On This Memorial Day...

As the United States continues its Long War against the axis of petroleum-fueled warlords, the USS Kearsarge trains for another tour in the Middle East and a wife mourns her fallen husband.

The USS Kearsarge is an Amphibious Assault Ship, really a converted aircraft carrier, that is “designed to put troops on hostile shores.” As Rear Adm. Garry Hall tells Bob McManus: “There’s no beach beyond our reach.”

It’s a ship with over a thousand sailors and 2,000 marines, and the crew is holding up “amazingly well” according to Hall.

But this Memorial Day, writes Jennifer Fermino, Sharon Engeldrum is getting ready to celebrate the first birthday of her daughter Kristian, who was born seven months after her husband, National Guardsman Christian Engeldrum was killed in an ambush in Iraq.

The widow said her heart breaks every time she hears of another casualty in Iraq and Afghanistan - which means another family shattered.



"It's hard, absolutely," she said.

Sharon is participating in Memorial Day celebrations in Washington DC, which this year will be the first year that the parade will honor the GIs returning from the war on terror.

Later today, Sharon said, she'll lay flowers on the Arlington National Cemetery grave of her husband, whom she met in 1983 when he worked at a Bronx gas station.

And so the nation honors those who serve and those who have fallen. And it also honors those who have lost their loved ones in the nation’s service.

After Bush and Blair We'll Still Have to Fight Terror

With Prime Minister Blair on his way out and President Bush on his way down, some folks think that pretty soon we can get back to business as usual in international affairs.

Not so, writes Janet Daley.

Maybe it was OK back in the Cold War that “We kept our sons-of-bitches under control and they kept their sons-of-bitches under control.” But now it is the sons-of-bitches that are the problem. And they insist that we pay attention to them.

It is the little dictators and the rogue states, with their access to nuclear weapons and their terrorist networks, who are the threat now.

So after Bush and Blair are gone we will still have to deal with the sons-of-bitches.

What really went wrong in Iraq was a failure of the US to grasp that not everyone would seize the gift of freedom with both hands and make it work...

...

[Americans] just don't get it when nations, given the choice, opt for dictatorship, theocracy or the tribalism of warlords.

That is where Europe comes in, Daley advises. Europeans understand about “ancient hatreds and peoples who fear liberty.” But so far, except for Tony Blair, the Europeans haven’t stepped up to the plate. They have prefered to barrack from the sidelines. So what is the answer?

In the West, we have learned how to eradicate mass starvation and gross inequality. There is no mystery: the answer is liberal democratic government and free market economics.

In the future the United States is going to need some help from its friends in the effort to export this answer to the oppressed peoples of the world.

SAT Scores Down This Year

Colleges are reporting that SAT scores of students are down this year, and David S. Kahn, who has been tutoring kids for the SAT test since 1989, confirms the drop in OpinionJournal.com.

[T]he scores of my best students dropped about 50 points total in the math and verbal portions of the test (each on a scale of 200 to 800).

So what is going wrong? Is the test different? Are the kids less prepared? What’s the problem?

The test has been rejiggered, Kahn explains, and is probably more difficult. It includes a longer reading section. the result is that

Studying vocabulary lists before the test--a long-favored shortcut to lifting scores--just won't cut it anymore. Students who read widely and often throughout their elementary and high-school years develop the kinds of reading skills measured by the new SAT. Students who avoid reading don't--and can't develop them in a cram course.

The math section is also more challenging, including some pre-calculus for the first time, as well as arithmetic, algebra, and geometry it tested before.

Quite simply, this is not the same SAT. Students, anxious parents and college admissions officers... need to adjust our expectations accordingly.


People complain that the SAT is biased and that the bias explains why students don't do well. That's true--it is biased. It's biased against people who aren't well-educated.

So maybe people will start to sit up and pay attention. They might figure out “that their children are not getting good educations.”

That would be a start. Then we could all decide what to do about the great big flabby education system we have tolerated these many years.

Why do we put up with it? Is it because it really doesn’t matter to us if the school system is a mess? That kids can sleepwalk through their school days and it doesn’t make any difference?

Immigration Bill Will Expand Welfare State

Some of us are wondering why the United States Senate seems to be in such a hurry to shower the nation’s illegal immigrants with forgiveness on back taxes owed and credit for Social Security taxes paid. And why rush to normalize their status? There are tons of immigrants who have crossed every T in the immigration regulations who seem to be relegated to the back of the line.

Maybe Robert Rector has the answer. Only not quite in the way he thinks.

By his reckoning the newly regularized immigrants will be eligible for a feast of benefits. And when they bring their parents in, they will be eligible for benefits too.

In the long run, the Hagel-Martinez bill, if enacted, would be the largest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years.

So that’s what it’s all about. Jobs for liberals. Imagine. The stunning success of welfare reform has thrown millions of people out of poverty. And that threatens the jobs of millions of liberals who depend on the existence of millions of helpless victims for their livelihood.

What could be more beneficial than to find a whole new stash of helpless victims, people with little experience of thriving in an advanced economy. They would be just what the doctor ordered. They could give the welfare state another lease on life.

So liberals will get bigger budgets and Democrats will get more votes. Why do Republicans put up with this stuff. Aren’t we supposed to control Congress?

Enron Guys Convicted. How about Fannie Mae?

Good. Enron’s crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, have been convicted in federal court of lying to investors in the meltdown of Enron back in 2000. Writes Greg Farrell in USATODAY:

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling said they always relied on the lawyers and accountants who signed off on Enron's earnings statements. Jurors said they should have relied on the truth.

