Understanding Rove and Plame

As you lightheartedly skim through important opinion pieces from good
conservative pundits like Ann Coulter,
some of you RMC readers may not yet understand the fundamentals of the blood-in-the-water
Karl Rove affair. You may not understand what it is all about.

It is quite simple. There is an eternal principle of American
politics that explains the whole thing.

Whenever a Democrat lies, a Republican must resign.

Remember John Kerry and his stories about the Swiftboats? It turned out that he misspoke
about a few things. The media decided that it was all the fault of the Swiftboat Vets and that they
ought to resign from campaigning.

Remember when Bill Clinton lied about sex? Before it was all over, a whole flock
of Republicans had to resign, beginning with Speaker Newt Gingrich and including Speaker
Bob Livingstone.

Before that, there was the Iran-contra affair. Remember that? The Reagan
administration was trying to stop the spread of communism in Central America and
the Democrats were trying to stop them with quasi-legal dodges like the Boland Amendment.
The Democrats were lying about the lefties in Central America and fainting over
poster girls with a questionable hold on the truth like Rigoberta Menchu. So a couple
of Republican White House aides had to resign.

Before than was the Vietnam War. Democrats lied about that, so Republican
President Richard Nixon had to resign. Nixon was double-damned, of course, because
he had helped expose the lies of Democrat Alger Hiss a generation before.

Get it? The kerfuffle about Karl Rove and the daring undercover CIA agent
Valerie Plame all makes sense now, doesn’t it.

And it is comforting to know how concerned Democrats have become about
preserving the anonymity of CIA agents.

Turner on Intelligent Design

RMC chappie Frederick Turner wades into the Intelligent Design debate and finds
both sides wanting (here).

The argument over evolution, Turner says, is important because of the way that it affects the
argument over the moral law, the foundation for the government’s law.

Does the theory of evolution make God unnecessary to the very existence
of the world? If there is no God, what authority, if any, guarantees the moral law of
humankind? These questions are crucial in the current controversies that are dividing the
nation. For just as our laws must be not for religious believers alone,
they must also be not for unbelievers alone either.

Although Turner accuses both sides, evolutionists and creationists, of intellectual dishonesty, the argument
is better understood as a case of trying too hard. Creationists are trying too hard to prove that
God exists, and evolutionists are trying too hard to prove that He doesn’t exist.

But the truth is—and it has been established for several hundred years now—that you can’t prove that
God exists. Nor can you prove that God doesn’t exist. This means that you cannot prove the need for a
divine moral law. Nor can you prove that law is whatever the secular elite says it is.

But when you
have chased religion out of the public square, what are you left with? Here Turner hits the crucial question:

If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people,
then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state’s
well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions.

What you get when God is dead is liberals legislating morality by calling it “health.”
What you are left with is a secular elite in love with its goodness and its power.

Even as we plumb deeper and deeper the depths of the atom and the universe we are still left with the eternal question:
what is the nature of the universe and what is its meaning, if any? Pending the definitive resolution
of these questions, we are left with faith.

Terrorists Born in Britain

Now that they know that the 7/7 bombers were native Britons of Pakistani descent—and
that one of them was an elementary school teacher—the Brits are sobering up fast. They can’t
just blame the whole thing on the Yanks or the Iraq War or a bunch of bored rich Saudis. The bombers
were Brits, children of the welfare state, for gosh sakes. Writes Conservative Member of Parliament
Boris Johnson:

They were our very own. They were as British as a wet bank holiday.
They were as British as Tizer [a Brit soda-pop], and queues and Y-fronts and the Changing of the Guard,
and the chips that made them what they were. They were born in British maternity wards,
and attended by every comfort that the state could give.

They went to British primary schools and learnt about Britain from British teachers...

Er, yes. Maybe that welfare state childhood, culminating in several meaningful years in a bog-standard
comprehensive school, had an effect on the young lads.

In an editorial The Daily Telegraph
gets serious and lays out a line in the sand. It starts with the rule of law.

First, we believe in the rule of law, meaning the successive
judgments of the common law and the statutory declarations of Parliament.
Those who wish to establish Sharia law in Britain are irreconcilables.

And there are several other points that define “irreconcilables.” They include people
who don’’t accept the nation state, or the secular state, or “the separation of the things of Caesar
and the things of God.”

