Cardinal Coverup (New Times LA)
“On the day after child-molesting Boston priest John Geoghan was sentenced to prison in late February, marking an incremental low in the sex scandal afflicting the Roman Catholic Church, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony launched a remarkable public-relations campaign. It began subtly, with a pastoral letter published in The Tidings, the archdiocese’s official newspaper. The 65-year-old cardinal pledged to do ‘all that is humanly possible’ to prevent sexual abuse in the L.A. Archdiocese, the nation’s largest. He set forth a zero tolerance policy for priests who abuse children.... A few days later — even as he abruptly dismissed a few sex-abusing priests who had enjoyed his favor for years despite his knowledge that they were molesters, and then stonewalled law enforcement about who they were — Mahony quickly sought to establish himself as a leading voice in dealing with the widening scandal. He ordered that a brochure on the problem of sex abuse be distributed to all parishes and schools within the sprawling L.A. Archdiocese, encompassing Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. And he unveiled a new sexual-abuse hotline ostensibly aimed at enabling abuse victims to blow the whistle on errant priests. The cardinal’s press spokesman described these efforts in glowing terms. In view of the Boston scandal, Tod Tamberg, his spokesman, said the cardinal thought the time had come to let the faithful know ‘that we have comprehensive policies on sex abuse, that we follow them carefully and review them regularly.’ The implicit message: Other Catholic hierarchs might appear flat-footed in the face of the worst scandal to rock the church in centuries, but Los Angeles’ Mahony was a leader who was actually doing something. Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahony’s actions amounted to little more than a public-relations snow job. His image as a reformer took another beating this week with the disclosure that his protecting of accused pedophiles has extended even to the new Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral residential suites, with abuse claims against Father Carl Sutphin, who until recently was associate pastor there.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, weren’t Mahony’s at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris. Barely a month before he would have been forced to testify at the Harris trial, Mahony authorized the Los Angeles Archdiocese to pay victim Ryan DiMaria $5.2 million — the largest such settlement ever for a single victim in a Catholic sex-abuse case.”

Bishops, media views of “zero tolerance” create gap in perceptions (CNS)
“U.S. church leaders left a Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse saying they felt encouraged to take new steps to curb such abuse and rein in offenders. But they arrived home in the United States to a largely negative reaction and headlines that read: ‘Cardinals Confront Sex Abuse and Come Up Short,’ and ‘Vatican Summit Confounds, Angers.’ What happened? Why such a gulf between perceptions? One big reason was confusion over the term ‘zero tolerance,’ especially in light of a final communique by summit participants. Going into the meeting, ‘zero tolerance’ was a phrase used by bishops and dioceses to describe the policy of removing from positions of ministry any priest who has abused minors or who is facing a credible accusation. In effect, the priest remains a priest, but he is out of a church job. The summit communique introduced a new, even stronger potential punishment that may be designed for priest-offenders: a quick procedure of forced laicization. That means an abusive priest would not only be out of a job, he would no longer be a priest. Unfortunately, many in the media never understood the distinction.”

What We’re Fighting For: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Let’s start acting like it. (Brendan Miniter)
“Now it’s time for Western culture to stand up again. Worries about imperialism, especially cultural imperialism, should be cast off. Global free trade isn’t imperialistic; it’s the spread of a natural right, economic freedom. Demanding that a country respect its people’s basic rights isn’t imperialistic, and neither is standing for an unfettered media. No one wants to bring back colonial empires. All cannot remain quiet on the Western front. The West, not just America, is locked in a struggle with forces that question its foundation. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and many others reject the fundamental ideals of Western culture: individual sovereignty, freedom of conscience, free interaction among men and the right to the fruits of one’s own labor. They reject the Western intellectual framework that has permitted scientific, political and economic freedom and given the world the fruits of unparalleled creativity. These thugs hate Western success and religious plurality. Like Lenin buying rope from capitalists, the only Western product they seem to like is weaponry. The media’s historical ignorance helps undermine Western confidence. Rarely do we see reports explaining how the West benefited from Judeo-Christian thought. We are told America’s Founding Founders were deists if not atheists. Yet studying the period you’ll find countless references to God and prayers of asking God’s guidance. John Adams once said the intellectual framework for rebellion was laid in the churches years before it became a political struggle. That makes sense, for America is founded on the idea that man is endowed by his Creator with the right to be free.”

Blind Spot (Randall Kennedy)
“The key argument in favor of racial profiling, essentially, is that taking race into account enables the authorities to screen carefully and at less expense those sectors of the population that are more likely than others to contain the criminals for whom officials are searching.... Some commentators embrace this position as if it were unassailable, but under U.S. law racial discrimination backed by state power is presumptively illicit. This means that supporters of racial profiling carry a heavy burden of persuasion.... Stressing that racial profiling generates clear harm (for example, the fear, resentment, and alienation felt by innocent people in the profiled group), opponents of racial profiling sensibly question whether compromising our hard-earned principle of anti-discrimination is worth merely speculative gains in overall security. A notable feature of this conflict is that champions of each position frequently embrace rhetoric, attitudes, and value systems that are completely at odds with those they adopt when confronting another controversial instance of racial discrimination — namely, affirmative action. Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of ‘color blindness’ programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job.”

A War of Resolve: American kowtowing to “moderate” Arabs may embolden bin Laden. (Bernard Lewis)
“It was the shock of America’s rapid and sharp reaction that made bin Laden blink. After the U.S.’s initial response, he halted his campaign and adopted a more cautious attitude. But some recent American actions and utterances may bring a reconsideration of this judgement and the halt to which it gave rise. Our anxious pleading with the fragile and frightened regimes of the region to join — or at least to tolerate — a campaign against terrorism and its sponsors has put the U.S. in a corner where it seems to be asking permission for actions that are its own prerogative to take. Likewise, the exemptions accorded to some terrorist leaders, movements and actions not immediately directed against us have undermined the strong moral position which must be the foundation of our global war on terrorism. The submission to being scolded and slighted, as Secretary of State Colin Powell did in his recent meeting with the king of Morocco, and his failure to meet with the president of Egypt, make the U.S. seem it is reverting to bad habits. That only further contributes to a perceived posture of irresolution and uncertainty on the part of the U.S. administration.”

Radical Islam gains adherents abroad (Stephen Handelman)
“But even where it succeeded in gaining a political foothold, radical Islam exposed itself as incoherent and unsatisfying to those whom it most needed to attract. Islamists’ ‘incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising approach to statecraft alienated the very middle classes that earlier sympathized with their critique of corrupt elites,’ wrote Ray Takeyh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. So what does their failure have to do with Europe and the West? The answer is chillingly simple: Unable to win political traction at home, radical Islam has found its most passionate new adherents in Muslim communities abroad. At least 12 million Muslims — perhaps as many as 22 million — live in Europe today. The targets of economic discrimination and prejudice themselves, many can be easily swayed to violence in the pursuit of a political agenda set elsewhere. That governments in the Muslim world are aware of this is indisputable. Also indisputable is the fact that the money and logistics support channelled to these overseas groups by some of those governments deflects the still-genuine threat posed by Islamic alternatives at home.”

Intellectuals are failing the West (Paul Mulshine)
“With a few prominent exceptions, such as Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami, intellectuals have been reluctant to criticize the Muslim world’s tilt toward totalitarianism. And that Muslim world will continue to be a threat to the West as long as so many fanatics cling to the illusion that a government is justified in ignoring basic rights as long as it claims to be religiously inspired. ‘Even the massacre of 3,000 innocent people has not alerted people to what’s going on,’ Warraq said of the events of Sept. 11. ‘I noticed in England, where I have some liberal friends, that many of the intellectuals took it that this was all because of American foreign policy. It’s really, really dangerous to go along that line of thought.’ The problem is much deeper than that, according to Warraq. The leaders of the Islamist movement see themselves as on the verge of another great expansion like the one that occurred in the Middle Ages. And the mushiness of the multiculturalists fuels their ambitions.... The multiculturalists maintain that different cultures can have different values, even if those values infringe upon the basic rights of the individual. The opposite view, best stated by Thomas Jefferson back when it was European kings who were claiming to rule in the name of God, is that rights are unalienable. Any government that tramples on them is illegitimate. Warraq says Western intellectuals should insist that Muslim governments observe individual rights.”