This is a principle that goes to the foundation of law. People have an obligation to know what the law is and what is going on in the institutions they lead. If you are CEO of a major company about half of your job should be checking up on what people are telling you. Otherwise you are not doing your job.

So now the federal government has got convictions in nearly all of the headline corporate scandals that surfaced when the economy went south in 2000.

Last year, a federal jury in Manhattan convicted former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers of encouraging his subordinates to cook his company's books. The year before, former Adelphia CEO John Rigas was convicted of fraud and misuse of investor funds. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau won a conviction last year of former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski and his CFO, Mark Swartz.

Now, could we please deal with the government’s rotten apples?

For a start there is Fannie Mae, the government sponsored mortgage bond issuer. The Wall Street Journal opines that the regulator’s report on FNMA’s tangled accounting indicates that “the internal rot is even worse than we ever imagined.”

Then there is the outrage in Congress that the executive branch, backed up by a warrant from the judicial branch, dared to execute a search warrant on a congressman’s Capitol Hill office. Excuse me, but I don’t see the problem with this. I seem to remember a Contract With America twelve years ago that declared that Congress should obey the same laws as the rest of America.

It’s easy to rag on business, and many people do. But business is continually reinventing itself. You could say that it has reinvented itself at least twice in the last century. And whenever it is a little slow to clean up, why there are a dozen sleek United States Senators ready to do it for them.

But government doesn’t seem to get it. Nor does education, a vast rent-seeking monster. Nor does the non-profit sector, a vast mirror of vanity.

Some of us are getting a little impatient out here. Putting corporate crooks in jail is just a start. We want the same enthusiasm for catching government crooks.

Bush and Blair Admit Mistakes!

It can’t be a coincidence that the first time that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair have “admitted mistakes” on Iraq is the week after the installation of a unity government following the national Iraqi elections back in January.

As reported by Joseph Curl and Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times, Bush and Blair admitted mistakes in not finding WMDs and taunting the Ba’athists to “bring it on.” Said Blair:

The chance of a major insurgency "should have been very obvious to us" from the beginning.

Bush admitted that Abu Ghraib was a major mistake. So that’s all right.

The problem that the coalition has faced from the beginning is that the government of almost every nation state has been defined and legitimized by war. Britain was defined in its Civil War, and the United States in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

The new Iraqi nation needs to define itself and its legitimacy in the same way. It must establish a “king’s peace” by defeating all the contending centers of power: in the insurgents, the Ba’athists, and all the war lords and barons with their private militias.

But it would be useless if the United States and its allies did all the work of pacification. The Iraqis must do that, the new Iraqi government, its new army, and its new police force. It must prove to the Iraqis, to the Middle East, and to the world that it deserves to govern the Land Between the Rivers. And to deserve to govern it must demonstrate that it has the toughness and power to defeat its enemies.

That is the challenge that the new government of Prime Minister al-Maliki must meet. It must pacify, and be seen to pacify, the roiling powers that contest for power in Iraq today. From that all else follows.

Gay Marriage and the "Pure Relationship"

What would legalization of gay marriage mean? Is it just a matter of human rights or does it interfere with the institution of marriage, that is the union between a man and a woman? Or even further, the basic equilibrium of society?

NRO’s Stanley Kurtz has written a number of articles on the subject, attempting to show that, based upon the European experience, gay marriage is part of a general movement to loosen the institution of marriage and to divorce the identity between marriage and children.

But here in the United States the advocates of gay marriage argue that it would strengthen marriage, since it would regularize gay unions and encourage long-term relationships among gays.

Now Kurtz has taken a look at the theorists behind the movement away from marriage. He’s provided us with a booklist that makes the case for sexual relations between any kind of partners for any kind of reason.

Most notably, Kurtz offers the work of Anthony Giddens, and his The Transformation of Intimacy as Exhibit A.

Anthony Giddens is no extremist. He is Director of the London School of Economics and a major influence on Tony Blair.

By looking at the implication of Giddens’ main argument, the idea of a secular movement from conventional marriage towards a “pure relationship,” Kurtz sees that the gay marriage advocates are either mistaken or dissembling.

Giddens’s point is that modern marriage is slowly being divested of connections with anything beyond the purely emotional bonding of adults. It used to be that the love of husband and wife was only part of the picture. Men and women were held together by love, but also by economic interdependence, and a shared commitment to parenthood. But gradually, says Giddens, the marriage alliance is becoming less and less about a shared project of prosperity and parenting. Increasingly, marriage is being reduced to a strictly emotional connection between two adults: “the pure relationship.”

If you look at the psychological model of Spiral Dynamics you can see that this approach is characteristic of the orange, creative level, where people experience life as a game to be won, and rules as something you make up as you go along. For instance:

[M]onogamy, Giddens says, should be adopted, if at all, as a result of negotiation and understanding between two particular partners, and not because of some institutional obligation embedded in marriage itself.

Leave aside Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, that you should ask the question: What if everyone did this? We already know what happens when a society implements this kind of radical individualism. It stops having children.

The reason is pretty straight forward. If you have no children, or one child, you can create an individual “lifestyle” in which you balance all your interests and activities. But if you have two or three children, then what you have is a life raising children.

The problem with gay marriage, with the pure relationship, and with “lifestyles” is that you devote your life to tangents instead of the mainstream of life. Which is generation. The generation of the next generation.

It is curious that our lefty friends, the ones pushing the elimination of conventional marriage are the ones who demand we live simply so that others may simply live, the ones who want organic, natural foods.
They are also the ones who are most likely to be childless. What is so natural about that?