Squaring the Culture

The news over the weekend includes Gen. Wesley Clark on Face the Nation taking shots at John McCain’s fitness for leadership, calling him “untried and untested.” Here are the talking points, borrowed from Ben Smith’s Blog at Politico:

…he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron,” Clark said.

and

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Summer is the trial period for sound bites. Democratic surrogates for Obama will be firing off lines just to see which is going to get a nice resonance from the base. Each sound bite will land on a few, and we’ll hear them again (and again and again and again: the Democratic base is big on repetition, and actually thinks in sound bites) but the campaign will keep trying until they find one that really sounds good in the echo chamber, and that’ll become the headlines for the fall. I don’t think this one’s going to do it, but we’ll hear it at least a few times at the leftish blogs.

The McCain campaign has their response down pat:

If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to question John McCain’s military service, that’s their right. But let’s please drop the pretense that Barack Obama stands for a new type of politics. The reality is he’s proving to be a typical politician who is willing to say anything to get elected, including allowing his campaign surrogates to demean and attack John McCain’s military service record.

The blog responses are mostly of the “Clark’s an idiot” and “McCain’s a hero” variety, which are both true as far as they go. Q and O makes a somewhat better point:

,,,if the willingness to fight for your country, put your life on the line and suffer the brutality McCain suffered as a POW doesn’t make the cut as far as qualifications go, how far below that does a “community organizer” show up on the list of non-qualifications?

My own observation is that we’re seeing an instance of what Democrats do with principles. Military service was not sufficient qualification for President when George H.W. Bush, a genuine war hero, was running against William J. Clinton, a draft avoider. It was not sufficient qualification when Robert Dole, wounded in a real war, was running against the same draft avoider. Then, combat duty became the sole, relevant qualification for President when John Kerry, who won three purple hearts in Vietnam, was running against National Guard aviator George W. Bush who never saw combat. Now that a Democratic professional political agitator is running against an aviator who served with genuine honor in an enemy prison camp, we’re back to military service not counting.

It’s not that Democrats can’t make up their minds, it’s that they don’t seem to have minds to make up. The guys crafting the sound bites don’t have principles, they’ll literally say anything, but it’s the Democratic base that astonishes me. They’ll swallow any sound bite their leaders throw them, even if it’s the exact opposite of the last one. How many Democrats will scratch their heads and think, “Now, didn’t I say combat duty was required for the President in 2004? How can I say it doesn’t count now?” The political operatives who write the campaign slogans for the Democratic party apparently don’t even have to think twice about whether this year’s sound bites contradict last year’s, because they can count on the fact that the base will simply parrot anything they say, no matter how inconsistent. This is a prescription for demagoguery.

And, no, folks, all politicians don’t do that. Some do, but there have been plenty who don’t. I’ve seen Republican politicians occasionally take an inconsistent position because of some constituent group that demands it, and there were plenty of reasonable questions about how sincere Mitt Romney’s conversions were. but for the most part, Republicans take consistent positions because their positions rest on principles. That’s how it’s supposed to work. While Presidential candidates have to tailor their positions to hit the fat part of the Bell curve on most issues, we should be able to count on them to say more or less what they genuinely believe, and to stand for a set of principles that are consistent with their party. Only, since 1992 at least, the Democratic party seems to have taken core principles out of the mix, and gone to literally saying anything, no matter how false — and their base has just gone along compliantly.

This is not politics as usual; this is political cynicism on steroids, and should be shunned.

John McCain is a nasty SOB and a hardball-playing politician, and I don’t think he’ll be a great President, but so far, it looks as though he’s running the campaign that Barack Obama promised to run. Obama, meanwhile, started off whining about how he’s going to be attacked, and now he’s sending out shills to slam McCain’s war record. Yes, we can see what sort of campaign this is going to be, and if anybody represents “New Politics,” it’s McCain.

In the photo, Barack Obama talks with former Gen. Wesley Clark during a military and foreign affairs round table discussion in Washington on June 18, 2008. Photo by Alex Brandon of AP Photo.

I’ve been avoiding the evolution/Intelligent Design debate since I started this blog, but I can’t avoid it today. Blame Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who signed into law on Friday a measure described by the Inquisitors General of Evolution as a “stealth Creationism bill.” The bill states simply that science teachers and local school boards have the right to add supplementary material to the prescribed science curricula, and specifically prohibits injections of religion into science classes, but the clear intent is to protect science teachers who want to present materials that explain the theory of Intelligent Design in the classroom. Significantly, though, the bill also specifically mentions the inclusion of supplementary materials regarding “the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as well as evolution. See the actual text of the bill here.

The Discovery Institute explains the need for the bill:

The law is needed for two reasons. First, around the country, science teachers are being harassed, intimidated, and sometimes fired for trying to present scientific evidence critical of Darwinian theory along with the evidence that supports it. Second, many school administrators and teachers are fearful or confused about what is legally allowed when teaching about controversial scientific issues like evolution. The Louisiana Science Education Act clarifies what teachers may be allowed to do.

I have some pretty strong opinions on the subject, and have had for some time. I’m also fairly well-read on the subject. Please bear with me while I air my complaint.

The attempt to conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism is intellectually dishonest and insupportable. I read a large volume of Creationist literature back in the 1970s and 1980s, and I’ve read a substantial volume of Intelligent Design literature in the last 10 years. They are not published by the same people. They are not similar in any regard worth mentioning. They are not saying the same thing, nor even anything terribly close to each other. They do not use the same methods. The only similarity that can possibly be educed from an honest reading of the two bodies of literature is that both recognize the possibility of intention in the universe.

Even that’s not all that similar between the two bodies of literature. The Creationists clearly began from a fundamentalist reading of the Bible, and just as clearly formed hypotheses to conform to their reading of the Bible. They would not be dissuaded from this approach regardless of the evidence; they were ideologically married to the Biblical account. The Creation Science Institute came from a theological tradition that was famous, even among the Christian community, for bringing the same attitude and the same methods to bible scholarship that they brought to biology and cosmology — “We interpret the clear teaching of the scripture to be X, and any claim to the contrary simply has to be wrong.”

