The Crucible

This tribute to our soldiers, which I first saw many months ago, is making the rounds again via e-mail and blogs. Have a look (with the sound turned up). You might need some kleenex.

Watching it again brought to mind a theme that I've been thinking about. Probably the best work of sociology of the last 25 years is the book Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe (1992). If you haven't read it, you really need to, along with their books 13th Gen, and Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation.

The authors' fascinating (as well as strongly and entertainingly supported) thesis is that, due to the human lifespan and the length of a reproductive generation, there are really only four basic generational types, which affect each other through their relationships as children, parents, grandparents, elderly, adults at different stages of their working lives, etc. One effect is that generations respond and react to the way they were raised, children reacting against the permissiveness of their parents by being stricter with their own children (and vice versa), for example. The authors provide evidence for their thesis by examing how the generational types have manifested themselves during the previous few hundred years of American history.

The four generational types we are all familiar with are the "Greatest Generation" (example: World War II soldiers), "Silent Generation" (too young to participate in WW II, too old to be hippies, example: my parents), Boomers (what more can I say?), and X-ers (My generation. You know, the bowling-shirt-wearing, goateed dot-commer ironists whose previous analog is the Great Gatsby flapper-era Jazz Age nihilists).

Now, as it turns out according to the thesis, even as it was spelled out in 1992, the kids of the age to be in Iraq are not X-ers at all. They're too young. Strauss and Howe call them Millenials, and they are in the same place in the generational wheel as the "Greatest Generation", with many of the same attributes.

I believe that part of the liberal panic about Iraq is that they know full well at some level that an entire generation of young people is being irrevocably lost to their ethos. Iraq is not Vietnam. It is the anti-Vietnam. Iraq (and Afghanistan, and anywhere else we actively fight the WoT, but I'll just use the term "Iraq" to encapsulate this) is the crucible in which this generation is being formed. The whole "hippie liberal" period between the mid 60's and now is being irrevocably and distinctly capped off. It has no future, and as time progresses, will be seen as a curiosity. The future does not belong to the people "of" that era.

The Iraq experience will result in young adults who might as well be in a different universe from the "boomer hippies". Offering your life by defending your country against a direct threat, while liberating 50 million people in the process, all the while having your efforts belittled and slandered by the partisans of the previous dispensation, will do that to you. This is a new generation that is just, just entering into adulthood. The changes they will work on American society are going to be absolutely profound, and will be completely different than anything the tired old libs are hoping for. Hence the panic.

Bringing it closer to home, my Mom has a friend about her age who has a 23 year old son. This son has spent the last 5 years essentially "failing to thrive" at college, dropping courses, unable to decide on a major, and frittering away his time on aimless pursuits. Finally the University dropped him from its rolls. After working at some odd jobs, this boy informed his mother that he had decided to become a long-distance trucker, and would be going to Georgia to spend 6 months at truck school, after which he was obligated to spend six months as a trucker, otherwise he's have to forfeit $3,000. Two weeks after he left for Georgia, he called his mother and told her the real plan. He was actually now at Fort Benning, training for Special Forces, with the intention of going to Iraq.

My Mom told me all this as if it were a tragedy. Well, not at all, the way I see it.

In a later conversation my Mom said that some of her friends were saying it's 1973 all over again. I reminded her that she'd also read Generations, so she ought to know that 30 years is way too short a time to cycle through a particular kind of generational era again.

There's a different kind of thing happening, something that most of us are just too young to remember...

Wry And Ironic Bibliographic Humor - For Children

My friend Matt runs a blog called "Rub-A-Dub". I really liked this post today:

I was looking at the Paidea Classics website today and saw a book title that cracked me up: "A History of the Church from Pentecost to the Council of Chalcedon - For Children". It was the "- For Children" that struck me as funny.