Excusing child abuse (Matt Kaufman)
“There are some things whose evil should be so obvious that no debate is necessary. We wouldn’t be a better society if we sat down for calm, dispassionate discussions of the merits of, say, rape. (‘Sure,’ one side would argue, ‘women say “no means no,” but some of them don’t really mean it.’) The same is true of sex with children. That’s why it’s important that we not only reject pedophilia, but reject it vehemently, with undisguised disgust. We modern folk hesitate to display that sort of disgust, for fear we’ll be considered ‘judgmental.’ But we’d better recognize something: If the pro-pedophilia crowd can simply get recognized as a legitimate side in a debate — sharing podiums with opponents, haggling over the fine points of scientific studies, gradually accustoming people to the idea that some types of pedophilia aren’t really so bad — then they’re well on their way to achieving their goal. As Newshouse News Service writer Mark O’Keefe summarizes their view, ‘it may be only a matter of time before modern society accepts adult-child sex, just as it has learned to accept premarital sex and homosexual sex.’ That’s a sobering comparison for anyone who complacently assumes society will never reach the point of tolerating pedophilia. It’s also an important reminder of where the roots of the threat really lie.”

Gunmen stole gold, crucifixes, escaped monks report (Jerusalem Post)
“Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside the Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them. They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage. The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers. One of them held a white cloth banner with the words ‘Please help.’ One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: ‘They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didn’t leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.’”

In Dealing With Abusive Priests, Bishops Stood Along Wide Spectrum (NYT)
“While some American bishops transferred predator priests from parish to parish, the leader of one diocese, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh, battled for seven years to remove a sexually abusive priest from the ministry. Bishop Wuerl suspended the priest, the Rev. Anthony Cipolla, in 1988 after a former altar boy sued him for damages and at least one other victim stepped forward. And when Father Cipolla persuaded the Vatican’s highest tribunal to reinstate him, Bishop Wuerl traveled to Rome with suitcases full of papers to document the priest’s sex crimes. The Vatican reversed course in 1995, upholding the bishop’s sanctions and vindicating what he describes as his effort to protect the safety of his flock. ‘You have to assure your people that their needs are first,’ he said in an interview last week. Bishop Wuerl stands on one end of a broad spectrum of how Catholic leaders have responded to the sexual abuse crisis in the church. While he and some other bishops in the nation’s 194 dioceses have sought in various ways to prevent abuse and to hold pedophiles accountable, others have seemed more concerned with protecting the church’s name and its bank accounts, church leaders and religious scholars said in interviews.... In an interview on Thursday at his downtown Pittsburgh chancery, Bishop Wuerl said that shortly after assuming leadership of the diocese in 1988, he paid a visit to the shattered family of two brothers who had been abused by priests. The meeting had a profound effect on him, he said. ‘You cannot visit with someone who has been abused without coming away with deepened resolve that this should never happen again,’ he said. That same year, he removed Father Cipolla as a chaplain at a Catholic home for handicapped children, after Timothy A. Bendig, a Pittsburgh paramedic, accused the priest of having repeatedly abused him when he was an altar boy earlier in the 1980’s. Mr. Bendig, the second Pittsburgh Catholic to step forward with accusations against Father Cipolla, sued the Diocese of Pittsburgh for damages, eventually obtaining a settlement. Father Cipolla appealed his removal all the way to the Vatican’s highest court, the Signatura, which in 1993 ordered that he be reinstated, on the ground that Bishop Wuerl had violated his rights under canon law. But in 1995, after the bishop went to Rome to offer details of the priest’s behavior, the court reversed itself. ‘Bishop Wuerl took a brave stand in my case,’ Mr. Bendig said in an interview. ‘He just insisted, “This man should not be a priest.”’”

Well, oil be ... it’s our new pal, Russia (Bill Virgin)
“So we have finally soured on our friends of convenience, the Saudis. This is hardly surprising. After all, if you expect us to keep your country from being annexed by Saddam as the 19th or 20th province of Iraq but you treat our troops like your subjects, all the while secretly encouraging attacks on us and our allies, even we Americans eventually catch on. But this is all right, because we believe we have found a new best friend — the Russians. An affiliation with the Russians has several attractions. It provides an answer and an alternative to the reason we’ve put up with the Saudis this long — oil. Having Russia as a major supplier would allow us to tell the Saudis to literally and figuratively go pound sand. And being business and political partners with Russia puts on our side a nation that, while smaller than in the Soviet Union era, is still a significant force (‘we just know we’ve got those nukes around here somewhere’).”

Jewish Chiefs: Anti-Semitism Grows (Yahoo! News)
“World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II. The executive committee of the World Jewish Congress demanded better protection by authorities. Secretary-general Avi Beker said 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France over the past two weeks heralded worse to come for Jewish communities in Europe. ‘There is today an anxiety on the part of Jews when they go to the religious centers, they go to their social centers, when they send their children to school,’ Beker said on the last day of a two-day emergency meeting of the umbrella group that represents Jewish groups from about 80 countries. ‘This is quite shameful for Europe.’ Synagogues, Jewish schools and cemeteries have been targeted in attacks in several European nations in recent weeks, coinciding with Israel’s major offensive in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Suspects in many of the attacks are Arab youths of North African origin.”

U.S. to help U.N. redefine “families” (WT)
“The Bush administration has joined European delegates to an upcoming U.N. summit on children in moving to recognize families ‘in various forms,’ including unmarried cohabiting couples and homosexual partners. A coalition of Catholic and Muslim countries has formed to block the change to the traditional U.N. definition of the family — married heterosexual parents and children — at the General Assembly’s Special Session on Children from May 8 to May 10. A senior official at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York said the U.S. Mission and the State Department are backing the delegates from Switzerland and the European Union in their efforts because so many children today are brought up by single parents. Informal negotiations resume today in New York on a final document for the summit. The U.S. official spoke anonymously, saying he did not want to be ‘hung out to dry’ for explaining the administration’s position. He said the United States supports the proposal to recognize families ‘in various forms’ because ‘obviously we feel this more reflects the families of today, which are headed by single parents and extended families.’ Customarily, U.N. members are obliged to conform their national laws to the body’s declarations, and critics have said that the European-backed changes would make such proposals as homosexual ‘marriage’ and domestic-partner benefits an internationally recognized right.”

PAT Answers: It’s time to stop taking the likes of Paul Ehrlich seriously. (Pete Du Pont)
“So how did the leading environmentalists get it so wrong in the 1970s? Perhaps the most important reason was a profound misunderstanding of the way the world works. The root of the misconception was Paul Ehrlich and John Holden’s famous equation: I = PAT. The negative Impact of humans on the environment, they said, is the product of Population times Affluence times Technology. A bigger population was a bad thing because people consume resources and need houses and roads and so forth. More affluence was bad too as it allowed greater capita consumption of resources, and that must be multiplied by the negative impact of the technology necessary to produce the resources consumed.... What was missing in this view was the greatest resource of all — the human mind and its ability to develop efficient technologies that would improve the quality of life. Missing was the understanding that more electricity for more operating rooms to do more heart surgery was a good thing. More fertilizer meant less acreage had to be tilled, thus saving — and actually expanding — the forests. More production of goods meant more jobs, more opportunity and more national income to devote to environmental improvement. In short, I = PAT posited not even a zero-sum society (your gain is my loss), but a negative-sum society (your gain is always the world’s loss). It was a cost-benefit analysis in which there was only cost, never benefit. And it was dead wrong.”

