Polls

Great Ace of Spades post on the flawed dynamics of polling.

excerpt:

We already know that these polls skew Democratic. They overstate Democratic support by five, six, seven, sometimes even ten raw points above Democrats' actual representation in the polling booths.

Why? Well, Dean Barnett says that liberals want to share their opinions, while conservatives have lives. That's, of course, a deliberately tendentious way to put it, but the fact of the matter is that poll respondants do tend to be those with an inordinate number of free time on their hands. The jobless, the inactive fraction of the elderly.

As well as those who are just all fired up to talk some politics to a stranger.

Who are these people all fired up to talk politics to a stranger? Perhaps this must-read New York Times article from a week or two ago yields a clue. Called "The Elephant In The Room," it notes the fact that friendships and coworker relationships are more and more strained over political differences.

While the New York Times strains to find Democrats who don't feel comfortable discussing politics with their conservative friends, most of the anecdotes are about "closet Republicans," Republicans who attempt to avoid political discussions and even lie about their beliefs due to the fear of ostracism by their eagerly-to-mock-Bush liberal friends.

I don't know if this is a nationwide phenomenon; I don't want to apply a Blue State bias to this. For all I know, the situation is reversed in more conservative parts of the country, with conservatives acting as the bullying smack-talkers and liberals hiding their views. But in the Northeast, I know for a fact it's common for Republicans to obfuscate their politics or even outright lie about them. Or, at least, attempt to deflect and avoid the topic entirely. And that it's the liberals who are always gung-ho to get into it.

After all, they've finally found one of those strange creatures called "conservatives" they've heard so much about. How can they pass on chance to interrogate this bizarre thing's alien mindset, and find the answer to the question that burns within them -- "What the Hell is wrong with you??!!"

Even if this situation were reversed in the South and heartland or mountain states, this effect would still cause a big skew in polling -- because it's not the South or heartland or mountain states where Republicans are in trouble. Almost exclusively, incumbent Republican congressmen are threatened in the Northeast and Midwest, from Yankee Connecticut through the farm and factory belt from Pennsylvania to Michigan. All blue, or at least blue-purple, areas.

I also wonder if conservatives are less willing to answer because of the economics of the situation After all, in answering these polls, you're providing a valuable service, gratis, to companies that are not, in fact, charities. They couldn't exist without the public being willing to give them the polling information they need, and yet do not pay for. "Jerry" from ARG doesn't come down to your place of employment and help you out for a half an hour with your job; why return the favor, then, for Jerry? If he wants to come down to your office, maybe you'd be more willing to talk politics while you both sort out your inventory figures.

A final bias may be due to the sorts of people asking the question. The 2004 election polls were skewed, most likely, because most exit pollsters were young college-age women. Now, you'd have to be pretty dumb not to know this is a demographic that skews left. And most people are nonconfrontational -- they'd rather not share their conservative opinions with someone they're pretty sure is very liberal. So again-- they self-select, or self-de-select. If polling questioners are largely women, or largely college-aged, or disproportionately minority, etc., people are just going to be less likely to say they're Republican (also known as "The Party Workin' Hard To Keep You Down.")

Yeah, it's pretty funny when you think about it. Youthful political volunteers with clipboards are generally to the left of Noam Chomsky, and regard Republicans with hatred and contempt. They are also dripping with youthful self-righteousness. Of course Republicans voters would enjoy shooting the breeze with them!

2004 Is Ancient History, Before YouTube.

Austin Bay has a wide-ranging bravura post, which examines many aspects of the Kerry faux pas. One of the things he points out is that Kerry didn't skate this time as he did in 2004, since we've become a YouTube nation.

excperpt:

Hitchens kicks Kerry in today’s Wall St Journal. The kicks are hard (it’s Hitchens) but given we’re dealing with thirty-five years of condescension, slander, and insult, I’d have liked to see two or three more paragraphs of Hitch using a steel-toe. Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” insult is uniquely trans-generational. It immediately connects with his 1971 “Winter Soldier” slanders where he asserted American troops were committing war crimes through out Vietnam, crimes on par with those of “Jing-gis Khan.” The anti-Vietnam War movement shaped Kerry politically and that decayed fossil still propels him– an ancient addiction he and his cohorts can’t shake. Simultaneously stuck in the past and stuck on stupid, the Junior Senator from Massachusetts has now insulted three generations of American troops.

Hitchens wonders if the US military is the new third rail of American politics. Interesting thought, but I think not. (Social Security still rates as the third rail, though as Boomers age perhaps its amps and volts are diminishing.) Here’s the real deal: Service men and women simply won’t accept insults about them and their service. In the 1970s they didn’t have the Internet or talk radio to counter-attack the boys and girls in New Mobe and network producers addicted to images of panhamdling, socio-pathic Vietnam vets. The troops now have the technology. This past week individual American citizens in uniform met Kerry’s insults with politically appropriate ripostes. That’s what nailed Kerry –individual ripostes from serving men and women and vets– not Geore W. Bush’s stump speech or Tony Snow’s press conference responses.

John Kerry’s simply not ready for the YouTube world.

Follow his career, such as it is. Kerry’s made it to the lofty perch of Senator from Massachusetts by:

(1) planning a political career from the age of 15 (if not age 11)

(2) riding the coattails of the Kennedy political machine (ie, brown-nosing and carrying water for the clan)

(3) marrying rich women

This nifty route to power works for a mediocre, arrogant politico in a world where the friendly political machine and a friendly media mask his foibles, incompetencies, and inadequacies.

The friendly machine and media also blunt criticism. The arrogant mediocrity (backed by clan and family cash) can float along within a machine and media bubble, slowly rising from preening young poseur to Beltway Clerk to Senator.

The Internet and talk radio have burst that bubble. The bubble is a puddle of slippery soap. I suspect Kerry now knows it. His Tuesday (October 31) press conference was a dismal failure. He essentially pounded his chest like an eighth grade boy and shouted “I’m a man.” That conference was designed to focus his (Kerry’s) media enablers on the White House, and spin the story as a “Kerry versus Bush” conundrum rather than Kerry responding to the people he’d slandered. The New York Times bought that meme, but the Internet didn’t. Troops responded with the now classic “Jon Cary halp” photo, which Drudge slapped on his page. Kerry then went into “seclusion” — as safe a place as any for a “man” insistently destroying himself. But seclusion sounds so un-manly, doesn’t it? (Seclusion– that’s where Victorian ladies retreat after their latest affair becomes London’s topic du jour.)

Sure, the DNC probably ordered Kerry off the hustings. Seclusion keeps him off YouTube.

The NYDCLA Axis (nid-claw media axis, New York-Washington-Los Angeles) can no longer hide Kerry’s mediocrity from the voting public. George W. Bush is clearly a better politician than Kerry. Bush was also a better student than Kerry. In other words, the “MainStreamMedia” story line that “Bush is stupid” is really a political lie. Is Bush stupid compared to Al Gore? (Gore invented the Internet!!!) Stupid compared to John Kerry? Obviously not...

Much more follows.

Cartoon

I just plain like the artwork in this one:

Good Point

Mary Katharine Ham:

All I Have to Say About This Haggard Guy

Posted by: Mary Katharine Ham at 4:51 PM

Ace already said.

Except for this thought. Isn't it funny how one fallen preacher is enough to make the Left declare that Christianity is a religion of gay-hate over love, judgment over forgiveness, and hypocrisy over honesty? Of course, there are no signs that would make them similarly rethink whether Islam can be accurately called a religion of peace. That's completely out of bounds, you xenophobic, racist, religious bigot! If Haggard had walked into a Jewish community center with a gun, they'd be discussing "root causes" of his anger.

Everyone Knows, Science Has Nothing To Say About Religion

At least Time magazine thinks so. Here's the latest cover:



and the exciting thesis of the cover story:

We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible?

It reminds me of a Simpson's episode where Kent Brockman, Springfield's bloviating News Anchor, is on the newscast in front of a graphic that displays the Ying/Yang symbol, the Cross, the Star of David, The Islamic Crescent, an Om symbol, and a giant question mark, and intones : "On our next segment: World religions. Which is the one, true faith?"

So Time magazine has spelled it out for us! It's God vs. Science!

I can pray my rosary or I can believe in DNA.

But I've got to choose!

I'm also reminded of an aphorism attributed to G.K. Chesterton:

“When the modern critical intellectual says he can no longer accept the doctrine of the Trinity and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, it usually means, ‘I’m sleeping with my neighbor’s wife’.”

