"Cross Fire"

Robert Bartley writes at OpinionJournal today about (horrors!) the president's Christianity:

Easter Monday is an apt time to note that President George W. Bush has been taking darts as a born-again Christian. This tells us something about today's president, and something more about today's religion.

The president comes by his faith, of course, because he stopped drinking and found God at age 40. As a Methodist, he's not exactly a speaking-in-tongues Pentecostal, but he clearly does believe that good and evil walk the world. He also says things such as, "Behind all of life and all of history, there's a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God." This comes from the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, where other presidents have said similar things. But both friend and foe have the sense that Mr. Bush really means it....

Alas, he repeats the error that the pope declared the war "a crime against humanity". The pope did no such thing. Both Chris Burgwald and Bill Cork have directed us to War in the Gulf: What the Pope Really Said in the past few days. But your Humble, Faithful Blogster did so weeks ago. :)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/21/03 08:46:28 PM
Categorized as Political.

"Terror and Liberalism"

A good, old article by Paul Berman at The American Prospect, Oct. 22, 2001:

.... Some people have argued that the terrorists chose to attack the World Trade Center for a second time because the towers were a symbol of American power. Perhaps so, though it would certainly have been possible, in that case, to attack other symbols with even greater fame -- the Statue of Liberty, for instance. But how many people would have been killed at the Statue of Liberty? A mere few hundred tourists and workers. The Trade Center offered one of the greatest concentrations of ordinary people to be found anywhere in America. And in this grisly fashion, Islamist terror against the United States has ended up outdoing, in the scale of its murders, even the Palestinian terror against Israel. It is worth asking if there is anything genocidal in this kind of terrorist impulse.

Someone might reply that murdering several thousand people in the United States cannot be compared in sheer numbers to other massacres -- Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, for instance. Yet nearly everyone seems to grasp intuitively that if the anti-American terrorists were to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, they would use it at once, and may perfectly well be planning such a thing even now. The word genocidal may go too far, but there is nothing excessive in observing that, like Hitler's Nazis and other such groups, these modern movements do seem to be entranced with slaughter for slaughter's sake. Nor do their motives and personal style set them apart from totalitarians of the past. It is not any kind of material desperation that pushes these people forward. It is a species of idealism, even piety. The terrorists in the United States were men with excellent German and American educations -- flight-school alumni, no less. Their leader, assuming it is Osama bin Laden, is a multimillionaire. These are not the wretched of the earth. And so, given the strength of their beliefs, we can assume that the struggle will go on for years. Bush was right to make that point in his address to Congress. And if, in their grotesque fashion, the terrorists are idealists, what are we?

We are, to begin with, naïfs, and of the worst sort. That much is certain, given what we have discovered about our own security arrangements and intelligence. (Even now the Senate has voted up a far-fetched and wholly irrelevant missile defense, instead of, say, voting up 10,000 new security guards.) And the naïveté goes on from there. It is naïveté that has already led any number of commentators to go on a hunt for possible ways to minimize the dangers we face. There is an impulse to describe our enemy as a mere handful of people, perhaps a few dozen -- far too small a number to merit the kind of opposition that could be called a war. How reassuring that would be -- to learn that our enemy has the dimensions of a small street gang! It may even be true that, at least in regard to the attacks of September 11, only a few dozen people were involved. But that would be like saying that Pearl Harbor was attacked by merely a few hundred Japanese pilots.

Some people have emphasized that, so far as we know, not one of the national states in the Middle East or anywhere else seems to have been directly responsible for the attacks. Thus it is said that without the involvement of a national state, we cannot properly speak of something as capacious as war (as if wars can take place only between national states -- when the great majority of wars in recent years have been, in fact, civil wars, meaning, conflicts in which only one side possesses a state). This is another way of making the same minimizing point: that we are not facing any kind of substantial or well-organized enemy, even if we have suffered a disastrous blow. But we are facing a substantial and well-organized enemy. Our enemy is the combat wing of radical and Islamist movements that are genuinely enormous.....

I think it is marred, somewhat, by the infelicitous (though, strictly speaking, correct) use of the term "liberalism" to mean, roughly, democratic freedom.

(Thanks, Howard.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/21/03 12:27:18 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"Arrogant Media Blunders"

Brent Bozell's latest syndicated column:

Gulf War II will be remembered for many things, not the least of them being another American victory that left the world in awe, just as America’s commanders predicted it would. It will also be remembered as having triggered another exercise in leftwing press agitation, with media armchair generalissimos making fools of themselves with one ridiculous pronouncement after another....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 04/21/03 10:54:10 AM
Categorized as Media.