It got me thinking about other book titles that might be produced "- For Children"

10. Canonicity in North America: Toward Jurisdictional Unity - For Children

9. Grain Production in Anatolia and the Stability of the Eastern Roman Empire - For Children

8. The Whore on the Altar: The Fourth Crusade - For Children

7. The River of Fire - For Children

6. Issues and Controversies Regarding the Dual Nature of Christ - For Children

5. Value: Price Stability and the Inflationary Practices of Central Banks - For Children

4. Ultrasound Process Control for Vulcanization and Polymerization of Organic Molecules - For Children

3. New Calendar/Old Calendar: The Controversy Explained - For Children

2. Against All Heresies - For Children

1. Laboratory Reproduction of Pathogenic Viruses - For Children

Oh, Good

I was hoping to find a webpage containing this photo sequence which I received vie e-mail yesterday. Serendipitously, I have. Now I can link to it. It's like a real-life version of something out of The Cat In The Hat. The last couple of frames do look pretty photoshopped, though.

Roraparooza

Some nice material from Orwell in this Michael J. Totten post, which also links to this blog entry, where we find:

Some of the commenters say the left is unduly obsessed with its perceived lack of patriotism. I don't think that's the case; rather, I think the suspicion that the left has learned to be reflexively anti-American is one of the reasons Kerry lost the election. And I think the perception bodes danger for the U.S. political system, if it continues to grow.

But at the same time I've come to view a person's ability to express positive things about the U.S. as a test to distinguish the honest left from the pod-people, Chomskyites, and Moore-istas.

Pressed for time in a political debate and want to cut to the chase? Politely ask him or her to talk for three minutes non-stop about what's great about America. "It's the gateway to Canada" doesn't count.

It's a shibboleth, if you will, but in the original sense of that word. Shibboleth is just an everyday Hebrew word, but in the Old Testament it was the password the Gileadites used to distinguish their own men from fleeing Ephraimites, because Ephraimites could not pronounce the -sh- sound in it. Just like the Italians used cicera "chick pea," to identify the French (who could not pronounce it correctly) trying to escape massacre in the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. One of my etymology correspondents, Dan Sachs, has informed me of another instance of this, which I'd love to track down and verify: Marines on Guadalcanal, he says, used "lollapalooza" as a password because Japanese can't pronounce "-L-" (Japanese is one of the many languages that has no such sound). It comes out "Roraparooza."

BTW, the second link above has a link to this site, which, like several other Typepad sites I've seen, renders its text lines as a jumbled mess in my version of Internet Explorer. Is anyone else seeing that?

Christians And Art

A neat reflection by Doug Giles. It's all worth reading. I liked this original way of putting things:

The believer in the biblical account of creation also believes that he is an image-bearer of his Creator, that he, too, has creative juices coursing through his veins. Thus, being veritable Mini-Me’s of Jehovah, we should be brimming over with creative, artistic life.

I am God's Mini-Me. I like it!

Sharansky Interview

Front Page Magazine has an interview with Natan Sharansky, a former Gulag-imprisoned Soviet dissident who believes in the transforming power of freedom. Freedom for all people, even those in Arab dictatorships.

excerpt:

Of course, it also helps to be able to see the lighter side of life, even in the most difficult hours. I especially liked telling anti-Soviet jokes to my interrogators. I remember one time I told a joke about Brezhnev being furious when Americans succeeded at putting a man on the moon. After emergency discussions with other members of the Politburo, he assembled all the cosmonauts. "We have decided to beat the Americans by sending a man to the sun," declared Brezhnev." "But Comrade Leonid," replied one cosmonaut, "we will be burned alive." "What? You think we at the Politburo are idiots" shouted Brezhnev, "We have considered everything. You will be sent at night."

My interrogators were ready to burst from laughter, but they would not dare laugh in front of another KGB agent at such a joke, so they pounded on the table and shouted at me. I told these jokes not only to irritate my interrogators - which of course was always a source of pleasure - but also to remind myself who is really free and who is really in a prison -- the interrogator who cannot even laugh when he wants to or you, who is free to think what you want, say what you want and laugh when you want. It helps remind you why you are really there and why you will never want to return to the life of doublethink and fear.