You can find discussion of the Time piece in the comments here.

Me So Brave

I've only taken a quick gander at this Michael Fumento piece, which identifies a hitherto overlooked motivation for the press making Iraq seem like a hopeless, violent, dangerous quagmire: The narrative of nonstop gloom and danger makes MSM reporters look heroic and brave for being there at all. Interesting thought: could it be that we'll lose this war due to morale problems on the homefront for the reason that a bunch of MSM reporters are mainly writing to impress their girlfriends and moms?

excerpt:

Ramadi, Iraq

Would you trust a Hurricane Katrina report datelined “direct from Detroit”? Or coverage of the World Trade Center attack from Chicago? Why then should we believe a Time Magazine investigation of the Haditha killings that was reported not from Haditha but from Baghdad? Or a Los Angeles Times article on a purported Fallujah-like attack on Ramadi reported by four journalists in Baghdad and one in Washington? Yet we do, essentially because we have no choice. A war in a country the size of California is essentially covered from a single city. Plug the name of Iraqi cities other than Baghdad into Google News and you’ll find that time and again the reporters are in Iraq’s capital, nowhere near the scene. Capt. David Gramling, public affairs officer for the unit I’m currently embedded with, puts it nicely: “I think it would be pretty hard to report on Baghdad from out here.” Welcome to the not-so-brave new world of Iraq war correspondence.

Vietnam was the first war to give us reporting in virtually real time. Iraq is the first to give us virtual reporting. That doesn’t necessarily make it biased against the war; it does make it biased against the truth.

During my three embeds in Iraq’s vicious Anbar Province, I’ve been mortared and sniped at, and have dodged machine-gun fire — all of which has given me a serious contempt for the rear-echelon reporters. When I appeared on the Al Franken Show in May, after my second embed, it was with former CNN Baghdad bureau chief Jane Arraf — who complained about the dangers of being shot down by a missile while landing in Baghdad, and the dangers of the airport road to the International Zone (IZ) . . . and how awful the Baghdad hotels were.

Descent into Hell?

Most rear-echelon reporters seem to have studied the same handbook, perhaps "The Dummies’ Guide to Faux Bravado". It usually begins with the horrific entry into Baghdad International Airport. Time’s Baghdad bureau chief, Aparisim Ghosh, in an August 2006 cover story, devotes five long paragraphs to the alleged horror of landing there.

It’s “the world’s scariest landing,” he insists, as if he were an expert on all the landings of all the planes at all the world’s airports and military airfields. It’s “a steep, corkscrewing plunge,” a “spiraling dive, straightening up just yards from the runway. If you’re looking out the window, it can feel as if the plane is in a free fall from which it can’t possibly pull out.” Writes Ghosh, “During one especially difficult landing in 2004, a retired American cop wouldn't stop screaming ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ I finally had to slap him on the face – on instructions from the flight attendant.”

The Associated Press gave us a whole article on the subject, titled “A hair-raising flight into Baghdad,” referring to “a stomach-churning series of tight, spiraling turns that pin passengers deep in their seats.”

I’ve flown into that airport three times now; each time was in a military C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and each landing was as smooth as the proverbial baby’s behind. But Ghosh is describing a descent in a civilian Fokker F-28 jet, on which admittedly I have never flown. (It’s $900 one-way for the short hop from Amman to Baghdad, and therefore the transportation of well-heeled media people.) So I asked a reporter friend who frequently covers combat in the Mideast and Africa, and has also frequently flown into Baghdad on those Fokkers. “The plane just banks heavily,” he said. “It’s not a big deal.” He requested anonymity, lest he incur the wrath of other journalists for spoiling their war stories.

Moreover, you can read similar corkscrew horror stories from reporters who have flown in on C-130s. “A C-130 deposits us onto the tarmac of Baghdad International Airport after a hair-raising corkscrew landing intended to elude incoming small arms and rocket fire,” a Greek freelance photojournalist boasted on his blog.

It’s not just experience that tells me that’s baloney. Look at a photo of a C-130; it’s a flying bathtub.

Chuck Yeager couldn’t throw it into a corkscrew and then pull out. I did ask a crewman on this last trip about deep-diving C-130s and he said that on a single flight (out of hundreds) the pilot had to plunge suddenly to avoid getting to close to another plane, but other than that “Landing in this plane is like landing in an airliner.” Except that unlike those Fokkers there are no flight attendants.

As to the overall dangers of flying into or out of Baghdad, one civilian cargo jet was hit after takeoff with a shoulder-launched missile, but landed safely; and one Australian C-130 was hit by small-arms fire, killing one passenger. That’s it. No reporter has been injured or killed flying into or out of Baghdad International.
The Highway of Death

Then there’s the dreaded “Highway of Death...”

I Might Be Wrong, But Downcast I Ain't

I've been depressed and discouraged before certain elections in the past. I don't feel either of those emotions in the slightest degree now, and I can't imagine why (at least on general principles) other members of the Republican base would. Sure, Republicans are barely capable of governing, and are far too cowardly, but the end of this campaign has brought the shear lunatic unsuitablility to rule of the leftist Dems and the MSM into sharp focus. It's simply a no-brainer. I'll take the cowards and morons of the GOP over the Baal-worshiping Dhimmicrats any day of the week. I think most of the base would, too, now that it has come time to put up or shut up. And the shear enjoyment of seeing the MSM utterly discredited is a gleeful motivator, as far as I can feel.

But not according to the polls.

Polls, schmolls, says this American Thinker piece (I've reworded a crude metaphor used in the text):

As a scientist with thirty years of experience working with data just like election polls, I think the Left is having its victory [dance] way too soon. The pollsters are using the same assumptions since the famous Truman upset election of 1948. They are now questionable or plain wrong. The biggest question is: How wrong are they?

The key to scientific polls is random sampling of target groups, in this case (a) actual voters (b) Democrats vs. Republicans. If you’re not properly sampling those groups your poll results are going to be wrong.

For fifty years or so, poll takers could find enough people in the the target groups to make reasonably good prediction.

What has changed today is a massive revulsion among conservatives and Republicans against the media and their handmaidens, the pollsters. The polls now have to guess at (a) and (b) among the conservatives. You can’t check on your sample if your target group won’t answer. Twenty years ago Black opinion would be consistently off, because Blacks were suspicious of White pollsters. Conservatives are the Blacks of today, as far as alienation from the media is concerned.

In technical sampling language, the drop-out rate or sample mortality is wildly different on the Left and Right. There are no statistical techniques that can make up for a lousy sample.

The Democrats are wildly overconfident about their coming revenge. Headlines here and in Europe are celebrating a bloody defeat for George W. Bush. Leftwingers are bubbling with eagerness to talk to pollsters.

On the Right, Republicans can’t stand the pollsters, who are blamed for their constant push-polls on behalf of the Left. Their predictable reaction is to avoid pollsters like the bird flu that never quite met the media hype. Today you would almost have to waterboard a lot of conservatives, one by one, to get them to talk to pollsters. You can’t get a random sample if one of your target groups won’t answer. So the data will be wildly skewed.

Sampling bias would be serious if the pollsters missed even ten percent of the actual GOP voters. My unscientific guess is that they are missing much more than ten percent of conservatives, maybe 20 or 30 percent.

Any scientific paper based on such wildly unlikely sampling assumptions would be rejected by journal editors, and never appear in print. The media just don’t have anything approaching scientific standards. They are run by “activists,” not scientists. They’re already partying all over the international Left. The Islamist world is probably celebrating right along.

My advice: Watch the premature election [victory dance] as it happens.

Then vote.

You might enjoy the vote count.

The Geopolitical Stakes

Highlights from this long Orson Scott Card piece:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America's role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it -- and in the most damaging possible way -- I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- the party I joined back in the 1970s -- is dead. Of suicide.

...

If we topple one government and then walk away, the result in any Middle Eastern nation would be civil war, and the probable winner would be the well-funded international terrorist groups that do not shrink from wholesale murder in pursuing their cause.

Just as Kerensky's attempt at a liberal government in revolutionary Russia was almost instantly snuffed out by Lenin's Bolshevik thugs in 1917, so also would any attempt at unified democratic government in Iraq, Iran, Syria, or Afghanistan be quickly converted into Islamo-fascism of one stripe or another.

And if that happened, Islamicist puritanism would be seen in every nation as the "wave of the future." Just as, when Nazi Germany was in the ascendant, the nations of southeastern Europe quickly made their accommodation with Hitler, since the alternative was to be swept away like Poland, France, or Yugoslavia, so also would nominally democratic nations adopt the trappings of Islamicism -- if they weren't already toppled by puritan revolutions from within.