Religious Freedom in Jeopardy? (Susanna Cornett)
“The protection religious groups have now is because of our Constitution — the protection of religious freedom — and because it is generally felt even among non-believers that religion on the whole benefits society, if for no other reason than that it is an expression of our freedom of speech and pursuit of happiness. What if, as society changes, the religious practices become more and more out of step with it? I think the response to what we see in Afghanistan is illustrative. When the media speak about the oppression of women in Afghanistan, using burkas as a symbol of it, they don’t separate belief from practice. The problem, as I see it, is not that women wear burkas, but that the ones who don’t believe it necessary are forced to do so. Our society, however, can’t quite conceive of women choosing to live within the restrictions imposed by some of the stricter Muslim teachings, so we assume that any woman who is living that way is doing so through force or ignorance. Perhaps that is true in some cases, but not all. And if we insist that their religious freedoms must stay within certain boundaries, then how can we preserve the full range of our own? I’m not advocating, in the Muslim instance, that all manifestations of Islam should be allowed. Murder of the innocent is always wrong, and we have a responsibility to stop it. And I’m also not saying that the teachings of Islam are correct; I don’t believe that’s true. But how we as a society respond to their religious choices, and how those of us who are religious respond to evil when we find it in our midst, will shape the tomorrow for religious freedom in the United States. Losing tax-exempt status wouldn’t end religious freedom in this country, but it would move us further down that road, and it’s not a road with easy return. Just as our right to privacy is in jeopardy from laws passed ostensibly to give us greater homeland security, so our religious freedoms could suffer from laws passed to prevent ecclesiastical abuse. I think we stand at a crossroad; how we call the Catholic Church hierarchy to account for lies, abuse and years of protecting self at the cost of the innocence of dozens of young men and women will help determine on which path we set our feet.”

The Hard Way: It’s easier to fight than to pray. So let’s pray. (Peggy Noonan)
“So what are we to do? I was daydreaming about all this as I walked in my neighborhood on Pierrepont Street yesterday, and I found myself staring at a message someone had drawn onto newly poured concrete: ‘Smile. Today is what you have.’ It struck me, naturally, as sentimental street art. And then I thought no, it’s both spiritual — ‘This is the day the Lord made / let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ wrote the Psalmist — and fatalistic.... It is easier to fight than to pray. In fact it’s much easier to fight than to pray. It’s one of the reasons we do more of the former than the latter. And fighting is hard. But it’s not the hardest thing of all the things we could do. The hardest thing is this: I have been reading about Karol Wojtyla during World War II, long before he became Pope John Paul II. Mr. Wojtyla was in his late teens when the war started, and after the Nazis invaded Poland he worked manual labor, on the freezing overnight shift at a factory, outdoors, breaking and carrying rocks.... He helped friends in the Resistance, but he did not join them. Why? Because, as he told a friend, the only resistance that would work was asking God’s help. ‘The only thing that will be effective is prayer.’ .... Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you’re doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won’t thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it’s not only the best answer but the only one.”

On Jew-hatred in Europe (Oriana Fallaci)
“I find it shameful that in part through the fault of the left — or rather, primarily through the fault of the left (think of the left that inaugurates its congresses applauding the representative of the PLO leader in Italy of the Palestinians who want the destruction of Israel) — Jews in Italian cities are once again afraid. And in French cities and Dutch cities and Danish cities and German cities, it is the same. I find it shameful that Jews tremble at the passage of the scoundrels dressed like suicide bombers just as they trembled during Krystallnacht, the night in which Hitler gave free rein to the Hunt of the Jews. I find it shameful that in obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for them extremely advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual opportunists — or better the usual parasites — exploit the word Peace. That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than the words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism) delegated to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot’s feet they incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated. Trick them, corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the yellow star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the Palestinans as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all.”

Return of the Guy (Charlotte Allen)
“In the furnaces of September 11, there was suddenly forged a new social trend: the return of the guy. (Remember that it was four guys who rushed the terrorists who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, wrenching it to the ground near Pittsburgh.) This trend was continued in the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. No one, even NOW, was heard to gripe that there were no women reported among the U.S. Special Forces troops fighting hand to hand with militant supporters of Osama bin Laden during the days after the Taliban fled Kabul. ‘For the first time in a long time, American heroes are not movie actors or sports figures or celebrity scandal-survivors,’ political commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Sunday Times of London. ‘They are cops and firemen and special forces soldiers.’ Their sex is male, and they do the kind of work that calls on specifically male attributes and virtues: physical strength, tough fatherly leadership (think of Rudolph Giuliani), brotherly bonding into fighting units, courage, and blunt compassion. Welcome back, guys.”

The Big Lie and the Big Lawsuit (Lawrence Henry)
“The world has changed, and it’s a meaner place. Little children who once would have gathered around a pipe smoker to say, ‘That smells good’ and ‘Daddy, why don’t you smoke a pipe?’ now point fingers and say ‘That stinks!’ and ‘You’re gonna die!’ Carrie Nation and her saloon-busting hatchet are totems of historical ridicule today. But Carrie Nation’s heirs in the anti-smoking movement have tapped into all the same wretched excesses of American culture — bluenosery, totalitarianism, and vandalism. There is a difference, of course. Today’s Carrie Nations have used thirty years of anti-tobacco jihadery to practice the sinister modern techniques of the Big Lie and the Big Lawsuit. Along the way, they’ve corrupted science, destroyed objective journalism, and made the truth nothing more than a commodity. They’ve demonized tens of millions of people and turned tens of millions more into preening, self-righteous jerks. And of course they’re not done. Having practiced and perfected their techniques, they’re now casting around for new targets. Food looms as the most likely. But there are others, lots of others. I would say that George Orwell himself would be challenged to describe it all. But of course he wouldn’t.”

Their way of life isn’t ours (Paul Mulshine)
“The problem, if my readings and discussions with American Muslim political activists are any indication, is that their goals and ours seem to be mutually exclusive. In our phone conversation, Obeidallah made a point of insisting that Muslims in America want to live Islam as what he termed ‘a way of life.’ I asked him what he meant by that. ‘Living Islam as a way of life means the leader is actually an Islamist,’ he said. ‘It means you must govern by the rules of the Koran and the rules of the Prophet Mohammed.’ He is not alone in that view. When I interviewed another leader of New Jersey’s Muslim community, Yasir El-Menshawy, the president of the New Jersey Council of Mosques and Islamic Organizations, he also insisted that the Muslim idea of a religious state is superior to the American idea of a secular state. ‘Muslims tend to want to have a more complete implementation of Islam running the affairs of the state,’ El-Menshawy told me. When I insisted that the American system of religious freedom is clearly a better one, he responded, ‘I don’t agree the U.S. system is clearly a better system.’”

I do have a few things to say now (Jon Carroll)
“Listen to me. It doesn’t matter who’s right. Let me say that again: Right now, it doesn’t matter who’s right. Stop with the screeds. It doesn’t matter who’s right. Peace making requires more courage than war making. Peace making require more intelligence than war making. Peace making requires patience, time, serenity and an open mind. I know about the numerous failures of peace making in the Mideast. But if we are to be humans, hope is always an obligation. We must always start again. We have just lived through a century of mass deaths, deaths in unimaginable numbers. Six million Jews killed by Nazis, at least 8.5 million people killed by Stalin, 800,000 Armenians murdered by Turks; 100,000 Kurds murdered by Saddam Hussein. One million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge; 800,000 Tutsis of Rwanda murdered by Hutus in 100 days. Do you know whether the Tutsis or the Hutus had a better claim to their disputed lands? Are you interested in the validity of the political claims made by the Armenians? The last two times we entered a world war, only a few people believed that it would happen. Generals on both sides of World War I thought it would last six months. At the beginning of World War II, the British called it ‘the phony war.’”

The priceless gift of the priesthood (Fr. William Leahy)
“To be a priest requires living a life marked by faith, integrity, and service, and it offers the possibility for doing so much good and for helping make God more present in our world. One day this winter I visited the parents of a recent graduate of Boston College whose son, like 20 other alumni of our university, was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. In grief and pride they told stories about their son, and showed me photographs, awards, and diplomas that chronicled his young life. They were speaking to me, I knew, as the president of the institution their son had loved but also as a priest. They asked if I would like to go upstairs and see their son’s bedroom, which they had kept exactly as he had left it. Perhaps they would have asked the same of the president of Harvard University or Stanford University. Perhaps not. But as a priest I was glad to be there to offer whatever comfort I could. Such moments have been part of my life as a priest, and as a result I feel truly blessed by God. I do not deny that there have been times of suffering and sorrow in my life. Like so many others, I feel betrayed and saddened by the shameful incidents of sexual misconduct committed by some priests, so devastating and harmful, especially to children and their families. But I trust that God and his people will sustain me and my fellow priests, now and in the future, and that my vocation, with all of its gifts, will never cease to be the wonderfully fulfilling experience that it is for me today.”