I guess it also helps to have a hobby that is compatible with prison life, and my hobby was chess. I played thousands of games in my head and guess what - I always won.

FP: We are running out of time Mr. Sharansky. Before we finish, let me just sneak in a brief comment.

This interview has a special significance for me. I am the son of Soviet dissidents, Yuri and Marina Glazov. My dad signed the Letter of Twelve, which denounced Soviet human rights abuses and my mom actively typed and circulated Samizdat - the underground political literature. We were very fortunate to escape the vicious barbarity of what Soviet terror had in store for us.

You are an individual who is very close to my heart. Throughout my whole childhood I listened to your name being spoken at my family’s dinner table – and it was a name that demanded respect and admiration. My dad and mom spoke very highly of you and closely followed your trials and tribulations. I remember how much we all cheered in front of our television that day when you zig-zagged walking across that bridge during the exchange that freed you from your Soviet captors and tormentors. My whole family had tears in their eyes.

And you zig-zagged because the KGB had told you to walk straight. Despite all the suffering you experienced you remained a warrior to the last second, achieving victory – a single human being against an entire totalitarian regime. That last counter-punch of resistance represented so much to all of us – it inspired and continues to inspire human hope and the unquenchable thirst for freedom and liberty that resides in the heart of man.

Debunking The Debunkers

As I mentioned in this post, the major media have seen fit in recent years to roll out "Christianity is a Myth" hit pieces like clockwork nearly every Christmas and Easter. Well, this is the first time they've done it with the Blogosphere running at full steam. The MSM and the Left always try to make it seem as though faith is based on nothing factual or logical whatsoever. Basically, the best attitude they can muster is, "How touching that you guys are idiots." But this engineer, for one, would not be a Catholic convert at all, unless Christianity were sitting on pretty freakin' solid ground philosophically, historically, logically, and experientially. In any case, Hugh Hewitt details the new dynamic: Newsweek prints a hit piece, and within days it is filleted by interested bloggers. It's a whole different game!

excerpt:

NEWSWEEK put Christmas on the cover of its December 13th issue, and the reaction among orthodox Christians was widespread and emphatic. Once again a leading member of the legacy media had produced a hit piece on Christian belief, employing many deceits, including the use of false dilemmas, the employment of only scholars with radical views, and the omission of evidence in support of the Biblical account of the birth of Jesus.

The author, Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham, didn't even try very hard to conceal his bias, becoming to religion reporting what Dan Rather has become to political reporting. My favorite line is this gem: "To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale." Meacham goes on to immediately declare that "faith and reason need not be constantly at war," but makes it clear that this is possible only when faith surrenders pretty much everything that defines it as orthodoxy. No explanation is ever given as to why the Crusades have any bearing on the legitimacy of Luke's and Matthew's accounts of the Nativity.

Hit pieces like Meacham's targeting Christianity have become commonplace in recent years as magazine editors and book publishers have come to understand the size of the market for stories on faith, but find themselves staffed almost exclusively with skeptics of one degree or another--usually extreme skeptics. So the offensive article/book/documentary appears, sales skyrocket, and a few weeks later some angry letters to the editor follow which are shrugged off as way too little, way too late.

That was then. The blogosphere is now.

Within 10 days of Meacham's article's appearance, his credentials had been reviewed for all to see by Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The article itself had been painstakingly--and fairly--sliced and diced by accomplished theologian, pastor, scholar, and author, Dr. Mark D. Roberts, whose double Harvard degrees, including a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, make his careful and complete criticisms of Meacham's reporting hard to dismiss.

After interviewing both Mohler and Roberts for two hours on the air, I then posted links to the Newsweek piece and their criticisms, and invited bloggers from around the internet to weigh in via a virtual symposium I term a "Vox Blogoli." Dozens of bloggers accepted the invite, and an astonishing array of piercing reviews of Meacham followed. Among many favorites are the Evangelical Outpost and Tapscott's Copy Desk, but all of them are well worth the read. (The complete list of symposium posts can be read here.)