Democracy -- the Other Hope

Wherever Islamicism has been tried, the result has been identical to Communism's miserable track record. The people are oppressed; the worst sort of vigilantes and thugs terrorize the population; the new power elite, regardless of their supposed piety and dedication to a holy cause, is quickly corrupted and comes to love the wealth and privileges of power.

When there is no hope of deliverance, the people have no choice but to bow under the tyrant's lash, pretending to be true believers while yearning for relief. In Russia it came ... after more than seventy years. China and Cuba are still waiting -- but then, they started later.

So it would be in the Muslim world -- if Islamicism were ever able to come to seem inevitable and irresistible.

You know: If America withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and exposed everyone who had cooperated with us to reprisals.

As happened in South Vietnam. The negotiated peace was more or less holding after American withdrawal. But then a Democratic Congress refused to authorize any further support for the South Vietnamese government. No more armaments. No more budget.

In other words, we forcibly disarmed our allies, while their enemies continued to be supplied by the great Communist powers. The message was clear: Those who rely on America are fools. We didn't even have the decency to arrange for the evacuation of the people who had trusted us and risked the most in supporting what they thought was our mutual cause.

We did it again, this time in the Muslim world, in 1991, when Bush Senior encouraged a revolt against Saddam. He meant for the senior military officers to get rid of him in a coup; instead, the common people in the Shiite south rose up against Saddam.

Bush Senior did nothing as Saddam moved in and slaughtered them. The tragedy is that all it would have taken is a show of force on our part in support of the rebels, and Saddam's officers would have toppled him. Only when it became clear that we would do nothing did it become impossible for any high-ranking officials to take action. For the price of the relatively easy military action that would have made Saddam turn his troops around and leave the Shiite south, we could have gotten rid of him then -- and had grateful friends, perhaps, in the Shiite south.

That is part of our track record: Two times we persuaded people to commit themselves to action against oppressive enemies, only to abandon them. Do you think that would-be rebels in Iran and Syria and North Korea don't remember those lessons?

...

The Competing Stories

...

President Bush's story offers the common people hope of living decent lives and seeing their children live to adulthood, to grow old surrounded by grandchildren.

The Al-Qaeda, Ayatollah story promises them dead children and the lash.

There are, of course, fanatics who will embrace Islamic terrorism because they choose to blind themselves to the truth and embrace the noble-seeming lies of the tyrants. Al-Qaeda does not lack for recruits.

But it also does not lack for people who fear and hate them. There are few pro-Al-Qaeda demonstrations on the Arab street. The people remember the images of liberated Iraqis tearing down the images of Saddam. And they know -- because they have relatives and friends, they hear from merchants and travelers -- that in most of Iraq, there is freedom and prosperity like never before.

They're getting the story, at the level of gossip and personal anecdote, that the anti-American media -- you know, Al-Jazirah and the New York Times -- never report: The Americans really mean to give the Iraqis self-government.

You hear about the power outages in Iraq and it's always somehow Bush's fault. What nobody points out is that these outages come in places where Saddam barely offered electricity at all. The reason the new power systems can't cope is because the newly prosperous Iraqi people are buying -- and plugging in -- vast quantities of electrical appliances they could never afford to buy before! When a town that used to have two dozen refrigerators and washing machines now has two thousand of each, the old power supply is never going to do the job.

"Americans Won't Stay"

How do the Islamicist tyrants answer the obvious success and growing appeal of Bush's democracy program?

They kill people, of course.

But they also tell the story, over and over: "America will never stick it out. We'll keep killing Americans till they give up and go away, and then you will answer to us!"

Until they believe that the Islamofascists are never coming into power, many people will remain afraid to commit themselves to democracy.

Under those circumstances, the remarkable thing is how courageously the Shiites of the south have embraced democracy, and how many of them are beginning to trust that we mean what they say.

But against Bush's promises and the actions of our brave and decent soldiers, the tyrants can set the behavior of Bush's political opponents, who are doing their best to promote the propaganda of the tyrants. Every Congressman who says "We must set a timetable for departure" is providing ammunition to the tyrants in their campaign of terror.

Because even more than they fear terrorist bombs, the pro-democracy forces within Iraq and Afghanistan fear American withdrawal. Every speech threatening withdrawal is a bomb going off in Baghdad, killing, not people, but the will to resist the tyrants.

Bin Laden predicted it. The Democratic Party in America is following his script exactly...

Can We Win?

That is certainly not what most who call for withdrawal intend. They see Americans dying and they have no hope of victory. The Iraq War (as they call it) is costing lives and shows no sign of ending. Meanwhile, Iran is getting nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them, Syria and Iran are sponsoring continuing and escalating attacks on Israel -- how can we possibly "win" a war that threatens constantly to widen? Let's cut our losses, retire to our shores, and ...

And will you please stop and think for a moment?

There is no withdrawal to our shores. American prosperity requires free trade throughout most of the world. Free trade has depended for decades on American might. If we withdraw now, we announce to the world that if you just kill enough Americans, the big boys will go home and let you do whatever you want.

Every American in the world then becomes a target. And, because we have announced that we will do nothing to protect them, we will soon be trading only with nations that have enough strength to protect their own shores and borders.

Only ... what nations are those? Not Taiwan. If they saw us abandon Iraq, what conclusion could they reach except this one: They'd better accommodate with China now, when they can still get decent terms, than wait for America to walk away from them the way we walked away from Vietnam and Iraq.

We cannot win by going home. In a short time, "home" would become a very different place, as our own prosperity and safety steadily diminished. Isolationism is a dead end. If we lose our will to protect the things that support our own prosperity, then what can we expect but the end of that prosperity -- and of any vestige of safety, as well?

The frustrating thing is that if people would just look, honestly, at the readily available data from the Muslim world, they would realize that we are winning and that the course President Bush is pursuing is, in fact, the wisest one...

There follows a lot of interesting geopolitical analysis re:Iran, Syria, and the ongoing centuries-old Shia-Sunni civil war. According to Card, the mutual and self-contradictory hatreds of all of these vicious factions are setting us up for a big win (divide-and-conquer!), but only if the Dems don't throw it all in the trashcan.

Incautiously Optimistic

Dean Barnett:

My homeys at the Weekly Standard have published their election predictions, and they range from dire to calamitous. Meanwhile, I’m merrily skipping about Soxblog Manor (in a completely manly way, mind you) whistling a happy tune. I expect Tuesday to be an extremely successful day for the Republican Party.

First of all, let’s concede the obvious – if the polls are accurate, then we’re in medium to deep shinola. There’s no question about that. It reminds me a bit of Election Day 2004 when we had to reach no other conclusion than if the exit polls were accurate, we were looking at the horror of President Kerry.

At the time, it was unthinkable to serious followers of politics that the exit polls would be completely worthless. They had never been wrong before. But something fundamental had changed in the way the public was responding to exit polls or the way the pollsters were gathering information to make their work-product obsolete. By 9:00 pm., it had become obvious to everyone except a hysterical and incredulous Susan Estrich that the exit polls were wrong. Why it happened that way is still something of a mystery.

What is even more of a mystery is why they all erred in the same direction, dramatically favoring the Democrat. I’ve offered theories in the past why this is so, and I’ll briefly summarize them for those with better things to do this fine Saturday than thumb through my archives: Liberals are bigmouths who can’t wait to share their opinions with strangers. Conservatives have lives.

To take a more serious look at the matter, what the polls measure right now are people passionate or bored enough to spend a half hour talking to a stranger or, worse still, punching buttons on their telephone when prompted to by a recording. Democrats are more likely to tolerate this exercise, just as they were more likely to tolerate the inquisition of an eager grad student as they left the polls on Election Day ’04.

The pollsters have also yet to devise a way of predicting who’s actually going to show up on Election Day. One poll I read talked to some 1200 registered voters and deemed 1000 of them “likely voters.” Since even a presidential year generates only 60% turnout max, the pollster’s conclusion that over 80% of the people he spoke with are “likely voters” is the professional equivalent of him throwing his hands in the air and saying, “How the hell should I know who’s actually going to vote?”

Of course, the pollsters can’t say that because if they confess weaknesses in their methods, they’re less likely to have customers queued up to purchase their services. So instead they must perform a charade in which they profess omniscience.