A Plan for the New Millenium (Fr. Robert J. Carr)
“The Roman Catholic Church has secularized itself and turned itself into a corporation. This is the center of the confusion.... We are supposed to be a community of faith. Ultimately, the issue, therefore, is whether we are a community of faith or a corporation. It is time to make the choice. The difference between a corporation and community of faith is all about how we define our association as members of the Roman Catholic Church. We were founded for one reason: ‘God so loved the world that in the fullness of time, he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him may not die, but have eternal life.’ We maintain that Jesus is resurrected. Many outside Christianity do not understand what that means in the long run, yet to put it simply: Believing in the resurrection of the dead means to live in a mindset that is so radical that once someone begins to comprehend this truth, they live their lives in radical ways not possible prior to that moment. Indeed, it is such a key aspect of our faith, that St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Jesus did not resurrect from the dead, we are wasting our time. I guess that is the best, yet quite poor, way of explaining what the depth of this fully inexpressible truth says to us.”

Holiness Is the Key (Fr. Roger Landry)
“The only adequate response to this terrible scandal, the only fully Catholic response to this scandal — as St. Francis of Assisi recognized in the 1200s, and as countless other saints have recognized in every century — is holiness! Every crisis that the Church faces, every crisis that the world faces, is a crisis of saints. Holiness is crucial, because it is the real face of the Church. There are always people — a priest meets them regularly, you probably know several of them — who use excuses for why they don’t practice the faith, why they slowly commit spiritual suicide. It can be because a nun was mean to them when they were 9. Or because they don’t understand the teaching of the Church on a particular issue — as if any of these reasons would truly justify their lack of practice of the faith, as if any of them would be able to convince their consciences not to do what they know they should. There will doubtless be many people these days — and you will probably meet them — who will say, ‘Why should I practice the faith, why should I go to Church, since the Church can’t be true if God’s so-called chosen ones can do the types of things we’ve been reading about?’ This scandal is a huge hanger on which some will try to hang their justification for not practicing the faith. That’s why holiness is so important. They need to find in all of us a reason for faith, a reason for hope, a reason for responding with love to the love of the Lord. The beatitudes which we have in today’s Gospel are a recipe for holiness. We all need to live them more.”

March 10, 2002, Homily (Msgr. Thomas Kane)
“What do we say? Immorality has no defense, does it? Abuse of minors has no defense. For our religious leaders, it may be absolutely inexcusable. And our hearts go out indeed to the victims of child abuse at the hands of churchmen. I cannot explain the Boston situation satisfactorily, and I cannot excuse Palm Beach. But as your pastor I should like to share some personal reflections with which you may identify and, hopefully, that will ameliorate some of the anguish that we feel – indeed embarrassment, as Catholics, that we all feel in view of the recent events.... I can honestly tell you that, after all these years, my idealism about the priesthood is exactly the same as it was when I served mass as a kid. It has not deteriorated. It has not been jeopardized. It has not diminished. And I think I can speak from the experience of knowing maybe 3,000 priests, and therefore knowing more of abuses than the average person would. And nonetheless to say unhesitatingly to you, the priesthood in its ideals, in its ministry, in its practice, is no less good, holy and outreaching as you ever thought it was. I say that to you as one who’s seen much of the sordid side of the life, sometimes, of my brothers, but also to reassure you that you are not to be disillusioned by the stories of the New York Times or Time magazine or the Washington Post or Boston Globe. You are not to be disillusioned. The priesthood is everything I thought it was as a kid, and from that vantage point of many years later, I would like to assure you that we are in this thing with you, we suffer with you, we know that embarrassment that you face, when maybe members of our faith nod knowingly to you, when those who are critical, when those who would smirk, when those who are cynical – I’d like to just say to you: We know we have our problems, but we have a priesthood that is as dedicated and holy and generous as ever it was.”

What the Titanic teaches (Stephen Cox)
“Investigation revealed that the Titanic had been following normal navigational practices and that she was equipped with more than normal safety features — including 200 more lifeboat spaces than government regulations required. In fact, more than 400 of the Titanic’s lifeboat spaces were never used. A very large ship, like a very large plane, is hard to evacuate completely; even if the Titanic had provided lifeboat spaces equal to the number of passengers, there would not have been enough time to use them all. No plans or regulations can guarantee that any vessel — or any human enterprise — is completely safe. Every action, even the apparently obvious action of turning a ship to evade an iceberg, carries with it an incalculable risk. And our moral decisions are just as risky as our practical decisions. The Titanic continues to fascinate the world because it raised this essential fact to the highest pitch of dramatic intensity. The Titanic sank [Apr. 14-15, 1912] in two hours and forty minutes — the length of a classic play. During that time, everyone involved in the disaster had to ask the most basic questions about what life is worth and what means may be used to save it. People had time to think, observe, reflect; but they finally had to decide, irrevocably, what they ought to do. Their decisions were as various as the individuals themselves.”

It’s a war, not a grudge match (George Jonas)
“In his Rose Garden speech on April 4 announcing Mr. Powell’s mission, the President struck a lyrical note: ‘America itself counts former adversaries as trusted friends — Germany and Japan and now Russia,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘Conflict is not inevitable. Distrust need not be permanent. Peace is possible when we break free of old patterns and habits of hatred.’ What Mr. Bush failed to mention was that Germany was flattened and de-Nazified before it became America’s trusted friend; imperial Japan was nuked, and Soviet Russia had imploded. The friendship of these nations was preceded by a complete collapse and fundamental restructuring of their respective societies. One wishes the Mideast conflict were just a grudge match between two old men. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a war between the Jewish state and those who have been trying to reject it for the past 54 years. Despite Mr. Bush’s uplifting speech, Mr. Powell probably lacks the illusions of Neville Chamberlain. He isn’t going to Ramallah as Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938, with the lofty hope for ‘peace in our time.’ Mr. Powell is hoping only for a licence from the Arab world to wage his own war in peace. He wants to finish a job in Iraq he left unfinished a decade ago.”

Evil’s triumph over conscience (Norman Doidge)
“Spooked, America is unwilling to let Israel end Arafat’s reign of terror. Washington has retreated into approaching him with a kind of primitive behaviour-therapy that says, ‘If he renounces terror’ or ‘If he controls terror,’ then we will talk to him. It is as though all that matters is to get him to say the right words, never mind his intentions; as if no distinction need be drawn between his strategic goal — the destruction of Israel — and a tactical willingness to say he opposes terror (when a lie serves his strategy). Arafat has discovered, as Shakespeare understood, that the more brazen and relentless one’s acts of brutality, the more likely it is that one will be allowed a second chance, and find even powerful men of conscience coming to one’s door offering to forget, to forgive and to give forgiveness a bad name.”

How white liberals destroyed black families (Anthony Covington)
“It would be nice to put the blame for inequality of incomes between African, Euro- and Asian Americans squarely where it belongs. Not on ‘white racism’, ‘the legacy of slavery’ and other dead or dying nebulae, but on poor old Dad — wherever he is. Even he is not the real villain. Rather, the most blame falls on American Democratic politicians between 1949-1999, including Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Their allies in the American left-wing devised the welfare state, an institution that wrecked the African-American family better than slavery or racism ever did. ‘Hold on’, I hear you say, ‘that sounds upside down?’ However, consider this; it is not colour, religion or your education in the USA that makes you more likely to end up in poverty, unemployed, on drugs and in crime. It is not having a father. Fatherless families of whatever colour in the USA make up 70 per cent of criminals, drifters, unemployed and failures. Parenting and not race is the major factor — undeniably so. Study after study confirms it.”

The death of socialism (Roger Kimball)
“It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has consistently delivered a more oppressive and mismanaged one. Socialism’s motto — Muravchik optimistically offers it to us as socialism’s ‘epitaph’ — turns out to be: ‘If you build it, they will leave.’ If, one must add, they are allowed to leave. As Muravchik reminds us in this excellent survey of socialist personalities and socialist experiments, encouraging dissent is never high on a socialist’s agenda. The socialist pretends to have glimpsed paradise on earth. Those who decline the invitation to embrace the vision are not just ungrateful: they are traitors to the cause of human perfection. Dissent is therefore not mere disagreement but treachery. Treachery is properly met not with arguments but (as circumstances permit) the guillotine, the concentration camp, the purge.”

