Random Thoughts on the Civil Forum

- That Barak Obama's Christian testimony at the Saddleback Civil Forum was superior to John McCain's mainly highlights the limited utility of the question. The(admittedly bizarre) combination of Calvin, Darwin, and William James in my own worldview causes me to say: politically speaking, I don't care whether my president is going to heaven. I do care who's side he's on. But short of an expression of dogmatic atheism (or Islam), the candidates' answers to Warren's question were likely to be a poor proxy for what matters.

- [This one I added since the original post.] I have become much more skeptical than I once was of the assertion that a man's Christian faith necessarily requires him to be politically pro-life. For that matter, I am skeptical that in a previous era it required him to be an abolitionist. On the opposite end, I would say that an actual abortionist, or a Portuguese slave-trader, is afflicted with a moral blindness that voids any claim to actual faith. Somewhere between these poles lies the line. That said: I find Obama's assertion that Matthew 25 casts judgment on the government of the present-day United States for not spending enough money and energy on poverty and "racism", while he simultaneously argues that women ought to possess full autonomy to kill their babies, to be deeply contradictory, and suggests that Obama is in thrall to a vision of society completely at odds from anything that could be inspired by the faith he claims.

- That John McCain put himself foursquare behind choice and competition in public primary and secondary education is all very well, but a discerning follow-up question would have been to ask him what specific policies at the federal level would he undertake to advance these principles. Ideally, the best answer would be: "nothing", and I suspect that this is exactly McCain's intention. But while local communities should be responsible for their own education policies, in practice, the federal government is already knee-deep in education at both a regulatory and financial level. It would therefore not be inconsistent, at a minimum, to tie federal funding to the implementation of meaningful choice programs, if for no other reason than to counterbalance the extraordinary power of the teacher's unions seeking to prevent it.

- Better yet, a completely honest answer would have been to admit that no policy cocktail, even "choice and competition", will dramatically improve aggregate educational performance as we usually measure it. A school's demographic profile imposes a hard ceiling on what it can accomplish educationally, on average. What choice will do (and the reason I support it) is restore to school staff, and by extension the parents who choose them, a measure of control over both the worldview and the behavioral standards that the schools seeks to teach. Presently, these are determined by the ACLU.

- Lest I seem like an idiot, I knew perfectly well who Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) is; I just assumed that McCain must have been referring to someone other than a standard-issue Congressional Black Caucus hack. Correct me if I am wrong, but if John Lewis has ever cast a conservative vote in deviation from the CBC's party line, I am unaware of it. But that said, it may well be that most of the people who know this about Lewis are his constituents, who will therefore disproportionally view McCain's endorsement favorably. It's mendacious as hell, but McCain might have put some votes in play in Georgia's 5th CD.

- How ironic that the president can launch a war on the other side of the planet, and continue that war in the face of the public's opposition to it, but the government can't muster the will to control immigration with the public's support. It's all well and good that McCain pledges support for fighting Islamic extremism, but until the extremists own a fleet of B-2 bombers, our greatest danger will be America's immigrant Muslim community. Not only is this this the sea in which the terrorists swim, but the sea itself can drown us. Either way, it's time to drain the sea.

Suderman on Government Regulation

Peter Suderman, writing at the American Scene:

[T]he favor-state [that author of The Wrecking Crew Thomas] Frank seems to despise thrives best under the larger, more intrusive government he favors. . . . [B]ecause of the complexity and political considerations of the regulatory process, those who can afford to hire expensive lobbyists to bend it in their favor are most likely to support it. I’d be surprised, for example, if Frank didn’t support some sort of fairly strong action to address global warming; yet as Jim Manzi has pointed out, climate-change policy is rife with opportunity for corporate gaming (indeed, a lot of major corporations are already spending massive amounts trying to pass climate legislation they believe is in their favor). If Frank is really worried about the corporate-lobbying behemoth in Washington, it seems to me he ought to address the root of the problem: the government’s willingness to set up elaborate bureaucratic systems. The more power the government wields, the more influence rich corporations and individuals will seek over how that power gets used. Lobbyists and the selling of connections and influence are merely inevitable symptoms of a powerful regulatory structure.

Funniest Thing I've Read All Day

From the Wikipedia article on the Soviet Union:

Although the Soviet Union was officially secular, it supported atheist ideology and suppressed religion . . . .