SO WHAT ARE THE POLLSTERS MISSING? Well, first they’re missing the fact that a disproportionate amount of Republicans are likely to tell them to take a hike. Next, they’re overestimating the enthusiasm on the left. For all the cacophonous din that emanates from the left, it’s critical to note that even their greatest hero, Ned Lamont, underperformed the polls on primary day. By several points.

Lastly, and most importantly, they’re missing a historic Republican Get Out The Vote (GOTV) effort. Republicans are going to turn out like it’s a presidential year. Independents and Democrats will turn out like it’s an important midterm. The Republican turnout will be worth between a few and several points in every race where there’s an effective Republican machine. And that includes every battleground state...

Maybe She's The Little Girl Who Never Was Because She Was Used As An Embryonic Stem Cell Factory

In 10 years, I'll lose my job to a Jew. In fifteen years, I won't be able to get the cotton picked. Who does Jim Talent think he is, deciding who is allowed to work, and how we're supposed to run our plantations?

Title of this post comes from a comment to this MKH post, which highlights a truly execrable political ad. How dare we add to the suffering of hypothetical little girls of the future? How dare we?

An MSM Gotterdammerung?

American Thinker piece examines the possibility that 2006 will be the election that shows the media has zero credibility when reporting on politics and prospective election outcomes. I can only hope so. In fact, I regard showing the MSM as being dead wrong to be a primary motivation to vote.

Thomas Sowell

Eloquent and clear as always, this time on egregious media bias.

Only Yesterday

VDH, in a brilliantly-written column, remembers why we are in Iraq.

excerpt:

Iraq is seen only in the hindsight of who did what wrong and when. All the great good we accomplished and the high ideals we embraced are drowned out by the present violent insurgency and the sensationalized effort to turn the mayhem into an American Antietam or Yalu River. Blame is never allotted to al Qaeda, the Sadr thugs, or the ex-Baathists, only to the United States, who should have, could have, or would have done better in stopping them, had its leadership read a particular article, fired a certain person, listened to an exceptional general, or studied a key position paper.

We also forget that Iraq, contrary to popular slander, was not “cooked up” in Texas or at a Washington, D.C., neocon think tank. Rather, it was a reaction to two events: a decade of appeasement of Middle East tyrants and terrorists, and the disaster of September 11. If one were to go back and read the most popular accounts of the first Gulf War, The Generals’ War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor of Cobra II fame, or Rick Atkinson’s Crusade, or research the bi-partisan arguments that raged across the opinion pages in the 1990s following the defeat and survival of Saddam Hussein, certain themes reappear constantly that surely help to explain our current presence inside Iraq.

One was shared regret that Saddam was left in power in 1991. No sooner had the war ended than George Bush Sr. appeared, not joyous in our success, but melancholy, and then distraught, once images of the butchered and refugees beamed back from our “victory” in Iraq. Culpability for thousands of dead Shiites and Kurds, the need for no-fly zones, and worry about reconstituted WMD were the charges then leveled.

The heroes? A troubled former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz (read The Generals’ War) who almost alone felt tactical success had not translated into strategic victory, and that we were profoundly amoral to have let a mass murderer remain in power, while thousands of brave revolutionaries were butchered just a few miles away from our forces.

We praise the first Gulf War now. Yet, almost immediately in its aftermath, critics accused us of overkill, of using too many soldiers to blast too many poor Iraqis. The charge then was not that we had too few troops, but too many; not that the Pentagon had understated the need for troops, but overstated and sent too many; not that we had too few allies, but an unwieldy coalition that hampered American options; not that the effort was too costly, but that we were too crassly commercial in forcing allies to pony up cash as if war were supposed to be a profitable enterprise.

The generic criticism in the 1990s of the United States, both here and abroad, was that America bombed from on high, and sometimes, as in Belgrade or Africa, even indiscriminately — its only concern being fear of losses, not worry over civilian collateral damage or ending the war decisively on the ground. Indeed, in Europe there was voiced a certain cynicism that we were cowardly turning war into an antiseptic enterprise (the “body bag syndrome”), adjudicated only by our concern not to engage with the enemy below.

There were other issues now forgotten. After the acrimony in the debate over Iraq in 1990, followed by the successful removal of Saddam Hussein, Democrats were determined never again to be on the wrong side of the national security debate. So they supported the present war because they were convinced that after Panama, Gulf War I, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, they could regain credibility by supporting muscular action that seemed to pose little risk of failure. That is why only recently have Democratic supporters of the war bailed — and only when polls suggested that any fear of “cut and run” or McGovernism would be outweighed by tapping into popular dissatisfaction with Iraq.

Realism is much in vogue these days, with James Baker returning as the purported fireman, and even Democrats demanding talks with horrific dictators in Iran and North Korea. That was not the mantra of the 1990s. The Reaganism that rejected Cold War realpolitik and risked brinkmanship to bring down a rotten and murderous Soviet Empire was considered both the wiser and more ethical stance, as even Democrats reformulated their opportunistic criticism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mutually Assured Destruction, Kissingerian tolerance for the status quo, and mere containment — all that was scoffed at in the afterglow of Reagan’s squeeze that popped the Soviet bubble.

Not long ago, abdication — from Rwanda or Haiti, or from the Balkans for a decade — not intervention, was the supposed sin. There were dozens of Darfurs in the 1990s, when charges flew of moral indifference. The supposition then — as now — was that those who called for boots on the ground to stop a genocide would not unlikely be the first to abdicate responsibility once the coffins came home and the military was left fighting an orphaned war.

Apparently all the high-minded talk of reform — Aristotle rightly scoffed about morality being easy in one’s sleep — was predicated only on cost-free war from 30,000 feet. Now the wisdom is that Colin Powell — the supposed sole sane and moral voice of the present administration — was drowned out by shrill neocon chicken hawks. But that was not the consensus of the 1990s. In both books and journalism, he was a Hamlet-like figure who paused before striking the needed blow, and so was pilloried by the likes of a Michael Gordon or Madeline Albright for not using the full force of the American military to intervene for moral purposes. That was then, and this is now, and in-between we have a costly war in Iraq that has taken the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans.

The unexpected carnage of September 11 explains so much of our current situation. It has made the realist, neo-isolationist George Bush into an advocate for Wilsonianism abroad, but only on the calculation that the roots of Islamic fascism rested in the nexus between dictatorship and autocracy — the former destroys prosperity and freedom, and the latter makes use of terrorists to deflect rising popular dissatisfaction against the United States.

The U.S. Senate and House voted for war in Iraq, not merely because they were deluded about the shared intelligence reports on WMD (though deluded they surely were), but also because of the 22 legitimate casus belli they added just in case. And despite the recent meae culpae, those charges remain as valid today as they were when they were approved: Saddam did try to kill a former American president; the U.N. embargo was violated, as were its inspection protocols; the 1991 accords were often ignored; the genocide of brave Kurds did happen; suicide bombers were being given bounties; terrorists, including those involved into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were given sanctuary by Saddam; and on and on.

So it is not those charges, but we who leveled them, that have changed. Americans’ problem with the war is not that it was not moral, but that it has been deemed too costly for the perceived benefits that might accrue...

I've never understood the cut-and-run mindset, especially among those who supported the invasion in the first place. If you start something, you finish it. If the going gets tough, you don't pretend you never wanted to start it. That's just plain dishonorable. And that should matter.

Kerry

Some more cartoons:

Yup.

Cartoon:




Update: Geraghty explains the NYT "bombshell".

Update: The Anchoress gets quite creative about this.

Michael Steele Comes Across As An All-Around Great Guy

In his commercials and in this video interview with Mary Katharine Ham.

Update: See also this HotAir feature about Steele.

Consistency Is The Hobglobin Of Small Minds

Seen at WSJ's Best Of The Web:

Two Papers in One!

"Mr. Bush has been . . .offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win."--editorial, New York Times, Nov. 2

"A substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress next Tuesday."--news story, New York Times, Nov. 2

Because Of Iraq

A defeatist cut-and-run genuine political commercial, along with an excellent satire can be found here.

Looks Like Parker And Stone Have Had Some Fun With The Evolution Debate

John Hawkins has rounded up some amusing (and, of course, ribald) clips from the latest South Park.

Lacking A Stitch Of Honor

I don't know how journalists can even look at themselves in the mirror. Patterico examines the outright spinning and lying the NYT is doing regarding the Kerry affair. They only get to what he said in Pasadena in paragraph 18 of their "story", and, in "quoting" him, they lie. Completely. I loathe the MSM.

