Who's to blame for the GOP malaise?

A lot of folks, really.

As Daniel Larison so trenchantly points out, however, the ones most to blame are also the ones receiving the least condemnation.

As the cliché goes, there are three main factions in the conservative movement: social conservatives, economic conservatives and national security conservatives. Each faction has received blame for the right’s electoral troubles in inverse proportion to its responsibility. ...

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

Check out the whole piece here.

Star Trek and Hell

No, I didn't think the new Star Trek was Hell. Actually, I thought it was really great and I intend to see it again soon.

No, what got me thinking of Hell was Eric Bana's character, Nero.

Nero's world is destroyed, and he is sucked through time to the past as a result of the tragedy that engulfed his world. (Yeah, it sounds dumb. It's a sci-fi flick -- what can I say? Well, one thing, I suppose: the time-travel shtick didn't bother me nearly as much as it otherwise would have because the casting and directing were so damn good they overcame a lame storyline and a terrible script.) He nurses his resentment for 25 years aboard a space mining vessel, then completely destroys the home world of the man who failed to save his planet from destruction. He's close to destroying Earth before his plan is thwarted and he's killed.

The parts that reminded me of Hell were Nero's stated motivation for destroying worlds and his response to an offer of mercy when his plan is thwarted and his life in jeopardy.

Midway through the film, Nero says that he destroys worlds so that everyone in the universe will share his pain. Hatred and bitterness have consumed him, and he has become their evangelist. This is the attitude of Hell: "If I can't have happiness, no one else can have it either."

But the part that really got me was at the end of the film. His plan thwarted, his spaceship's defenses and weapons disabled, Nero stands at the mercy of the crew of the Enterprise and Captain Kirk. As Nero's ship is being sucked into a black hole created by a truly lame plot device, Kirk offers to save Nero and beam him aboard the Enterprise. Nero responds that he would rather endure the most painful death and see his world destroyed 10,000 times before accepting Kirk's mercy. Kirk obliges him by obliterating his craft as it's sucked into the black hole a terrible script created.

Nero's response reminded me of C.S. Lewis's description of Hell as a place that is locked on the inside, filled with the remains of souls so committed to themselves that they refuse to be saved if salvation requires them to reach out to anyone at anytime.

His response is also terribly instructive, because one day God will do as Kirk did. He will let all those who've refused to accept His help be sucked into the abyss created by their own rebellion. As Lewis said in The Problem of Pain, there are only two groups of people in the world: those who say to God, "Thy will be done" and those to whom God says "Thy will be done."

Dreher gets it

He's not always on, but he is here.

Talking about the New York Times's ridiculous account of the would-be terrorists in the Bronx, Dreher says,

You read and you read, and not until after you've plowed through nine paragraphs and 476 words -- longer than most editorials -- do you come to the following sentence:

They are all Muslim, a law enforcement official said.

This is what is called "burying the lede." Some editor in that newsroom found this to be an inconvenient truth, and tried to hide it. You can practically hear the Times cringing when it has to disclose this fact, which most fair-minded readers would find rather pertinent. ...

Trust me on this, if you are depending on the mainstream American media to keep you informed about radical Islam in America, you are going to stay in the dark. Political correctness on this point is a powerful force.

Preach it, Brother Rod!

And later,

If these alleged terrorists were white supremacists, neither the New York Times nor the New York mayor would have trouble speaking plainly and directly about what this is. ... That these men were Muslims is not incidental to their alleged crime. ...

Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists today are Muslims. You can't wish that fact away. We have to deal with it. Stop trying to make up this mythical horde of Christian abortion clinic bombers who in your minds balance out Muslim terrorists. These people barely exist.

Amen.

Islam, the secular West, and radical evil

Spengler (a.k.a. David Goldman) has written an excellent article about what the torture debate tells us about ourselves and our enemies.

What Spengler calls "radical evil" -- evil acts committed for their own sake, instead of for a selfish motive (as in most rapes or thefts) -- differs qualitatively from regular evil in its effect on those fighting it. Resistance to radical evil must be correspondingly radical and unequivocal, which means that radical evil proves insidiously contagious to those fighting it. The only safeguard against being affected by this radical evil is to fully believe in the moral rightness of your fight against it.

This fact, says Spengler, spells doom for any secular society fighting radical evil. Unlike a religious society (or a society informed by religious morality), secular society has no frame of reference for understanding radical evil.