In other Wikipedia news, although the Catholic Church is officially Christian, it supports belief in the resurrection of Christ . . . .

Live Blogging Saddleback's "Civil Forum"

Okay, not quite: I'm actually watching the DVR with about an hour and a half delay. On a positive note, I can close some of that delay by fast-forwarding through the commercials.

On a negative note, I'm worried about this. Obama, and even McCain, will probably run circles around Rick Warren in this deliberately "non-confrontational" forum. We'll see.

Obama's up first.

8:06 EDT. Obama calls Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar his administration's "wise men." Does this include Nunn's pivotal role in legislation restricting gays in the military?

8:09 EDT. Obama says (in context) that lack of government welfare is our "greatest moral failing."

8:11 EDT. Obama takes credit for Campaign Finance Reform. Wasn't that passed before he was elected?

8:12 EDT. Warren asks Obama to confess to any flip-flops. He admits to changing his opinion on Welfare Reform. (He now supports it.)

8:13 EDT. Obama calls opposition to the Iraq War his most "gut wrenching decision". Lists the obvious difficulties with 20/20 hindsight.

8:20 EDT. Worldview section: Obama: "I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins and that I am redeemed through him." We should "act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with our God." Right out of the song. Damn, this guy's good!

8:22 EDT. Abortion section. Obama doesn't think that there is a scientific or theological answer to the question of when life begins. A lot of shuck and jive about "moral gravity," but he's ultimately pro-choice. More shuck and jive about "limits on late term abortions" that he's never actually voted for. He's in favor of government spending in support of pregnant women.

Obama: "Marriage is between a man and a woman," but will leave the issue to the states, which means activist state judges imposing gay marriage. Supports civil unions, or words to that effect.

8:27 EDT. He's in favor of stem cell harvesting from embryos "about to be discarded." I could drive a truck through that loophole. "If adult stem cell lines are working, we should try to avoid any kind of moral arguments that may be in place." What does this mean, exactly? More vignette's about "perspectives" of the harvesters.

8:30 EDT. Obama: There is evil in Darfur, child abuse, etc., but not, evidently, in Iraq or Georgia. Says that good intentions are not enough. True.

8:31 EDT. Which existing supreme court justice would you not have nominated? Obama sez: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and John Roberts. Honest and predictable. The job of SCOTUS is to "guard against the encroachment of the executive branch on the other branches." Why is SCOTUS supposed to take a side in disputes between the executive and legislature?

8:34 EDT. Obama: faith-based social services must forfeit right to discriminate in favor of their own faith when hiring people for programs for which they receive federal funds.

8:37 EDT. Education. Obama supports "performance pay" for public school teachers as long as teachers agree with it. In other words, no, but the crowd didn't get it, since they applauded.

8:38 EDT. Who's Rich? "If you have 25 million book sales . . ." Outstanding answer. Serious answer: more than $250K, so their taxes will go up. He's in favor of tax simplification.

8:45 EDT. America's role in the world. What's worth sacrificing American lives? "Freedom and National Interest." "Honor alliances." Darfur: no commitment. "If we have it in our power to prevent genocide and if we act in concert with the international community, we should act." Do we need U.N. approval? "No." Obama gives Bosnia as an example of something he would support. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

8:48 EDT. Obama commits America to supporting orphans worldwide. How much will taxes have to go up exactly? Sorry, question wasn't asked.

8:49 EDT. Religious persecution, China specifically. "We should speak out." Blah, blah, that's it pretty much. Not a bad answer, necessarily. But then: "The U.S. must have religious freedom at home. We must support habeus corpus and no torture to have moral standing." So once again, America must be metaphysically perfect by liberal Democrat standards to be concerned about the rest of the world.

8:52 EDT. Human trafficking. Again, we must first fight it at home.

Energy: There will be "a price to pay," "everyone must get involved", "we must make sacrifices on behalf of the next generation." The devil is in the details.

Not a bad performance; he totally snowed these yahoos. I wouldn't trust any of the commitments, but it was a good show, judging by the applause. I wonder how the crowd was picked? The Fox panel gave him high marks, but points out "racism and sexism" were among his answers of America's greatest evil. Krauthammer points out the irony of Obama's criticising Thomas's "inexperience" prior to his SCOTUS appointment.

McCain is up next. He's supposed to be asked the same questions.