By contrast, the Intelligent Design movement began from a reading of current microbiology, and from the recognition by bright observers outside the field of evolutionary biology that what was coming from within the field was barely disguised philosophy, not science. The published works of Intelligent Design theorists include complex discussions of microbiology, robust philosophical evaluations, and incisive analyses of modern culture. There’s very little biblical theology to be found among them; many are not theists. They’re simply legitimate scientists who stopped drinking the kool-aid, and summoned the courage to raise the unpopular point that the processes they’re studying look intentional, and that that just might mean that they were intentional.

There’s a revolution going on in microbiology, occasioned (as is usual for scientific progress) by improvements in technology, and the explosion of information there has not been friendly to neo-Darwinism’s model of descent with modification. That’s an understatement.

The gene theory of biology has taken a severe beating over the last 15 years or so. It’s perfectly clear that genes do not carry information to describe large segments of what we see in the biosphere (the shapes of living objects, for example, are not found in the genes at all.) If that information does not exist in genes, then it cannot possibly have evolved by way of genetic mutation or genetic drift. Prompted by this discovery, biologist Michael Denton and his co-workers in Australia developed a theory of natural laws in the biosphere, analogous to the laws that govern physics, and used their hypothesis to predict a series of laws governing the behavior of protein folds. Their hypothesis proved correct in the laboratory; they discovered something like 1,000 separate protein fold patterns, all behaving according to a definable set of rules that correspond to physical characteristics of the molecules themselves. Their findings were published by invitation in Nature(1) and in the Journal of Theoretical Biology(2).

One of the disturbing characteristics of the history of the science of evolution is how poorly the theory has performed in predicting what they’ll find. Darwin predicted simple early life forms; we now know the earliest life forms were insanely complex. Darwin predicted intermediate forms in the fossil record; literally millions of fossils have been gathered, and at best a tiny handful of them can even plausibly be described as intermediate forms; the clear pattern in the fossil record is species stasis — a species appears, goes along unchanged for millions of years, then simply disappears. More to the point, there are only perhaps a dozen instances in the last 150 years of paleontologists using the theory of evolution to predict a particular finding in nature, and then actually finding it, and there isn’t even the beginning of a model that can predict the evolutionary direction of a living population. For Denton and his cohort to produce a non-genetic hypothesis that successfully predicts a discovery on the first try, strikes me as proof that their hypothesis is orders of magnitude more robust than the neo-Darwinian model that they’re bucking. To suggest that what Denton is doing is “not science” deserves nothing more friendly than a horse laugh. Anybody who says such a ridiculous thing ought not to be taken seriously ever again.

I acknowledge that there are some who are simply taking the word of others and repeating a second-hand conclusion when they say that Intelligent Design is not science, and confuse it with Creationism; if that’s you, please try to understand that you’re being deliberately misled by religious partisans who are defending their pet philosophy, Scientific Materialism, against any and all legitimate debate. I further acknowledge that the Creationists have hopped on board the Intelligent Design train, and are touting their own theories as I.D. these days, so for an outside observer unfamiliar with the literature, I.D. might be confused with Creationism. You need to read the literature. Anybody telling you the evidence points to “the God of the Bible” is probably touting Christianity. By the same token, anybody telling you “descent with modification is beyond question” is selling you swampland in Florida (just as anybody who tells you “anthropogenic global warming is beyond question” is selling you swampland in Florida — the claim that something “is beyond question” should be your first clue, because if it were true they wouldn’t have to say it so loudly.)

But people saying “This process looks too complex to have been produced without intention,” are saying something no more controversial than this: “If I see a slip of paper with the words ‘Please pick up my suit from the cleaners’ on it, I infer that an intelligent being was sending a message.” The genetic detail in the simplest, earliest life form is a similar phrase, only instead of being 40 characters long, is millions of characters long; it’s every bit as much an encoded message, and to infer intent is not only plausible, it’s the only plausible inference possible. We’ve uncovered the earliest life form and found in it a huge computer program; come on, folks, draw the obvious conclusion. It can’t possibly hurt that much.

To those who want to pretend that I.D. cannot be science a priori because it allows the mere possibility of a designer, I say “Rubbish.” Such people are as biased, and as religiously motivated, as the Creationists they hate so much (which is why they hate them so much.) If science is a search for truth fact, then the scientist must accept whatever conclusion follows as a result of honest evaluation. One cannot allow oneself to be limited by a priori philosophical claims. If science does not allow the scientist to draw whatever conclusion properly fits the facts, then I’m not interested in science, and neither should any thinking adult be interested in it.

The notion that the definition of science demands a non-directed process in the biosphere, logically, arises from philosophy — obviously, you can’t prove such a claim in the laboratory, it’s a definition. That definition — that there can be no intelligence directing our biosphere — is imported from Materialism, a self-demolishing philosophical system that absurdly presupposes that nothing exists, or can exist, outside of our three-dimensions-plus-unidirectional-time universe. The very existence of an idea, or of consciousness, falsifies the presupposition: ideas have no dimension, cannot be examined by scientific inquiry under a microscope, are not affected by time, and clearly exist, therefore things do exist apart from dimensions plus time. But whether one accepts or rejects Materialism, its presuppositions are a foreign import into science (the earliest Western scientists were not Materialists), and the attempt to define “science” by excluding all that does not conform to Materialism’s presuppositions constitutes an anti-intellectual hijacking. Short version, the Materialists mugged the culture, and stole science.

The link at the top of this article under the words “stealth Creationism bill” points to a document by the National Center for Science Education. The NCSE represents the attempt by dogmatic Materialists to prevent consideration of non-Materialist scientific literature in public schools, by way of Inquisition. They actively search for instances of teachers attempting to discuss the ideas of current opponents of neo-Darwinian theory, and when they find one, they send a team to attempt to have that individual fired. It’s basically a goon squad; it’s not in any meaningful way different from the Spanish Inquisition I mentioned yesterday, except that instead of imaginary thumb screws, they use shame and the courts, and instead of burning at the stake, they get people fired.