What the blogosphere allowed to happen is the organization of dissent which is focused, credentialed, complete, and--crucially-publicized. No fair reader of Meacham's piece and the commentaries on it can conclude that Meacham produced good journalism. It is simply too one-sided, too agenda-driven, and too ignorant of serious scholarship to qualify as anything other than a polemic. The exposure of Meacham's folly doesn't guarantee that Newsweek won't stumble again, but it surely must give others in his position pause. The blogosphere has experts and megaphones. As Joe carter of Evangelical Outpost concluded "the mainstream media is only able to retain their influence by convincing the populace they possess special skill and knowledge. But as the Internet continues to fill with . . . debunkers, the media continues to lose credibility, influence, and power."

Maudlin Humor

From The Onion.

"Rover! Here, boy! Flag! Cross! Why Isn't This Working?!?"

Peggy Noonan has a good column about the Democrats and their search for the "secret message" or "symbol" that will win them elections like it does Republicans. There's a very interesting (and exceedingly improbable) suggestion at the end.

excerpt:

The idea that the president is speaking in religious code to his religious followers says more about the reporters who asked the question than it does about the president, or his speechwriter.

It reminded me of something. Once, 20 years ago, I was working in the White House and received a call from a respected academic. Her area of claimed expertise was presidential rhetoric. She introduced herself and told me she wanted to talk about "the manipulation of symbols" in President Reagan's speeches. I told her I was not sure what she meant, could she tell me more.

She said, "You know, the flag--stars and stripes. He uses symbols like the flag in his speeches."

I thought about that. I said I couldn't think of anything the president had said about the flag, couldn't even remember him using the word flag. Could she give me another example of what she meant. She just pressed on about the manipulation of symbols and seemed to focus on flag imagery, so I told her someone in speechwriting had given the president a Scott Fitzgerald quote recently on the meaning of being American. It was very moving. Maybe when the president speaks movingly of our country and its people she sort of sees flags in her imagination? She liked that. How do you all do that? she said. Do what? I said. Manipulate symbols that way, she said. I said, I don't think we "do" anything. We're just writers, we write. It's writing.

We rang off without having achieved the mind meld she hoped for. I thought about the conversation for years. My first thought was, You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore. I wondered if she didn't honestly think that it couldn't just be writing. She thought it was some kind of higher, dark and secret magic. She thought there were secret codes and symbols placed in speeches to communicate secret messages and elicit certain reactions.

And it is not only academics or journalists who sometimes think things like that. So do Democrats, at least if you go by the last election.

Perspective

I just can't take the Chicken Littles seriously when they speak of Iraq as a horrific quagmire that we're going to lose. Have they total ignorance of military history? Here's a nice summary of the Battle of the Bulge which started 60 years ago today.

Note:

Before it was over, the Battle of the Bulge would involve three German armies, the equivalent of 29 divisions; three American armies, or 31 divisions; and three British divisions augmented by Belgian, Canadian and French troops.

More than a million men would be drawn into the battle. The Germans would lose an estimated 100,000 irreplaceable troops, counting their killed, wounded and captured; the Americans would suffer some 80,000 casualties, including 19,000 killed - that's a rate of 500 a day - and 23,554 captured.

What Planet Is He Smoking?

Front Page Magazine has a short book review of the latest by Michael Albert, the editor of Z Magazine. Back in 1988, when I was sloshing over the brim with all the wisdom of my 23 years, I was a charter subscriber to Z Magazine. Having just graduated as pretty much of a commie from UC Berkeley, I was an avid reader. One thing that Albert opened my eyes to, is that we are all slaves. Oh yeah, we have "freedom" to work for pay at whatever job we can get, but if you're not willing to enslave yourself by working for The Man's inhuman machine, well then you'll starve. Some freedom. For some reason, I thought this was pretty profound. I didn't like getting up early and commuting through awful traffic to work, there were no hi-jinks like we had in the dorms at college, so it was obvious that THE WHOLE SYSTEM HAD TO COME DOWN, MAN!

It's beyond me that I wasn't able to see that complaining about "you don't work, you don't eat", made about as much sense as complaining that, oh, say, in Bushitler's Amerikkka we don't have any freedom. You jump off a building and Rumsfeld's Gravity Beam is going to smash you into Cheney's Pavement, man. NO FREEDOM!!

Anyway, you can read some of Albert's latest Z Magazine thoughts here, complete with accompanying Ted Rall cartoon.

A taste:

Criticizing Democrats for not running campaigns that address issues honestly is like criticizing owners of corporations for seeking profits or criticizing hit men for killing people. Democrats are just being who they are. Their behavior is continually reinforced by the institutional pressures of the positions they have navigated and now occupy and we should not expect it to change. Meanwhile, Republicans do whatever they want with plenty of funding, unlimited media visibility, and with no qualms whatsoever.

The upshot is that we need much more than a better Democratic candidate. We need a new electoral system and a new base of support for candidates, as well as new candidates. But even a good candidate—Nader, Cobb, Kucinich, Sharpton—is barely listened to. Why?

The U.S. population has a great mental failing. It is greater than its ignorance, which on many counts is profound. It is greater than its racism, which is often substantial. It is greater than its homophobia and sexism, which are substantial as well. This mental malady is that our population believes that nothing better than the corporate capitalist system is possible; that efforts at reform are largely fruitless—either these efforts are defeated or they are rapidly rolled back.

...

For those still mulling over the possibly venal mind-set of the U.S. population, try this thought experiment which I offered others while in Greece.

Imagine that the just completed presidential election was declared null and void. There is an overwhelming mandate for a new election to be held. Bush will run against someone new, Candidate Z, who puts forward an uncompromising program including:

universal health care

no nukes

major moves toward ecological sustainability

withdrawal from Iraq

dismantling empire

implementing international legality

replacing the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO with real internationalism

implementing effective affirmative action for gender, race, and class

redistributing wealth downward

establishing just wages

vastly improving work conditions

implementing structures for democratizing the political process
and on and on

The election campaign will last for six months. During that time, there will be a country-wide discussion/debate of all the issues and relevant facts in workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and the media. Information will be fully presented and verified. Debates will be sustained and thorough. The election will then be held: Candidate Z vs. George W. Bush. Now add one more caveat. By some means or other everyone in the country is completely convinced that the winner will fully and successfully implement all campaign pledges. The whole program of either Bush or Z will be enacted, fully, successfully. And everyone believes and indeed is totally sure that we are going to get the list of changes above, or we are going to get four more years of Bush. How many people would vote in that case—only 60 percent; maybe 110 percent?

If you think the turnout be low and Bush would still win such an election then you are right to worry about the underlying psychology and morality of the U.S. population—and of all people everywhere, every when.

But if you think there would be a large turnout and Candidate Z would win in a landslide, then clearly the obstacle to people becoming activists is not that people don’t care, but that people doubt that their efforts can achieve much.

Albert is so darned shortsighted. Why didn't he add "abolishing death" and "repealing the second law of thermodynamics" to his list?

And, oh, yeah, hit men and profits. Pretty much the same thing, man.

"All Art Is Rape"

A friend of mine coined that quote when we were discussing uber-feminist attitudes one day. That same friend and I went up to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art one Saturday. Before we got there, I was joking, "It's not a real modern art museum unless a urinal is on display as art." We went in there, and it was pretty disheartening, mostly. After going through the "monkeys-with-paintbrushes" room, we went through the "photographs-taken-by-the clinically-depressed room", then it was upstairs to the "lesbian anger floor", where we saw things you normally wouldn't expect to see with anything below a fever of 105. After this, we went down to the central floor and were looking at some Warholian stuff. Then my friend said, "Oooh! Just look down at the floor and follow me". We went through a couple of rooms and then stopped. My friend said, "Okay, look up!" Suddenly it all came together, and the disjointed vaguely panicky feeling that had been building inside of me during our tour subsided. There it was, serving as this display room's centerpiece. The urinal.

This trip didn't have its denouement until a couple of weeks later. On the trip home from the museum, my friend let me drive. The streets in that part of the city are very hectic, and you have to be pretty aggressive if you don't want to be hemmed in. I ended up just catching a "piece of the red" in an intersection. My friend received a citation in the mail, with a picture of "doofus" in the driver's seat...

All this came to mind as I read this Front Page Magazine interview. The interviewee is Roger Kimball, who wrote The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.

Here's a taste:

Kimball: The great enemy of the totalitarian impulse, in intellectual life as well as in politics, is the idea of intrinsic worth. As Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, one of the most toxic and destructive features of totalitarian movements is their attack on the integrity of the individual and his experience. When the enforcer O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 induces Winston to say that twice four equals 5, he has won a great, if pernicious, spiritual victory, for he has violated Winston’s sense of reality. When it comes to art and intellectual life, the examples are not so dire, but they are in their own way just as significant. In the course of The Rape of the Masters I quote--twice--Bishop Butler’s great remark that “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” In a way, that can stand as the motto for the book. For what we see in the academic art historians I discuss--it is something you see in literary studies, too--is an effort to discount, to deny the essential reality of things in order to enlist them in an ideological war. A family portrait of four young girls is no longer a family portrait of four young girls but a florid allegory of sexual conflict and gender panic. And so on. If one had to sum up the essential purpose and direction of the new academic art historians, one might say that, notwithstanding the variety of their political commitments, they are all engaged in an attack on the idea of the intrinsic. They start from the contrary of Butler proposition: nothing is what it is, it is always something else--and, they might add, something worse than it seems.

FP: You are an art critic yourself. Please tell us, what is an art critic? Can anyone be one? What motivated you to become one?

Kimball: T.S. Eliot once defined the task of criticism as “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” I think that is a good capsule definition. But I would add that I believe that the role of the critic is actually quite modest. The image I like to use is that of a marriage broker. The critic can explain all sorts of subsidiary facts; he can provide some intellectual and historical context; but in the end, his most important job is to bring the viewer and the work of art together. Once an effective introduction has been achieved--making that introduction effectively can be trickier than it might first appears--the critic should just get lost and let the relationship develop on its own.

Zicam

Probably most of you have at least heard of the increasingly popular cold remedy called Zicam. I finally gave it a try. On Tuesday morning, I woke up with a worsening sore throat, that odd "hot-in-the-face" feeling, and a cough trying to get started. As I'd just had a frickin' 3 week cough starting on election day, I sure wanted to nuke this thing if I could. "That's it, I'm getting some Zicam!", I said, heading out the door for the walk to the pharmacy. I'd used echinacea root capsules in the past with some success, but generally, you had to catch things before they got this bad. On the way to the pharmacy, I figured, "I'm screwed. It's too late". Reality was already starting to get that slightly fish-eye lens Twilight Zone feeling...

I got the Zicam tablets. There are other forms that you swab in your nose or take as a nasal spray, but there have been reports (still being investigated, I assume) of people permanently losing their sense of smell with that stuff. Outside the pharmacy, I let one of the yucky, chalky, bitter tablets dissolve in my mouth. After I took the next one three hours later, it was pretty obvious that the stuff was working. And now here it is, two days later. The cold simply never happened. I've been able to get up very early both yesterday and today and have a vigorous swim in an outdoor pool this morning, and I simply don't have any cold symptoms at all!

I'm not a doctor, but I've seen ones on TV. Give Zicam a try!

Welcome, Right Wing News Readers

Thanks for clicking through on the "website of the day" link over on John Hawkins' great site!

Your host here is a 39 year old electrical engineer and private pilot, and also a convert to the Catholic Church, living in Palo Alto, California, in a "Blue Zone" if ever there was one.

If any of you are interested in aviation (you might have to be really, interested, I don't know) you might like some of the entries indexed here, particularly the November posts.

