Squaring the Culture

Jonah Goldberg played the prophet yesterday, and I agree so strongly that I want to emphasize his prediction: when President Obama’s popularity falls, as is it bound to fall, his defenders will blame the fall on racism.

Polls show he’s popular now. Eighty percent of Americans — that means a lot of conservatives and Republicans — find him likeable. I’d even put myself in that camp, and I think he’s wrong about so, so, so much. When Obama’s numbers fall to Earth, it will be interesting, and entirely predictable, to hear his supporters blame it on racism of some kind or another. It’s going to be a hard argument to make, unless you believe that a large chunk of that 80% are lying racists of some kind. But it’s going to happen. Mark my words, or if you prefer, bookmark this link.

I missed this last week, but it’s too good to pass up. Morgen at Verum Serum noticed Rep Frank (D, MA) lying through his teeth on the Tavis Smiley show, claiming he’d always objected to home ownership for people who could not afford it and blaming the entire housing bubble on Republicans. Now, we’ve all seen those vids of Frank and other Democrats declaring Fannie and Freddie in fine shape, no crisis whatsoever, and so had our good Morgen, so he went out to scare up a few good examples. During the search, he obtained a clip from C-SPAN that apparently had never been aired since the speech was made; it’s not even on C-SPAN’s web site, he had to order it on DVD just to see it.

Here we see Rep. Barney Frank continuing to push for more affordable housing (which he told Smiley he’d never done), and also declaring that a bursting of the housing bubble could not possibly cause anywhere near the damage caused by the bursting of the Internet bubble, because the housing assets have so much inherent value. Watch:

Frank is not the only person who did not see the potential impact of the housing bubble collapsing. However, the list of people who did see the potential impact contains a number of people whom today, Frank is accusing of causing the crisis, including Alan Greenspan. That Frank did not see it coming undercuts his self-proclaimed expertise regarding the banking crisis. “…there is not the degree of leverage we have seen elsewhere.” Holy Down Payment, Batman, not the degree of leverage? We’re talking about zero equity loans to homeowners with credit problems! He’s not just a liar; he’s clueless.

Patterico wrote a fairly complete summary of Rep Frank’s complicity in the downfall of Fannie Mae and the collapse of the US banking industry back in March. I highly recommend it if you want the complete picture; he even deals with Frank’s alleged support of Mike Oxley’s (R, OH) toothless oversight bill.

Barney Frank is waist-deep in the financial crisis, and remains one of the single individuals most directly responsible for the crisis. Learn about him and keep your facts straight, because Frank has been selling a lie pretty much non-stop since November.

Courtesy of the National Republican Senatorial Committee:

I find the “no lobbyists” portion a trifle hard to take, not because President Obama is clean, but because simply noting that one lobbyist made it in doesn’t mean much. The more important fact is that the entire “no lobbyists” meme is thoroughgoing nonsense; a lobbyist is just a paid advocate, and anybody appointed to a government position who has advocated some political position or other is going to have the same impact as a lobbyist in the same position.

I also think that raising the AIG bonuses as a response to Obama’s claim never to bail out Wall Street again is a bit lame; it may have emblematic value in the public, but the real scandal is that Obama’s regime at several points has supported the sorts of Wall Street fat cats he claims to detest, and that he and the Democrats engage in the very same sort of nest-feathering as the folks he demonizes.

Still, this is a pretty good summary of the new President’s first 100 days. The public seems to think so, too. Notwithstanding the embarrassing “He’s So Fine” swooning of the press, Gallup’s April survey pegs President Obama’s approval rating at 56%, which is unusually low for a President after a mere 100 days in office. Of recent Presidents, only President Clinton landed lower after 100 days, and that was due to bad publicity over gays in the military and 86 civilians dying in a badly mishandled standoff with the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX. So far, polls show that people like President Obama personally but detest his policy choices, and the divergence of those two threads is going to disappear sooner or later.

I’ll let the Washington Times editorial staff finish for me:

The explanation for Mr. Obama’s low approval is that he ran as a moderate but has governed from the far left. The fawning and self-deceiving press won’t go there. On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory asked a panel about critics who “would say one of the things that he’s done in 100 days already is expand the role of government, the size of government.” Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claimed, “That’s what he ran for the presidency in the first place for.”

Perplexed about complaints over Mr. Obama’s expansion of government, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham asked: “does no one listen during campaigns?”

It was these pundits who weren’t paying attention during last year’s campaign. In all three presidential debates, Mr. Obama promised to cut government spending and reduce the size of the deficit. He blamed the economic crisis on excessive deficits. At no time did candidate Barack Obama say that more deficit-spending was the solution.

