from the 18th-century Revolutionary era through the 19th-century Age of Jackson, when the suffrage was broadened to white men beyond the traditional gentry. In the 20th century, women and, at long last, African-Americans were included in the mainstream. Now, in the 21st century, the world is turning over yet again. The political energy in the country is being harnessed by a younger and more diverse group than it has been in ages past. This does not mean the millennium is at hand, but it does mean that the face of power is changing.

Read the whole thing here.

Interestingly, it's frankly indisputable that Barack Obama's the most powerful person in the world. Obama will be, of course, the President of the United States, and for all the talk of America's relative interanational decline, it goes without saying that Obama wouldn't be powerful at all if he wasn't representing the American people and the American political system, which remains the light and power of freedom and morality in the conscience of humankind.

Here's Newsweek's top 50 of the world's most powerful people:

1: Barack Obama
2: Hu Jintao
3: Nicolas Sarkozy
4-5-6: Economic Triumvirate
7: Gordon Brown
8: Angela Merkel
9: Vladimir Putin
10: Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud
11: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
12: Kim Jong Il
13-14: The Clintons
15: Timothy Geithner
16: Gen. David Petraeus
17: Sonia Gandhi
18: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
19: Warren Buffett
20: Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani
21: Nuri al-Maliki
22-23: The Philanthropists
24: Nancy Pelosi
25: Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
26: Mike Duke
27: Rahm Emanuel
28: Eric Schmidt
29: Jamie Dimon
30-31: Friends of Barack
32: Dominique Strauss-Kahn
33: Rex Tillerson
34: Steve Jobs
35: John Lasseter
36: Michael Bloomberg
37: Pope Benedict XVI
38: Katsuaki Watanabe
39: Rupert Murdoch
40: Jeff Bezos
41: Shahrukh Khan
42: Osama bin Laden
43: Hassan Nasrallah
44: Dr. Margaret Chan
45: Carlos Slim Helú
46: The Dalai Lama
47: Oprah Winfrey
48: Amr Khaled
49: E. A. Adeboye
50: Jim Rogers

It's personally bothersome that Newsweek's editors would "honor" Osama bin Laden as among the world's most powerful people. Osama's a has-been who's currently nowhere to be found.

But note too how Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, makes the cut at #11, and Hassan Nasrallah ranks #43. There's a little "axis of evil rankings" for you.

Maybe New Yorker or some other pop culture rag will come out with a "Moral Relativism Rankings of the Year."

Screw You Glenn Greenwald

I haven't bothered a Glenn Greenwald takedown as of late, and frankly I'm not ballsy enough to do it as well as Robert Stacy McCain, "Thank you, Glenn Greenwald."

Apparently the master sockpuppet called out "The Other McCain" as a "desperate" Bush warmonger and was quickly repaid the favor with both barrels:

This is amusing. Greenwald is demanding war crimes prosecution of Bush administration officials and yet I am "desperate"? Frankly, I don't even give a damn. If I turned on the TV sometime next year to see Paul Wolfowitz in the dock at the Hague, I'd shrug in mute acceptance, and if I blogged about it, would do so in an insouciant way.

But that's never going to happen, which is why I can merrily mock Greenwald's frothing outrage. Nothing, not even a New York Times editorial, can turn this madness of the fanatical fringe into a "mainstream" project. The Democrats would never allow it, no more than they would allow Obama to withdraw too precipitously from Iraq.

The political winds have blown, and the system has encompassed that wind, directing it toward the recent resurgence of the Democratic Party, and smart Democrats know that the surest way to lose that favorable breeze would be to overplay their hand by pandering to the monstrous appetites of Greenwald and his ilk. Obama, Pelosi and Reid will all answer this idiotic demand in the only way it deserves to be answered: Fuck you, Glenn Greenwald.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Thank you Robert Stacy McCain.

Jules Crittenden: The Wisdom of Our Forefathers

Jules Crittenden provides a straight-up defense of Bush-era American government and foreign policy, in response to another round of Andrew Sullivan's hysterical ravings:

In the United States I’ve been living in, the president very politely sought and received authorization from Congress to run this nation’s wars; asked for and received billions of dollars in multiple appropriations from Congress to finance this nation’s wars; consulted Congress on interrogation techniques and had Democrats urging him not to pussyfoot around; and when the going got tough and popular opinion wavered, stood alone as a strong executive, pushing forward to fight and win while the legislative branch dithered, wrung its hands, and did what legislative branches and weak executives do, which is cater to popular whims, ineffectively. Thank God for the wisdom of our forefathers and a Constitution that has allowed us to survive so many assaults from so many enemies, foreign and domestic, and remain free for more than two centuries.

Check the link for the Sullivan takedowns.

Matt Yglesias, Jennifer Palmieri, and the Third Way

People aren't getting some of the key issues in the public smackdown of Matthew Yglesias at Think Progress. It turns out that Yglesias, who is as far left as possible without being formally identified as communist, was smacked down by Jennifer Palmieri, who is the interim chief at the Center for American Progress.

It turns out that Yglesias wrote a post recently on the Third Way, a centrist Washington Democratic policy shop, in which he offered an ultimately unwelcomed turn of phase. Here's the key quote (in bold italicized text), in the context of the the full paragraph, which most of Yglesias' defenders are leaving out:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullsh*t. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago [emphasis added].