You might also enjoy my "Bush Got Game" think piece that I wrote before the election.

Excellent

Via Right Wing News.

Fisk-o-Rama

John Hawkins deconstructs two lunatic articles today.

In the first he takes on this kind of logic:

Person 1: "Hey, that guy who just walked into the bank has a gun and is wearing a ski mask!"

Person 2: "So what? Snow-hunters have guns and ski masks, too!"

In the second, well let's just say this kind of encapsulates it:

Come on you College Republicans, you're being too sensitive. Why, if you'd written a "comedy piece" that suggested keying the cars of faculty members, punching them in the mouth, and shooting 15 or 16 of them, why I'm sure they wouldn't have immediately expelled you, they would have just laughed and laughed and laughed!

A Smoking Crater

Wow, when you spell it out this way. Real Clear Politics notes a DLC document in which Al From and Bruce Reed take a look at the damage sustained by the Dems in recent elections. I'm going to quote the same section that RCP quoted:

For the first time since before the New Deal, Republicans are now the majority party from the top of the ballot to the bottom. That's reality -- and we delude ourselves if we take false comfort in the closeness of our loss.

This was the second national election in a row -- 2002 was the first -- in which Republicans won a majority of the votes cast. That broke a string of three presidential elections and three congressional elections in a row in which neither party won a majority. Moreover, this election was the latest chapter in a four-decade swing to the Republicans that began after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide victory.

The dimensions of that swing -- and our decline -- are staggering. In1964, Johnson won 60.6 percent of the popular vote and 90 percent of the electoral votes, and Democrats held 2-to-1 advantages in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and among governors and state legislators. Today, the Republicans not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, but a majority of statehouses and state legislatures. In the 10 presidential elections since 1964, the Democratic candidate has won a majority of the popular vote only once -- Jimmy Carter won 50.1 percent in 1976. President Clinton slowed our slide in the 1990s, but even he never reached that magic 50 percent mark. The trend in the vote for Congress has been the same. After 40 straight years of domination, Democrats have not won a majority of the cumulative national vote for the House since 1992.

In 1964, according to the University of Michigan, more than one-half of all Americans -- 52 percent -- identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 25 percent who identified themselves as Republicans and 24 percent as independents. In the 2004 election, party identification was dead even: 37 percent Democrat, 37 percent Republican, and 26 percent independent.

We cannot assume this trend will end on its own. We know the Republicans will do everything they can to keep it going. It is up to Democrats to stop it.

Analysts who believe changing demographics will lead to a new Democratic majority should take a careful look at this election. According to that theory, women and the increasing number of minority voters will lead to an emerging Democratic majority. In this election, the percentages of women and minorities in the electorate indeed increased. But President Bush made significant gains among both groups. He won white women by 11 percentage points, 10 points more than his 2000 margin. Among Hispanics, Bush cut a 27-point deficit in 2000 to just 9 points this time. In the critical battleground state of Ohio, Bush secured his victory by winning 16 percent of the African-American vote, nearly double what he won in 2000.

We got out our base, but our base is not what it once was. The biggest blow in this election is how badly we lost the middle class.

It's no surprise for Democrats to lose white men and evangelicals. But in this election, we also lost white women, married people, couples with children, high school graduates, college graduates, people over 30, and, by our estimate, voters in every annual household income category above $40,000. Our coalition consisted of high school dropouts (though we won them by only 1 point) and those with postgraduate educations. That coalition is not the foundation for building a durable Democratic majority.

Dayamm!

Huh?!?

In the previous post, I quoted The Anchoress, who had linked to this article by Emil Guillermo, inside of which I find:

I'm even in the easy part of parenting a teenager. My daughter hasn't started couples dating yet. So I know the rough years are ahead -- when I may have to say yes to things I may not want to. Inevitably, I know I will be forced to deal with all the tough subjects. Not just birds and the bees -- how do I explain her Catholic school's contradictory teachings of virgin birth and physics?