BTW, I think it's funny how the running dog traitors of the left think that what Kerry did is no big deal because the troops weren't really his target, really. Apropos of that is this Corner entry I saw yesterday:

Bush's Response [Jonah Goldberg]

From a reader:

I only hope that Mr. Bush will put out a gracious press release accepting Mr. Kerry's word that it was not a slight against the military, but only a personal insult to the President of the United States.

Posted at 5:54 PM

Along the same lines is this comment to the Patterico piece:

One more time: it doesn’t matter if the “joke” was on Bush or on the troops. Either way, it was a dishonorable insult directed at our Commander-in-Chief while we have troops fighting and dying overseas, and it denigrated their efforts and sacrifices by saying they/we/whomever are “stuck” in Iraq. Yes, it’s the lame “quagmire” gambit all over again, and is doubly offensive coming from one that voted to authorize the action in the first place.

Even if the line had been delivered perfectly (which you would naturally expect it to have been, what with Mr. Kerry being so smart and well-spoken and all), it was an insult to our President, everyone that voted for him, and our troops that are over there supporting our mission. I’m sick and tired of being gratuitously insulted by that pompous ass, and I think it’s about time he got his due. He’s gotten away with this crap for too many decades now.

Transparentness Of Bias, Weirdness Of English

Some Jay Nordlinger excerpts:

If you will allow me to continue a theme from yesterday (Johnny One Note that I am): No one — no liberal commentator, not anyone — is saying that the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election is a test of that state’s racial maturity. No one is saying that Ohio’s gubernatorial election is a test of that state’s racial maturity. No one is saying that the Maryland senatorial election is a test of that state’s racial maturity.

And why? Because the mainstream media have stopped caring about race? Oh, no. Because the black candidates running in those states — Lynn Swann, Kenneth Blackwell, and Michael Steele — are all conservative Republicans. And if they were liberal Democrats: Don’t you think the media would be saying, at a minimum, what wonderful opportunities the people in those states have? I do.

Now, when those candidates lose — if they lose — I will not be ascribing racism, or racial immaturity, to Pennsylvanians, Ohioans, and Marylanders. But if the shoe were on the other foot? If those candidates were Democrats? What would the media say, in the event of their losses?

I will stop beating this horse (for the time being).

And race aside — two of the most beautiful words in the English language: “race aside” — Swann, Blackwell, and Steele are all superb men, and I hope the voters have the sense to put them in office.

I think if I could command the election of any three candidates this season, I would command the election of that trio — race, mercifully, aside.

...

A reader from Maryland wrote the following — terribly amusing, terribly painful, terribly true — letter:

Jay,

This is an easy prediction, but it’s worth making: If the Democrats take both houses of Congress, Diebold machines could grow robotic legs and run out of the polls without making national news. But in every close GOP win, voting-machine security will become an issue.

Here in Maryland, there are only two possible headlines on November 8: “Despite Irregularities, Steele Claims Senate Win”; and “Cardin Victory Seen as Iraq Repudiation, Harbinger of ’08.”

...

Want a little language? We often talk about the mysteries of English, in this column — and how a foreigner ever learns to pronounce it. In a letter to me, a reader wrote of a well-known routine by Gallagher, the (one-named) comedian: Consider good vs. food; laughter vs. daughter; comb vs. tomb vs. bomb; and — best of all — go vs. do.

Yes, go vs. do — that takes the cake.

Cartoons

Three good ones:

Coulter

Some good bits from today's otherwise average Coulter column:

[F]or Democrats simply to match the historical average gain for the party out of the White House during the first and second midterm, they would have to pick up 67 seats in the House and 11 seats in the Senate. They're about 30 Mark Foleys short of having that happen.

It at least seems clear that Democrat gains this year are going to fall far short of the historical average. No poll has the Democrats winning even half of their rightful midterm gains.

Despite the precedent of big wins in midterm elections for the party out of power – especially in a sixth-year midterm election – something is depressing the Democrats' popularity with Americans this year. I suspect it's the perception that many of them are Democrats.

But instead of recognizing that the Democratic Party is a dying party, falling far short of its due historical gains, any gain by the Democrats will be hailed as a crowning mandate for the party that wants to lose the Iraq war, shut down Guantanamo and stop spying on Islamic terrorists on U.S. soil.

Even a dying party has death throes. If Democrats win a slight majority in the House or Senate, Americans will get shrill, insane leadership of the nation in time of war.

Democrats can't not be crazy. They will instantly set to work enacting a national gay-marriage law, impeachment hearings, slavery reparations and a series of new federal felonies for abortion clinic protesters. The only way to get Democrats to focus on terrorists would be to convince them that the terrorists are interfering with a woman's right to choose or that commercial jetliners exploding in midair are a threat to America's wetlands.

...

As millions of lunatic Muslims plot to murder Americans, some Americans – we call them "Soccer Moms" – will cast a vote to save Michael J. Fox this year. In the process, they will put all Americans at risk by voting for a frivolous, dying party.

Not The Onion

Some fine Bay Area minds respond to the Kerry brouhaha. H/T Riehl World View.

Right Down The Middle

Ben Shapiro on the location of the political center:

Americans are not an extreme lot. When it comes to elections, we never follow the Ralph Naders or George McGoverns or Pat Buchanans. The country never swings too far in one direction without a subsequent swing in the opposite direction. Republicans Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were followed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Democrat Woodrow Wilson was followed by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Those three Republicans were followed by Democrats FDR and Truman, who in turn were followed by Republican Eisenhower.

With our tendency toward moderation, it is no wonder that after six years of absolute Republican domination many Americans are thinking of pulling the Democratic lever. Democrats recognize that the natural swing of the political pendulum tends toward the party not in power. Their campaign has relied heavily on that pendulum swing, and they have campaigned on the basis of their opposition to Republicans, labeling Republicans extremists, "out of the mainstream."

There is only one problem: The political pendulum only operates if the center between the two parties is truly at the center of the political spectrum. If both political parties have shifted to the left, the Republican Party now occupies the political center. There is nowhere for the pendulum to swing.

In order for the political pendulum to work, there must be some common ground at the center. Wilson and Harding both believed in the essential morality of America, and both believed in the traditional morality of marriage, family and religion. So did Hoover and FDR. Arguments about the size of government were arguments about how best to bolster that traditional morality within the framework of a growing America.

The period of liberalism ushered in by LBJ, Nixon and Carter, however, pushed all of American politics to the left. The common ground was no longer between the parties; it resided within the Republican Party. The election of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush was not so much a swing of the pendulum as a national realization of that fact. That is why the fluke election of Bill Clinton (who has Ross Perot to thank for his presidency) prompted the Republican Revolution of 1994. The political center was not Bill Clinton, but the much-maligned Newt Gingrich.

Americans recognize that the playing field has shifted. The Republican Party of today is closer to the Democratic Party of 1960 than the Democratic Party of today is...

He then gives many examples to establish this.

Let Me Count The Ways

Michael Medved:

For several reasons, Kerry’s crack matters. Those reasons are:

1. He clearly meant it.

...

Kerry...told the students that if they were able to navigate the education system, they could get comfortable jobs – “if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,’ he said to a mixture of laughter and gasps.” If Kerry had meant his comments as another jab at Bush, why the gasps? And why not any attempt to explain his lame attempt at humor on the spot by adding, for instance, words that specified, “and a prime example of somebody who didn’t do his homework, and didn’t try to be smart, and who didn’t do well, is George W. Bush…. “or some comments to that effect. The actual tape shows Kerry delivering his fateful (and perhaps politically fatal) remarks, getting the decidedly mixed response, and then racing on without hesitation to fulsome praise of his Senatorial colleagues, Boxer and Feinstein. If the context of his words about getting “stuck in Iraq” had in any way exonerated him from the charge of insulting the troops then why, even twenty hours after the event, had his handlers failed to call press attention to the full tape (which most of America still hadn’t seen, as of this writing)?

...

2. Kerry’s Comments Highlighted the Democrats’ Longstanding (and uncomfortable) Position on the Wrong Side of the Nation’s Key Cultural Divides.

