Some hard truths

Fellow conservative blogger Donald Douglas has an interesting post up that cites Robert Bork's recent book entitled: A Time To Speak:Selected Writings and Arguments. Many of you will remember Bork as having been an unfair victim of left-wing demagoguery during his 1987 Senate confirmation hearings after Ronald Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court. Though beaten in that instance, Bork has been unbowed in using his prodigious intellectual talents to influence the national debate via his writings over the past 20 years. As Douglas recounts, Bork wrote back in 1995 with uncanny prescience in his essay Hard Truths About the Culture War that we face a real and growing threat from liberalism that is destroying our culture: Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers, they win more than their share and move the culture always in one direction ....

What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s - the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than ever before.

In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex ...

As Douglas also notes, the "splintered" left-wing groups that Bork described in 1995 look a lot like the various liberal organizations that have now organized to make change within the Obama Administration.

An excellent example of this can be found in Ben Smith's recent article at Politico.com entitled: Unity '09 -- Dem Groups Quietly Align:

A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, "Unity '09," aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.

Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity '09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.

The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity '09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.

The obvious point to be made here is that the most radical of left-wing interest groups are organizing to have a major impact on public policy in the Obama White House. What follows logically from this is a pro-choice, pro-illegal immigration, pro-tort/pro-defendant and pro-union orientation that will systematically weaken the foundation of our nation and our economy. Just today, for example, it was revealed that estimates for Obama's "Cap and Trade" environmental protection regime will cost the economy well over $1 trillion over the next several years -- a huge tax on business in the name of satisfying the global warming alarmists who seek curbs on carbon at any cost.

With the Obama presidency we have opened the West Wing to the worst kind of single-minded interest groups -- for whom the word "compromise" and "in the national interest" have absolutely no meaning. There is no quid-pro-quo among the true believers, who have organized their lives around unyielding belief in the importance of a single issue -- be it abortion, immigration, torture, civil liberties or the environment.  For these disciples, there is no second place  -- total victory is the only option.  And for those of us who believe in open, honest debate, this is a hard truth, indeed.

The Obama Bowl

What exactly is the connection between NBC and President Obama?  Is it simply a case of mutual love and abiding devotion?  The Super Bowl coverage by NBC looked as much like a post-inauguration celebration as it did a football game.  The Obama interview aired right before the game was a first in Super Bowl history if my recollections are intact, and it was an effective way to get in America's face and remind us that as much as we love our Super Bowl's, we need to be gently prompted to love our new president with equal passion and enthusiasm.  As President Obama tossed out a big howdy to troops in Iraq, I wonder how many of them will actually not be home next year to watch the Super Bowl, but will be reassigned to Afghanistan instead.  The pronouncement was good PR, even if it ends up not being quite correct.  The Super Bowl is a day of hero worship; incredible focus and agility of quarterbacks, amazing speed and fancy footwork of running backs, bone-cracking strength of linemen, and of course, greatness in leadership of presidents.  NBC did their best to create a seamless link between athletic prowess and political greatness.

VISIO television even paid big money for an ad within which they gave the prez a favorable nod on his stimulus package.  The sitcom, The Office, which aired right after the game gave a cozy familiarity to its relationship with the president by calling him "Barack".   The musical entertainers were all avid Obama campaign supporters.

When the owner of the Steelers thanked the president for his years of support of the team, the message was sent, "If you are a Steelers fan, you automatically support Obama." 

There were lots of free endorsements intertwined with an event that is typically non-partisan.  During the previous eight years Super Bowl Sunday was not a day-long love fest with the sitting president.  It was clear yesterday that to be a Super Bowl fan, it was hip to be an Obama fan. 

I think most Americans HOPED yesterday would be a day to relax with family and friends, indulge in favorite food and drink and prepare to be entertained by some smash-mouth football.  Super Bowl is our holiday.  We wanted a day off from the typical media blitz of doom and gloom and the onslaught of propaganda of how much we need the government to soothe our wounds.  We got our money's worth out of the game, for sure.  Both the Steelers and the Cardinals put on quite a performance.  Most of us were not expecting NBC's overt agenda, steering us into the belief that whenever the country is having fun and engaging in an enjoyable activity, we should be ever mindful of our president.  Looks like CHANGE has taken over the Super Bowl, too.