In the Second World War and the Cold War war, Americans could endure the actual or prospective horrors of war because they understood in theological terms that they were at war with radical evil. ...

Secular society, by contrast, has an inherent vulnerability to radical evil, which it has no means to understand. Secular philosophy cannot produce an ethics; much less can it account for radical evil. Marx’s economic man may pillage and Freud’s libidinous man may rape, but they do so for the sake of loot and pleasure. Evil that destroys for the sake of destruction, out of envy of the Good, lies outside the horizon of secular thought.

Spengler then goes on to lay out how America's secularization, combined with our intense aversion to admit that the "War on Terror" is actually a legitimate war against Muslim Fundamentalism, increasingly robs us of our ability to successfully fight the radical evil of radical Islam.

America was vulnerable to terror and horror during the Vietnam War, when its government failed to persuade the public that its adversary embodied an evil so great as to justify the use of terrible countermeasures. America is even more vulnerable today, when its government cannot even identify who and what the enemy might be. President Obama insists that America is not at war with Islam, but it surely is at war with an interpretation of Islam shared by tens and possibly hundreds of millions of people. By falsely representing the terrorists as an unrepresentative minority in the Muslim world, Western governments have left their people vulnerable to a profoundly demoralizing shock. ...

Nearly two hundred thousand Americans, military and civilian personnel, were exposed to Iraqi terrorist organizations that routinely employed suicide bombings in order to kill Americans and their supporters. Some of these organizations were supported by Iran, which employed waves of children as human minesweepers in its war with Iraq. These atrocities were motivated by a religion that permits a peaceful interpretation, but cannot refute the cruelest and most violent interpretation.

Read the whole thing. It's excellent.

Dianne Sawyer and everyone on 20/20 are morons

A few weeks ago, there was a special on 20/20 called If I Only Had a Gun, the explicit purpose of which was to convince viewers that guns are bad and citizens should never use them to protect themselves.

Through misinformation, contradictory examples, and outright lies the crew of 20/20 went out of their way to create the impression that one can almost never use a gun responsibly in self-defense without putting your life (or the lives of innocent bystanders) in jeopardy. There was no hint that guns could be used by citizens to successfully prevent or deter crime. In fact, there was a 2-minute segment devoted explicitly to denying that such prevention or deterrence is possible.

This in the face of countless examples of how a firearm, used properly, can save the lives of many innocent people. Examples, that, if you listen to Dianne Sawyer and the other idiots on 20/20 don't exist.

Bizarro Britain

The UK, which has already become a far Left, quasi-fascist PC regime, is also in the process of becoming a sharia state due to the massive influx of Muslims (who have lots of kids). The British government is very tolerant.

It won't refuse entry to folks from Eastern Europe or North Africa who put a drain on public finances (by living off the dole) or represent a clear and present security threat (by actively encouraging, or actually participating in, terrorism). It won't deport people who openly call for the murder of non-Muslims.

It will, however, bar political and social conservatives from coming to Britain. (To be fair, it will also bar certain stripes of legitimate hatemongers, like Fred Phelps.)

If this wasn't so pathetic, it would be comical. If I wrote a fictional story depicting something like this, no one would believe it because it would be too much of a PC Lefty caricature.

The funny thing is, I agree with British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's rational for barring people.

I think it's important that people understand the sorts of values and sorts of standards that we have here, the fact that it's a privilege to come and the sort of things that mean you won't be welcome in this country ... Coming to this country is a privilege. If you can't live by the rules that we live by, the standards and the values that we live by, we should exclude you from this country ... It's a privilege to come to this country. There are certain behaviours [sic] that mean you forfeit that privilege.

I'm fairly certain that if anyone wanted to apply those words along non-Liberal lines -- if, say, they wanted to bar followers of sharia -- because of the effect such people's presence would have on the country, Ms. Smith would be apoplectic. I couldn't express my feelings about immigration much better than she has, though.

World Bank: The Pope was right about how to fight AIDS

The World Bank's own reports admit that pro-promiscuity efforts to fight AIDS in Africa -- handing out condoms instead of educating people about abstinence -- are failures.

See for yourself.

The World Bank points to weak bureaucracies as the culprit for the programs' failure. Well, it's true that most African governments tend to be ineffectual and corrupt. It's also true that putting an abstinence education program in place doesn't really depend on government bureaucracies, however. You can circumvent them entirely, actually. This is probably news to those at the World Bank, of course, who largely tend to subscribe to the Liberal belief that if there's something good that can be done for society it should be done by the state.