9:02 EDT. Petraeus is his wiseman. But who is John Lewis? And why the CEO of Ebay Meg Whitman? I'm skeptical, in general, that corporate types, and especially entrepreneurs, will excel at statecraft.

8:04 EDT. McCain's greatest moral failure is his divorce. An honest answer, and one that helps to disarm the inevitable charge of hypocrisy. America's greatest moral failure is self-interest. We should have told America to "join the Peace Corp" after 9-11. Was the Peace Corp hiring? That would come as news to a lot of folks who lost their jobs.

8:06 EDT. When did you buck your party? A total softball for McCain, obviously. But he mentions our Beirut adventure in the early Reagan administration as something he opposed. If that's true, it was prescient, and an unexpectedly good answer, considering that most people have forgotten about Beirut, in contrast to most of his other party-bucking (immigration, campaign finance reform, etc.), which is viscerally despised by people like myself.

Flip flops? He's now in favor of offshore drilling. Outstanding. Supports alternative energy including nuclear. Double outstanding. "We now have a pro-American president of France, which shows if you live long enough anything can happen." Lots of applause for the home run.

Toughest decision: remaining a POW even after offered early release to deny North Vietnam the propoganda victory. Good answer, and undoubtedly true. "It took a lot of prayer." Good answer, and probably not true.

9:16 EDT. Worldview section. He's "saved and forgiven." Not as good as Obama's answer. Another 'Nam story, this time of a shared Christian moment with a prison guard over a cross drawn in the dirt. Would he make up a story like that?

9:18 EDT. When does a baby have human rights? "At the moment of conception." Applause. Unequivocally commits to pro-life policies across the board.

9:19 EDT Marriage: "Between a man and a woman." California Supreme Court was wrong to impose gay marriage. Supports federalism, as long as gay marriages contracted in one state do not have to be honored in other states; if SCOTUS makes that position non-viable, he would support the Federal Marriage Amendment. Hedges on civil unions, but my impression is that he believes these should be private contracts. Not sure.

9:21 EDT. Stem cells. Supports it without must specificity, but clearly means he's in favor of embryonic stem cell research until adult cells show more promise. I think.

9:22 EDT. Pledges America to fight evil, specifically "radical Islamic extremism." Energetically pledges us to see Iraq through.

9:24 EDT. Which Supreme Court Justices would you not have nominated? Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer, and Stephens. (I guess that means that Kennedy and Alito are the only ones the candidates agree on?) We must nominate judges with a "proven record of adhering to the Constitution and not legislating from the bench." Supports Alito and Roberts with enthusiasm. He implied earlier that he would see the overturn of Roe v. Wade, but it doesn't come up here.

9:26 EDT. Pledges support for full personnel discretion for faith based organizations, including those that receive federal funds. Battery is dying. . . . UPDATE: Most of the rest is from memory.

9:28 EDT. Education. McCain supports not only merit pay, but firing bad teachers. "Choice and competition, vouchers, homeschooling, charter schools. Every American family should have the same choice as we did and Obama's did. Vouchers work, homeschooling works." Lots of applause, but does he really want to "equalize opportunity" as he claims? I think (I hope) he's being hyperbolic here.

9:31 EDT. What is rich? Artfully dodges the question, but says he wants everyobdy to be rich. Supports tax credits for families, opposes government takeover of healthcare. "Spending got completely out of control." Good bit about how he wants taxes to be as low as possible for everyone.

America's role in the world. Avoids specific commitments to Georgia and Darfur, while expressing sympathy for those peoples. Reiterates that he puts American national security first in regards to our commitment of troops.

McCain totally misunderstood the international orphan question, which is just as well, since it probably kept him from saying somethingn foolish.

Religious freedom: I can't recall what he said about the world, but unequivocally said that America was unique in our freedoms and that we should always be greatful for these.

Surveillance. McCain acknowledged the trade-off with privacy, but pointed out the extent to which our enemies use communications to operate. He should have said that privacy protections exist to protect Americans, not scummy foreigners.

Winds up saying that America was founded on "Judeo-Christian principles."

Summary: well done. He totally snowed this yahoo. In fact, since immmigration didn't come up, were this all I knew, he'd have my vote. I specifically was impressed by the way his reflex was to praise America, in contrast to Obama's blame America.

On the other hand, the forum suffered the absence of tough follow-up. I think McCain got the better of this arrangement in that he was often non-specific on the extent of his proposed foreign policy commitments. But Obama got off easy on this too, plus his answers on domestic policy should have been challenged. Of course,the forum would no longer have been "non-confrontational".