If the ideas behind descent with modification were so clearly superior, they would not need goon squads to enforce them. The reason neo-Darwinism needs to take the Inquisition approach is something admitted on the first page of Richard Dawkins’ book, The Blind Watchmaker: the universe we live in looks designed. Any intellectually curious adult can see it, because it’s immediately obvious to the casual observer. It took Dawkins a book-length dissertation to explain why the design that’s obvious on the face of things is actually an illusion. Since it takes that much verbiage to dispute the obvious, the fact that so many in our culture feel as though only deluded dunces can infer design, is counter-intuitive; it could only be so if the intellectual life of the culture had been straight-jacketed against drawing the obvious conclusion from examining the universe.

Even the atheists recognize Occam’s Razor, and if they were being candid, they’d admit that the most likely explanation for the fact that our universe appears to have been designed, is that it was designed. Anybody taking the opposite position, has to believe that life appeared magically out of non-life, without the slightest hint of an explanation how that’s possible (no, evolution does not address the question), and that takes way more faith than any Christian doctrine requires. To quote Norm Geisler and Frank Turek, I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.

(1) M. J. Denton and J. C. Marshall, “The Laws of Form Revisited,” Nature 410 (2001): 411, General concepts discussed in Michael John Denton, “An Anti-Darwinian Intellectual Journey,” Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing,, W. A. Dembski, ed,, Wilmington, DE, ISI Books, 2004.
(2) M. J. Denton, J. C. Marshal, and M. Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the Pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 218 (2002):325-42. General concepts discussed in Uncommon Dissent, Dembski, ed,, op. cit.

Update: a couple of commenters at Little Green Footballs created links from an article about Creationists in Texas to this blog. Thanks for the notice, folks, and welcome. The article there appears to illustrate my point here: at least one of the actions cited in the quoted New Scientist article is by real, old-fashioned Young Earth Creationists, but the article dishonestly and inaccurately names the Discovery Institute, the flagship of the Intelligent Design movement, as the force behind the actions of these Creationists. While there’s some reason for the uninformed to be confused, it’s simply dishonest for New Scientist to conflate them.

We keep seeing worldwide repercussions of Barack Obama’s unintended declaration that he’d negotiate with America’s enemies without preconditions. Here’s another possible consequence:

John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, opined today that if Obama wins the election, Israel is likely to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities sometime before Inauguration Day. He reasons that the Israelis expect Obama’s policy to be more protective of Iran, and will want to do what’s necessary to protect themselves while Bush is still President.

In an interview with FOX News, Bolton says, “I think if they are to do anything, the most likely period is after our elections and before the inauguration of the next President.”

Bolton reasons Israel won’t be able to hold off a strike on Iran any longer than that given the Illinois senator’s intended foreign policy toward the Islamic Republic.

“I don’t think they [the Israeli government] will do anything before our election because they don’t want to affect it,” he says, adding, “They’d have to make a judgment whether to [strike] during the remainder of President Bush’s term in office or wait for his successor.”

Bolton points to Obama’s statements in which he says he would engage Iran in direct talks and take the military option for dealing with Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons off the table, a position he believes will further embolden Tehran to build a nuclear bomb.

The irony is as Charles Krauthamer pointed out a few weeks ago — most likely, this “sit down with our enemies” approach is not a policy decision, it’s a gaffe that got out of hand. Obama is now trying to reverse field, but once the words are out, it’s tough to get them back. As the ancient Persian proverb goes, “You own your words until you speak; then, they own you.” This is why it’s not good enough that a young man gather advisors around himself in order to learn how to be President; he’ll learn eventually, yes, but in the meantime he’ll cause bigger problems than he can solve. Not just anybody can be President, and it takes more than just the ability to make convincing speeches (although that surely helps).

I’m reading a fascinating book called The Irrational Atheist, by Vox Day (his real name is Theodore Beale). The book is a rational evaluation of the arguments raised by the recent champions of atheism, including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Onfray, Daniel Dennet. Day is Christian, but doesn’t spend any of his effort defending Christianity; his purpose is simply to horsewhip the atheists on their own terms, showing factual, scientific, and logical errors in their arguments. He does it in a GenX-ish, conversational tone, with dry humor, and with some pretty astonishing research. Day is the guy who scanned the history of wars and determined that fewer than 10% of them manifestly had anything to do with religion, and that’s if you don’t count the later Crusades as political, which they were. I’m reading the book mostly because I’m preparing to engage in public apologetics, and I figured it’d be easier to read Day than to read Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett in the time I have available.

Jumping forward in the book a bit, I learned some fascinating facts about the Spanish Inquisition this morning. My introduction to the Inquisition came early in life, as my Hebrew School teachers gave me the history of conversos in Spain. Spain was historically one of the few European nations that did not expel Jews during the Middle Ages, so lots of European Jews moved there; later, the Spanish crown offered them sanctuary if they would convert to Christianity, which a number of them did, but they continued to practice Judaism in secret. It was the conversos, also called Marranos (which is apparently not a very nice name), who were the stated target of the Spanish Inquisition, and I’d always figured it was just another of the long list of anti-Semitic acts of the Church during the Middle Ages. Turns out I was wrong.

Day supplies some relevant context to the Inquisition, beginning with the Muslim conquest of Spain. The Umayyads invaded during the 8th century, and captured pretty much the entire Iberian Peninsula in an 8-year campaign. They were stopped from capturing northern Iberia by Payalo of Asturia at the battle of Covadonga in 722 AD, from invading France by Charles Martel at Tours in 732 AD. From that point, it took the Spanish Christians nearly 800 years to push the Muslims out of Spain again. Eight hundred years is a lot of war, and a lot of blood and money wasted. They were not eager to have to do it a second time.

What my Hebrew School teachers forgot to mention to me is that the Jews collaborated with the Muslims in Spain. Apparently, Jews in Spain had encouraged the Umayyads to invade back in the 8th century, and had been given weapons and responsibility for managing certain southern cities on behalf of the Muslims.

“It remains a fact that the Jews, either directly or through their correligionists in Africa, encouraged the Mohammedans to conquer Spain. . . . The conquered cities Cordova, Malaga, Granada, Seville, and Toledo were placed in charge of the Jewish inhabitants, who had been armed by the Arabs.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906). Vol XI, 485.