Here's hoping we survive Obama

When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, I could see nothing to cheer about. A friend calmly assured me that "The Republic will survive." He was right, but only because enough Americans concluded that Clinton must be opposed. We now face the same challenge with the ascension (if that is the right word) of Barack Obama as the 44^th person to hold the nation’s highest office. In plain words, what made the Clinton Administration endurable was the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, which gave substance to vague talk of fiscal responsibility and even gave us the greatest reform of the welfare system in our history.

Naturally enough, the media are full of sophomoric enthusiasm for the new president, but this is hardly surprising, given the fact that 90 percent of the national media are Democrats. Under the circumstances, Republican criticism is muted, one hopes only until the first Obama policy proposals are put forward in Congress or implemented by executive order.

For make no mistake, this administration will constitute a comprehensive assault on the "flawed" regime which Obama wishes to "transform" into the perfect polity wherein, as he said in front of the Lincoln Memorial Sunday, "anything is possible." The idea that there are limits to what can be accomplished by political action has never occurred to the man raised in the soiled world of Chicago politics.

Our constitutional republic will be subjected to what a close friend has called "the death of a thousand cuts." Because Obama’s liberalism is not endorsed by a majority of Americans, because many voted for him because they were so angry at George Bush, and because his cabinet choices are reassuringly "moderate," i.e., Clinton Administration retreads, public attention is deflected from the seemingly vacuous but actually pernicious utopian rhetoric of the political campaign.

Obama knows how to make the right music that appeals to the hopes of his fellow citizens, but only those who can read music, as it were, can know with precision what the melody is. Lots of rock ‘n roll, country and soul music was played in the joyful celebrations that marked the Inauguration, but perhaps the real strain is Wagnerian tragic opera.

It is hardly a secret that Obama is the most vociferously pro-abortion president ever. For those who think Evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics and Mormons–and anyone else who takes seriously the principle that all men are created equal–can safely be ignored as fringe elements, it is almost rude to point out that they understand that our rights are in peril.

More unborn babies are going to die each year during the next four, perhaps eight, than in the history of the country. Obama has pledged to sign a vile piece of legislation dishonestly labeled the "Freedom of Choice Act," which would effectively remove every federal and state limit on the judicially imposed "right" to kill unborn babies.

That is not all. Obama will reverse Ronald Reagan’s policy which forbids funding for abortion overseas, and he will overturn George Bush’s ban on embryonic stem cell "research" that entails the destruction of human embryos. As Abraham Lincoln said about slavery, we must daily "crucify our feelings" about baby killing because it is permitted by law and even hallowed by an alleged constitutional interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The greatest aspect of the current euphoria over Obama arises from his being the first American of any degree of African descent to be elected President. Many words have been written about how this will give peace to our nation in that no legal or other barriers prevented it. All of that is true as far as it goes, but there is no assurance whatever that racial peace will occur.

The Democratic Party has for more than 40 years been the advocate of reverse discrimination, known variously as "affirmative action," "diversity in hiring," remediation of past wrongs, and so on. Even if Obama wanted to end the "temporary" policy purported to be necessary to overcome many years of racial injustice, Congressional Democrats would not hear of it. There are too many people, especially well-connected people, who benefit from the liberal racial plantation for there to be any motivation to close it down.

Our commerce, so damaged by government manipulation of credit and currency, will hardly recover from Obama’s policies of even greater doses of interventionism that brought on the sickness in the first place. There is insufficient space here to discuss the perilous times ahead in the international arena, but for now "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Captives of the media?

(Denver Post, Jan. 18) You, a captive of the media? No way. Nobody mediates for you. You think independently. You gather your own information and decide for yourself. Me too. We don’t need no media mediating for us, no sir. Yeah, right. In our dreams, maybe, but not in America today. The world is so interconnected, changes so fast, and presents each person with so many choices, that reliance on others for much of our knowledge is inescapable. But which media can we trust, and how do we keep them at our service – on tap, not on top? Especially if newspapers as we have known them are on the way out, how can we stay reliably informed as free citizens in a free society? That’s the underlying concern as Coloradans wonder about the fate of the Rocky Mountain News, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and maybe even the Denver Post.

I love newspapers. They’ll always be my preferred window on our civic and cultural life. Online and broadcast media rank a distant second. I hope enough American papers manage to reinvent themselves for the digital era so that print journalism can long continue. Since you’re reading this, you probably agree.