On Class-based Affirmative Action

John Rosenberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates come at Peter Beinart from opposite directions for his op-ed urging Barak Obama to embrace class-based affirmative action as a replacement for race-based affirmative action.

When do we consider "no affirmative action"?

The virtue of a change to class-based affirmative actoin would be to assuage the anger of those who believe that the already-priviledged offspring of such as the Obamas and the Cosbys are receiving preferential treatment at the expense of hard-scrabble whites. Unfortunately, there is no political reason why these concerns should be elevated over those of blacks who believe that their underrepresentation is proof that higher-ed is a white racket. And in the mean time, we still have the same problem: a group of people elevated beyond the warrant of their cognitive station.

Lost in this discussion is: what ought a university admissions committee try to accomplish?

Here are some worthwhile objectives:

1. Predict Success. Can the applicant successfully complete the academic program? If his portfolio says no, then it doesn't matter that he faced discrimination or that his mother is a crack-whore: he ought to be steered in a direction in which he has a higher probability of success. If your prediction models tell you that objective criteria (test scores and GPA) underpredict the college performance of blacks and poor people, then by all means take these factors into account. But I haven't seen any evidence that this is true, and much evidence to the contrary.

2. Academic Uniformity. When all students in a classroom possess the same level of cognitive ability and preparation, all students benefit. In contrast, when an instructor must pitch his presentation at the mean of a wide distribution, all students suffer. The smart students are bored and learn less than they would at a more advanced level of instruction; meanwhile, the deficient students learn less than they would were the material presented at a slower pace.

Here is a wrong objective:

Diversity. The claims made for the benefits of diversity are mostly bogus. Whatever the theory about Learning To Get Along With Different People, Etc., the experience of "diversity" as it is actually practiced on college campuses is quite alienating: witness Michelle Obama.

Or perhaps alienation, a.k.a. "raising minority racial consciousness" is the real goal. Fine: go sell it to the voting and tax-paying public.

Lest I seem too dogmatic about this, I can think of other formulations, for instance, that schools wish to produce a particular type of graduate whose post-college career in the real world doesn't reduce to his collegiate GPA. I'm skeptical of the good faith of this claim made in this context, but stipulating good faith, I would challenge supporters of race-based affirmative action to rewrite Title IV of the Civil Rights Act specifying the kinds of racially discrimination that they now favor. And of course, sell it to the voting public.

Good luck with that.

On Values

Spungen attends her Catholic all-girls high school reunion, and discovers a sizeable proportion of attractive, slender, women who seem stuck in spinsterhood:

I think the problem is that they retained religious values, without being actually religious. This makes it difficult to navigate the unreligious, educated mainstream . . . . Perhaps adjustment takes a certain... moral flexibility.

Translation: it's tough attracting men if you don't put out.

How sad. This puts me in mind of the discussion between Trumwill and me a while back, during which Trumwill essentially took this same view.

I'm struck by the extent to which the sexual zeitgeist has served the interest of Spungen at the expense of her classmates. Objectively, Spungen's life has worked out quite well for her, and she otherwise has no regrets. (Alternatively, she remains heavily invested in her own "moral flexibility".) By her own telling, however, this regime has come at a cost to other women: either they feel compelled into more sexual activity than they would otherwise choose, or they find themselves in an uphill struggle in the dating marketplace.

Were this still an active question, I would insist that Christian morality is under no obligation to grovel before sexual libertinism. Sadly, that argument is already lost in the "mainstream" culture.

On Georgia

Via Majority Rights, here is an article from a webzine called Stratfor that seems to call the situation exactly right:

Putin did not want to re-establish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re-establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to re-establish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in the context of its region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had U.S. support, aid and advisers and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.

By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin re-established the credibility of the Russian army. But far more importantly, by doing this Putin revealed an open secret: While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. The United States wants to place ballistic missile defense installations in those countries, and the Russians want them to understand that allowing this to happen increases their risk, not their security.

The Russians knew the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk.

Read the whole thing. It seems incandescently obvious at this point that our bluffs aren't going to work anymore. We're going to have to decide what we want out of Eastern Europe, draw the appropriate perimeter, and buy the military that will secure it in the face of a resurgent Russia. None of this will be cheap or easy.