Mr. Obama’s popularity after 100 days is the second-lowest for a simple reason: He is more partisan and divisive than his predecessors – including Richard Nixon.

One Hundred Days, One Hundred Mistakes. The Official List, by Don Surber. Accept no substitutes, unless they’re funny.

(Author’s note: This is the second installment in a series discussing why Christians worship God. The first installment can be found here.)

Instructional Worship: Our Response to God as Parent

Children, when they’re born, naturally love their parents and look to them for provision, but that gets challenged. As children grow, they begin to test their independence, and they also begin to respond to their parents’ personalities, learning some ways and responding negatively to others. Life also creates opportunities along the way for children to distrust or disrespect their parents. A child falls into a swimming pool and nearly drowns, and then wonders “Why wasn’t Mommy there to stop me?” The other children treat them cruelly, and the parents don’t notice to protect them. And so forth.

Parents who take seriously the responsibility to train their children have to manage their childrens’ responses to these, so the child can continue to learn from them his or her parents well into adulthood. A child who hates or disrespects his parents cannot be taught. Parenting is the art of gradually releasing responsibility, but only when the child can handle the next level of responsibility, and if the child comes to disrespect the parent at any point along the journey, he grabs too much responsibility too soon, and can hurt himself badly. Thus, wise parents work to protect their childrens’ attitudes toward them, both by acting in a sensible manner before them at all times, and by stamping out the slightest disrespect as soon as it appears.

Some modern parents have completely lost this understanding, choosing instead to treat their children as equals over whom they have no authority, only the power to persuade. This is polite insanity. While granting that sort of latitude in some things is wise, one does not have the luxury of time to explain to a four-year-old why they should restrain their impulse to visit the bunny on the other side of the busy street; if the child hasn’t learned to respond to your voice by that time, you’re likely to lose the child. I recall watching a documentary in which the narrator recounted the experience of having his six-year-old struck by a car when he pulled free from his hand and ran out into the street. The fellow recalled how brave his son was during recovery, but I couldn’t help thinking that the man had probably failed to train his son properly, and that his failure had cost the child a great deal of pain.

Plus, it’s not good for the child to think they have some inherent right to buck their parents; such a child never learns humility, which is a necessary virtue, nor does he learn appropriate respect for law. Good parenting grants as much respect to the child as possible, but without relinquishing the right to command, which is a natural and necessary right.

The Ten Commandments, at the beginning of the Law of Moses, articulate the most basic rules for civilization, and their order is not accidental. Before the basic behavioral rules — don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t covet, don’t violate marriages or lie about your neighbor — come several relational rules that secure the citizen’s respect toward God. These first few rules establish the basis for the others; without these in place, the other commands simply would not be obeyed. Critics ignorant of the Old Testament suggest that these were created by priests to retain control for themselves, but that’s just a mindless prejudice; the commands don’t even mention the priesthood. They mention God Himself: worship God and no other entity, don’t make statues and call them “god,” don’t claim God’s authority where He has not given it, surrender your time to His control. And they mention parents: honor them.

The connection between honoring God and honoring parents is organic. The purpose of life is growth, with God as parent. Some amount of awe for God comes naturally, having been designed into ourselves and into creation, just as love and trust for the parent are designed into the parent-child relationship. However, ordinary life and growth present opportunities to learn to distrust God, just as with parents; life is difficult, and often hurts. If at any point in the process we lose respect, trust, appropriate fear, or love for God, we lose the ability to learn and grow as we ought, and then, like unruly children, we can do ourselves great damage. And these affect each other; if a person rebels against God, they tend to rebel against their parents as well, and vice versa.

For this reason, it’s necessary to command people to worship God, just as it’s necessary for a parent at times to command their children to show respect. Parents — good ones, at any rate — never insist on respect for the purpose of pleasing their egos, although it’s easy for the child who lacks perspective to think so; it’s always for the purpose of maintaining the ability to train the child. Likewise, God insists on worship, because He has to protect our ability to learn from Him.

This often becomes difficult at times of crisis. When a man has lost his wife to illness, for example, the deep grief naturally includes the question, where was God? Facing this sort of crisis requires a titanic struggle, and while God is always present through the crisis, He’s often silent, allowing people to work through their grief and come to a new understanding. This is a dangerous time in which faith can be lost; and it might be lost, if there was not a standing command to honor God, and an already-existing relationship. The conflict between grief and love for God produces tension; the tension eventually produces new growth, trust with a more mature understanding. The obligation to worship is the lynch-pin that keeps the believer tethered to his salvation when life makes little sense.