When Ferdinand and Isabella finished the Reconquista, Isabella expressed concern about the Jews who had converted, fearing that some were not wholehearted Christians. The part we don’t get, from a modern perspective, is that in Isabella’s mind, if these converts were not truly faithful to the Church, it seemed likely to her that they were also not faithful to the Crown. They did not need Muslim spies among them. Ferdinand pressured Rome to establish a Spanish branch of the Roman Inquisition, and after playing hardball and threatening to withdraw his military protection from Italy, received official support from Pope Sixtus IV to question recent converts about their adherence to the faith.

He didn’t appoint any inquisitors for about two years, though. Apparently, he was not all that keen on getting started. Historians aren’t sure why he changed his mind, but I like Day’s suggestion: about 3 months before the first Inquisitor was named, a Turkish navy landed in southern Italy and sacked Otranto, killing about 10,000 people. In a still-remembered incident, 800 men of the city who refused to convert to Islam were taken to a nearby hill and beheaded en masse; the hill is still called the Hill of the Martyrs. The Turks then bounced along the coast, sacking more cities, and eventually left.

Apparently that was enough to remind Ferdinand of the stakes. Call it their version of 9/11. It probably took a few weeks for the news of Otranto to reach Spain, and another month or two to find the right individuals to start the process rolling. By the time five months had passed, the Inquisition had identified 6 false Christians and turned them over to the civil authorities.

The point is that the Spanish Inquisition was not some ruthless, demented rush to torture people who just happened to be different. It was, in fact, an understandable and appropriate response to very real contemporary threats.

It also was not the horror most people think it was. The common image of the Spanish Inquisition that we see in films and documentaries, and that most people have in their minds, is mostly fantasy, having been created by a Protestant smear campaign in the 16th century that is now known as the Black Legend, and extended by imaginative 19th century literature. The methods of the Spanish Inquisition were actually common for the period. Torture was seldom used, only in instances where the investigators were pretty sure they were being lied to, and even then under strict oversight and rules; there were excesses, but the reason we know that is that the Church identified them and held the perpetrators accountable. The Spanish law enforcement regimen was actually more lenient than most European practices at the time, and was followed strictly. Anybody complaining about the Inquisition as an assault on human rights, needs to complain about the entire world’s law enforcement regimen during that time period.

The Inquisition was later extended to examine Muslim converts to Christianity as well, and also to discover Protestants. It was brought to an end in the 18th century; in all, around 3,000 people were tried, convicted, and put to death over a period of about 400 years — about 1/3 of the number killed by the Turkish attack that goaded Ferdinand into action. The Inquisition was never used to produce converts to Christianity; that’s a myth. Thumb screws, toe screws, and torture chairs are also myths. The Pit and the Pendulum was Edgar Allen Poe’s whiskey-soaked imagination, not history.

No Christian need be bothered by claims of the Inquisition’s brutality; it was just the way the world was back then. As a Christian of Jewish ancestry, I’m much more dismayed by 800 years of official Church anti-Semitism in Europe.

Most of us over here on the political right are expecting a full-court press from the press (repetition intended) for Barack Obama, and today’s report from the Associated Press about HIllary Clinton supporters backing Obama does not disappoint. Just look at the spin:

The headline reads “Obama Winning Over Clinton Supporters,” and the opening paragraph reads:

Barack Obama has won over more than half of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s former supporters, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll that finds party loyalty trumping hard feelings less than three weeks after their bruising Democratic presidential contest ended.

Fine. This is no different from what we expected; it seemed unlikely, possibly even too good to be true, that Clinton supporters would jump the party line and vote for McCain. They said they would, but nobody really believed it would last.

Only, look at the actual numbers in this survey: there’s that stubborn 24% of Clinton supporters who said they wouldn’t vote for Obama back in April, and now, it’s 23% — statistically speaking, it didn’t change. All the new support from Clinton’s supporters came from the group that said “I’m not sure,” or from the “no response” category that’s not shown on the graph (note that the numbers don’t add up to 100%).

If 24% of Clinton’s supporters genuinely won’t support Obama under any circumstances, and vote for John McCain instead, Obama might be in serious trouble. AP doesn’t like that meme, so they won’t say it, but it’s true.

Don’t get me wrong; I still don’t think most of those folks will be in McCain’s column come November. But right now, in objective terms, the shift from Clinton to Obama is not going well for Obama. Not at all.

…and it couldn’ta happened to a nicer guy.

Starting in April, Rep Henry Waxman (D, CA 30th district) initiated hearings in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which he chairs, to evaluate the usefulness of federal funds spent on sex education programs that feature an attempt to tell kids to abstain from sex until they’re married. Fierce advocate of scientific inquiry and a concern for unvarnished truth that he is, Waxman stacked the panel with professionals who all have some stake in preserving traditional sex education that advocates condom use for safety.

Citizenlink.org produced a nifty little video (two and a half minutes long) that absolutely pwnd Waxman’s committee. Check it out.

Simply put, the majority of “experts” on the panel admitted that their advocacy would not be influenced by facts. Your tax dollars at work.

This is not the first time Waxman has gotten caught attempting to skew the public debate dishonestly. His last attempt was a minority report prepared entirely by Waxman’s staff, but touted inaccurately by the press as a Congressional Report, claiming that there was no support for the claim that abstinence education works. Fortunately, a true Congressional report exposed the fraud; unfortunately, the press didn’t really cover the rebuttal, so folks who rely entirely on news reports have been completely misinformed yet again.

The comment I made a couple of days ago, about how the hatred of Evangelicals may be mostly due to a broad-based desire among Americans to practice sexual incontinence, gets support from the sheer insanity I hear on any subject dealing with sex publicly. It does not take a scientific survey for us to know that more sex will lead to more pregnancy. This is knowledge that’s been available among humans for the entire length of recorded history. The primary variable determining whether you’ll get pregnant is “Did you have sex?” This is not controversial — or, it wouldn’t be if people weren’t trying to rationalize away sexual misconduct.

In sheer contradiction to the Facts of Life, however, we find advocates of “sane” sex education attempting to make the completely laughable claim that it’s not more sex, it’s abstinence education, that’s to blame for the rise in teen pregnancy — a rise that’s, just coincidentally, occurred in perfect synchronization with the rise in teen sexual activity. (I found a typical example at a blog called Cafe’ Philos. Too funny.) Also coincident with the abandonment of the abstinence ethic in America is the meteoric rise in venereal diseases, the rise in teen depression, and the rise in poverty — single women with children are the largest group of welfare recipients in America.