This is going to be interesting to watch.

How Much Publicity on Terror is Enough?

Some conservatives are outraged that the MSM isn’t devoting enough attention to the
London terror bombings of 7/7.Tony Blankley notes
the outrage of Michael Savage that by the weekend after 7/7 the MSM had switched their
attention from terror bombing to important matters like baby pandas, hurricanes, and the
breathtaking story of Karl Rove and the leak.

And of course there was also the scandal of the BBC emptying its coverage of the
emotional word “terrorist” half way through 7/7.

But is this a bad thing? The terror strategy requires high impact and relies
on western democracies cringing from media-fueled
sentiment and overreaction. It requires hitting the sweet spot between actions that
are ignored by the media and actions that spur the west to “do something,” the mid-point at which the west is
neither inattentive or angry, but just becoming more and more discouraged.

The purpose
of terror attacks in Iraq, for instance, is to create a Vietnam quagmire
effect and encourage the US political and media elite to withdraw “from a faraway country about which we know little” before the elected Iraqi government can
develop effective security services. President Bush seems to be trying to avoid
high expectations about Iraq. No doubt he wants to avoid media and Democrat-fueled discouragement frenzy.
Maybe the best way to achieve this is to get terror attacks off the front page
as soon as possible.

Bottom line on all this is always the reaction of the stock markets. And hyper-optimist
Larry Kudlow is
crowing that the markets are already up after 7/7, telegraphing that the markets
think that 7/7 was not going to impact global growth.

As I write here, the Islamic terrorists can probably best be
compared to other movements of desperate young men like the Ghost Shirt movement
of the Plains Indians and the Chinese Spirit Boxing movement of late nineteeth century.
They were no match for the global capitalist juggernaut.

Breaking the SoSoc Ice Jam

It used to be called the Third Rail. That was when Democrats believed that
they could electrocute any Republican that touched Social Security. Now it looks
more like an ice jam on an arctic river. The two sides are straining mightily, the Republicans
to Do Something, and the Democrats to avoid doing anything.

Now some Republicans are
trying to finesse the politics of Social Security with a bill to stop the skimming of the Social Security “surplus,”
the difference between the amount the federal government takes in every year in FICA taxes and the
amount that it actually pays out in benefits to Social Security beneficiaries, and put it in
personal accounts for individual taxpayers. Peter Ferrara
has the details. The bill is sponsored in the House of Representatives by “James McCrery, Louisiana Republican, and Republican Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin,
Clay Shaw of Florida and Sam Johnson of Texas,” and in the Senate by Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

The best thing is that it polls well, with the “public favoring it 59 percent to 37 percent.”

The Iraq Connection

The central argument against the Iraq invasion has been for some time that Iraq is a diversion in
the War on Terror. The main front was in Afghanistan and in breaking up terror cells around the world, but not in
Iraq.

Of course, nobody has said that the 9/11 attacks were planned in Saddam’s office in Baghdad, but the
evidence is pretty clear that Saddamite Iraq had allied itself with Al Qaeda and saw itself as part of
a coalition of forces opposing the power of the United States.
Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn ventilate some of the intelligence that the MSM
would rather not talk about that makes it pretty clear that there were relationships between Iraq and
Al Qaeda.

We have been told by Jordan’s King Abdullah that his government
knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former
Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents
from Zarqawi’s group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in
Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was
with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime
minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin
Laden’s top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

It is stretching credibility to imagine that al Zarqawi was operating in Iraq without the approval
of Saddam. More interesting is the question whether the Baathist opposition is still allied with
al Zarqawi or whether they are now ready to do a deal that gets them out of the uncomfortable
business of civil war and back into the political scene
in post-Saddam Baghdad.

Rich Republicans? Not Yet

What about that old chestnut that the Republican Party is the party of the rich and the
Democratic Party is the party of the poor? Is it true? Well, not exactly.

According to recent census numbers, the Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the
poor. But where does that leave Republicans?

It leaves them with everyone else, and that is a majority of Americans. The Republican Party is
the party of the aspiring or maybe, more exactly, the party of the perspiring. Democrats are people
who get their income from trust funds and from government funds. Republicans are people who work for
a living. That is why 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the US voted for President Bush in 2004.

Read the whole thing and
find out what is really the matter with Kansas.