Yet trouble and transformation are stalking the media industry regardless. News providers face brutal pressures to adapt. For us as news users, this is a good time to think about the fundamental question we began with: Who mediates for you? Or as the counter-culture used to say, what do you feed your head?

The media seldom challenge us on this. They have a commercial motive not to. Challenging myself, I find I’m often careless as to both the quality and quantity of what gets fed into my head. New technologies and rebranding by the providers are beside the point. The problem is my passivity about the content they deliver.

A medium is a just a conveyor belt. At one end is a loadmaster, the editor. According to what’s on his clipboard, the belt gets loaded with news from reporters, opinions from pundits, and ads from businesses. It’s all conveniently brought to our homes. That convenience can be a trap, however. We may become too accepting.

“Couldn’t drink coffee without the morning paper,” worried someone at our Vanguard discussion club when the industry’s woes were this month’s topic. “We are Colorado,” says a Denver Post promo campaign. Media companies, this paper included, become part of our lives. They’re still only companies, means to an end. The end is knowing what we need to know to live together responsibly and happily.

Running the conveyor costs money. Persuading us to buy things, either subscriptions or advertised goods and services, is life and death to the company. Print is in trouble because more and more people are buying elsewhere. How concerning is that?

After all, as the Post’s Dean Singleton told fellow publishers in a speech last June, “Newspapers are the cornerstone of democracies everywhere…. If we fail, democracy fails.” Thomas Jefferson said two centuries ago that he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than vice versa. So are bankrupt papers a national crisis?

No. Both men’s points go to freedom of the press via whatever medium works best. They aren’t limited to ink on pulp. In America, thanks to the First Amendment, it’s the marketplace and not government that picks media winners and losers. You and I as consumers, voting with dollars, make that sovereign choice.

Again, as I’ve written before, it’s up to us. Insisting on liberty, WE can make our country’s broadcasting and Internet as free as print has always been. Exercising personal responsibility, WE can choose a healthier information diet, more fiber, less junk. Conveyors inevitably come and go, but independent thinking remains.

The church of climatology

One of the things that has always confounded me about many liberals is their arrogance. They are so darn certain they are right that they are unable to entertain any divergent views. Ever try and have a truly rational discussion with a liberal on race? On abortion? How about the war in Iraq? Or Guantanamo Bay? As they say on the Sopranos: Fuggedaboutit.

There are no areas of compromise on what I call the signal issues of the left. And even worse, if you dare to think differently, you are immediately attacked as a racist, a sexist, a fascist or just plain stupid. Using such personal attacks with such highly inflammatory labels has the effect of putting those with opposing views on the defensive, and distracting the discussion from the issue at hand. It is a very common -- and very effective -- way for the left to quell honest debate on many of the most important issues of the day. It's disingenuous. And it works.

Climate change is a perfect example of this. Bill McKibben at the left-leaning Foreign Policy magazine has a fantastically irresponsible piece on global warming where he claims without qualification that global warming is an irrefutable fact and that it might already be too late to save the planet. The science is apparently settled:

Every national academy of science, long lists of Nobel laureates, and in recent years even the science advisors of President George W. Bush have agreed that we are heating the planet. Indeed, there is a more thorough scientific process here than on almost any other issue: Two decades ago, the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and charged its scientists with synthesizing the peer-reviewed science and developing broad-based conclusions. The reports have found since 1995 that warming is dangerous and caused by humans. The panel’s most recent report, in November 2007, found it is “very likely” (defined as more than 90 percent certain, or about as certain as science gets) that heat-trapping emissions from human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century.

According to McKibben, the IPCC (a UN sponsored body that is rife with political considerations) has decided that humans are warming the planet -- and so it must be true. He speaks as if the science of geologic activities on the earth -- a planet billions of years old -- is settled fact because a group of scientists have been studying the issue for twenty years or so. That he speaks with such certainty of the science behind temperature change within earth's complex ecosystem is the height of arrogance. How do we know that this isn't normal change in the ebb and flow of the earth's climate process? Doesn't anyone recall that the earth was once covered in ice? And that the onslaught of the ice age happened so quickly that it wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the planet?