Waxman’s biased panel of “experts” is just one instance of a culture-wide pattern of frantic, fevered rationalization for the grotesquely irresponsible position we’ve taken about sex. More of us need to spend more time propounding the truth on the matter — despite how irritating it will make us seem to our neighbors. And, if we do it the way Stuart Sheppard does, above, we might even get a few laughs from it.

No sooner do I take on the academic distaste for Evangelicals than the same topic pops up in the political square. How convenient.

Yesterday a small brouhaha erupted when James Dobson, radio host of Focus on the Family, did a little critique of a speech by Barack Obama about religion in the public square. The speech was an old one; it had been delivered in June of 2006, as the keynote address to a religious conference called “Call to Renewal,” put on by the politically progressive religious group Sojourners.

Here’s an uncharacteristically fair report on the discussion from Jake Tapper of ABC News:

You can hear Dobson’s entire critique, and Obama’s speech in its entirety, here at CitizenLink.com, FOTF’s political action blog. Dobson’s radio portion is the small bar just above Obama’s picture. You have to sit through Dobson’s tribute to Tim Russert, but that’s actually very nice.

Now, I’ve never thought Dr. James Dobson, child psychologist, was particularly cogent on political subjects, and I don’t think he makes his case correctly on this one. (His books on child-rearing are another matter; I used them, and they were outstanding.) However, he was right to be incensed by Obama’s faux libertarianism, and whether he makes his point well or not, he’s on the side of the angels this time.

The speech was standard Obama fare, solidly Progressive while couched in the language of conciliation. Obama fancies himself a negotiator and reconciliation counselor, and often offers advice for keeping the conversation civil, but his terms usually favor the left. It’s a couple of those moments that agitated Dr. Dobson, enough to make him respond 2 years after the fact.

Objectionable point number 1:

Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.

There’s a lot for an Evangelical to get agitated about here, but I’ll focus on just one.

For a conciliator, Obama makes a huge goof by comparing Dobson with the Reverend Al Sharpton. This would be like saying to a Democrat, in the context of explaining why we don’t have political classes in public schools, “Whose politics should we teach? Yours, or David Duke’s?” The implication, of course, would be that the Democrat represents on the left what David Duke represents on the right. Do you suppose the Daily Kos Kids might have a few choice words about that comparison?

Nobody objects to Al Sharpton because of his religion; we don’t even know what his theology is, nor do we care. Al Sharpton is a professional racist. He runs a protection racket; he routinely hustles money out of legitimate businesses by threatening them with racial demonstrations if they don’t contribute to his organization. He deliberately inflames tense situations by invoking race in order to garner attention for himself. Some of his attention games have resulted in riots, and in innocent people being killed; others, in people having to fight in court and the public square for their liberty. You may disagree with Dr. Dobson’s politics, but the man has never in his entire life engaged in the sort of sleazy, self-aggrandizing demagoguery for which Sharpton is known. The comparison is insulting and inappropriate.

Other avenues Dobson approaches here are valid as well: Obama’s application of Bible verses are distorted horribly, and then he rubs them in with “folks haven’t been reading their bibles.” Obama invokes multiculturalism inaccurately; a huge majority of citizens in the US self-identify as Christian, whereas no other group Obama mentions even represents double digits in the American population, except for non-believers.

My own take is that Obama’s point illustrates why there should be no public schools. If parents could send their children to the sectarian school of their choice, every parent would be satisfied with the religious content, every right would be protected, and every point of view adequately represented. It’s the act of the public providing universal schooling that creates the conflict in educational content, not the fact of sectarian opinions. I personally favor a completely private system, with public funding only for the very poorest students, but given the reality of near-universal public funding, I favor vouchered education that includes sectarian choices.

Obama’s offending comments, take 2:

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

I have to admit that this is one topic on which I’m apt to throw my equanimity to the winds and simply explode. You want to hear me get steamed? Suggest that democracy requires that I stifle my religious opinions, like Obama does here.

Obama simply does not understand the American political system. And this putz wants to be President.

If Obama were simply offering avuncular wisdom, it would be fine: “You know, if you want to have more impact on people who disagree with you, you’ll do better if you take this approach.” Yes, for a religious person to have a wider appeal, this is sensible advice.

That’s not how it’s phrased, though, and it’s not what’s being said. Obama says democracy depends on such an approach. If Obama was simply giving advice, the consequence of not following it would be just “You’ll not be heard.” By contrast to that, he seems to be saying that the failure to put religious points in secular terms somehow damages the body politic — that it hurts us all. The reason he’s rapproaching Dobson thus is not that Dobson is hurting himself and not being heard; quite the contrary. Obama knows Dobson is being heard, by lots of people, and he wishes he wasn’t. His point is just another attempt by a leftist to get his opponent to shut up.

No agent can be prevented from engaging legally in free, political advocacy on the basis of the terms of that advocacy. Frank religious talk is protected, and, contrary to ridiculous readings of the establishment clause, there is not a single word of the Constitution that prohibits citizens from advocating their favored policies in the starkest religious terms possible (in fact, not a single word of the Constitution prohibits any citizen from doing anything; the Constitution limits the government, not the people).

I, personally, have no problem couching my own political points of view in secular terms, but let me be clear: I don’t do it because democracy demands it, I do it because I think it’s more effective. If Evangelicals want to advocate some policies publicly by saying “We believe it because it’s biblical,” that is their right, and no defender of liberty has any basis for silencing them. If Dobson cared to form policy on the basis of casting lots at midnight and barking at the moon during the vernal equinox at the center of Stonehenge, and then advocated it publicly on that basis, that is his right. If he can garner enough votes to pass his measure stated in those terms, he wins — as he should. There is no obligation to avoid religious language in political advocacy, none whatsoever. Religious people have every bit as much right to participate in the political process as anybody else, using any terms they choose, and any attempt to make them tone down their religious talk is tyranny, pure and simple.