Understanding history (Balint Vazsonyi)
“At last, reparations for slavery have taken center-stage. It has been like waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since the United States decided to compensate persons of Japanese ancestry for their treatment following Pearl Harbor. Once we accepted the proposition whereby the attitudes of the present, though no less transitory than those of the past, should nonetheless be applied to the past, we mortgaged the future. We can no more relive the past than foretell the future. The appropriate expression of disagreement with the ways of the past is to change those ways in the present, for what we believe will be a better future. Attempts at ‘rectifying’ the past are bound to fail because, owing to obvious limitations, they have to be selective. Unavoidably, what we see as old injustices will result in new injustices.”

The Mau-Mauing at Harvard (John McWhorter)
“The campus race game has largely prevented any sustained investigation into what — if anything — Afro-American studies programs actually accomplish academically. The assumption in the mainstream press during the West-Summers contretemps was that the intellectual quality of Harvard’s Afro-American studies was unassailable. Unfortunately, that’s far from true. Survey the department’s undergraduate curriculum, and you find that most of the courses express the pernicious belief that victimhood defines what it means to be African-American — that to be black in America has always been a story of betrayal, disappointment, passivity, and tragedy, and that when things seem to be improving, it’s only an illusion.”

Hunt the Boeing! (Urban Legends Reference Pages)
“The notion that the Pentagon was not damaged by terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and crashed it into the military office complex, but that the whole affair was staged by the U.S. government, has been promulgated by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book, The Frightening Fraud. Meyssan offers no real explanation for what did cause the extensive damage to the Pentagon, asserting only that Flight 77 did not exist, no plane crashed into the Pengaton, and that ‘the American government is lying.’ Unfortunately, the appeal of conspiracy theories has resulted in widespread dissemination of Meyssan’s ‘theory’ in France and the USA, particularly in web sites that mirror his work. As Le Nouvel Observateur noted: ‘This theory suits everyone — there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality.’ The text cited in the example above comes from a Hunt the Boeing! And test your perceptions! web site, one of the English-language mirrors of Meyssan’s claims, where readers are invited to ponder a series of questions about why photographs of the damaged Pentagon seemingly show no evidence of a crashed airplane. The answers to the questions are....”

Are Michael Bellesiles’s Critics Afraid to Say What They Really Think? (Jerome Sternstein)
“Has the time come to ask if Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America is an example of scholarly deceit? Some defenders of Bellesiles’s work have insisted in various forums that Bellesiles’s critics have yet to bring forth any evidence to suggest scholarly fraud. Recently, in making his case, one apologist pointed to the ‘searching examinations’ of Bellesiles’s book in the January 2002 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ), which, ‘although severely critical, eschews charges of fraud or misrepresentation.’ To be sure, ‘charges of fraud’ do not appear in the Quarterly’s forum on Bellesiles. But what is truly remarkable about that forum is what does appear there: scathing appraisals of his book’s misuse of sources and evidence which some might regard as consistent with academic fraud, such as repeatedly misquoting, distorting, falsifying, or perhaps even deliberately inventing evidence to support one’s thesis.”

The slavery reparations hustle (Jeff Jacoby)
“Don’t bother telling the plaintiffs who sued last month to collect reparations for slavery from three US corporations that they don’t have a legal leg to stand on. They already know it. After all, you don’t need a law degree to recognize that FleetBoston, CSX, and Aetna bear no legal culpability today because of lawful activities their corporate ancestors may have engaged in two centuries ago. Even unlawful activities were long ago mooted by statutes of limitations. And in any case, none of the companies being sued and none of their living shareholders has ever owned or trafficked in slaves, just as none of the plaintiffs and none of the 36 million black Americans whose interests they claim to represent has ever been held in bondage. These specious lawsuits will never win. But then, they were never expected to. The plaintiffs and their lawyers make no secret of the fact that their goal is not to win a legal verdict but to pressure the companies into making lucrative out-of-court settlements. If they balk, the lawyers’ PR machine will generate ugly publicity about the companies’ ‘insensitivity’ to African-Americans. Set up pickets outside their corporate headquarters. Threaten a national boycott. Maybe arrange a public denunciation by Al Sharpton or the Congressional Black Caucus. It isn’t hard to mau-mau corporate America if you know how to play the race card.”

Big earners hit hard by income tax (Houston Chronicle)
“Another way the rich are different: They pay the lion’s share of the nation’s income tax bill. The wealthiest 5 percent pay more than half the taxes, while people in the bottom half pay 4 percent. The annual federal tax deadline for most of America is next Monday. Two-income households are increasing, putting more families in the top slice of taxpayers. Millions of small businesses and partnerships are up there, too, paying personal instead of corporate income taxes. Many other people were boosted by the 1990s stock market boom. President Bush’s big tax cut will prevent the wealthy from paying an even greater share in coming years. But key provisions, such as the doubling of the child tax credit, will cut or eliminate income taxes for many middle-income people, while the rich won’t qualify.”

Congress Sets Record for Pork Spending (FOXNews)
“A war and a recession did not stop Congress from doling out the pork for special hometown projects, a government watchdog is reporting Tuesday. Citizens Against Government Waste is releasing its annual ‘Pig Book,’ a listing of what it calls the most egregious examples of special interest spending. The results are grim, but not surprising, group officials said. ‘Taxpayers will be disappointed,’ said Thomas Schatz, president of CAGW. ‘Here they are, sitting around doing their taxes — a good time to be thinking what they’re getting for their money, and in this case it’s a pretty bad deal.’ According to the group, members of Congress seem to be the only ones not tightening their belts since the economy took a downturn and the country started fighting a war against terrorism. Pork — that is, excessive spending for members’ pet projects, which usually grease the skids for special interest and hometown support — increased 9 percent in fiscal year 2002 to $20 billion. The number of pork projects increased 32 percent to a total of 8,341.”

Safe House: High-end “Panic Room” hideouts becoming more common (SFC)
“Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one Batcave. Her secret hideout is behind a seamless wall in her one-story ranch house in rural Livermore. A robber could break in, check every room and never know she’s a few feet away, calling authorities as she loads a handgun. Milani is one of the hundreds of Bay Area residents who have a real-life ‘panic room,’ which real estate insiders used to call safe rooms before the hit movie starring Jodie Foster came out. Some are converted closets with doors that bolt shut from the inside. Others are like Milani’s — with secret entrances that are impossible to detect unless you know where they are. And a few are similar to Foster’s fortresslike hideout in Panic Room, or even more intricate, with heat-sensing cameras, multiple ventilation systems and chemical washbasins for scrubbing away biohazards. In Los Angeles, most A-list celebrities and entertainment executives have safe rooms, said Bill Rigdon, who is a vice president of Building Consensus, a Los Angeles company that builds the hideaways. He said Bay Area safe-room owners are a little less conspicuous. ‘It’s the guy who owns the grocery store chain, software people, an owner of several hundred business franchises,’ said Rigdon, who has built more than a dozen safe rooms from San Jose to Marin County. ‘During the next fiasco, where do you want to be?’”

Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel. (David Brooks)
“Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world.... Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia.... Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia.... Since September 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia, it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests. In an essay in the New York Review of Books called ‘Occidentalism,’ Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising, television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology — the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, ‘Female emancipation leads to bourgeois decadence.’ Women are supposed to stay home and breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of their manhood and weaken their virility. If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like America and Israel.”