Despite their flamboyant efforts to masquerade as Church-going, duck-hunting, gun-loving, flag-waving, NASCAR fans, the leaders of the Democratic Party clearly feel more at home with the values of San Francisco or Nantucket than with the down-home mores of Biloxi or Boise. In June, an important Gallup Poll asked respondents to rate 15 institutions in terms of “public confidence.” The military came out on top, followed by police and then preachers. As the survey reported: “At different times in the past, banks, the presidency, the Supreme Court, newspapers and public schools have commanded a high degree of confidence from at least half of Americans. However, this year the top tier group is limited to the military, the police, and church or organized religion.” The key GOP advantage in this political campaign (and all other battles in the near future) involves the accurate, unshakable public perception that Republicans display far more genuine and consistent support than their opponents when it comes to the three institutions that Americans embrace most enthusiastically. How can Democrats pose as “friends of the police” when they regularly endorse the agenda of the ACLU, and show more concern over police brutality and the rights of the accused than for aggressive, effective law enforcement (energetic interrogation – or wiretapping –anyone?). When it comes to religious institutions, liberals not only split with most believers on big issues like abortion and the defense of traditional marriage, but also warn of the dangers of “theocracy” when their opponents promote even the most innocuous displays of religious symbols.

...

Kerry...has compiled a long history of criticizing our “heroes” in shockingly intemperate terms– beginning with his celebrated (and slanderous) claims to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that our forces in Vietnam committed widespread atrocities on a daily basis. Just a few months ago, the Massachusetts Senator slammed members of the US military in Baghdad for “terrorizing innocent Iraqis” in their homes. Despite the assumptions of Kerry and company, military personnel aren’t stupid: in fact, recently released Defense Department figures show that 2005 recruits are more intelligent, better off financially and, yes, more educated than their counterparts in the public at large. These willing warriors in an all-volunteer military understand that the loud-mouthed lunatics who want to cut back on our defense budget, see American power as a threat to world peace, and regularly deride our troops as baby killers, all find their natural political home in the Democratic Party.

3. Kerry’s Words Expose the Essentially Fraudulent Nature of Contemporary Liberalism: Expressing Disrespect for the Very Americans the Left Claims to Defend.

Most people understand the difference between pity and respect. You may well feel sorry for the drunk collapsed on the street corner but you don’t, in any meaningful sense, respect his current condition. You probably look on a nursing infant with tenderness and affection but given his helpless, utterly dependent state you don’t view him as an equal. In similar terms, the Democrats who claim to care only about the less fortunate among us, who insist that they speak for the struggling victims suffering from cruel capitalist excesses, view these masses as helpless, unlucky, unintelligent and, ultimately, pathetic. On my radio show today I spoke with a caller from Santa Monica, California, who defended Kerry’s comments and noted that in his opinion the military option represented a “last resort” for unfortunates with no other options in life. To show his sympathy for the young soldiers, the caller said he sent “care packages” to the troops in Iraq. I noted in response that he might also send care packages to starving villagers in Africa, since the gesture suggested he felt sorry for our soldiers rather than inspired by their example. The consistent theme of Democratic propaganda is pity for the purportedly helpless and hopeless, including the middle class as well as the poor, all of whom can’t succeed or even survive without the efforts of liberal activists and the government programs they promote. If the Dems insist that ordinary citizens can’t succeed without government help, and the GOP emphasizes that hard work and decency still bring the American dream if bureaucrats and do-gooders stay out of the way, which side demonstrates the greater respect for the ability and potential of American strivers?

...

4. You Can’t Portray the Troops as Pitiable Victims and Still Say You Support Them in their Mission.

The Kerry comments demonstrate the hollowness in Democratic insistence that “we support the troops.” If you believe that the difficult mission to which they’ve devoted their lives represents a war crime and a catastrophe; if you suggest that they’ve been snookered- or forced -into a meaningless, perhaps genocidal errand based on lies and greed and neo-con manipulation; if you see the soldiers on the ground (and in the air and on the sea) as hapless, helpless pawns in some monstrous oil-company conspiracy, then in what significant sense do you support these poor, abused troops?

They see themselves as part of history’s most formidable fighting force – as self-reliant adults capable of following the Marine motto (“improvise, adapt and overcome”) for the sake of an important mission that history will judge generously. Which side in the current debate about the war – Republicans or Democrats—comes closest to expressing the soldiers’ conception of themselves? The margin for Republican candidates among military voters (which regularly approaches three-to-one) provides the most direct answer to that question. The Kerry controversy represents a significant event because it highlights the contrast in GOP and Democratic attitudes with unexpected clarity.

Office Hijinks

Highlighted by Ace Of Spades. One heck of a startle reaction, but the lady is a good sport.

Now Here's A Great Rebuttal Ad

Michael Steele knows how to play the game. Take a look at this.

Good Comments

Classical Values and Kesher Talk both have posts about a recent NYT article which describes the shunning of conservatives by alleged liberal friends. Each post has a lively and articulate comment section.

Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts

An amusing practical joke based on literate humor.

A Charlie Brown Ramadan

Cartoon here.

Hoist By Their Own Petard

Mission accomplished:

How to Keep Your Base at Home

"Despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally," the New York Times reports, "there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans." What shenanigans would those be? The paper explains:

"This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we're having to go out of our way to counter them this year," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist. . . .

Democrats' worries are backed up by a Pew Research Center report that found that blacks were twice as likely now than they were in 2004 to say they had little or no confidence in the voting system, rising to 29 percent from 15 percent.

And more than three times as many blacks as whites--29 percent versus 8 percent--say they do not believe that their vote will be accurately tallied.

Voting experts say the disillusionment is the cumulative effect of election problems in 2000 and 2004, and a reaction to new identification and voter registration laws.

Who exactly made the notion that elections are stolen or rigged "so common in the public sphere"? Wouldn't that be the Democrats, who never got over their grudge over Al Gore's photo-finish loss in 2000, who preposterously claimed Ohio was stolen in 2004, and who are already warning that if they don't do as well as they expect this year, it will be because of Republican dirty tricks?

Given that many of the Dems' complaints are made in expressly racial terms--e.g., blacks were disfranchised in Florida, or a requirement to show ID to vote is racist--why should it be surprising that blacks are more "disillusioned" than whites?

Furthermore, isn't there something patronizing about the whole complaint? Many Republicans in Washington state believe that the Democrats stole the razor-thin 2004 governor's race there, but does anyone think a New York Times reporter will go to Walla Walla and write a sympathetic piece about white conservative voters who are so disillusioned that they plan to stay away from the polls?

It seems to us that the real problem here is that the Democrats have outsmarted themselves. By creating the false impression that black voters are victims, they have discouraged blacks from going to the polls.

Kierkegaard On Sullivanism

Good quote that I ran across here fits pretty well:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

-- Soren Kierkegaard

Examples of Sullivanism as recently noted on this blog are here and here.

Paglia: Democrats Acting Like Idiots

Excerpts from a Salon.com interview:

What has been your reaction to the huge uproar over Rep. Mark Foley, which was on the front pages of newspapers in Europe as well as the U.S. for two straight weeks?

Foley is obviously a moral degenerate, and the Republican House leadership has come across as pathetically bumbling and ineffectual. But the idea that this is some sort of major scandal in the history of American politics is ludicrous. This was a story that needed to be told for, you know, like two days.

Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing but a drip in the torrential flood of current geopolitical problems. The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" -- and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley's name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don't the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who -- unless they're out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag -- simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put into physical danger. It's already starting with news items about teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. Since when does the Democratic Party use any gay issue in this coldblooded way as a token on the chessboard? You'd expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.

It's also been interesting how both sides -- but the Democrats early on -- characterized Foley as a pederast. He's a dirty old man in the classic Washington tradition, going after teenagers. But there's no proof that he's a child molester.

I kept hearing on the radio the stentorian voices of Democratic women politicians saying that Foley was "preying on children." When will this stop? This blurring of the line between teenagers and children -- who should be vigilantly protected by any society.

And in Washington, the age of legal consent is 16.

Exactly! Therefore if it wasn't absolutely clear at the start who exactly Foley was flirting with, the Democrats should have been far more cautious about what they said. All that's been accomplished by this scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition -- the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo's nudes to Hadrian's Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It's a formula at the heart of Plato's dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades. In ancient Greek culture, an adult man could publicly profess his love for a young man without necessarily having sexual contact with him.

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web [what the heck is she talking about?]? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

It also advances a line the far Christian right has employed for years -- to make a connection between gay men and child molesters. It's one of the most despicable smears imaginable.