Obama’s response, noted in the ABC News clip at the top of this post, was typical: “He must have misunderstood, or he’s just trying to score political points.” Jim Wallis of Sojourners takes a similar swipe at Dobson, calling his objection disingenuous. Wallis is wrong; Dobson is not being disingenuous, he’s heard this same attempt to get him to shut up thousands of times before, so he recognizes it when he hears it. He responded honestly to precisely what Obama meant. Obama’s point is the point of tyrants; Dobson correctly defends his own liberty, with my wholehearted approval.

One of my readers sent me a link to this article by Prof. Rick Hills about what Prof Hills called “Theophobia”. What he meant by it was that in his experience, a lot of college professors irrationally fear Christians. This discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy that followed Prof. Hills’ article (the link leads to a collection of six posts about the same subject) led to the assessment that this is somewhat inaccurate; this incisive bit of research from the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, published in 2007, demonstrates that it’s not Christians, per se, that academics dislike, it’s Mormons and Evangelicals, especially Evangelicals.

Thirty-three percent of academics surveyed view Mormons unfavorably. Evangelicals fared much worse: 53% of surveyed professors say they have unfavorable feelings toward Evangelicals, and only 30% expressed any sort of warm or positive feelings toward them. By contrast, more than 60% of academics said they viewed non-Evangelical Christians and/or Catholics warmly or favorably. Only 22% of faculty expressed cool feelings toward Muslims, 18% toward atheists, and 13% toward Catholics. Other sections of the study show that the dislike of Evangelicals correlates strongly with liberal politics and with atheism or disinterest in religion; most notably, more than 70% of academics (more than 90% of those who self-identify as liberal) say that Evangelical Christians should keep their opinions out of politics.

So… what’s with that?

The discussion among the academics and legal geeks at Volokh favored the view that the dislike of Evangelicals was mostly a statistical marker for the mostly liberal professors’ dislike of conservative politics. I think they’ve got it backwards; the primary hatred is more about religion than about politics, and it’s the hatred of political conservatism that’s a misleading marker for the hatred of Evangelical Christianity.

The relationship between Evangelicalism and modern, political conservatism is indirectly causal; the American libertarian experiment is actually the product of a brand of Christianity and a level of religious devotion that more resembles modern Evangelical Protestantism than any other modern religious group, although, clearly, there are stark differences between the beliefs of America’s founders and those of modern Evangelicals. It’s the presuppositions of this historical brand of Protestant Christianity, the social and political effects of their particular faith, that modern, social and political progressives want to overturn. At its core, social and political progressivism are about overthrowing the Christianity of the West and replacing it with a “progressive” ethic, and since it’s Evangelicals that most vividly retain the marks of that Christianity that they want to erase, they hate Evangelicals, and wish they would just shut up already.

Note the tone of that last phrase. Lots of people in America find Evangelicals to be pretty irritating. It’s important to understand, though, precisely why they’re so irritating. And before you Evangelicals get angry with me about saying that, please understand that I’m kinda one of you — I’m not an Evangelical, exactly, because my beliefs have evolved a little, but I met Jesus among Evangelicals, and still fellowship with them. I’m very definitely a Bible Guy. So let’s unpack this.

My older brother (one year ahead of me) returned from his freshman year at college with horror stories about his roommate. College freshmen don’t usually know anybody, so they take the luck of the draw for their first roommates; Bob’s luck (despite the name of the blog, it’s my brother who’s actually named “Bob;” I’m Phil) landed him with an immature Evangelical, and he griped about it long and loud. He recalled in particular one night when he’d brought his girlfriend back to the room and she’d stayed the night. The roommate spent the entire night sitting outside the room, wondering what he should do, and what he should say to my brother in the morning.

Bob was being an insensitive jerk, true (it’s characteristic of college freshmen, and unfortunately also characteristic of my family,) but if Roomie had been anything other than an Evangelical or a Mormon, chances are he’d have simply found some other place to sleep, and the next day’s conversation would have been in terms to which my brother could easily relate: “Hey, it’s my freakin’ bed, and I’d like to sleep in it, if you please. You should at least have given me some lead time, and if it starts happening every week, we’re going to have another talk.” This, however, was an Evangelical, and the discussion included three unpleasant additions: 1) the emotional angst this poor religious fellow experienced from sitting out there all night wondering what to do (which he blamed on my brother); 2) the grossly unwelcome addition of a moral factor: “What you’re doing is morally wrong, and I shouldn’t have to put up with it;” and 3) Roomie’s conscientious belief that he was morally and mortally obligated to emphasize the moral factor in order to rescue my brother from his self-destruction.

It’s those three factors, buttressed by a fourth, that make Evangelicals stick out so badly. They seem unable to absorb social rules that make life run smoothly for everybody else, rules about what topics may be raised and with whom; some of them actively look for ways to bring these topics up, and with perfect strangers. They dig in their heels against social changes, refusing to drift with the rest of the culture. And then, they have the bad manners to make a fuss about it repeatedly, because they feel responsible to reverse your social drift for your own good. The fourth element lies at the root of the other three: they’re basing their behavior and moral choices on their interpretation of a Book (capitalized because we’re talking about THE Book,) and their reliance on the Book makes them unapproachable. They won’t be dissuaded by reasonable argument if they’ve decided that The Book has a firm position on the subject. No number of surveys, no amount of research, no appeal to reason or good sense will move them from their stance. When Evangelicals — and, to a lesser extent, Mormons — decide they’re against something that other citizens are for, they become a Permanent Stone In Their Shoe.

That is irritating.

Now, let’s be fair. Social progressives do precisely the same thing, and worse. They believe they have the Special Knowledge to Save The Planet from war, poverty, pollution, and Evil Capitalists. They won’t ever stop telling you about it, and they’ll shamelessly resort to maudlin emotional appeals in order to trump whatever objection you might raise. They genuinely feel responsible for making you stop destroying yourself. They won’t be dissuaded; they’re impervious to fact or reason. And worse than Evangelicals, they resort to all sorts of illegal, immoral, and tyrannical power plays to force their Special Knowledge down the culture’s collective throat. The only real difference is, they’re not basing their stances on a Book. However, this post is not about them, so social progressives are off the hot seat for the moment. (Besides, social progressives rule the universities; the vast majority of professors are social progressives, so they get to answer surveys about how warm or cold they feel about Evangelicals. We should perhaps ask Evangelicals how warm they feel about their socially progressive professors.)