Thus worship must be commanded, in order for the believer to continue to learn from God in a difficult world. I call this “instructional worship,” and it’s the reason why worshiping God is most important specifically when we don’t feel like it. It’s not that God needs to have His ego stoked — not even good humans fall into that pit — but rather that the tension between hard life and worshiping God produces maturity.

Next: battle worship, our response to God as liberator in a world under siege.

In the world of Christian apologetics, the question “Why do Christians worship God,” comes up usually as a challenge from scornful atheists who view God as a narcissistic megalomaniac who demands attention to feed his weak ego. Of course, their idea is anthropomorphic (it assigns human characteristics to God) and therefore invalid. However, discounting the unwarranted scorn, it’s a fair question, and one that I’ve had difficulty answering in the past, other than to say “Because God says to do it.” So, I examined that part of my life a bit more carefully, and developed a more robust answer.

There are actually several reasons why we worship, all arising out of different parts of our relationship to God. Since our relationship to God changes as we mature, our reasons for worshiping change as well over time. The categories I’ve discovered are:

• Natural worship, or the natural response to God as creator;
• Instructional worship, or the required response to God as parent;
• Battle worship, or the necessary response to God as liberator;
• Intimate worship, or the voluntary response to God as intimate companion.

The first and last are natural responses of the individual, and are not commanded by God; the second and third are commanded by God, but for our benefit, not His.

Today I’m going to describe Natural Worship. I’ll follow up in the coming days with separate instalments explaining what I mean by each of the other three terms.

Natural worship: the response to God as creator

A little after 3 PM on January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549 took off from Laguardia airport in New York only to fly through a flock of geese, rendering both engines mostly inoperable. Without enough lift to stay aloft in the wake of the freak incident, pilot Chesley Sullenberger turned the plane around, determined that he would not make it back to Laguardia, and after checking unsuccessfully for alternative runways on which to land, laid the plane gently onto the Hudson River in one piece, at a point within easy reach of three major docks. Because of his level-headedness, preparation, and flying skill, 155 people were rescued unharmed who could easily have been involved in a fatal crash. The nation responded by making “Sully” a hero for a few weeks, and properly so.

Why is it, do you suppose, that we all automatically praise excellent performance, as we did Captain Sullenberger’s? This is clearly a human characteristic, not a cultural trait; every culture on the planet has some form of recognition for jobs done well, as they count jobs done well, and for the people who do them. It’s so much a part of us that we never wonder about it. Of course we praise those who do well. Doesn’t everybody? This is as natural a part of being human as are eating and sleeping.

Every one of us has experienced the same feeling while looking at a sunset, or at a vista of enormous mountains, or at a storm on the horizon over the ocean. The power of nature is awesome, and the recognition of it is a common human theme, a stock topic for poetry and song. I submit to you that this is the same impulse as the impulse to praise those who have done well; we recognize what is excellent, and we respond by first feeling, then expressing its excellence. The only question is, whom or what are we praising?

Praising nature itself is like praising a remarkable feat itself without knowing who performed it. When we see something remarkable take place, we naturally want to know who, what, and why. While the feat is remarkable, it’s the person who performed it that deserves the praise. And by the same token, Scientific Materialists speak of praising the excellence of nature as an end in itself, but the Christian does them one better; the Materialist can feel awe at the creation, but the Christian feeling the same awe knows Whom to commend. It’s great to enjoy a work of inspired engineering; how much better, to enjoy close friendship with the Engineer?

I’ve been taught at various Christian meetings that praise is commanded, with reference to the Psalms, vis: “Praise God in His sanctuary! Praise Him in the power of His creation!” (Psalm 150) I think the ministers who teach this are misreading the Psalms. This is no more a command to praise than a dinnerbell is a command to eat. This sort of praise is not commanded because it does not have to be. It’s a natural response. When one sees greatness, one praises it.

The only part of natural worship that requires anything approaching a command is the exhortation to notice. Allow me to illustrate: I find that I enjoy road trips, driving excursions that require me to drive on the interstate highways in the US, particularly on clear days when the traffic is not too heavy. I enjoy it because it’s an occasion where I get to view the horizon. During ordinary days when I’m not driving, my focus is on a computer screen, on my lawn, on cooking utensils, and so forth; it takes a special occasion, like a road trip, to force me to look at the horizon and remember the exquisite world I live in. In the same manner, the Psalmist encourages us to look up and notice; and once we notice, praise comes naturally.

It appears that this sort of praise is designed into us for the purpose of identifying and recognizing God. If that’s true, then atheists’ questions on the order of “If God exists, where is He?” are at least partially answered by nature.