And with the Democrats' record of sex scandals, what the hell were they thinking of? For heaven's sake, after we just got through the whole Clinton maelstrom! What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was far worse than any evidence I've seen thus far about what Foley did with these pages. Clinton, whom I voted for twice, used his superior power as an employer to lure Monica Lewinsky, who was perfectly willing, into these squalid sexual assignations on the grounds of the White House. There was a time when feminists were arguing, in regard to sexual harassment in the workplace, that any gross disparity in power cannot possibly produce informed consent. All of a sudden, all of that was abandoned for partisan reasons in the Clinton case. I take the European view that any government official has the right to conduct as many sexual affairs as he wishes -- off government property. But Clinton, with all his power, somehow couldn't figure out a way to discreetly meet his chosen women at the mansions of his many friends. I can understand why hotels and motels might have been difficult to manage, with the telltale Secret Service presence. But to use the hallway off the Oval Office for those encounters -- to be serviced by a young woman to whom he gave no other dignity and whom he used like a washrag -- he turned that hallway into a sleazy mosh pit! The Democrats are being extremely imprudent to arouse all those sleeping tigers again -- particularly if their next presidential nomination is Hillary Clinton. They've reignited the endless series of charges about Clinton's allegedly abusive physical encounters with women, beginning when he was governor of Arkansas. The Foley case shrinks in comparison to Clinton's rumored history of hitting on women in subordinate positions.

But what if by jumping on and making a big deal out of this, it delivers the Democrats the House and the Senate? Will it have been worth it?

I completely disagree that the Foley case has helped the Democrats. There's been so much fudging of the polling data, which long before the Foley case already indicated that many Republicans nationwide were turned off by the direction of their party and were planning to sit home on Election Day. It's a boldfaced lie that the Foley case caused this. Bedrock Republicans have been dismayed by the Bush administration's overspending and by its inaction on illegal immigration, among other things. These trends were already quite visible before the Democrats inserted themselves into the Republicans' slow drift away from the polls. So what they've done, in this rabid orchestration of the Foley case, is to risk energizing the Republican base again. Are they mad, or just dumb? They've handed the Republicans a reason to go to the polls -- to register their contempt for Democrats!

And this was at a moment in the campaign when we needed to keep the fiasco in Iraq on the front pages. For the Democrats to have stolen the headlines and forced the major media to switch subjects has been a tremendous boon to Bush. What kind of disproportion of scale are we talking about here? The Foley case is nothing compared to the disaster in Iraq and the innumerable lives that are being lost or ruined on both sides.

...

It seems like religion has never been a bigger issue in American politics, recognized on both sides of the aisle as something that needs to be addressed. Have the Democrats changed the longtime Republican characterization of them as godless?

Well, as long as the Democrats are perceived as the anti-religion party, we're going to lose the culture wars. That's why Hillary has made such a show of churchgoing and wearing crucifixes -- even while there seems to be little connection between her Christian ideals and her backstage activities as a politician and money raiser. But religion is absolutely central to this country in ways that Europe's secularized intellectuals fail to understand. I'm speaking here as an atheist who studies religion and respects it enormously. In the history of mankind, the benefits that religion has brought to society in shaping behavior and moral choice are overwhelming in comparison to the negatives, which anyone can list -- like religious wars and bigotry. Without religion, we'd have anarchy.

Religion is also a metaphysical system that honors the largeness of the universe. It's that sense of largeness, which my generation used to call cosmic consciousness, that is missing in the cynical ideologies promoted by the elite universities -- like post-structuralism, which is obsessed with politics and language and has a depressingly debased view of human experience. Post-structuralism doesn't see the stars or the enormity of nature, which for religious people symbolizes God's power. So I think that the constant sniping at religion coming from liberal Democrats is really a dead end.

But there's reason for alarm at the right-wing intertwining of religion and politics, where the Bible is seen as the prophetic master plan of the universe and where Israel as the Holy Land must be protected at all costs from Muslim infiltration -- duplicating the agenda of the medieval crusades. But to claim, as Democrats often do, that there has always been a separation of church and state in America is misleading: The U.S. simply has no official state religion. The formative influence in our intellectual heritage came from Puritan dissidents in New England. Major universities like Harvard and Yale were founded on religious principles.

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We're heading into that world again.

What do contemporary intellectuals have to offer anyhow? What passionate engagement do they have to appeal to young people? Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic. It's snide, elitist, and politically marginalized. The chattering class clearly has no effect whatever on decision-making in Washington. Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush's decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler's rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

A Real Circus

Sullivan was on Hugh Hewitt yesterday. He was absurdly combative. BTW, he asserts that it is no one's business if he is a Christian, that the Gospels are not inspired, that Jesus was searching for the truth, that Jesus did not have a theology, that St. Paul had a fatal effect on Christianity, and that the very idea of the importance of doctrine is Phariseeism. He also endorses Jefferson's editing of the Bible with scissors to distill it down to what Jesus really teaches. But he's a devout Catholic. Here's a roundup link by Hewitt, plus a Townhall column he wrote about the interview. If you've got time, you should listen to the interview. Transcript is here.

Definitely check out Lileks' call in parody of Sullivan's ranting.

Update: A couple of theologically informed bloggers look at Sullivan's, shall we say, unusual theology and ecclesiology.

Update: Someone noticed that Sullivan held up Pontius Pilate as a great moral thinker, because Pilate asked "what is truth?" Of course he said this after Jesus said that He had come to give witness to the truth. After which Pilate had Jesus crucified. But, hey.

Atheism. It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.

Gaghdad Bob has atheism for breakfast in this post. He takes atheists to task for pontificating against genuine religious experience. For folks to whom God and revelation are data and not merely theoretical conclusions, "shut up" is not much of a convincing argument.

There's a lot of good stuff in the piece. Here's a teaser:

I do not know the first thing about wine. And yet, I know that I do not know, and I also know full well that there are enologists who do know what I don’t. In fact, I am one hundred percent certain both of my ignorance and their expertise in this area. But since I am ignorant, how do I know this? Among other reasons, I know it because it would be absurd to deny the testimony of thousands of enologists who have trained themselves to make subtle discriminations in the realm of wine. If I were to object and tell them that they are fooling themselves and that there is no empirical proof that one wine is any better than another, they would properly regard me as a gustatory moron with a boorish and cretinous palate.

While numbers aren’t everything, needless to say, the numbers are on my side, in that billions of human beings have personally experienced the Divine, whereas atheism is an absurdity that makes no sense to all but a few eccentrics and misfits. More importantly, there are any number spiritual geniuses who have left maps of the domain of spirit that are every bit as subtle and detailed as the maps of science. I have been guided by these maps, so I know the territory they describe is ontologically real.

One atheist yesterday took me to task for “trashing” atheism because I hadn’t personally experienced it, but that is false. There was a time that I was an atheist, but I eventually found its philosophical foundation to be utterly lacking. When I wrote yesterday that positive atheism was naively self-contradictory at every turn, I meant that literally, not as an insult. Most bad metaphysics can be dismissed with a single insurmountable sentence or two, and atheism is no exception. To declare that it is absolutely true that only relative truth exists is nonsensical. And to declare that absolute truth exists is to make a statement so pregnant with metaphysical implications that one could write a whole book on the subject, which I done went and did.

One commenter proclaimed yesterday that “I am an Atheist because the universe makes perfect sense to me without putting God in the equation. You say God is easily provable. That is horse manure. There is absolutely no evidence God exists. God is nothing but a manmade idea in order to give one hope for meaning and even everlasting life.”

He dismisses all religion as an “invisible myth that you cling on to. In fact, I now have as much justification that there is an invisible man living under my bed, as there is a God. In other words, I have no reason to believe in either, as no evidence exists that either God or the invisible man under my bed exists.”

How does one respond to such invincible ignorance? “There is no evidence that God exists.” Of course there is evidence. It's just that he is either unfamiliar with the evidence or has chosen to reject or ignore it, which he is naturally free to do. As for the statement that religious belief is an “invisible myth,” the reverse is true: it is only possible to cling to the invisible myth of atheism in a hermetically sealed environment of fellow fervent believers who are similarly innocent of any direct encounter with transcendent reality. They are free to insist that “all wines are identical,” just as I am free to dismiss them as possessing barbarous palates.

Spare The Rod, Spoil The Child

Dr. Sanity takes a look at Islam as a religion equating to narcisistic borderline personality disorder.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Great post at Shrinkwrapped.

You Don't Hear This Every Day

ABC's Mark Halperin on O'Reilly, admitting that the old media are biased and unfair to conservatives, and that those networks are starting to suffer financially and need to do something to attract the half of the populace they are ill-serving. Also be sure to check out Halperin's piece in The Note.