Actually, there’s one other difference. Social progressives are nearly always wrong; what they propose is usually disastrous. What Evangelicals propose, by contrast, makes them “The Very Worst Sort of Pain In the Ass:” they’re frequently right. They’re right often enough that they’re actually vindicated, at least partly, for relying on the Book instead of reacting to whatever catchphrase the latest research has made trendy.

I mean, it’s bad when somebody gets in your face over some moral issue about which they have not the slightest clue, either making irrational moral judgments or demonstrating sheer ignorance about what you’re doing. It’s orders of magnitude worse, though, when someone gets in your face over a moral issue about which you know, at some level you’d rather not examine, that you’re actually doing wrong.

This affects the issue in a way that I can’t prove, and which even if I’m right, no research will ever uncover because most people have deceived themselves about it. It’s this: I believe a huge proportion of most peoples’ irritation with Evangelicals is really about sex.

It’s one of those things that pops up only occasionally, when some college atheist is being unusually candid. The truth is, most of what Evangelicals believe is relatively easy to live with. We all agree that cheating on our taxes is wrong. We all agree that it’s better to honor your parents than not. But, doggone it, when the culture tells you that it’s perfectly natural for you to enjoy sex with your date long before you’re ready to make any sort of permanent commitment, it’s just horribly inconvenient to have people around actively trying to remind you that you’re really being a selfish jerk (which you already know perfectly well), and that if you had the self-control God gave an amoeba, you’d say goodnight and go sleep alone. I actually think this is such an issue for so many people that a large number of atheists, are atheists specifically because it excuses their sexual incontinence. It’s not that they don’t believe in God, it’s that they don’t want to, so they can do as they please and still consider themselves good people. But, they’ll seldom admit this, even to themselves. And don’t get me started on homosexuality…

I’m going to leave the evidence that Evangelicals are right for other posts. Admitting that Evangelicals may have a point about sex (and pornography, and abortion, and divorce, and homosexuality, and whatever else,) however, doesn’t really let them off the hook. The fact is, Evangelicals can be pretty rude about being right, and there’s no good excuse for that. When I was in the middle of my marital troubles, I got lectured by complete strangers who knew nothing other than some phrase they’d overheard me utter at that moment, and who claimed full authority to intrude based on some passage of scripture that commanded them to confront sin — ignoring the intense, personal relationships that such passages take for granted, and that are a prerequisite for even the gentlest rebuke having its intended effect.

On the other hand, the culture has been absurdly rude to them, marginalizing their books, sneering at their stances, mocking their ministers, and generally treating them like they’re just small-town hicks who have grown bitter, who “…cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations…” (Sound familiar?) Evangelical authors are among the best sellers in the world, but you’d never know it because the New York Times separates them into a completely separate category, for no good reason except the editors don’t consider their work serious. Evangelical speakers routinely fill the largest auditoriums in major cities, but except for Billy Graham, nobody knows their names because news reports simply black them out. It’s as though the culture at large decided that Evangelicals have no right to exist. And as Harry Stein observed in his entertaining rant, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), Evangelicals mostly kept to themselves and didn’t really bother anybody until the social progressives started jamming their religion down their throats — and then, they started getting politically active.

Most of us have had bad experiences with an Evangelical at some point or other, like my brother had. He had some bad experiences with me, too; I was irritating when I first became Christian. What those of us who have never been the irritant don’t realize is that most of those bad experiences occur at the hands of immature Evangelicals. The ones who have been around a bit longer and grown up a bit more, have learned how to carry their beliefs in ways that don’t chafe as much. They’re far less likely to make an issue out of something until you’ve actually expressed a need to change something in your own life, and then, they’re the best friends anybody could ever want: patient, helpful, sensitive, and usually not intrusive at all. The years I’ve spent worshiping in Evangelical churches have been good years, mostly, and the people I’ve known there are the finest people on the planet. You just have to be willing to overlook the ones who are still irritating.

“Theophobia” is a rotten term for something that’s real — a deep-seated hatred among some atheists and non-Evangelicals against Evangelicals, a hatred that is partly about irritating habits, and partly about antipathetic social or political views. Along with hatred of white men of European descent, it’s the one, remaining bigotry that’s permitted in American culture. It appears as an expectation of intolerance, ignorance, and venom, expectations that are mostly unfair, but that have their roots in reactions against genuinely rude conduct. It’s real, and if you’re an Evangelical attending an American university, you’re going to face it.

There, galynn — does that help you?

Mandatory disclaimer: endorsements by every freakin’, murderous, leftist tyrant in the universe does not constitute proof that Barack Obama is either a leftist or a tyrant. In fact, it doesn’t mean anything at all. Does it?

Here’s the good news, though; Kim Jong Il of North Korea tells us exactly why he’s endorsing Barack Obama, and it sounds… well, eerily familiar. Via OneFreeKorea, and with full faith that they’re translating the Korean accurately (emphasis mine):

We will see a better relationship between the U.S. and the Korean Peninsula with Obama, who sternly criticizes Bush and who would meet the leader of Chosun without pre-conditions, than with the “Bush clone” and scarecrow of the neocons McCain.

This illustrates the danger of allowing beginners to make policy statements on the campaign trail.

The article at OneFreeKorea contains this helpful comparison of the McCain and Obama campaign statements about North Korea, with additional commentary about the Bush administration, which has not nearly been tough enough:

Bush’s North Korea policy may be a poor baseline for comparison, but the candidates themselves have given the North Koreans plenty to judge them by. Both Obama and McCain have told us how they’d deal with the North Koreans. McCain has expressed his distaste for the latest variation of Bush’s policy and emphasized his willingness to raise uncomfortable topics, including human rights. Obama has already shown a disappointing lack of consistency in holding North Korea accountable for its intolerable behavior. If I understand Obama’s policy to consist of direct summit talks, aid, and trying to coax North Korea into opening itself up, that same policy was tried for years, without success, by the South Koreans, and it’s now being tried without success by President Bush. If I understand McCain’s policy to consist of tightening sanctions until North Korea verifiably disarms, that was tried briefly by the Bush Administration and showed signs of considerable success until its inexplicable and premature abandonment.