We can infer from the design, from the natural impulse to praise and from the naturally-occurring objects that evoke praise, that God recognized that we humans would be plagued by what I call the “Fish Problem.” The “Fish Problem” arises when one considers how difficult it would be to explain to a fish in the ocean that there exists such a thing as an ocean. The fish has a problem understanding (suspending such obvious problems as language and intelligence, of course) not because it cannot see the ocean, but because it has never experienced anything but the ocean. There’s no background against which the ocean appears in the foreground. By the same token, humans cannot see God in our universe because there’s no part of the universe that is not an active, ongoing work of God. God is never the foreground in our universe because everywhere, God Himself is the background. The literally correct answer to “Where is God?” is “Where isn’t God?” But because we have this problem, God designed into us and into our world both the impulse to worship naturally, and the natural object of that worship; looking up, noticing, and offering praise to the creator of what we see is a natural response, as natural as eating or sleeping. So the correct answer to the atheist who asks “Where is God?” should be, “Look up and take notice,” because the atheist is someone who has somehow lost the natural ability to wonder at the immensity of nature and praise Whomever made it.

Next: Instructional worship, our response to God as parent.

UPDATE, 4/30/09: It occurred to me after publishing this that what I’m calling “natural worship” actually progresses as the Christian gains maturity. It begins by recognition of nature, but as the Christian grows, his or her awareness of God’s acts grows as well, and praise naturally follows. Thus Christians with a little more experience will find themselves praising God because, for example, a check arrived in the mail at a moment when it was particularly needed. The natural response to good fortune (”sweet!”) converts into gratitude (”Thanks, Jesus”), and with gratitude comes recognition of God’s sovereignty (”God is amazing.”) Natural worship grows in proportion the Christian’s awareness of the work of God in his or her ordinary life, and never needs to be commanded.

In a turnaround that has to have leftists around the world weeping into their Starbucks lattes, the Attorney General of Spain has decided against investigating war crimes allegations against six members of the Bush administration — for a reason people who read my comments will recognize.

In fact, I almost reported this development as an update to the War Crimes Trial for King Mohammed VI!!! post from yesterday, because reality, in this case, makes the same point that I made in the comments section following that post. It seems that prosecuting war criminals only works if you prosecute the people who actually committed the crimes.

Via Moe Lane, who scarfed it from Ed Morrissey (with my emphasis):

Spanish prosecutors will recommend against opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, the country’s attorney-general said Thursday.

Candido Conde-Pumpido said the case against the high-ranking U.S. officials — including former U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales — was without merit because the men were not present when the alleged torture took place.

“If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out,” Conde-Pumpido said in a breakfast meeting with journalists. He said a trial of the men would have turned Spain’s National Court “into a plaything” to be used for political ends.

As I explained to my friend Jim (darkhorse,) the entire topic — and I mean everything in the last eight years where the world “torture” was used — is a political game from the left. They’re using the consciences of good men against them as a weapon, a favorite tactic of World Socialists for the past 80 years. There are folks who genuinely care that torture is used around the world, and I believe that darkhorse is one of them, but these good-hearted folks are the unwitting dupes of very, very bad people, and are being used in a decades-long strategy aimed at killing American liberty by a thousand cuts.

The best way to deflect attempts at manipulation is to make sure the manipulators obtain none of their goals. To quote a very bright computer from a fascinating, old-school movie called War Games: “The only way to win is not to play.” For this reason, I firmly oppose any attempt to prosecute American officials for their conduct of the War on Terror, which is, in my mind, a model of American resolve, decency, and ingenuity.

So, it turns out that a real court in Spain noticed the same thing, and decided not to involve itself. Good for them. I would have preferred, though, along with Ed Morrissey, that they had decided not to get involved for an even better reason, namely that the conduct of American officials is no damned business of Spanish prosecutors, and that even raising the question is a serious insult to the sovereignty of the US, which declared its independence from European interests some two centuries ago.

Morrissey gets a nod from Lane regarding the invention of the term “Spainmas,” a reference to “Fitzmas,” the pre-Christmas giddiness that possessed leftists as they contemplated the coming gift of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald “frog-marching Karl Rove out of the White House in handcuffs,” a Christmas that, sadly for these demented children, never came. I’m no fan of adding “gate” to the end of every scandal, either, and “Spainmas” does not have the same ring to it as “Fitzmas,” but he’s nailed the left’s emotional state, sure enough.

President Obama apparently attempted to reproduce a scene from the movie Dave last week when he sat his cabinet down and demanded $100 million in cuts. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a little belt-tightening, but here’s an illustration that shows just how much it’s likely to help, courtesy of the Heritage Foundation. Don’t miss the dot at the top that represents Obama’s cuts.