Myths of the Crusades hard to kill (Vincent Carroll)
“You look at the latest U.S. News & World Report cover story, on the Crusades, and you figure they’ve got to be kidding. You know they can’t be serious in proclaiming the Crusades ‘the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom,’ or in headlining the Crusades — in both print and in the version at USNews.com — as ‘The First Holy War.’ No sober journalist or historian could claim that ‘During the Crusades, East and West first met — on the battlefield,’ and expect any reader even casually familiar with world history not to leap out of the chair in exasperated shock. It’s a gag, almost certainly, when U.S. News quotes the chair of Islamic studies at American University as solemnly maintaining that ‘The impact of the Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today — the memory of a long European onslaught.’ No serious news journal would let such a statement stand without some mention of what happened before 1099 and the sack of Jerusalem by the likes of Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon.... Like so many articles on the Crusades since the attacks of Sept. 11, U.S. News takes for granted the idea that the Crusades constitute a looming grievance against the West that rightly resonates to this day. And it would be funny, this journalistic malpractice, if it didn’t buttress the convictions of the fanatics who are still seeking revenge.”

China’s Economic Facade (Arthur Waldron)
“Officially, China has for some time been claiming growth rates of 7 percent or more. But information casting doubt on those figures has long been available. Visitors see lots of rural people camped out at urban railroad stations or on sidewalks: Clearly they have nothing to do where they come from, or where they have arrived. Block after block of abandoned construction projects in cities suggest someone has run out of money (as does the recent proposal that money be raised for the Three Gorges Dam by selling stock). Almost daily protests by workers, many violent, are also a clue that all is not well. Moreover, even the official figures don’t make sense: How can it be that energy use is falling in a booming economy? And unemployment rising (as the official statistics show)? This is unprecedented in economic history. Finally, the state borrowing for pump priming to which Premier Zhu refers has always been public knowledge. Why, if the economy is burning up the track, has stimulus been necessary? Once again Chinese officialdom has put one over on Western observerdom. The shining exception is Prof. Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh, who over the past year or so has been making thoroughly empirical and highly persuasive presentations across the United States on China’s economy, based entirely on open Chinese sources, comparisons with other fast-growing economies and some solid economic analysis. He argues that China’s economy may actually have been contracting since 1998.”

They are the product of institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of Jews (Howard Gerson and Harold Waller)
“The myth that suicide bombers are necessarily produced by ‘desperate’ or ‘inhumane conditions’ should have been fully dispelled by the suicide attacks of Sept. 11, which were carried out by highly indoctrinated and motivated individuals who were neither economically deprived nor oppressed. Rather, they had been living freely in the United States for years. For many of us, this lack of desperation or of any apparent oppression was one of the most intellectually indigestible facts to emerge from the investigation post-Sept. 11. Perhaps there is a powerful need in Western culture to ascribe something other than simple hatred to explain a phenomenon as extreme as a suicide attack. Similarly, the idea that such attacks are the result of an institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of Jews is repugnant to our rational and liberal approach. The Western psyche demands a reason to make ‘sense’ out of the act: The homicidal terrorist must suffer from ‘desperation,’ ‘humiliation,’ or "hopelessness." There must be ‘another side’ or a ‘missing link’ to the story. Yet the evidence that the recent suicide attacks in Israel are the result of indoctrinated hatred actively carried out or condoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and by the Arab states, is overwhelming.”

Bush must face truth about Arab terror against Israel (Norman Podhoretz)
“A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words ‘cycle of violence’ allow of no distinction between terrorist attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians in a military action. And in the context of the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ (itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called ‘the Arab war against Israel’), to speak of a ‘cycle of violence’ is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational parties. This maneuver is calculated to conceal the crucial fact that Palestinian terrorism is neither a random nor an uncontrollable nor a ‘senseless’ phenomenon. On the contrary: it is a tactic carefully designed to advance a precise objective. And that objective is to wipe the Jewish state physically off the map, just as Israel is erased from the maps of the region printed in the textbooks given to Palestinian and other Arab schoolchildren.”

Journal Editors Disavow Article on Biotech Corn (WP)
“The science journal Nature has concluded that a controversial article it published last year on the discovery of genetically engineered corn growing in Mexico was not well researched enough and should not have been published. In a highly unusual ‘editorial note’ in this week’s edition of the journal, the editors said that based on criticisms of the article and assessments by outside referees, ‘Nature has concluded that the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper.’ .... The initial study had been embraced by anti-biotechnology activists, who said it confirmed worries that the technology was spreading in uncontrolled and unapproved ways. But Nature’s near-retraction of the article was welcomed by advocates for the technology.”

Say goodbye, Yasser Arafat (Mark Steyn)
“It’s very difficult to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’ when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to a one-state solution: ending the ‘Israeli occupation’ of the West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel. The divide among the Palestinians isn’t between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those who want to destroy her through artful ‘peace processes’.... As for the Palestinians, they’re a wrecked people. It’s tragic, and, if you want to argue about who’s to blame, we can bat dates around back to the Great War. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter whether you regard, as the Europeans appear to, the Palestinians’ descent into depravity as confirmation of their victim status: as Palestinian Authority spokesman Hasan Abdul Rahman said on CNN after a new pile of Jewish corpses, it’s the fault of Israel for ‘turning our children into suicide bombers’. Might be true, might be rubbish. Makes no difference. They can’t be allowed to succeed, because otherwise the next generation of suicide bombers will be in Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. That’s why Arafat will never be president of a Palestinian state, and has begun his countdown to oblivion. The unravelling of the Middle East has just begun.”

Fawning Critics Don’t Say Book Was Fraud (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)
“In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University published his book Arming America, which purported to establish that the core historical argument behind the Second Amendment was a fraud. The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National Rifle Association. As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles’ end. At least, that’s the conclusion of those who have examined his work — from journalists, to historians, to law professors — and found it wanting. Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out of context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have used documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. One historian familiar with Bellesiles’ work called it a case of ‘bona fide academic fraud.’ Emory University is investigating.... Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles’ work, many of the publications that afforded his book so much laudatory attention when it came out have remained silent.”

Crusade Propaganda: The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars. (Thomas Madden)
“The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history.... The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.... Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy.”

Understanding America (Owen Harries)
“The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September 11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility. Rosemary Righter, chief leader write of the London Times, has observed recently that ‘America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Vietnam’ — and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East, but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not just a case of the usual suspects on the Left, but that a ‘resurgent anti-Americanism’ exists across the political spectrum. As she says, ‘America is never less loved in Europe than when... it is angry, determined, and certain that it is in the right’. Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced American decisively along a course of action that — by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behavior — is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.”

Religion of Peace Update (Rod Dreher)
“On the way to work [NYC] this morning [Apr. 3, 2002], I stopped into an Arab-owned convenience store to buy a newspaper. A wiry Arab man, about my age and looking like a tightly coiled spring, stood by the counter holding a clipboard. ‘You should not buy that one,’ he said to me in a thick accent, as I picked up a New York Post. ‘You should buy this one. It’s more fair about this story,’ he said, holding up a Daily News — which, like the Post, reports the Bethlehem siege on its front page. The man’s eyes were hot, and I didn’t want to argue with him. I told him I prefer the Post. ‘But they print lies about Palestine!’ he said, his voice rising (the Post's editorial policy is strongly pro-Israel). ‘Hitler, he knew what the those people were about. He knew that if you give them freedom, they will take over your country, just like they have done here. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a Muslim.’ I pointed out to the man, as calmly as I could, that Hitler killed six million Jews. ‘Not true!’ he shot back, sticking his finger in my face. ‘It’s a lie!’ I turned and walked out without saying a word more. Because there is nothing left to say to such fanatics.”

Quiet time campaign muzzle (Jacob Sullum)
“No one disputes that the First Amendment applies to opinions about who should run the government and what the government should do. Yet in the topsy-turvy world of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the closer speech gets to the sort of political expression the Framers clearly meant to protect, the more restricted it is. An organization may criticize a politician, so long as the message is timed so it’s not likely to change anyone’s vote. Or it may discuss an issue, so long as it does not mention a particular official’s position on it. What it may not do is engage in ‘electioneering communication’ — speech that might actually have a political impact. These restrictions do not apply to news organizations, which helps explain why so many of them looked favorably on campaign finance reform. (For newspapers and magazines, as Reason’s Jeff Taylor has noted, there was also the possibility of attracting ad revenue that would otherwise go to TV and radio stations.) Unlike environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, journalists remain free to discuss the merits of candidates at any time and in any terms they choose.”