(Bear in mind that the sanctions the Bush Administration applied for just 17 months were a pale shadow of the power we could potentially apply but did succeed in driving Kim Jong Il back to the bargaining table. When we lifted the pressure, the North Koreans resorted to form and balked at full disclosure or disarmament. And as we’ve since learned, they weren’t dealing in good faith to begin with. The key to any successful negotiation with the North Koreans is showing them that you’re fully capable and prepared to hasten and accept the collapse of the regime as an alternative.)

And finally, I simply cannot resist reproducing Michelle Malkin’s take on the endorsement:

Delicious. But, of course, the endorsement of every single one of America’s enemies around the globe doesn’t prove a thing about Barack Obama. Does it?

I want to draw to my readers’ attention Scott Shane’s discussion at the New York Times of the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed by agents of the Bush administration. The article produces some fascinating and relevant details about the process that should become part of the cultural narrative, which I’ll cite at the end.

First, though, the attention paid the article over the weekend focuses appropriately on the fact that the Times chose to reveal the identity of the chief interrogator, which exposes the man and his family to possible attacks from Islamic radicals. This constitutes another incident in the Times’ ongoing war against the Bush administration, and at a level that’s genuinely disgusting. The exposed interrogator, who did not agree to be interviewed, requested anonymity, but the Times rationalized that request away; the same article, however, grants anonymity to several sources that agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. This makes it appear that the disclosure of the man’s identity hinged on his willingness to be interviewed, with the protection of anonymity somehow a perquisite of collaborating with the Times. I don’t see this as different in any way from what the Times accuses (falsely) that the Bush administration did to Joe Wilson by revealing the identity of his spouse, though Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who unpacks the matter, finds a distinction in the fact that the interrogator was never undercover; I think that’s a difference of degree, not of type(1). Flopping Aces takes my side in the discussion, in the middle of a piece discussing how much of the Times’ treatment of Iraq constitutes anti-US propaganda.

I’ve written before about the Intel Community’s covert war against the Bush administration; see my topic “Intelligence Community” for instances. I firmly believe that the entire Wilson-Plame affair was a covert op by rogue elements within the CIA to undermine the Bush administration’s War on Terror (it’s not widely appreciated how thoroughly the CIA leans toward the political Left); Kenneth Timmerman’s book “Shadow Warriors” addresses this and wider issues. The Times’ repeated moves to disclose details of classified operations related to the War on Terror constitute cooperation in this effort.

The press’ and the CIA’s response to the Bush administration pose a thorny question for those of us who value freedom of the press: is there a difference between advocating a position contrary to that of the government, and actually attempting to undermine the government’s policy? Fiction writers for years have speculated about wholehearted attempts to subvert the government, usually from well-meaning but utterly mistaken far-right military types (think “The Siege,” “Clear and Present Danger,” etc.) What we’re seeing is a murky, gray area between that extreme and ordinary advocacy, only coming from the political left. The left has thrown aside mere advocacy, spurning the regard for legitimate processes of government that are necessary for protecting our liberties in favor of activism deliberately aimed at overthrowing the government’s policy. Fortunately for all of us, they stopped short of overthrowing the government itself, choosing instead to pursue the Constitutionally appropriate course of impeachment; this failed because they could not manufacture an issue large enough to produce a credible impeachment move (The Anchoress produced a raucously convincing piece about 2 weeks ago regarding just how insupportable a move to impeach President Bush would be; it’s worth a visit.)

There needs to be a legal line between legitimate advocacy of contrary positions, and activism to undermine the legitimate policies of legally elected government. The former is inviolable in a free society; the latter is a danger to us all. Without the willing collaboration of the electorate, no political system can survive for the long haul. This illustrates just how foolish, selfish, and ultimately destructive was Al Gore’s attempt to overturn the 2000 election in Florida; even if he’d had a legitimate complaint (he did not,) he should have backed off for the sake of the nation, as Richard Nixon did when the Democrats actually stole the election from him in 1960. The Left’s perception that George Bush was not a legally elected President surely contributed to their decision to undercut his policies rather than cooperate with the elected government. It should be possible to prosecute the perpetrators of this war against the Bush administration, not because dissent is not permitted — it most certainly is permitted — but because dissent can never become actual undermining of policy without destroying the institutions that protect us all.

The details of the interrogation are fascinating, on the other hand, and except for the truly insupportable decision to air the interrogator’s name, constitutes a solid and helpful bit of journalism. A few thoughts about the article itself:

• I’m not sure I believe there has never been any application of the harsher techniques of interrogation, as Scott Shane reports. I’d like to see a less invested historian’s take on that topic. I do find the application of harsh interrogation techniques troubling.
• The article undercuts the sorts of complaints raised by the dupes of hard leftists regarding how ineffective harsh tactics are known to be; there was clearly no agreement among professionals regarding this, and it remains unclear whether harsh tactics produced results or not.
• The article also explains the decision to house detainees in undisclosed locations, and undercuts claims that this practice was unduly harsh and unnecessary, although there are questions of national sovereignty that ought to be considered. The account includes the observation that the CIA, drawing on close associations with the Thai intelligence community, housed detainees in a Thai jail without informing the Prime Minister.
• The Times notes of the FBI, “They correctly predicted that harsh methods would darken the reputation of the United States and complicate future prosecutions.” I add: not without your collaboration, New York Times. Nice going.
• Whatever else you can say about the Bush administration’s handling of the capture and interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, it worked, and very well. We owe them gratitude for an essential job well done.

The topic deserves more attention and less heat. The partisanship in the current political arena poisons sensible discussion of these matters, and sane assessments may not arise for decades.

Courtroom sketch from the New York Times.

(1) The reason disclosing the identity of a covert agent is a problem is not just that it ruins their effectiveness (although that is a consideration,) but rather that it exposes that individual and everyone nearby to danger. The general discretion of the CIA regarding the locations of detention and the identities of personnel, effectively prevents enemies from learning the identity of the interrogator unless they have an inside source; the Times provides that inside source, and thus exposes the interrogator to reprisals from which he’d probably be safe otherwise. It may not be as egregious a violation as the outing of Plame would have been if the government had actually done that; but it’s the same violation.