The problem with the budget at this point is not the waste, nor the pork, but the reach of government. The budget has reached $3.6 trillion because the government under Democrats is doing things the government was never constituted to do. The fact that this violates the Constitution is beside the point; fiscal discipline requires that the government get the hell out of health care, auto manufacturing, banking, insurance, charity, and every other private enterprise it’s improperly gotten into. You have to get the fundamentals right first. Afterwards, yes, cut the pork and the waste. But first things first.

In case you haven’t seen Dave, it’s a clever little shtick from the 1990s’ spate of presidential movies about a fellow impersonating the President to hide the fact that the real President has had a stroke and is permanently incapacitated. Aside from the annoyance that the movie writers were leftists who live in an inverted reality, where all the Presidents who cheat on their wives are Republicans and all the Presidents who genuinely serve their country rather than themselves are Democrats (this is just about 180 degrees opposite the truth,) it’s genuinely entertaining and relatively harmless. In the scene I mentioned above, Dave (the ersatz President) breaks free from his handlers’ leash and manages a cabinet meeting in a mature fashion to produce enough savings to spare a bill favored by the First Lady. Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver.

Hat tip goes to Glen Reynolds at Instapundit.

King Who?

King Mohammed VI, of Morocco. Let me explain.

The blog chatter late last week came mostly from the Left, and mostly concerned the release by the Obama administration of four, previously-classified memos from Bush administration officials regarding the use of harsh interrogation techniques to question highly-placed al Qaeda detainees who might have knowledge of imminent attacks. The memos documented in some detail the specifics of the techniques that were used, most likely rendering them useless for future interrogations since America’s enemies will now be prepared for them.

It’s possible that the dollar may collapse in the wake of the current administration’s grotesque overspending; it’s also possible that the US economy could collapse. Either would probably cause the world’s economy to collapse, resulting in the loss of millions of lives worldwide due to poverty and disease. Islam as a religion perpetrates the killing of hundreds of people worldwide regularly (318 killed in Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide so far this April), and Wahabist terrorists routinely threaten mass killings around the world; they continue to hunt for weapons of mass destruction with which to perpetrate larger murders. Irrational tyrants are testing intercontinental ballistic missiles possibly carrying nuclear weapons, which they might just fire at a major city someday. If global warming alarmists are correct, the world faces ecological calamity, and if they are not correct (as current research suggests,) the world faces deliberate crippling of its economic power, which will result in vast and permanent global poverty. And if none of that is bad enough, there’s a growing disaffection among American citizens regarding whether their government is behaving according to its Constitution, and a wave of immigrants threatens to undermine the ability of border states to maintain civil services. There are real, serious threats facing the world, and the nation.

And so, surrounded by very real, very frightening threats, the hard Left in America is screaming like agitated, feces-flinging gorillas about some two dozen individuals, who helped plot major terror attacks, being deliberately slammed against a soft, flexible wall designed to make a loud noise that would startle them — after having that specific technique approved for that particular detainee by some highly-placed official, with monitoring of the detainee’s vital signs to make sure there would be no permanent damage. Or having them squat in an uncomfortable position for no more than four hours. Or making them stand undressed in a room with temperature certified to be no less than 64 degrees Fahrenheit, making them feel embarrassed. This is the defining issue of the Bush administration, to these moral and intellectual giants — whether 28 individuals were treated in this manner.

Have they gone insane?

I’m pretty sure they have, and I’m not using hyperbole. The agitation with which the hard Left regards the possible mistreatment of some two dozen anti-American terrorists in our custody over the past 8 years constitutes a moral inversion of truly astonishing proportions. I’ve read portions of the memos, including the descriptions of the techniques. Americans are pussycats. The first, general definition of “torture” mentioned in the memos rests on the phrase, “acts that shock the conscience.” The only thing about the techniques in these memos that shocks my conscience is how much effort the Bush administration spent evaluating whether it was proper to do these things, and when, and under what circumstances. It’s shockingly decent. It’s virtue in unheard-of proportions. Can you imagine any other government of any nation anywhere in the world, at any time in human history, writing hundreds of thousands of words, spending hundreds of hours evaluating laws, investing thousands of hours of psychologists’, doctors’, and engineers’ time designing techniques that would not hurt anybody, but would achieve the desired result of making them tell us what they knew of plans to harm us? What sort of people fret over when and whether it’s permissible for a questioner to slam one of their sworn enemies against a wall — a fake wall, carefully engineered to prevent him from bumping his head — to thwart a deadly calamity like the WTC attack? The Bush administration was careful in a manner practically unheard of in human history.