Area man says father shot Martin Luther King Jr. (Gainesville Sun)
“Claiming he wanted to get a 34-year-old secret off his chest, an Alachua County man said Tuesday that his father was the triggerman in the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, the Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson said, portions of the murder plot were hatched in Gainesville.... ‘My dad was the one who shot Dr. King,’ he said. He said his father, Henry Clay Wilson, died in 1990 at age 68 and is buried in Gainesville. His father’s two co-conspirators, R.D. Wilson said, also are dead. Wilson, who lives near Keystone Heights, and several other family members and ministry associates gathered at the Gainesville Community Plaza to reveal what they said was the truth about the King assassination. Wilson and his sister, Velma Roark of Waldo, said their father told them many times over the years that he shot King.”

“Why Do They Hate Us?” (John Perazzo)
“Since September 11, the uniquely introspective, self-critical people known as Americans have asked this question countless times. What elusive logic, we want to know, lies behind much of the Muslim world’s overt hatred of our nation? Not surprisingly, our progressive social critics, ever eager to explain the logical underpinnings of anti-Americanism, have dutifully provided numerous answers to these questions.... Considering the amount of time Americans have devoted to analyzing the aforementioned questions, it is utterly remarkable that the opposite questions are never raised: What have Muslim societies done to convince us that we should not hate them? Have they demonstrated an ability to resist engaging in ‘meddlesome,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘decadent,’ or ‘arrogant’ behavior? These would be reasonable queries coming from a citizen of the mostly-Christian United States, given that his or her fellow Christians are treated abominably in much of the Islamic world.”

Suicidal Lies (Thomas Friedman)
“The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of ‘desperation’ stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their ‘desperate’ occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.... Let’s be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.”

We shall not fear (David Warren)
“We hang not on the Cross, but on Christ’s Resurrection. At the centre of all Christian doctrine — and according to Christians, at the centre of everything — is this one moment. It is not understood as a miracle, but as the miracle at the heart, explaining all miracles before and after. It was, or rather it is, the grand intersection between the eternal and our own transitory world of space and time. Everything in nature and in ourselves was — is — transformed by it. It casts backwards through history as well as forwards, it gathers together every strand of meaning, into one knot, into one flame, and is of the moment with the Creation. And in prayer, and contemplation, the Christian apprehends, through the fact of the Cross, and shining through the Cross, the Resurrection. It is the lifting of the burden, the weight — of sin, of mortality, of fate. Christ, according to the Gospels, came into the world to abolish death. To abolish the tyranny over us, to free us from our greatest fear. In the moment of contemplating Christ’s Resurrection, we know the truth, and the truth has set us free.”

Bogus bias at MIT (John Leo)
“The sad truth is that MIT, one of the world's great centers of scientific education, has now produced and accepted two astonishingly unscientific studies of its own administrative behavior. In response to these studies, nobody on campus has spoken out. ‘The people on the gender committees control the airwaves on this story, and nobody will speak up,’ Steiger says. ‘And with good reason. If they speak, they will be branded as misogynists, and their careers will be in jeopardy.’ Worse, the culture of MIT is being changed. Gender equity has replaced scientific merit as the value administrators will be judged by. And as always in preference schemes, women on the faculty will now come under suspicion as people who wouldn’t be there except for politics. And all without any real discussion or open debate. Amazing.”

Listening for the Voices of Women (NYT)
“In the two decades since she wrote In a Different Voice and went on to identify a crisis of confidence in adolescent girls — a phenomenon Ms. Gilligan famously dubbed ‘losing voice’ — her work has attained the status of public gospel, inspiring pop psychology books, feminist lobbies and op-ed columnists, and galvanizing policy makers. Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus behind the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act, which, with an eye toward improving girls’ test scores, banned sex-role stereotyping and gender discrimination in the classroom.... Meanwhile, social scientists were busy challenging her research. In a Different Voice was attacked almost as soon as it appeared. Some researchers rejected Ms. Gilligan’s claim that women were more likely to consider their obligations to others (what she called an ethics of ‘care’) in making moral decisions, while men were more likely to rely on abstract principles of fairness (what she called an ethics of ‘justice’). Ms. Gilligan was accused of using unorthodox interview methods, of lacking control groups and of failing to publish her data in peer-reviewed journals. In a 1983 article in the journal Social Research, Debra Nails, now a philosophy professor at Michigan State University, dismissed In a Different Voice as ‘social science at sea without anchor.’ Since then, trying to replicate Ms. Gilligan’s findings has become a virtual social-science subfield, employing a small army of researchers — with little success.”

What You Say Reveals How You Think (David Stolinsky)
“The same paper, like most papers, takes great care to refer to anyone who has not yet been convicted of a crime as an ‘alleged’ or ‘accused’ murderer or rapist. This wording avoids lawsuits, and more importantly, it follows the American tradition that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So why is it that this paper began a story about child abuse in the Catholic Church with the front-page headline ‘Mahony Won’t Name Abusers.’ Not one of these priests had been charged with a crime, much less convicted, or their names would already be a matter of public record. But those Cardinal Mahony didn’t name were not referred to as ‘alleged’ abusers. Somehow the fear of lawsuits, and the devotion to civil liberties, were forgotten in the rush to condemn the Catholic Church — and, by extension, Christianity in general. Accused murderers and rapists in jail awaiting trial are ‘alleged,’ but priests not formally charged with anything are ‘abusers.’ How inconsistent. But how revealing.”

The slyer virus: The West’s anti-westernism (Mark Steyn)
“The Arabs say America is to blame for the Middle East. And Britain and America don’t disagree, not really. The Durban Syndrome — the vague sense that the West’s success must somehow be responsible for the rest’s failure — is a far slyer virus than the toxic effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into the cultural bloodstream. At its most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests itself in a desire not to offend others if one can offend one’s own instead. We saw this after September 11 in the incessant exhortations from government, public service announcements, the nation’s pastors and vicars, etc., that the American people should resist their natural appetite for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of Americans had no intention of brutalizing Muslims but they were sporting enough to put up with being characterized as a bunch of knuckledragging swamp-dwellers, understanding that diversity means not just being sensitive to other peoples but also not being too sensitive about yourself. Similarly, at airports across the continent, eighty-seven-year-old grannies waited patiently as their hairpins were confiscated and their bloomers emptied out on the conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as a ritual of the multicultural society: to demonstrate that we eschew ‘racial profiling,’ we go out of our way to look for people who don’t look anything like the people we’re looking for.... I am woman, hear me roar! Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! The one identity we’re not encouraged to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise. I am Western, hear me apologize!”

A Turn from Tolerance (WP)
“Long before Sept. 11, many white Europeans had deep-running concerns that their countries were involuntarily becoming multicultural as guest workers and refugees, mostly Muslim, established themselves in residence. There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making Islam the the continent’s largest non-Christian religion. The post-Sept. 11 concerns underscored a paradox that has cycled through European politics for years: The continent needs foreign workers to gird an aging workforce but is queasy about accepting them, especially if they are Muslim. ‘There is this fear for national identity combined with a fear of Muslims that has fueled this debate on immigration,’ said Jan Niessen, director of the Migration Policy Group, a research organization in Brussels.”

As the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find (NYT)
“Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box. What attracted many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions: the Coffee Cam, a live image of a coffee maker at the University of Cambridge; the Fish Tank Cam from an engineer at Netscape; The Spot, the first online soap opera; the Jennicam, the first popular Internet peephole; the Telegarden, which allowed viewers to have remote control of a robot gardener; and the World Wide Ouija, where viewers could question the Fates with the computer mouse. The Web was like a chest of toys, and each day brought a new treasure.... The problem facing the Web is not that some of these particular sites have come and gone — there are, after all, only so many times anyone can look at a coffeepot, even online — but that no new sites have come along to captivate the casual surfer.”