McKibben has no such questions, however. His article also includes a strange defense of China as a main culprit of the carbon dioxide that he blames for heating up the earth -- and herein lies a clue as to his political motivations. McKibben argues that while it is true that China has overtaken the U.S. as the main producer of carbon emissions, the only fair way to view the issue is on a per capita basis: because China has four times the population of the U.S., China is not as bad a carbon scofflaw as America is:

And by that standard, each Chinese person now emits just over a quarter of the carbon dioxide that each American does. Not only that, but carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for more than a century. China has been at it in a big way less than 20 years, so it will be many, many years before the Chinese are as responsible for global warming as Americans.

Starting to see the picture? China produces more carbon emissions that the U.S., but we are the bigger sinners, since they are new to the game and we've been doing it for years. And, if that isn't bad enough, McKibben actually gives credit to the Chinese political leadership for doing more about global warming than we are:

What’s more, unlike many of their counterparts in the United States, Chinese officials have begun a concerted effort to reduce emissions in the midst of their country’s staggering growth. China now leads the world in the deployment of renewable energy, and there’s barely a car made in the United States that can meet China’s much tougher fuel-economy standards.

Maybe McKibben hasn't been paying attention to the air quality issues athletes faced at the Beijing Olympics, or the tremendous air quality problems throughout China that have created serious health issues. China has one of the worst environmental records in history, and their rapid industrialization has been virtually without restraint.

But none of this matters when you worship at the Church of Climatology, where faith trumps fact every time. It is more important to punish the culture of consumption in the United States and place the blame on Americans who drive SUV's and other cars that the left finds to be a sin against their belief that everyone should ride a bike to work. We are the original sinners, after all; we are the true crucible of industry. It is because of America that the automobile is so ubiquitous in our world.

So according to McKibben we must repent and change our deadly ways. And even then, it may be too late:

The only question now is whether we’re going to hold off catastrophe. It won’t be easy, because the scientific consensus calls for roughly 5 degrees more warming this century unless we do just about everything right. And if our behavior up until now is any indication, we won’t.

And the left always says that conservatives practice scare tactics!

Now, I'm not a scientist and I don't pretend to play on on the Internet. But I've done a little bit of research, and the science of climate change is not settled. Take a quick look at the informative article, for example, at the aptly named JunkScience.com, which takes you through the science of greenhouse gasses and global warming. The most interesting section is the following:

Who says it (the earth) is warming catastrophically?

Humans have only been trying to measure the temperature fairly consistently since about 1880, during which time we think the world may have warmed by about +0.6 °C ± 0.2 °C. As we've already pointed out, the estimate of warming is less than the error margin on our ability to take the Earth's temperature, generally given as 14 °C ± 0.7 °C for the average 1961-1990 while the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) suggest 13.9 °C for their average 1880-2004

We are pretty sure it was cold before the 1880 commencement of record and we would probably not handle the situation too well if such conditions returned but there has been no demonstrable catastrophic warming while people have been trying to measure the planet's temperature.

If we have really been measuring a warming episode as we think we have, then setting new records for "hottest ever in recorded history" should happen just about every year -- although half a degree over a century is hardly something to write home about -- so there's really nothing exciting about scoring the highest number when looking at such a short history.

The JunkScience.com article has lots of interesting graphs -- perhaps the most interesting is the one which shows the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. For a full resolution image of the graph, click here.  This graph shows a slight uptick in temperature (to the tune of .5 degree centigrade over 120 years), but you see a much larger increase in carbon dioxide over the same period. Doesn't look like a clear causal relationship between the two to me -- and this is the primary foundation for both McKibben's article in Foreign Policy and almost all climate change policy.

The point here is not that the earth isn't warming -- clearly, it is to a small degree. Rather, the issue is how much and why: the left wants us to believe that the science is clear that we are to blame, and that the impact of this change will be catastrophic. These scare tactics are designed to quell open debate about climate change, and to make it impossible to discuss alternative explanations (or solutions) to the problem.

Most religions are organized around fear to a certain degree, and the Church of Climatology is no different. It's a powerful motivator for change. In this case, that change is to remake the world in a more progressive fashion -- wind, solar, electric cars, etc. The only way to get to this in a rapid fashion is to galvanize people through tales of Armageddon. How much are you willing to spend to save the earth from certain destruction? To the green movement's lasting delight the answer is plenty. And with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in charge, you can bet that the money will be flowing for the foreseeable future.