After reading these memos, I am deeply, deeply proud of my country, and of my government. These are good men who did the right thing with a very difficult problem. There is still much good in America.

There is simply no rational explanation for the level of anger on the political Left regarding this topic. The only plausible explanation is irrational hatred gone out of control; they wanted so badly for so long to find something, anything, with which to justify their inner, uncontrollable hatred for this one man, President George W. Bush, that they are now pretending that something unusually decent is something unusually indecent — in a world filled with real indecency. The people who engaged in this charade, and who continue to engage in it, need help. They’re simply and completely insane; and because their insanity is pushing them, by the thousands, toward insisting on world-approved war crimes prosecution for some of the most morally sound leaders in human history, they’re extremely dangerous.

So, what’s all this got to do with King Mohammed VI of Morocco?

Well, one of the more alarming incidents that people point to who want to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes is the case of one Binyam Mohamed, whose case is currently being heard in British courts. When people I know were challenged to produce evidence of torture, it was Binyam Mohamed’s case to which they pointed. Mr. Mohamed was detained in Pakistan while boarding a flight to the UK bearing a legal passport belonging to somebody else, but with his own picture inserted over the photo. He’d been weapons-trained by al Qaeda operatives at a camp in Afghanistan, and is alleged to have been involved in a “dirty bomb” plot. Mr. Mohamed testifies that he was questioned improperly in Pakistan by MI5 operatives, then rendered by the CIA to Morocco, then to Afghanistan, and finally to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, courtesy of the US government. And while imprisoned in Morocco, testifies Binyam Mohamed, he had his penis sliced with a scalpel 30 times.

Now, let’s ignore for the sake of argument the fact that we have in writing instructions given to al Qaeda members training them to make horrific claims of torture if they’re captured and held, for the sake of propaganda. And let’s ignore for the sake of argument that the British court has not even evaluated the evidence supporting this man’s claim yet, they’ve simply ruled on whether certain evidence is going to be allowed. And let’s ignore for the sake of argument the fact that there’s no public evidence supporting the claim that this man’s manly bits have been damaged, or that if they were, they were damaged where and by whom he’s accusing. And let’s ignore for the sake of argument the fact that the man has no legally supportable reason to infer that any of this has the slightest to do with the US. Let’s ignore all that, and assume he’s telling the truth (and let me be plain, I don’t think any rational person should believe that for a millisecond.)

It was in the Moroccan prison that the penis slicing allegedly occurred. If the most outlandish claims of the Leftist Torture Poo Flingers are correct, the CIA deliberately transferred this poor, innocent British subject to Morocco specifically for the purpose of letting the Moroccans do what Moroccan torturers do. This means that it’s known that in Morocco, you get tortured in prison. This would also be true of other, barbaric places to which the CIA deliberately transferred prisoners.

So, there are prisons all over the world where the keepers engage in acts like slicing prisoners’ penises with scalpels, and everybody seems to know it.

And for this reason, the Poo Flinging Geniuses want to prosecute… drum roll, please… George W. Bush.

Will somebody please explain to me why these Protectors of the World’s Conscience are not calling for the war crimes prosecution of the King of Morocco, under whose inspiring leadership prisons have been constructed in which Bad Cops around the world can count on prisoners having their favored bits sliced thin? Or for the prosecution of Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, under whose leadership Binyam Mohamed was mistreated? Or for the prosecution of Pervez Musharraf, the Prime Minister in Pakistan under whose leadership Mohamed had interrogators play Russian roulette with him, claiming out loud “the Americans told us to treat you this way,” and then had them turn him over to the CIA? (The assertion about the Americans is particularly hilarious. Seriously — can you imagine an interrogator informing his subject who told him what to do? or a subject believing it even they did? or one remembering that specific detail? Binyam’s claim about this was alleged by the raving communist loons at theworldcantwait.net, who you can read about at discoverthenetworks.)

My conscience is shocked by penis-slicing prison keepers. That’s repulsive. And yes, there are plenty of places in the world where humans do such shocking things to other humans. I have no argument whatsoever with people who genuinely, in good conscience, want to go to places where people are treated in this manner and convince them not to do it. If I believed that the American left genuinely had the eradication of world mistreatment of prisoners in mind with their activism, I would at least applaud that concern; and if I thought they had a legitimate means of making it happen, I’d probably support them, both financially and verbally. Furthermore, if it were the case that the US had willfully sent prisoners to Morocco for the express purpose of being tortured, I’d favor the prosecution of those who sent them — as accessories to the actual crimes committed by the Moroccans, and after the Moroccans had been duly prosecuted and convicted. And if it were the case that the US had sent prisoners to Morocco for sound reasons but discovered after the fact that they’d been tortured, I’d argue against sending any more prisoners to Morocco — and call for the prosecution of the Moroccan jailers.