What’s news for the experts is common knowledge to most (Kay Hymowitz)
“Not so long ago, everyone knew that children — boys and girls — were cruel, aggressive, Darwinian creatures who needed adults around to teach them self-restraint. William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a disturbing story of English private school students deserted on an island after an airplane crash, illustrated the point most dramatically. It was common knowledge that, while girls didn’t often resort to fisticuffs, they were prone to back-stabbing, manipulation and scheming, a fact known to everyone from William Thackeray, who created the infamous Becky Sharpe in the novel Vanity Fair to Charles Schultz, inventor of Charlie Brown’s nemesis, Lucy. But in the late 1960s, development experts began revising the commensense view of children’s natural ethical state. This was partly because of the influence of the liberation movements of the time, partly to address changes in the family such as divorce and working mothers that made autonomous children a necessity.... But after a dramatic rise in juvenile crime and bullying, a slew of suburban school shootings, and just the daily grind of adult-child warfare, this theory was bound to disappoint.”

U.S. maintains the upper hand (David Warren)
“As I reported in this newspaper on Friday, the ‘jailing,’ or rather probationing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been taken over from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney. It is an extremely significant step, not because it ‘disempowers’ the Israelis, but because it puts the United States forward directly in the role of Israel's protector, negotiating on Israel’s behalf. While lost on the western media, the point has been taken in several capitals of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat and his terrorist groups are no longer simply confronting Israel. They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly aware of their international connections. Mr. Cheney set the conditions for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday, which did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The essential, verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver a public address, to his people, in unambiguous Arabic, demanding an immediate end to all terrorist strikes against Israel, and be seen delivering like orders to all the Palestinian militias under his ultimate command. Instead, he appeared on Palestinian TV looking as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement by his kidnapper. He condemned, after the fact, only one particular suicide bombing in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen.”

Stranglehold on Speech (Robert Samuelson)
“Free speech is not selective speech, respectable speech or popular speech. Free speech does not exist unless it can include speech that you — and perhaps most people — despise. People must have, as individuals and as groups, the routine right to express themselves, even if their expressions offend. Somehow these truths escape the supporters of ‘campaign finance reform,’ whose crusade threatens free speech.... In the final 60 days before the 2000 election, more than 135,000 political advertisements were run by sponsors who weren’t candidates or the political committees of candidates, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The new campaign finance legislation — known variously as McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan after its main Senate and House sponsors — aims to remove many (if not most) of these ads by non-candidates from the air. Unless political advertisements aren’t ‘speech,’ this represents a massive suppression of free speech.... Free speech must be a concept that ordinary people can grasp in most ordinary circumstances. It must not become a lawyerly collection of qualifications, footnotes and regulations, and that is where the campaign finance crusade is leading.”

Bleak future looms if you don’t take a stand (Dan Gillmor)
“This is a quiz about your future. It’s about how you view some basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information? 2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others? Those are no longer theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling. Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination of digital information.”

The Great Terror (Jeffrey Goldberg)
“Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago — that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. ‘For Saddam’s scientists, the Kurds were a test population,’ she said. ‘They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery.’ The charge is supported by others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as “How far are the dead from the cannisters?”’ Gosden said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. ‘It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA,’ she told me. ‘I’ve seen Europe’s worst cancers, but, believe me, I have never seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.’”

The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug (Mark Steyn)
“Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no bad side, just two parties ‘trapped’ in a ‘mindless’ ‘cycle of violence’ that ‘threatens the peace process.’ The ‘peace process’ tends to be no peace and lotsa process, in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts of their prestige. That’s why in Paris this weekend most of my dining companions were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis but by the shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings. ‘These buildings,’ one indignant Frenchman told me, ‘were built with money direct from the Union!’ — i.e., the European Union. ‘We have given billions, and now it is rubble.’ ‘Oh, your money's perfectly safe,’ I said. ‘Its sitting in the Hamas bigshots’ numbered bank accounts in Zurich.’ .... Forget the ‘cycle of violence’ and the ‘peace process.’ History teaches us that the most lasting peace is achieved when one side — preferably the worst side — is decisively defeated and the regime’s diseased organs are comprehensively cleansed. That’s why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism have not troubled us of late.”

Households Divided (Jean Bethke Elshtain)
“Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without fathers are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge. No responsible person wants to see that world expand, given its clear and present dangers. But how did it come about, and how are we to bring the second nation closer to the standard of the first in order to ensure that, in the parlance of the moment, no child is left behind? Wilson reminds us that when Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan first alerted the country in 1960 to the troubles looming on the horizon as the world of fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock birth was coming into view, he was denounced, accused of everything from racism to sexism to cultural imperialism, even as many people within the black community were saying the same thing — that a leap in fatherlessness was a ‘pathology.’ But that made no difference to the mainstream media or scholarship. As a result, it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly, to ignore the problem of the second. Forty years later, facing an epidemic in teenage motherhood — by 1995, ‘three out of every four births to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was nine out of ten’ — the alarm bells finally went off as politicians and social analysts converged on the same point: This trend cannot continue, as too much measurable harm is being done to children. As the evidence piled up, even those most resistant to the notion that fatherlessness as an independent factor generated risk factors for children, whatever the family’s socio-economic status, were forced to acknowledge the data. ‘Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth.’”

How Oscar Ghettoized Poitier (John Podhoretz)
“The spin on the evening was that it made history because two black performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night that the first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary Oscar. But there was something terribly retrogressive about the way all this was treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make us think of Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique and remarkable talents but rather as tokens. Why were only black actors and actresses given a chance to speak in the three-minute film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitier’s career really have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His extraordinary dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white audiences could only respond to white performers and white stories. In a magnificent speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable ceremony, Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors, producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the films that made him a star. They were all white. So is Poitier’s wife Joanna. Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore both black and white. He is an integrationist not only professionally, but personally. For him to be seen as an inspiration only to black people is to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply refused to accept the limits of race.”

Dumbing Down the SAT: The very existence of intelligence differences in America is about to become a forbidden truth. (Stanley Kurtz)
“There was a time when Americans believed that finding and training the country’s finest minds was in the national interest. Certainly, all American children ought to have access to quality education. But, ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as a nation to have a way of identifying students of high aptitude. And it is fairer to students themselves — especially those from lesser schools — to have a way of recognizing intellectual potential that has not yet come to the surface. The irony is that support for destruction of the SAT test comes from a liberal elite that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy. Guilt about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle — and many minorities as well — still believe in the principles of liberty and equality that created the meritocracy in the first place. But once again, the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself, is managing to turn our most basic values and practices inside out — with nary a peep from a public that would fight these changes if they were honestly told what is happening.”

Of conscience & cowardice (Robert Going)
“I happen to believe in the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. While perhaps a minority view, it is generally not considered an extreme position except by those who take delight in yanking babies feet first three quarters of the way out of their mothers’ wombs, sticking a needle in the head and sucking the brains out. Those people would doubtless find my views radical. Still, if I had written what I’ve just written, or said it aloud in a public place at any time from 1985 when I first became a candidate for judicial office until I left the bench in 2001, I would have been subject to discipline, even removal, by the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Some members of that commission and its staff have even gone so far as to state that accepting the nomination of the Right to Life Party is judicial misconduct.... After I became a county-level judge, the death penalty was restored in this state. As a cross-assigned judge I was offered the opportunity to take special training that would allow me to sit on capital cases. I declined, and wondered what I would do if such assignments became mandatory. Most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the death penalty. I never did, truthfully. But when faced with the real possibility that you might someday decide who lives and who dies, you’d sure better start thinking about it. I likely would have ended up as one of those who should have resigned rather than follow the law. But would I have? I believe in the sanctity of human life from birth to natural death. It’s such an easy thing to say. Now.”

But Seriously, Folks (Larry Miller)
“But, you see in all of American life there has, for a long time, been a battle of sorts to define what is serious and what is not, and all the wrong people are consistently winning. No matter how stupid, wrongheaded, or immoral some of our leaders and representatives have been over the years, if they can affect an appearance of troubled thoughtfulness when they address our problems, if they speak in a measured way, if they look around and nod with gravity, and if they use coy, calculated gestures — biting a lower lip, say — they will always be considered ‘serious’ people, and there’s no telling how far they can go. And I just don’t get it. P.J. O’Rourke has created some of the most immensely funny things in the history of immensely funny things, and I consider his work to be wise, large, insightful, and practical; in short, serious. The problem for me, you see, is that I don’t know what to call the ‘serious’ people of today, because I don’t think they are. When Mr. Daschle holds forth on our war effort,