Well, it turns out the Palmieri didn't like this at all, so she logged into Yglesias' blog at Think Progress to write this:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

This is a D.C. Democratic-insiders' squabble. The Politico reports that Palmieri might be tapped as an Obama administration assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. So let's break it down:

1) Palmieri's a hack. Who would want to work with her - much less under her - with a demonstrated leadership like that?

2) Palmieri's even more of a hack if she doesn't realize that Yglesias' views above are entirely representative of the organization she currently heads. Maybe she doesn't actually read Think Progress, one of the most disastrous "progressive" blogging outfits on the web. Or if she does, she's down with the filth and spew eminating there, and she only makes a stink of things when her hat's in the ring at the Pentagon. Either way, once again, she's not a very good manager, and the country certainly doesn't need that kind of waffling, self-serving "expertise" on defense policy, unless such abject caving to political pressure is the style of policy leadership and diplomacy expected at Obama's Defense Department.

3) Take a look at Yglesias' post, in any case: If Third Way's positions resemble the practical meaning of the term (Britain's Tony Blair, President Bush's greatest ally on the Iraq war, was a well-known leading advocate of "third way" ideological centrism), he's either living in an isolated pocket of the hard-left blogosphere, or he's truly lost his mind. Sure, the netroots left can raise a big stink on many issues, and these folks get a lot of media coverage for all their blustery talk and self-exaltation. But they are not mainstream. Hillary Clinton dissed them, Joseph Lieberman dissed them, and Barack Obama's now repudiating them (think Rick Warren). This is smart politics (or, on Warren, brilliant Machiavellianism, but that's an aside). Talking "bullsh*t" on one of D.C.'s insider think tanks is hardly the worst offense one might find coming out of the fever swamps of the online Democratic Party base. The considerable outrage among the commenters at Yglesias' post, and well as the support Yglesias is getting from fellow bloggers, only confirms that deep split between the activist base of the party and the top operatives who will have to actually govern.

Remember the debate about a "center-right nation? Stuff like this demonstrates it better than ever. It's actually funny, however, that both Yglesias' original post and then Palmieri's subsequent smackdown reveal that no one involved in this debate's got a shred of class.

Forget Marriage, Gay or Not ... Kill Tradition Altogether

Bob Ostertag, in "Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue," is brutally honest in revealing the subterranean agenda that girds the left's blitzkreig assault on tradition - from marriage itself (which will no longer have original meaning once homosexuals enjoy the same right of union that's by both nature and tradition only available to one man and one woman) to the entire Western ethical system based in Judeo-Christian morality:

Through years of queer demonstrations, meetings, readings and dinner table conversations, about gay bashing, police violence, job discrimination, housing discrimination, health care discrimination, immigration discrimination, family ostracism, teen suicide, AIDS profiteering, sodomy laws, and much more, I never once heard anyone identify the fact that they couldn't get married as being a major concern. And then, out of the blue, gay marriage suddenly became the litmus test by which we measure our allies. We have now come to the point that many unthinkingly equate opposition to gay marriage with homophobia.

Rick Warren is now the flash point, the one all our political allies, even Barack Obama, are supposed to denounce because he doesn't pass gay marriage the litmus test.

I disagree with Rick Warren on many things. To start with, he believes that 2000 years ago God sent his only Son to die on a cross so that mankind would not perish but have everlasting life. To me, that's weird. I don't know how to even begin to address an idea that far out. And he believes that everyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell. He doesn't single out gays and lesbians in particular. To me, the weirdest thing there is not that he thinks queers will go to hell, but that he believes in hell at all. But mainline Protestants believe in hell too. So do Catholics, who also add purgatory and limbo.

Steve Waldman, founder of Belief.net (where you find the most thoughtful exchanges on present day religion), did an extended interview with Warren which has been hyped all over the blogosphere as an example of why we should all be screaming for Obama to disinvite Warren from the inaugural. The quote that got all the attention was when Warren said gay marriage would be on a par with marriage for incest, pedophilia and polygamy. And yes, I think that's off-base. Not up there are the scale of the whole God-sent-his-only-Son-to-die-on-a-cross bit, but weird nonetheless.

I thought this was satirical at first, but it's not.

Read the whole thing. It's a tricky argument. On the one hand, Ostertag amounts a vicious atheist attack on marriage traditionalists and those of religious faith. But on the other hand he suggests he'd be perfectly willing to work with "progressive" evangelicals who want to tackle "more important" problems, like global warming, which just "can't wait."

Note though that Ostertag conflates the whole of pro-marriage traditionalism into a faith-based pigeonhole. And that's the trick: There are powerful secular arguments against same-sex marriage, so when leftists take issue with the spiritual proponents of traditionalism, they work to attack the larger edifice of Western culture and tradition that's been the basis for the American political culture, the rise of capitalism (the Protestant work ethic), and the natural law rationalism that grew out of the Enlightement and sustains modern democratic institutions.

The religious argument against gay marriage is a good one. But those who take that approach will be bogged down in defending against anti-Christianist assaults, not to mention the debate over "religious rites" versus "civil rights." And while religion ultimately provides what is in essence the supreme power of universal reason, debating gay marriage on religious grounds puts people of faith in a position of endlessy rebutting spurious allegations of congregational bigotry.

It's too bad that things have come to this, but those who respect traditional values are in a sense fighting a secular creed, an atheistic faith that would banish universal good from the public square altogether. It's this underlying secular humanist agenda that will destroy all that's best about our culture, not just heterosexual marriage traditionalism alone, but the entire moral firmament beneath it.