The fact that they’re going absolutely berserk over this topic here in America, and using it to insist on the prosecution of George W. Bush, proves beyond even unreasonable doubt, let alone reasonable doubt, that their goal in all this has Abso.Bloody.Lutely nothing to do with concern over torture, and everything to do with irrational hatred of George W. Bush. Real torture regimes have existed all along, and not anywhere controlled by the US. These activists should be calling for King Mohammed’s head, not George Bush’s. They’re not, ergo torture is not their concern. QED.

It’s really fairly simple, and it’s been clear for at least 40 years. The one government that stands in the path of World Socialism is the United States government, and really, it only does so when it’s in the hands of Republicans. For this reason, socialists worldwide have been systematically, consistently attempting to demonize American government, and especially Republican American government, in any way possible for most of our lifetimes. The agitation over “torture” (which is, truly, anything but torture) is part and parcel of that effort, and to the extent that any citizen in the United States has participated in the agitation, they are either dupes of World Socialists, or partners with them. The Democratic party of the United States as a whole has absorbed more of the assumptions of World Socialism than most Democrats realize, and for that reason most American Democrats cooperate unconsciously with World Socialism, but that’s what this is about. Otherwise, we’d be banging the drum for sanctioning of Morocco, Pakistan, and Afghanistan at the UN, not banging the drum for lynching George W. Bush and John Yoo. Who the hell is John Yoo, anyhow?

We cannot allow the legacy of Bush Derangement to simply slide unremarked into the past. This is the era during which political partisanship took on horrific and dangerous proportions in America. Seemingly ordinary folks became obsessed and enraged with irrational hatred, and used that hatred to tear the nation to pieces. This is beyond ordinary, allowable disagreement. They’re calling for war crimes trials, not just for the Innocent, but for the Good. To continue to pretend that what separates us in the American body politic is simply disagreement between ordinary citizens of equivalent good will is delusional. We need to recognize the level of insanity, and we need to protect ourselves, and it cannot be done within the existing American republic. They’ve gone nuts over there on the left, and they’re going to harm us with it.

By now you’ve probably heard about the Department of Homeland Security report that Ed Morrissey calls “execrable” and Michelle Malkin calls “a hit job on conservatives.” Dated April 7, 2009, as far as I can tell it was first front-paged by Roger Hedgecock, who provides a link to the .pdf file on his site.

Basically, this report is government-speak alerting law enforcement officers to keep their eyes peeled for right-wingers using fears of the economic downturn, restrictions on weapons ownership, concerns about illegal immigration, and other measures of the Obama administration as tools to recruit to their “extremist” organizations. It does not say that these groups actually plan violent acts — in fact, it’s got virtually no specifics at all, other than the details of the issues they’re concerned about — but it says they might be recruiting based on these issues.

The problem, of course, is that the only specifics in the report detail issues advocacy that pretty much describes the concerns of the mainstream right. In other words, the Obama administration’s DHS is warning law enforcement officers to keep a suspicious eye on all conservatives, lest they turn violent. The report makes no distinction between “extremists” and ordinary conservatives, so if law enforcement officers take it seriously, they’re basically going to be keeping their eyes on about half the country. This is a first in American law enforcement to my knowledge, although I imagine some intrepid history major can whip out some of Lincoln’s measures against copperheads during the Civil War as a counter-example. Be that as it may, it’s chilling.

At the near extreme, this report might be nothing more than the opinion of a paranoiac leftist at DHS thinking out loud that the militias are likely to use current turmoil as a recruiting vehicle. If it’s that, the only problem is that the wording is so unspecific that they’ve taken the entire political right in a net that was aimed at catching hard-right militia. They could solve the entire furor by retracting the report and re-releasing it with tighter wording, including a definition of “extremist” that excludes ordinary Republican and Libertarian issue voters. Let’s hope they do that.

At the far extreme, however, a government that plans to institute restrictive and anti-libertarian measures in the near future might issue a report like this in advance to categorize as “extreme” the expected outrage of ordinary citizens against the loss of their liberties.

And let’s be candid, here: if the Obama administration does intend to remove Constitutionally-protected liberties and criminalize their political opposition, in a style reminiscent of the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Maoists in China, then they are correct in warning against violence from opponents. That will happen; they can count on it. The Tea Party gatherings all over America today signal the administration that some citizens who have never engaged in activism will rise up as activists if his measures go too far. I’ve written before on this blog that certain intentions of the hard left could at the extreme lead to civil war in the United States.

My research regarding Barack Obama’s upbringing and personal history suggest at least some possibility that he’s executing long-established plans to overthrow the US Constitution and replace it with something more like the Communist Manifesto. Short of that, though, there’s also the possibility that he’s just an addled leftist who genuinely believes that conservative ideas are evil and should be criminalized. In practice, there’s no difference between those two positions; both lead to the same, tyrannical, one-party government that suppresses opponents. And both can, will, and by proper moral concern for the rights of humanity must be opposed with force should some tyrant attempt to impose such a government on a free citizenry.

So, which is it? Sloppily-worded government-speak, or preparation for a legitimate uprising by ordinary citizens?

Recent comments about my post regarding the UK blogger who called President Obama a “surrender monkey” and “President Pantywaist” raised the objection that I was engaging in unpatriotic behavior by approving such talk. In a “tu quoque” fallacy consistent with the favorite tactics of the left, this commenter, a friend of mine who loves to play Devil’s Advocate, recalled the public agitation over the behavior of one Natalie Maines.

For those reading who don’t remember, Natalie Maines is the singer for the Dixie Chicks who expressed disgust before a British audience back in 2003 over the Iraq war, and shame that she came from the same state as President Bush. My friend correctly recalled that conservatives expressed a lot of outrage about her saying that. Of course, this has nothing to do with my approving a British journalist’s derisive opinion. The complaint about Maines back then was that it was bad form for an American to be criticizing America overseas. The journalist I quoted over the weekend was an Englishman criticizing an American President in England, which is not just his right, it’s his job. I’m an American critizing America in America, which is likewise my job. Neither of us are doing what Maines did.

Beyond that, though, Maines was crossing a very different frontier by trying to turn a country music show into a political statement. This is one of the truly obnoxious characteristics of leftists: they deliberately make every act of theirs political, from drinking coffee to singing love songs to driving the right car, and they expect everybody to go along with them. Most people really would prefer to enjoy their music, their coffee, their cars, etc. without thinking about politics, but leftists won’t let them. They think they know better. To them, everything is political, and if you don’t like it, tough. They’re, like, the Worst Church Ladies Ever.

This is what Maines was doing. She expressed a political opinion at a concert, assuming everyone within hearing agreed with her. The problem was, a large number of her listeners back home a) heard when she didn’t intend them to, b) felt very, very differently about the matter than she, and c) were sick of having leftist politics rubbed in their faces inappropriately. Some of them felt so strongly about it that they chose not to buy her music anymore. Natalie Maines works in a public but normally apolitical business, a business where the opinions of consumers make a difference (in which business do they not?) She discovered something she should have anticipated, namely that in her business, if you throw your politics into your audience’s faces, they might just respond by bringing their politics to the music store.

My friend was offended that conservatives attempted to ruin Ms. Maines’ career, but what I’m wondering is, why is his ire directed at conservatives? If it’s acceptable to turn a concert into a political statement, isn’t it similarly acceptable to turn the purchase of CDs and tickets to concerts into political statements? Conservatives didn’t start this; Ms. Maines did. If Ms. Maines truly does not want her fans to bring politics into their purchases, perhaps she should refrain from shoving her politics into their faces at her concerts. The truth is, nobody ruined Natalie Maines’ career except Natalie Maines.

What leftists do is the rudest sort of proselytizing. Proselytizing is the religious act of making converts. The friend who brought this up is a Christian who engages in “lifestyle evangelism,” which is a reaction to the confrontational proselytizing tactics that were successful for evangelists like Charles Finney around the turn of the 20th century, and were used by Evangelicals until near the end of the century. Modern Evangelicals think that the confrontational approach was rude and invasive, and favor a more organic approach that requires little confrontation (and which, by contrast, doesn’t seem to work very well.)

The comparison is worth considering: if it’s rude for Christians to shove Christ in peoples’ faces in public at every turn, why is it not similarly rude for leftists to shove leftist politics in their faces at every turn? And we might further notice something that follows plausibly from that observation: if leftist politics are being touted like a religion, perhaps they are religion. Perhaps Christians should reconsider when they feel inclined to participate with the leftists, lest they enlist themselves in proselytizing for a foreign god. Perhaps the objection to proselytizing was not really about it being rude in the first place; perhaps it was always about Christianity being the wrong religion. Perhaps Christians need to tell the leftists where to get off with their false religion, and return to publicly and loudly declaring the true one. After all, the approach seems to be working well enough for the leftists.

Questions of making converts aside, whoever brings politics into their art has no ground from which to object if patrons remove their patronage on political grounds. None of this, however, has any bearing on how we comment on the opinions of foreign correspondents. They’re entitled to their opinons, and we’re entitled to agree.