Uhhh, Emil. The Virgin Birth is this thing called a "miracle". It would not be expected to obey the laws of physics. There is no contradiction.

I've never understood the "criticism" that Scripture is unreliable because it talks about things like The Virgin Birth, which unlike those rubes 2000 years ago, we now know to be against science. If those rubes 2000 years ago didn't know it was against the natural order of things, then why did they consider it a miracle and make a big deal out of it?

This ought to be a pretty "duh" point, I should think. However, it is employed by modernist "scholars" like the Jesus Seminar guys (beloved of Time and Newsweek, who like to trot out cover stories every Christmas and Easter to help the poor uninformed folks getting all excited about those holidays see that God is as real as the Tooth Fairy). It's very circular. We know that miracles don't happen. Why? They would disobey physics (non sequitor!). Therefore, we must try to figure out how the New Testament came to be. Originally, (it seems, because miracles are fairy tales!) Jesus was some kind of leftist college professor, whose core teachings were simple socialist and feminist moral and ethical maxims. There were no miracles. But over time, various "interpretive communities" embellished the story (you know, like the way, in the third decade of the 20th century, a "world war" narrative emerged, reporting on purported events between 1914-1918--I mean, I can believe the Archduke assassination but the whole 8 million dead thing is just poppycock--or the way that in the 1880's a "savior of the nation" narrative emerged which claimed great things for the alleged Abraham Lincoln), giving us the myth we have today. Unfortunately, all documentation of this earlier, purer, miracle-free version of Christianity has since been lost, and can only be reconstructed by these enlightened scholars and their enlightened physics-informed assumption.

If anyone says, "But there is evidence for miracles. What about what Jesus did?" The answer is, "You naive fool. Modern scholarship has shown that the miracle stories in the bible are just myths added later." And modern scholarship "showed" this only by assuming (that assumption resting on a non-sequitor) that there were no miracles. Which are known to be scientifically impossible both because they are, uhh, scientifically impossible and because there is no evidence for them!

And the fever dream chases its tail...

I Would Never Dream!

The Anchoress has some nice posts today. One examines new liberal efforts to "pass":

Can't help but notice what appears to be a co-ordinated effort by liberal folks to sidle up to the red staters and say, "psssst, lissen, we're not so bad! We're not as liberal as you think! We've got kids! We've got the same values as you!"

There were a few yesterday that I didn't get to blog and have since forgotten, but today I note this one and this one. (Hattip: Lucianne.com.)

See? They're just like us conservatives! They're simply, as the second writer states, "The GOOD Kind of Conservatives."

What is a "Good" Conservative? From what I can tell, it's someone who is raising a family but dislikes the president and the war, is "uncomfortable" with abortion but would never, never, never dare to impose that value on another, "I don't tell others what to do," sniffs the "Good Conservative."

Except of course if he is lecturing those bad, "mouth-foaming Conservatives." (Do they HEAR themselves at all? Apparently not.)

Regarding abortion and the whole "I would never dare impose my values" ethos, this is my slogan:

I am personally in favor of abortion. But I would never dream of imposing my values on unborn babies!

They Got Capone On Tax Evasion

The terrorists have Allah? We have lawyers!

excerpt:

Accountants destroyed Al Capone; it may yet be litigators that shut down Islamic extremism in the United States. Daniel Pipes tells today the story of a lawsuit brought by an American family named Boim against Hamas front organizations in the United States. The Boims' teenage son, David, was murdered in Jerusalem in 1996 as he waited for a bus.

A 1992 law allows Americans injured by a terrorist act to sue any American organization that provided financial support to the terrorist group that committed that act. The Boims used this law to sue three American Hamas fronts. After years of litigation, the Boims last month won a verdict of $156 million.

If upheld on appeal, the Boim verdict will have very large practical consequences. It means that financiers of Islamic terror who have access within the reach of American law must now worry not just about being shut down by the Department of Justice, but about being hauled in front of a jury for massive damages in civil actions.