Phoning It In Is A Losing Strategy

From James Taranto's column:

Our item yesterday in which we reaffirmed our support for the liberation of Iraq brought some very interesting reader comments. This is from an American there who asks not to be named:

There's been a lot of discussion back home about the course of the war, the righteousness of our involvement, the clarity of our execution, and what to do about the predicament in which we currently find ourselves. I just wanted to send you my firsthand account of what's happening here.

First, a little bit about me: I'm stationed slightly northwest of Baghdad in a mixed Sunni/Shia area. I'm a sergeant in the U.S. Army on a human intelligence collection team. I interact with Iraqis on a daily basis and I help put together the intel picture for our area of operations. I have contacts with friends, who are also in my job, in every are of operations in the Fourth Infantry Division footprint, and through our crosstalk I'd say I have a pretty damn good idea of what's going on in and around Baghdad on a micro and intermediary level.

I wrote heavily in favor of this war before I enlisted myself, and I still maintain that going into Iraq was not only the necessary thing to do, but the right thing to do as well.

There have been distinct failures of policy in Iraq. The vast majority of them fall under the category "failure to adapt." Basically U.S. policies have been several steps behind the changing conditions ever since we came into the country. I believe this is (in part) due to our plainly obvious desire to extricate ourselves from Iraq. I know President Bush is preaching "stay the course," but we came over here with a goal of handing over our battlespace to the Iraqis by the end of our tour here.

This breakneck pace with which we're trying to push the responsibility for governing and securing Iraq is irresponsible and suicidal. It's like throwing a brick on a house of cards and hoping it holds up. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)--a joint term referring to Iraqi army and Iraqi police--are so rife with corruption, insurgent sympathies and Shia militia members that they have zero effectiveness. Two Iraqi police brigades in Baghdad have been disbanded recently, and the general sentiment in our field is "Why stop there?" I can't tell you how many roadside bombs have been detonated against American forces within sight of ISF checkpoints. Faith in the Iraqi army is only slightly more justified than faith in the police--but even there, the problems of tribal loyalties, desertion, insufficient training, low morale and a failure to properly indoctrinate their soldiers results in a substandard, ineffective military. A lot of the problems are directly related to Arab culture, which traditionally doesn't see nepotism and graft as serious sins. Changing that is going to require a lot more than "benchmarks."

In Shia areas, the militias hold the real control of the city. They have infiltrated, co-opted or intimidated into submission the local police. They are expanding their territories, restricting freedom of movement for Sunnis, forcing mass migrations, spiking ethnic tensions, not to mention the murderous checkpoints, all while U.S. forces do . . . nothing.

For the first six months I was in country, sectarian violence was classified as an "Iraqi on Iraqi" crime. Division didn't want to hear about it. And, in a sense I can understand why. Because division realized that which the Iraqi people have come to realize: The American forces cannot protect them. We are too few in number and our mission is "stability and support." The problem is that there's nothing to give stability and support to. We hollowed out the Baathist regime, and we hastily set up this provisional government, thrusting political responsibility on a host of unknowns, each with his own political agenda, most funded by Iran, and we're seeing the results.

In Germany after World War II, we controlled our sector with approximately 500,000 troops, directly administering the area for 10 years while we rebuilt the country and rebuilt the social and political infrastructure needed to run it. In Iraq, we've got one-third that number of troops dealing with three times the population on a much faster timetable, and we're attempting to unify three distinct ethnic groups with no national interest and at least three outside influences (Saudi Arabian Wahhabists, Iranian mullahs and Syrian Baathists) each eagerly funding various groups in an attempt to see us fail. And we are.

If we continue on as is in Iraq, we will leave here (sooner or later) with a fractured state, a Rwanda-waiting-to-happen. "Stay the course" and refusing to admit that we're screwing things up is already killing a lot of people needlessly. Following through with such inane nonstrategy is going to be the death knell for hundreds of thousands of Sunnis.

We need to backtrack. We need to publicly admit we're backtracking. This is the opening battle of the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose it because of political inconveniences. Reassert direct administration, put 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground, disband most of the current Iraqi police and retrain and reindoctrinate the Iraqi army until it becomes a military that's fighting for a nation, not simply some sect or faction. Reassure the Iraqi people that we're going to provide them security and then follow through. Disarm the nation: Sunnis, Shias, militia groups, everyone. Issue national ID cards to everyone and control the movement of the population. [not going to happen. It's politically impossible. If this is what it would take, then we've utterly screwed over the Iraqi people, and American power is null and void until the nukes start going off in our cities. I'm sure Europeans and others will enjoy themselves after the collapse of Pax Americana. Perhaps it is wrong to say that we screwed over the Iraqi people; the Arabs of the world are quite capable of screwing themselves over. The peaceniks, leftists, and traitors of this country have all but guaranteed that we will never again fight a war using half-measures]

If these three things are done, you can actually start the Iraqi economy again. Once people have a sense of security, they'll be able to leave their houses to go to work. Tell your American commanders that it's OK to pass up bad news--because part of the problem is that these issues are not reaching above the battalion or brigade level due to the can-do, make-it-happen culture indoctrinated into our U.S. officers. While the attitude is admirable, it also creates barriers to recognizing and dealing with on-the-ground realities.

James, there's a lot more to this than I've written here. The short of it is, the situation is salvageable, but not with "stay the course" and certainly not with cut and run. However, the commitment required to save it is something I doubt the American public is willing to swallow. I just don't see the current administration with the political capital remaining in order to properly motivate and convince the American public (or the West in general) of the necessity of these actions.

At the same time, failure in Iraq would be worse than a dozen Somalias, and would render us as impotent and emasculated as we were in the days after Vietnam. There is a global cultural-ideological struggle being waged, and abdication from Iraq is tantamount to concession.

I thought one of the big and obvious goals of this war was to show the world that messing with the US has consequences. And we're managing to show just the opposite. Oh, well. The anti-war folks are all but guaranteeing a much vaster conflagration at some point in the not too distant future. But, hey. Civilization did just fine after Rome withdrew the legions, so, no worries.

I'm Going To Just Step Back A Little, To Get The Whole Launch Trajectory Into The Frame.

Pretty wild picture of a shuttle launch. H/T Peeve Farm. Taken from the International Space Station.

As For Me And My Tribe, We Will Serve The Lord

Dinesh D'Souza (H/T Siggy by way of The Anchoress):

A group of leading atheists is puzzled by the continued existence and vitality of religion.

As biologist Richard Dawkins puts it in his new book "The God Delusion," faith is a form of irrationality, what he terms a "virus of the mind." Philosopher Daniel Dennett compares belief in God to belief in the Easter Bunny. Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" and now "Letter to a Christian Nation," professes amazement that hundreds of millions of people worldwide profess religious beliefs when there is no rational evidence for any of those beliefs. Biologist E.O. Wilson says there must be some evolutionary explanation for the universality and pervasiveness of religious belief.

Actually, there is. The Rev. Ron Carlson, a popular author and lecturer, sometimes presents his audience with two stories and asks them whether it matters which one is true.

In the secular account, "You are the descendant of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm washed up on an empty beach 3 1/2 billion years ago. You are a mere grab bag of atomic particles, a conglomeration of genetic substance. You exist on a tiny planet in a minute solar system in an empty corner of a meaningless universe. You came from nothing and are going nowhere."

In the Christian view, by contrast, "You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are the climax of His creation. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among your kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires your companionship and affection that He gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with him."

Now imagine two groups of people -- let's call them the Secular Tribe and the Religious Tribe -- who subscribe to one of these two views. Which of the two is more likely to survive, prosper and multiply? The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The secular tribe is made up of people who are not sure why they exist at all. The religious tribe is composed of individuals who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.

Should evolutionists like Dennett, Dawkins, Harris and Wilson be surprised, then, to see that religious tribes are flourishing around the world? Across the globe, religious faith is thriving and religious people are having more children. By contrast, atheist conventions only draw a handful of embittered souls, and the atheist lifestyle seems to produce listless tribes that cannot even reproduce themselves.

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and there abortions outnumber live births 2 to 1. Russia's birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. And then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Lacking the strong Christian identity that produced its greatness, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. We have met Nietzsche's "last man" and his name is Sven...

Or Maybe It's Because It's Just Plain Unmanly To Be Yapping On The Phone For Four Hours A Day

Men who use mobile phones face increased risk of infertility.

Men who use mobile phones could be risking their fertility, warn researchers.

A new study shows a worrying link between poor sperm and the number of hours a day that a man uses his mobile phone.

Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.

Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate...