Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Connie Schultz is married to U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.  She recently wrote a column explaining why she’s a liberal.  This is what I would say to her about her column:

Dear Ms. Schultz,
I usually don’t bother reading your columns, because I feel confident that I won’t agree with you anyway.  For this reason, and as strange as this might seem, I must thank you for writing with such clarity for so long that I feel I know where you’re coming from on just about everything. I’m not trying to be cute!  I really mean this as a compliment.

With this unusually interesting and important election nearly at hand, however, I saw the headline of your column and was persuaded to give it a go.  I’m glad I did.  I used to be called a liberal, but without changing my views one bit, I am now considered an extreme right-winger. This phenomenon has always fascinated me.

For this reason I was tempted to read your recent column explaining why you are a liberal.  It was thoughtful and thought-provoking.  I have a lot to say about is and hope you don’t mind my reproducing your words for clarity in explaining myself.

To say I'm proud to be a liberal is a little like saying I'm proud to have teeth.

Both are essential parts of who I am, but I tend to take them for granted.

It's not that I mindlessly trot through life without giving them a thought. Our teeth, after all, need daily tending and regular checkups, and so do our values. Neglect is corrosive. But they're also such a part of us that we count on them to work even when we're not thinking about them.

As the momentum of the presidential election surges, so do partisan attacks from both sides. Lately, my in box fills rapidly whenever I write about race or Sarah Palin, and attacks predictably take aim at my appearance and my politics. Occasionally, someone creatively combines the two by calling me a liberal who's long in the tooth.

Clever.

Now, no woman enjoys being insulted for the face God gave her, but I also understand that this sort of discourse comes with the territory. Sometimes, people are funny when they don't mean to be. Lately, the Birkenstock line keeps popping up - as in, "You probably wear Birkenstocks, too." Pretty silly. Have you ever worn a pair of those things? Lighter than air, folks.

Calling me a liberal, and thinking that's an insult, indicates a real misunderstanding of what makes my heart go pitter-pat. Every time someone says, "You're nothing but a liberal," I want to say, "Why, thank you."

Like so many Americans who came from less-than-idyllic beginnings, being a liberal is, for me, an act of gratitude for who and what made me possible. My whole life is a product of this country's faith and generosity.

Most people don’t continue drinking milk  from the same carton when it’s gone sour.  Nor do they continue to drink milk as adults, particularly if the beloved drink of their childhood wreaks havoc with their digestion and cholesterol.  To drink it anyway simply because they owe their strong bones to drinking it when they were children isn’t really a good reason, because it condemns them to poor health.  When the Democratic Party stopped being what had come to be called “liberal” and became more and more “leftist,” I felt, as many other Democrats did, that the Party had left me.   I owe everything to this wonderful country, but I owe nothing to the Democratic Party, which I served as I was serving my country for nearly a quarter century on Capitol Hill.  I was chief of staff to a member of the House who had the strongest labor union constituency of any district in the United States, and even as some of the union leaders in the 1980s saw how the Democratic Party was moving away from the principles that had attracted them to it in the first place, they would tell me that they would stick with the Party nevertheless, because it wasn’t right to “leave without the girl who brought’em to the dance.”

I am reminded of a conversation a few years ago with an editor who was increasingly frustrated with my topics and scolded me for failing to understand who I am.

"You are not the working class," he said, waving his finger at me. "You are an intellectual."

I shrugged and informed him that, if it's true that I'm an intellectual - and there are plenty who would make the contrary argument - then I'm an intellectual from the working class.

"We have smart people, too," I said.

The thing that divides so many Americans is not ability, but opportunity. And when it comes to big chances, no one has benefited more than people like me. 

Sure someone has:  Obama is the most obvious example.  I don’t mean to insult the junior senator from Illinois, for he certainly has the gift of “presentation”; he would be fine reading news on Channel 3.  But, honestly, I have never seen a guy with less talent become the standard-bearer for a major American political party.  Just as the Swastika on Charles Manson’s forehead warns that his statements should be taken with a grain of salt, everything Sen. Obama has done in his past tells us the same thing.  In fact, I have never seen a candidate advertise so clearly before election day that he will be even worse than Jimmy Carter. 

You wrote, “The thing that divides so many Americans is not ability, but opportunity.” Well.  That is not to say that we have more ability than opportunity, is it?  After all, there seems to be a lot more incompetence at the top these days.  I would say in Congress and in the news media.  You would say in the White House.  Such complaints tend to prove there’s more opportunity than ability.  It is still an axiom that there’s plenty of room at the top.  And a visit to McDonald’s seems to indicate there’s plenty of room at the bottom as well. Affirmative action created opportunities for people without ability.   You might bridle at that remark, for I acknowledge the purpose of affirmative action was to create opportunity for people with ability who had no opportunity because of adverse prejudice, but the success of Obama indicates we no longer need affirmative action for Americans of African descent, and the success of millions of women shows we no longer need affirmative action for females.  Continuing with the liberal agenda in that case promotes reverse discrimination.  As an outspoken so-called feminist, you might think that’s a good thing, and if you do, then that’s enough reason for you to continue to support the affirmative action policy that many people think has outlived its usefulness. 

We were launched from the blue-collar world with little help beyond big dreams, low-interest college loans and a family legacy of wearing out someone else's low expectations. For so many of us, that was help enough.

Gloria Steinem was right: The personal is political. I can list all kinds of reasons for embracing the liberal agenda, starting with the civil rights movement. But if I am honest, I have to admit that my political values began at the cradle, and you can't get more personal than that. 

Of course your political values began at the cradle.  When I was in college with the two mediocrities  who would become President Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich and President Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, our political-science texts detailed how children usually affiliate by default with the political party preferred by their mothers.  But my political philosophy was somehow fixed by age six, and I have kept it as the parties have realigned through the years.  My grandfather worked as an upholsterer for GM in Detroit, and we wasted a lot of money over the years driving lousy GM cars in the name of loyalty.  We were loyal to GM with our hard work and hard-earned money, but GM wasn’t loyal to us because, despite good-quality work by my grandfather and others on the assembly line, they still could not turn out a car that would get us from point A to point B without stranding us by the side of the road too often to count. 

A little tolerance is good.  Too much is a disaster.  Tolerance by definition means allowing bad things to exist.  Taking medicine is the proper dosage is good.  Overdosing is bad, because our bodies don’t have unlimited tolerance for poisons.  The liberal agenda was a good thing, but some of us didn’t know when to quit, and we became slaves to detrimental intellectual addictions.

Is it possible for us to be so loyal to the United States that we would fight for her even though she is wrong?  Yes it is.  But the default position of the liberal agenda today is that the United States is assumed to be wrong from the get go.  That’s not only wrong, it’s suicidal.

This is the problem with big-government liberals.  All the people I knew in Washington were doing their jobs with pride, sincerely thinking that they were doing the country good.  They also, quite naturally, thought they were in a position to “know better” than the average man on the street.  But the end result of all this is that the well-intended effort to serve our needs does more harm than good in the vast majority of cases because that is the nature of large centralized institutions.

The civil rights movement began with the anti-slavery roots of the Republican Party.   People forget that Dr. King was a Republican.  The Democrats were the party of segregation.  Parties do change, not to say that the Republicans are the party of slavery, as you might secretly wish to allege in your more puckish moods, but that no one would call Democrats the party of slavery.  Well, as least as black slavery goes, although I guess the case could be made that the liberal agenda did more to destroy black families and strengthen the status of Americans of African descent as members of a permanent underclass.  This made them slaves to government tyranny.

Comes now the first affirmative-action candidate, for nothing in Senator Obama’s background even suggests that he wasn’t gaming the system all along.  By identifying with his father’s side he’s able to play the race card and boost himself beyond what even the Peter Principle would allow.  I don’t agree with many of your views, Ms. Schultz, but I would feel more comfortable voting for you for president than for Senator Obama.  I care not what color the Senator is; culture is more important than color.  If I say he has no accomplishments, I’m called a racist.  No one who supports Senator Obama has been able to articulate any cogent statement why he should be president, other than “He’s not George Bush.”  Unfortunately, that’s good enough for some people and is one of the three reasons Obama shows so well in the polls, the other two being racism (with the respondents afraid of being called racists) and shallowness (with the respondents somehow not being able to distinguish between the Democrat and the Republican except by superficial stylistic clues).

I am a liberal because my father's union wages and benefits kept his family out of poverty and me in health care after I was diagnosed with severe asthma.

If your father had had the same wages and benefits without being a member of a union, as is much more possible today, would you still be a liberal?

I am a liberal because Medicare kept my grandmother alive long after she was diagnosed with a disease that eventually would kill her.

One of the reasons I’m a conservative is my experience with Medicare, which has kept my mother alive after she was diagnosed with diseases that eventually would kill her “within six months” ten years ago. She’s not dead yet, and Medicare no longer pays for some of the care she needs. And the paperwork is a nightmare.  It boosts the cost of care Medicare will not pay for by a factor of three.  If you think I’m not grateful for having my mother around because the paperwork is a hassle, you would be wrong, but at the moment I just don’t know how to explain things in a way that doesn’t make me look like a jerk.  Besides, like many of your liberal colleagues, my mother is still voting for the Democratic ticket because of FDR.   This year she wanted to vote for John Edwards because he was the “handsomest” of the candidates.

I am a liberal because of laws that insist that women like me get equal pay for a job equally well done.

Those same laws have me sitting at home writing this letter because there are too many women who will work for less than men.  Heck, apparently I was fired from the last job I had on Capitol Hill so that my boss could eventually hire his mistress!  There are some things that even a lawyer won’t do.  Besides, why hire a man when you can hire a woman for less and avoid the lawsuits?  I happen to have seen how the market does a better job of allocating resources and value than any bureaucrat, but the liberal agenda does not stop with equal pay for equal work.  If a lady plumber comes to my house tomorrow to install my new faucet, I’ll gladly pay her the $500 I’d pay a male plumber (to the extent that one can be “glad” to pay $500 to have a faucet installed in the first place).  But the liberal agenda, as you called it, goes beyond equal pay for equal work to the concept of equal pay for comparable work.  That would suppress self-regulating market forces and impose through bureaucratic fiat the same pay for opinion columnists and over-the-road truckers, say.  Or perhaps for senators and opinion columnists.  That might help you out at home.  I just think that’s silly at best and damaging to the economy at worst.

How can I turn my back on all of that? It just wouldn't be right to finally reach my little patch of the mountaintop and then immediately surround myself with a wall to keep everyone else out. I got mine, you folks are on your own, just doesn't cut it where I come from.

Who among conservatives says anything so shallow? You would not be turning your back on any of that, in my view.  The liberal principles of JFK, for example, are no longer embraced by the Democratic Party.  The Party platform would move us toward the European-style socialism.  There’s no persuasive evidence anywhere that socialism would be a good thing for the United States.  At least I haven’t seen any, and it’s not for lack of looking.  (I do try to be fair and keep an open mind.)

By the way, the people who make rude personal attacks on you are not necessarily conservatives, just jerks.  I remember when you were a guest on Whad'Ya Know? and host Michael Feldman told all of us out here in radioland how cute (“hot”?) you were.  Your readers should be civil in their discourse, of course.  I cringed and seethed with anger, though, when on national radio you took it upon yourself to apologize to the American people for the people of Ohio, who voted stupidly to give the nation George Bush in 2004.  In a similar vein, I must tell you that I cannot vote for Senator Obama after he went to Germany to make a campaign speech in which he apologized to the German people for America.  That was traitorous. If anyone should be apologizing, it should be the Germans to us and to the rest of the world.  Maybe they’ve apologized enough by now, but we should not have to apologize for Europeans’ wanting our soldiers to die first for whatever liberty they still permit themselves.

Besides, I love this country. How can I do this for a living and not love America? I'm full of opinions and I'm paid to publicize them, and I don't spend a second worrying that the government will throw me into prison for doing so. In this country, you can say what you want and live to tell the tale. What a liberal notion.

You are right about that.  In no other country is that possible.  That’s why I’m skeptical of any attempt to incrementally un-tether the country from her founding principles and remake her in the image of other countries with their confiscatory taxation feeding oppressively large government bureaucracies.
 

So, if I think about it, I'd have to say that, yes, I'm proud to be a liberal.

I’m not convinced.

The teeth are good, too.

Don’t forget to floss.  The Obama administration might try to make it a federal offense not to, particularly if the taxpayers will be paying for your dental care.

After managing Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign against President Reagan in 1984, Bob Beckel went on to a more formidable challenge, to manage the campaign of Owen Pickett to succeed the retiring William Whitehurst in representing Norfolk and Virginia Beach in the U.S. House of Representatives.  My use of the word formidable was a bit sarcastic, but the race was by far the most expensive campaign for a House seat up to that time (1986).  I met Mr. Beckel after Mr. Pickett hired me to be his chief of staff just weeks after he’d won the seat.  I found Bob to be quick-witted with a keen sense of humor, a bit dark, which I appreciated, particularly in light of our profession. I find it increasingly hard to believe that a man that intelligent can still affiliate with the Democratic Party today, but I guess he’s paid well to say what he says, and it’s worth the money to hear a guy be articulate without being obnoxious.  Of course, that isn’t the case all the time.

In his commentary after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama on September 26, Mr. Beckel noted that Obama admitted that McCain was either “right” or “absolutely right” in answering the moderator’s questions, but that it was “rude” of Senator McCain not to reciprocate the courtesy.  Bob couldn’t have been serious, could he?  When it comes to being courteous to members of the opposing party, McCain is generous to a fault, but he’s not going to lie about Obama’s responses just to avoid being called “rude.”  And anyway, Bob, I think the operative term for disagreeing with Obama’s philosophical positions is “racist.” 

Something Mr. Beckel wrote in his blog last summer illuminates the difference between liberals and conservatives as they are thought of today.  In a piece responding to many posters’ harsh opposition to his calling President Bush “arrogant,” Bob said, “I believe in a liberal political agenda. I have a right to believe what I believe without you calling me a commie.”  Well, I would like to express discomfort with Obama’s desire to surrender in Iraq without my being called a racist, Bob!  But the fact is, although you do have a right to believe what you believe, you most certainly do not have a right to believe what you believe without someone calling you a commie.  You are forgetting that there’s a significant difference between someone calling you a commie and someone putting you in jail for being a commie. 

The left believes that anyone can believe or say or, in some cases, do what he wants without consequences.  Well, obviously not anyone; only those who agree with you on, as you call it, the liberal agenda.  Speech the left doesn’t want to hear is never permissible in the first place.  That’s why there’s a move in Congress to bring back the FCC’s so-called Fairness Doctrine.  Leftists have no natural aversion to denying the rights of people who disagree with them.  Sure, Bob, you have the right to support a liberal agenda, and I have the right to tell you what I think of it, even to the point of calling you a commie, if that’s what I believe.  (If I didn’t think you were a commie, I wouldn’t call you one, but I would still have the right to, and you would have the right to ask me to justify myself.)  To have the right to do what one wants, even to the point of offending others, while insisting that the “victims” of your behavior are wrong to feel offended and that they must never speak of their feelings, is classic political correctness, which is just a weasel word for socialist tyranny, which tells its citizens the way things are going to be and then forbids them to gripe about it.

I disagree with you about conservatives.  They are not “haters” in the extreme sense that liberals are haters, but I wish you well and can’t help thinking that you looked better with eyeglasses.

The United States was formed as an antidote to Britain’s maladies.  It was the greatest of experiments in self-government, and the preponderance of evidence confirms its success.

The leftists who have taken over the Democratic Party say the experiment is over and that it has failed.  This argument makes sense if and only if its proponents know no history, have been taught the wrong history, or deliberately ignore history to acquire power. 

Our public school system, which exists to ensure, at least, the continuation of the “state,” has been failing since the boomer-hippies took over the education establishment.  Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate to have come through the post-hippie, revisionist education system that teaches history from the point of view that the great American experiment has failed and that the mere existence of the United States has had a net negative effect on the world, as historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular university textbook, A People’s History of the United States, has stated with astounding forthrightness.

Obama’s strategy is to try to convince the American people that every inconvenience in their lives is more evidence that our “system” is "broken," and that if we would just give him the power, we’d never be inconvenienced again.  How?  Because he would work with his big-government leftist associates in Congress to grow an army of government bureaucrats big enough to make sure everything is regulated into a Huxlian-Orwellian sameness.  Prices would not go up or down, they would stay the same.  There would be regulations to keep the sea level steady and to keep the rain away from everyone but government-approved farmers.  That should take care of everything.

The free market works, but not without some ups and downs.  Americans are used to ups and downs, and we tolerate the downs for the benefits of the ups.  There are too many variables in a market for government to regulate them all, and that’s why government intervention with market mechanisms ends up causing more trouble than it's intended to avoid.  This is why the so-called financial crisis Congress is trying to relieve today is not, as the Democrats and their superficial stooges in the mainstream press would have the people believe, a failure of markets.  The problems arise from failure of government intervention in markets.  Congress cannot repeal the laws of economics any more than it can repeal the laws of physics.

The great American experiment is still going strong and all evidence indicates that it is succeeding.  The United States is not merely different from other countries; it is better than other countries.  Her individual citizens are not necessarily “better,” but her cultural and governmental systems are better, because they allow people to be as productive as they want to be and rise to their greatest potential.  Assertions of American exceptionalism are confirmed by long lines of people trying to become Americans.  No other country has so many immigrants risking their lives to come here to make better lives for themselves.

To call America the last best hope is not hyperbole. American leftists believe that if other countries are embracing socialized medicine, for example, then it must be a good thing.   Consider this: socialized medicine “works” in other countries because the United States’ system is always there as a standby for people who need superior medical care in a hurry.  But if the United States embraces the Canadian or European systems, our medical services will be rationed by government just as they are in Canada, Europe, and Cuba, and people will no longer have a better alternative than to sit tight for months, hoping they don’t die waiting for treatment.  If people really thought they would get better medical care in countries with socialized medicine, then they would go to those countries to get it.

Extrapolating the health care situation to a grander scale is not that much of a stretch:  The United States of America is what it is because it was founded on certain principles that history has shown repeatedly make it work better than other nations.  Some might say America is different, but not better.  If that were the case, as I said above, then people wouldn’t be dying to get in here.  We live here instead of in Europe because we think this is a better place.  If all countries and cultures were the same, then people wouldn’t care where they lived.  But people do care.  If a substantial number of Americans want to live like the Europeans, then they should move to Europe.  This country became independent from Europe for good reasons, and the experiment has shown that those reasons cause America to ascend steadily while Europe declines. 

The bottom line is this:  If Obama and his team of leftist handlers win the White House, there will be no need for liberal Americans to move to Europe or Canada or Cuba or anywhere else the people don’t want to govern themselves.  America is the world’s safety net.  If we do not conserve the founding principles that underpin her and have made her the greatest country on earth, then, for those of us who embrace those principles, there will be no place else to go.

Legendary Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein is touring the country promoting his new biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman In Charge.  As a guest on Michael Medved's radio show on October 17, Mr. Bernstein lamented the dearth of "real biography," which his new book by most accounts certainly appears to be.  If there had been more "real biography" about the candidates during the 2000 Presidential campaign, Mr. Bernstein suggested, then the result of the election might have been different.  When interviewer Michael Medved asked Mr. Bernstein what he meant by that, Mr. Bernstein answered that a proper biography of candidate Bush would have revealed personality traits that even many congressional Republicans have confided to Mr. Bernstein are appalling.  When pressed about what such traits might be, Mr. Bernstein revealed the chief trait Republicans (not to mention Democrats) find problematic with the current chief executive is "intellectual laziness."  Apparently this is defined as not reading many books, though Mr. Bernstein did not attempt to refute reports that the President reads quite a lot.

Mr. Bernstein speaks with the infallibility of the mighty warrior who "brought down Nixon."  He resists being corrected on facts, insisting that he's right or, if shown to be wrong, that the distinction makes no difference—talk about intellectually lazy!—as in whether President Bush was told that the Katrina-threatened New Orleans levies were in danger of being "breached" or of being merely "topped."

Intellectual laziness would seem to be an unforgivable handicap for the President of the United States, but is it really?  Is intellectual laziness really what people are concerned about when they say it is?

When conservatives call liberals intellectually lazy, it means one thing, and when liberals use the term to describe conservatives, it means something else altogether.   Conservatives call liberals intellectually lazy because the latter cannot reach rational decisions; liberals do not sharpen their minds enough to cut through the gray areas that keep them from espousing coherent positions. The purpose of having an intellect is to observe the world and make decisions about it.  As Chesterton said:  "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening a mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

On the other hand, liberals reject Chesterton and attribute intellectual laziness to conservatives who do make decisions, who do hold opinions. Liberals today view the height of intellect as never making up one's mind.  Always keeping an open mind, always thinking that every decision ever made, every action ever taken, might have been a mistake, like the very founding of the United States, for example.  It's as though decisions are like cultures, none being better than any other.  The only place a person can function in a society with an intellect so superior that he cannot make a decision is at the lowest rung of the economic ladder or in a university or in a government bureaucracy.  

Beyond the basic education necessary to function in society, intellect for its own sake is no measure of presidential greatness.  An inverse relationship seems even more likely.

President Nixon was not intellectually lazy.  Nor was President Carter.  Nor was President Grant.  These Presidents are far more likely to be found on lists of the three worst than on lists of the ten best.  No one would accuse Abraham Lincoln of being intellectually lazy, for his determined self-education refutes the argument.  President Reagan was not necessarily intellectually lazy; he would better be described as intellectually efficient, yet he was denounced as being an "amiable dunce" by the never self-effacing Clark Clifford, or as downright stupid at every turn by less accomplished Democrats.  George W. Bush's alleged stupidity is all but axiomatic in the consciousness of much of the public.

Executives must make decisions.  If they are so overwhelmed by their own intelligence that they cannot make decisions, they are worthless as executives.  This gets at the root of the difference between knowledge and information.  Just being able to suffer a lot of information manifested as intellectual noise might be a mark of intelligence, but cutting through the noise requires more than intelligence; it requires knowledge.  The most learned and intellectual college professor still has to call a plumber with a GED to fix his leaky faucet because the professor either lacks the knowledge of what to do or is too intellectually lazy to try to gain the knowledge for himself.  It's not that the professor's "decision" to hire a plumber is strictly economic either, for the plumber probably earns more than the professor.

Perhaps being liberal means never having to make one's own decisions.  That a decision was made to call the plumber in the above example does not invalidate the argument, because the decision was probably made by the professor's more conservative spouse.

The biggest, most severe, most urgent crisis we face today—in fact, scientists agree the worst cataclysm the earth has ever had to face since creation—is the catastrophic warming of our atmosphere from all the hot air that's being generated by Al Gore.

Senator Gore was trying to set himself apart from his colleagues by creating a public persona of a seer who is interested in issues so far-reaching in their implications that none dared call him a "typical" politician concerned only about the next election.  He built a reputation for being a genius by assuming the trappings of geniuses, like taking on issues no one understands and for which he'll be lauded today but not blamed for until after he's dead and gone.  He stares into his crystal ball like a sideshow fortune-teller, seeing nothing, but making up something that sounds ominous.  The most sophisticated supercomputers can barely tell us whether the temperature will rise three degrees by the weekend, much less how a few degrees fifty years from now will make the earth a charred cinder.  I mean, after all, if one extrapolates from a newborn baby's twelve inches of growth by the time he's one year old, then a computer can easily predict that by the time the child reaches the age of seventy he would be seventy feet tall.  Such shallow thinking is one reason every prediction ever made by the so-called environmentalist movement has been wrong. 

Mr. Gore has stated in no uncertain terms that global warming is a more urgent crisis and a bigger threat to the world than Islamofacism.  No rational person would believe that assertion, so Mr. Gore is a hero to the irrational.  This was confirmed once again by his winning the Nobel Peace Prize, joining other heroes to the irrational, such as Yassir Arafat and Jimmy Carter.  If global warming were such a huge threat, then it certainly should have appeared even more severe before the war on terror pushed it out of the headlines.  In fact, global warming was so far off the front page before 9/11 that Mr. Gore himself had forgotten how important it was:  He did not mention it once during his 2000 presidential campaign.

The fact is, Mr. Gore doesn't really care about global warming.  He cares only about being identified with an issue that is so nebulous that no one can turn him into a has-been by proving him wrong.  No matter what we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nothing measurable will happen, so the Gore crowd can claim victory because no one will be able to prove them wrong until they are long gone. 

But what if Senator Gore is right?  What if the global warming, which has been going on since the last ice age, is being significantly or even substantially exacerbated by human activity?  What would the world look like?  Well, I think the half-witted liberal left is misguided in trying to stop global warming, because as things heat up, the world will look more and more like a liberal leftist paradise:

People would wear fewer clothes and expose more skin.  People of color would gain more political power as the underpigmented succumbed to skin cancer.  Nations that cannot grow enough food for their own people today would be able to do so in the new climate patterns.  The United States would become less able to be a food exporter and become instead a food importer, depending on other countries for food as we depend on them today for oil.  We would not burn as much fossil fuel to keep warm in the winter, but this might be offset by burning more gasoline driving in the longer summer season. "Rich people" with oceanfront property might lose their houses, but, unfortunately, this would include the Hollywood elites living in such places as Malibu.  Who knows?  Maybe folks who can't afford oceanfront property today will find their homes gradually becoming valuable oceanfront property tomorrow.  Third-world countries might become first-world countries.  I live in northeast Ohio now, so the very pleasant summers here would last more than three weeks.  I'm not complaining.

I ended the last entry with a reference to people with more than half a brain.  It seems they are the ones profiting from those with less than half a brain.  The "halfs" versus the "half-nots."  The half-wits are the useful idiots of the big-government smarty-pants elite.  Al Gore is not a halfwit, for if he were, he would sincerely believe that he's not cynically trying to perpetrate one of the biggest hoaxes ever conceived.  No, sir, Mr. Gore is no halfwit, but he holds the whisk that's whipping the halfwits into a frenzy, made extra frothy with lots of hot air.  The hysterical global-warming crowd displays characteristics of a religious cult.  I'm not the first to notice this, so I'll leave the obvious cult characteristics for others to explain.

Last February we were treated to another report that said that many scientists were more certain than ever that the contribution of human activity to data indicating a pattern of global warming was "discernable."  This wasn't really saying much, other than that we had adjusted our computer models and had refined our measurement techniques to detect things we didn't claim to detect before.  There's nothing wrong with improving our investigatory skills, and so the report went on to say that under various sets of assumptions the data indicated that a human contribution to global warming was "likely."

But what the report said didn't really matter.  On its face it asserted that there was a consensus among "scientists" that humans are likely to be partially to blame for global warming, but this was a far cry from the language used in the media to tout the report as proof beyond a reasonable doubt that humans were the cause of global warming.  If that's what the report meant to say, it would have.  It did not say so, because such an assertion could not be justified by real scientists, even those who politically wished it so.

As some of those involved in the writing of the report observed in the Associated Press story accompanying its release, the document was a political document designed to get policymakers to act.

Supporters of the report say it proves that we have to do something now to avoid catastrophe.  The report says nothing of the kind.  In fact, it makes a counterintuitive assertion that even though humans have had a hand in global warming there is nothing we can do to prevent it.  If that's the case, then reversing the industrial revolution, perhaps also reversing the trend in human life expectancy that went along with it, would have no benefit.  We owe it to ourselves not to think in sound-bites.  But our choices are limited in times of crises, such as when an armed assailant demands "your money or your life." Al Gore is holding his whisk to our throat and demanding that we be whipped into submission or stand accused of something akin to denying the holocaust of World War Two.  That's some choice, isn't it?  It's one that fewer and fewer thoughtful people are willing to accept.

I feel I should apologize, dear reader, for something I fear I might have set in motion two decades ago.  Whether my "sin" is something for which a reasonable person would think I should apologize I cannot be certain, because though I try to be reasonable in all things, I might be a bit too close to the situation to judge myself fairly.  And so, to be on the safe side, I will apologize.

And for what, you ask, is this apology owed?  I can't help but harbor a sneaking suspicion that I might have had a hand in creating the monster that is the high priest of the hysterical global-warming cult, Al Gore.  This insufferable, cynical, anti-capitalist gasbag is one of the most ridiculous characters on the national scene, and because there is nothing noble about the Nobel Peace Prize anymore, as is readily ascertained from its most recent winners (or should I say "whiners"?), we are all doomed to suffer even more of Mr. Gore's officially sanctioned silliness masquerading as seriousness.

Back to my confession:

During a hiatus from Capitol Hill in 1986, I worked under contract to the Department of Energy's Office of Carbon Dioxide Research.  The growing awareness that man might be causing a "greenhouse effect" was starting to affect public opinion.  The Environmental Protection Agency, which was set up to identify threats, considered global warming a threat, because any change from the status quo is considered a threat in the environmentalists' playbook.  On the other hand, the Department of Energy, which was set up to monitor and solve energy problems, knew that we could not simply stop burning fossil fuels, so DOE wanted to determine what the greenhouse effect really was all about and what really should be done about it.

Clearly, there was no immediate market incentive to stop burning fossil fuels, but if we waited until there were, would it be too late to "save the planet"?  The big question was what should Congress do now to stave off a possible catastrophe fifty years in the future.  Wrecking our economy was not a viable option, according to the DOE.  (The EPA didn't care about viability, because even though the driving force behind the environmental movement has always been misguided anti-capitalism, the EPA's mission was to identify all possible threats, not to do cost-benefit analysis.)

Scientists and politicians don't speak the same language, and, for reasons I won't get into here, I was one of the precious few who could translate.  Most politicians don't have the time, education, or inclination to grasp the details necessary to understand what the scientists are trying to tell them.  If they did, they probably wouldn't have gone into politics in the first place.  My job was to come up with a process whereby scientists could communicate effectively with policymakers in a way that would convey knowledge (not just information!) to the policymakers so that they could understand the problem enough to legislate appropriate policy in a timely manner.  

[If you don't know the difference between knowledge and information, just think about how much more information we have at our fingertips today than we did just ten years ago.  Now think about how today's college graduates seem stupider than ever.  They have lots of information, but they don't have enough knowledge to interpret it.]

I wrote a "thought paper" framing the problem about the effects of human activities on our "global village" and sent it out to a carefully considered list of distinguished intellectuals from a broad range of disciplines: science, engineering, ethics, psychology, journalism, and philosophy.  DOE flew these deep thinkers into Washington to brainstorm the problem from every possible angle.

How does a scientist with a long-term concern (that is, one that will come to a head so far after the next election that most of the current crop of legislators would have died) get the attention of today's lawmakers and convey enough knowledge to them to do the right thing before the problem gets out of hand?  To make a long story short, my conclusion was that he couldn't.  A legislator has so much on his to-do list that he must focus on the things that need to be taken care of now.  If global warming won't be a problem for fifty years, what's the rush?  Come back when the matter is urgent.

The only way to get a lawmaker's attention off of someone else's crisis du jour and onto yours is to claim that your crisis is more urgent that anything else on the lawmaker's plate right now.  No one really enjoys working under crisis conditions, but at least the pressure of a crisis affords lawmakers cover by absolving them of their duty to make the best possible decisions.  They can explain to their constituents that they cast what turned out to be a bad vote based on the best information available at the time:  "Well, maybe it wasn't the best decision I could have made, but Congress had to do something!"

[Acting in the heat of the moment excuses a lot of bad decisions; that's why, for example, the punishment for second-degree murder isn't as severe as for first-degree murder.]

Like Lenin's "useful idiots," the naive, emotional environmentalists oppose global warming because it threatens them with the specter of something different from the status quo, so, as is their wont, they become hysterical in their demands that something be done about it.  The deliberate, leftist, anti-capitalist environmentalists, on the other hand, want to elevate the nature of the phenomenon to "threat" status and blame the United States so that our shining city will fall off its hill.  None of this has anything to do with science or the environment, but it has everything to do with politics.  If these people were really concerned about pollution from fossil fuels, they would be pushing for nuclear power.

I can't help but think that then-Senator Gore, who was deliberately building his reputation as a forward-thinker on the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology & Space, had became aware of what the Department of Energy was doing about research into the greenhouse effect, which loomed either as a great threat or as a great opportunity for a bright politician.   

As strange as it might seem, I really do have pangs of guilt about somehow inadvertently giving Gore "permission" to use a cynical phony crisis to hoodwink the American people into surrendering their economy and their freedom to power-hungry, self-serving, anti-capitalists.  Fortunately these guilty thoughts are alleviated somewhat when I realize that any experienced politician, and certainly anyone with more than half a brain, already knows about exaggerating his needs when begging other people for money.

(To be continued . . . .)

As if there aren't enough serious issues for Congress to consider, now comes the latest effort to pander to the basest (yet baseless) fears of Americans of African descent: to enact a federal ban on nooses.  Not a ban on lynchings, mind you, which are properly against state law and have not been a problem for a century, but a ban on tying a particular type of knot. 

This is a perfect issue for cynical white leftists, who, one would think, had already demonized the Boy Scouts enough for referencing "traditional" moral principles.  Now perhaps they can continue to erode any useful purpose the Scouts have by outlawing one knot at a time, starting with the noose. 

The next step will be to try to outlaw as racist the knot used to tie shoes.  After all, it's pretty much strictly urban Blacks who wear $200 basketball shoes without tying them.  Is that to make them easier to steal so an impatient thief doesn't shoot first?  Or is it just that tying one's shoes is "acting white" in hip-hop circles? 

When people claiming to be "leaders" of a particular "community" endorse such silliness, it does no one any good, least of all the community victimized by such leaders.

In further reference to the matter of Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who has since announced his resignation from the Senate and has followed-up that announcement with another stating that he is reconsidering his resignation (confirming yet again his long pattern of questionable judgment), I was going to address the issue of hypocrisy, but better columnists beat me to it and deserve the credit for what they said.

From the Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby:

A furtive surrender to temptation may indicate lust or stupidity or a failure of will, but it takes more than that to prove hypocrisy. The H-word gets thrown around with abandon these days, but generally what is meant by it is inconsistency—failing to live up to one's words, falling short of the values one espouses.

Thus a politician who calls for more compassion yet rarely gives a dime to charity is inconsistent, but not necessarily hypocritical. A gun-control advocate who shoots an intruder with an unregistered handgun can be faulted for not acting in keeping with his beliefs, but that alone doesn't make him a hypocrite. A woman strongly opposed to abortion who gets one herself when she becomes pregnant hasn't practiced what she preached. But those aren't instances of hypocrisy — not unless they never meant what they preached in the first place.

Hypocrisy isn't merely saying one thing but sometimes doing another. Nor is it simply having a double standard—lionizing Anita Hill, say, but trashing Paula Jones (or vice versa). Hypocrisy is worse than that. It's a form of duplicity. A hypocrite is one who doesn't believe the moral views he proclaims and violates them routinely in his own life.

Hypocrisy is deceit, not weakness; a vice, not a blind spot. Larry Craig has much to atone for. But the charge of hypocrisy seems to me a bum rap.

And this from Ann Coulter:

Liberals don't even know what they mean by "hypocrite" anymore. It's just a word they throw out in a moment of womanly pique, like "extremist"—or, come to think of it, "gay." How is Craig a "hypocrite," much less a "blatant hypocrite"?

Assuming the worst about Craig, the Senate has not held a vote on outlawing homosexual impulses. It voted on gay marriage. Craig not only opposes gay marriage, he's in a heterosexual marriage with kids. Talk about walking the walk! Did Craig propose marriage to the undercover cop? If not, I'm not seeing the "hypocrisy."

If the charges against Craig are true—and that is certainly in doubt— he's a sinner . . . , but he is among the least hypocritical people in America.

It seems hypocrisy is far more demonstrable on the political left, certainly among the leaders of the Democratic Party, who profess certain values publicly but know in their heart of hearts (and admit to their colleagues and assistants) that they would never stoop to live by them privately.  This is true hypocrisy and was the professional Democrat's most telling characteristic when I was on Capitol Hill even back in the late1960s.  Republicans and conservatives are much more likely than liberals to hold privately and publicly beliefs and standards that are more demanding.  If a politician falls short of the standards and values he professes publicly and believes privately, then he might be a failure or a sinner or both, but he's not a hypocrite.  On the other hand, if he pretends to believe something or to profess standards in order to get votes, he is a hypocrite whether he gets caught or not.

The latest faux pas of Idaho Senator Larry Craig strengths a bizarre trend that goes back at least to 1982, when he puzzled everyone on Capitol Hill by issuing a press release stating that he had nothing to do with an incipient scandal about lewd conduct with congressional pages.

What was puzzling about his behavior was that he was not among those accused of any misconduct, nor would anyone have thought of him in connection with the scandal had he not brought it up.  Associating one's name unnecessarily with negative news is not something a smart politician does.  

In the congressional office I was running at the time—definitely not Larry Craig's—we considered whether we should issue a press release denying our boss's involvement with the scandal, even though any sort of association between such a situation and our boss could not have been conceived by a rational mind.  The mere mention of the idea took about five seconds to morph into hysterical laughter.  If it were a good idea to issue press releases about everything that did not concern you, then wouldn't you be neck-deep in bills from your publicist?

This incident of bad judgment is the most salient feature of Larry Craig's career for people old enough to remember it.  He was a freshman member of the House of Representatives back then, and this was the first time America had ever heard of Larry Craig.  Now comes the Senator again with what seems to be an ill-considered plan to plead guilty to something he insists he didn't do in a Minneapolis airport men's room.  Pleading guilty to avoid the exposure of a lengthy or embarrassing trial or to keep legal costs down or to reduce or avoid prison time is something that's done every day.  For misdemeanors, a plea bargain can "put an end to the matter."  But it's not a good choice for a U.S. Senator in a situation like this.

The issue calls into question the Senator's judgment, which is the most important thing his constituents need from him.  His colleagues in the Capitol can urge him to resign to protect the reputation of the Senate—and yes, I am saying this with a straight face—but as a practical matter, the end of Mr. Craig's Senate career comes either at a time of his own choosing or when his constituents vote him out next year.  Whether Idahoans believe one of their home-grown potatoes would be a better Senate candidate is entirely up to them.  There is no better example of where the decision rests in such matters than the continual reelection of Ted Kennedy by the people of Massachusetts.  

Even more interesting to me than this whole sordid affair are the cries of many self-styled liberals who call Mr. Craig a hypocrite.  Most liberals are so busy defending lewd behavior in public bathrooms that they often don't think to take two seconds to check a good dictionary before using big words like hypocrisy.  I'll have something to say about that next time.

Desperate, champion-starved Cleveland sports fans prematurely elevated a talented young athlete to the basketball monarchy by proclaiming 22-year-old LeBron James "King James."  He is a well-spoken, well-mannered, and well-liked hometown boy, one of the most visible role models in the country.  He's building a 30,00 square-foot home in a pleasant suburban neighborhood (of much smaller homes) for his girlfriend and their children, so when the materially obsessed Cleveland Plain Dealer asked its readers the fatuous question, "What should LeBron buy next?", the most frequent answer was "a wedding ring for the mother of his children."

Shortly thereafter, the following letter from a Matt Harmon of South Euclid, Ohio, appeared on the Plain Dealer's editorial page:

Must The Plain Dealer insist on printing the hate speech of religious zealots?  The fanatics who continuously pelt LeBron James with their harsh criticism of his marital status are no better than the extremists we fight overseas.

The beauty of democracy and the principles for which our soldiers continue to die is that we are allowed the freedom to worship as we see fit.  LeBron and his girlfriend are well within their rights not to bind themselves to a legal contract.  Love is thicker than parchment.

With half of all marriages ending in divorce, perhaps those with complaints for LeBron would do better to focus on the quality of their own unions.

Mr. Harmon's letter wouldn't be worth a response, except that it's a good example of the muddled thinking that makes political discourse so messy lately.  Where does one begin in responding to a statement obviously based on so many false assumptions?  I guess one must start with great patience at the beginning.

Logic is turned on its head by the leftist, media-nurtured view that healthy skepticism about half-baked ideas that reject time-proven practical traditions makes the skeptic himself the radical extremist.  Anyone who hates LeBron probably doesn't care whether he gets married or not.  Those who want him to marry his girlfriend and legitimize his children want only the best for him.  Since when is urging a man to be the best man he can be "hate speech"?  No one is even threatening to behead him.  Would the opposite, encouraging all black men to knock up as many "ho's" as possible, be hate speech?  

The vast majority of people in all cultures support the institution of marriage.  To assert that this makes them "fanatics" is absurd.  Is the family unit necessarily an exclusively religious idea?  Of course not.  Family units persist in force because they work.  Every religious person is not a religious zealot.  If Mr. Harmon had to plead for his life before a would-be murderer, would anyone seriously scoff at him for being a "religious zealot"?

To say that LeBron's fans' (distinguished from fanatics) wishing he would set a good example to his hero-worshippers is "continuously pelt[ing]" him with "harsh criticism" is nonsense.  The expectation that a man will get married before he has children has never been called "harsh" before, because the word was unthinkable in this context before the regrettable rise of the undereducated left.

Mr. Harmon echoes sound principles when he cites religious freedom as a cause requiring ongoing blood sacrifice, but nobody knows or cares what Mr. James's religious belief are, for they are irrelevant.  A marriage is not merely a contract between two people, but a change in legal status involving a third party, the state.  It is in the state's interest to encourage stability in family relationships so that we won't be overrun by packs of feral bastards.  Some states abdicated this responsibility by enacting no-fault divorce statutes that make dissolution relatively easy and by subordinating the healthy childhoods of future community leaders to the narcissism of their parents.  If love were thicker than parchment, then most paper mills would have gone out of business long ago.

Mr. Harmon suggests that people should not encourage others to get married because the divorce rate shows that marriage is perhaps not such a good thing.  The rumor that half of all marriages end in divorce has been disproved by census data, and the higher divorce rates caused by 1970s radical feminist attacks on the institution of marriage waned as people rediscovered the human nature they had been told to reject.  The single thing that pushes the divorce rate up is disrespect for the institution of marriage.  As long as divorce is an easy choice, like switching cell-phone networks or having an abortion, it will continue to be a threat to (rather than a last-resort safeguard for) families.  If divorce were not so convenient, people would have to think twice before choosing their life partners.  Even good marriages are hard, and the more easily they can be undone, the more frequently they will be undone.

Mr. Harmon's outrage of outrages, however, is this equation:  Anyone who supports marriage is a religious zealot.  Islamofascists are also religious zealots.  All religious zealots are equivalent.  Therefore, people who support marriage are no better than—perhaps even worse than?—those who invoke the name of God in murdering as many innocent children as possible to earn a gold key to a heavenly whorehouse.

Whether Mr. Harmon is a teenager educated in the public schools, an aging 1960s hippy who missed the evolutionary train through yuppidom, or just a senile crank who writes stupid letters to the editor all the time, he certainly moved the discussion of the Cleveland's NBA championship loss from the superficial to the existential.

LeBron James, as good a man as he already is, might say he's not a role model, but such protests are always in vain.  Everyone is a role model in some way, and no one can avoid it.  But everyone CAN choose what kind of a role model he is.  The best thing an adult can do for a child is set a good example.  Setting a bad example does not make one any less of a role model, just a bad one.

Christopher Hitchens has gotten a lot of airtime on conservative talk shows because he's a rare man of the left who uses his prodigious intellectual power to support the war on terror.  Unlike, say, John Edwards, whose leftism springs not because of any particular intellectual hunger, but precisely because it suits his needs at the moment and because most of the people to whom he panders are also on the left.  [See Mr. Edwards's recent address to the Council on Foreign Relations, asserting that George Bush and Karl Rove "framed" the response to 9/11 as a war on terror simply to justify their desire to torture innocent people at Gitmo.]

Some say leftists and liberals act on feelings rather than thought.  That is to say, their position on any issue is the one that makes them feel best.  Another way of putting it is that they take whatever position is easiest to take, which is usually the first position that occurs to them with the least amount of thought.  Apparently this is not so with Mr. Hitchens, whose positions on issues might seem to some to be a strange amalgam of inconsistencies, as though he reinvents the wheel for every position he takes.  But this is not necessarily so.  Mr. Hitchens is a man of the left who comes by it honestly.  He does not take the positions he takes just to pander to the thoughtless.  Whereas it might be easy to mistake a British accent for erudition, Hitchens is a genuine intellectual who blazes his own trail.  Sometimes he blazes them in the wrong direction, at least from my perspective, and seems to have been, as Faulkner once said of Joyce, electrocuted by his own divine spark of inspiration.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Hitchens realizes that violent fundamentalist Islamic jihad is a threat to all the West's liberal principles.  Unlike other liberals who believe that it is our fault for the jihad and that if we simply ignore the problem or surrender to it, then it will go away.  Hitchens knows his throat will be the first to feel the scimitar when the jihadists prevail.  One would think that the liberals in Europe and America would realize this, but their visceral mindless dislike for George Bush makes them incapable of acknowledging that Bush might be right about something.

Unlike Jews who reject evangelical Christian support for Israel because they believe the support is for the wrong reasons (selfishly theological, rather than moral or practical affinity for Jews, as if that were relevant), conservatives accept Mr. Hitchens opposition to radical jihad, even though he has just as much animosity toward anything else that is motivated by a belief in a deity.  Jihad to him is reprehensible not just because it is violent, but because it is religiously inspired.

This was made clear in his comments on the passing of Jerry Falwell, a man who would never prescribe a violent end to another human being simply because of a theological disagreement.  For some reason, Mr. Hitchens was invited to appear on the Hannity and Colmes show to voice his thoughts on the late Dr. Falwell and he unleashed quite a stream of vitriol about the man, who Hitchens believed was just as much a hustler and charlatan as any other televangelist, even those whose reputations had been marred by scandal.  Hitchens's words about Falwell were as harsh as anything he had ever said about bin Laden.  To Hitchens's credit, when he was attacked by both Hannity and Colmes for his opinion, he defended himself by reminding his hosts that he was asked to come on and express his opinion, not to have his opinion attacked for the purposes of good television.  His opinion is what it is and those who ask for it can either accept it or not, but he was not going to change it to give others a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.  Religious people are reprehensible to Hitchens because they "tell lies to children."  In this, Mr. Hitchens is wrong.  When religious believers tell others what they believe, they are not telling lies and more than President Bush was lying when he believed with the rest of the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Based on everything observable, it was much more reasonable to believe that Saddam HAD such weapons rather than to believe that he did NOT have them.  

["Telling lies to children" is a complaint that inspired much of today's so-called liberalism.  Many Baby Boomers distrusted their parents and anyone else over 30 and assumed that the accumulated wisdom of the ages was a lie.  Rather than honest critical thinking, which would reveal why things work the way they do, the hippie generation simply denied history in a narcissistic, counterproductive attempt to appear intellectual without doing any real thinking.  Ignoring Santayana's warning, repeating history's mistakes, reinventing the wheel every day, today's liberals believe surrendering the war on terror and other suicidal policies are the right thing to do.  At least Mr. Hitchens's has been honest in his cogitations about the war.]

In fact, Mr. Hitchens's atheism does not have any bearing on the existence of God.  When one takes a look around, no matter how closely or scientifically, which of the following assumptions is more reasonable?  That nature came from something or that it came about by chance from nothing?  The existence of God will be proved only when He reveals himself to us, whether we are looking for Him or not.  To prove that He does not exist at all is probably impossible.  For this reason, atheism is no less a matter of belief than theism itself.

It is patently absurd to say that all religious fundamentalists pose equal danger to civilization.  Still, the ironically named "Christ-bearer" Hitchens's eloquence on the threats to western civilization are welcome additions to the need to realize what we are facing.

Hitched Couplets (A Drinking Song)

Christopher Hitchens is an honest liberal,
Whose skepticism doesn't buy the Muslim's great fib or all
That rubbish claiming Islam's the religion of peace.
(If you believe that lie, then this sweet young thing's my niece!)

When Hitchens gets to bitchin' 'bout religion and the soul,
With bombast 'bout Islamists and its bombists and their goal,
Unlike his fellow libs, ol' Chris stands up to face the worst:
He knows that when Sharia comes, his head will come off first.

So at the Grammy Awards last night, who should come out to present the rock & roll record of the year award?  None other than that rockin' stiff himself, Al Gore.  To give him "street cred," he was accompanied by Queen Latifa, but that's neither here nor there.  Queen Latifa introduced Gore as the savior of the planet and Gore thanked the audience for taking the lead in saving the planet.  That's funny, because it wasn't too long ago that Big Al and his wife Tipper were trashing the same people for ruining civilization with all their foul lyrics and suggestive videos, which have only gotten worse since then.  The Gores took on the Grammy-winning smut peddlers back in the day, but I guess all is forgiven now, because Gore discovered that to strike it rich mining the intellectual power of today's performing artists, he doesn't have to dig very deep.

More and more applicants for advertised job openings these days seem to be receiving rejection letters telling them that after "careful consideration" of their qualifications "we cannot hire you at this time."  Cannot?  That must be a lie.  A job is obviously open, or the employer would not have advertised it and the applicant would not have applied for it.  The potential employer 's saying that he cannot hire the applicant implies that he is physically unable to do so or that the laws of God and man otherwise forbid him from hiring the applicant.  Of course, the right response is that the employer simply does not WANT to hire the application for whatever reason.  It is probably safe to assume that there are reasonable grounds for the rejection.  What doesn't the employer say so?  Does he fear lawsuits from applicants whose feelings are hurt?  Whenever an employer says that he cannot, he is deflecting blame from himself and onto some nameless, faceless decision-maker.  He is creating the impression that it's not his fault that he rejected the applicant, so there's no reason for the applicant to direct any hostility toward the potential hiring officer or his company.  It's a coward's way out, but the trial lawyers of America have made great progress in making cowards of us all.

Here are some thoughts on my interview with the seasoned professional print journalist.

The advocacy method of discovering the truth in our courtrooms has developed into a situation in which the individual "officers of the court" have lost interest in their own role in discovering the truth.  They are more interested in winning.  The system is supposed to reveal the truth, so whoever wins must be right.  

This concept has bled into the so-called mainstream media, which considers itself, in the words of the late John Chancellor, the fourth branch of government.  To the extent Mr. Chancellor's haughty characterization was true at the time, it was true only because the mainstream media were the major source of information people used to learn what their government was doing.  

On each issue, news reporters attempted to gather enough information to tell a coherent story readers would understand.  That process naturally required some "interpretation," and the individual biases of reporters and editors along the line would sometimes color the story no matter how hard these journalistic professionals tried to maintain their objectivity.  Well, getting at the truth does not win as many Pulitzer prizes as causing headaches for authority.  Just as the more one promotes hatred and ideas that are sure to get innocent people killed, the more likely he is to win the Nobel Peace Prize, so too will a journalist who causes trouble without any positive results likely win the Pulitzer.  

When the government says that we are winning the war, it is the journalist's job to find any and every opposing opinion to show that we're losing the war.  In this way, the reader will be able to ascertain the truth.  But the reader doesn't want to have a do-it-yourself truth kit, with instructions written by a judge.  If that's what people wanted, they wouldn't try so hard to avoid jury duty.  

People want to know what the truth is, they might even want an interpretation of the truth, but they don't want to pick up a paper or watch a broadcast just to have to review a list of evidence that shows that the government is lying to us.  Even if the news reporter knows that the government is not lying, he feels it is his obligation to write the story in as unsympathetic to the truth as possible to avoid charges of bias.  This of course invites just as many bias charges from the other direction.

As a result, however, people who read newspapers quickly come to the conclusion that the world is full of gloom and doom and the forces of good stand no chance again the forces of evil.  Fomenting despair might be big business, but it also encourages suicide—national, if not individual.

The assumption is that the newsmakers—the people being written about—are lying.  We know they're lying because they're moving their lips, and no one ever makes a statement without "spin" that artificially favors his side of the story.  Negative spin, no matter how outrageous, must always be applied by the paper to get to the truth.  This model promotes leftist bias because it fails to take into consideration that there are some people who tell the truth.  I say leftist bias because most people in the field of journalism are anti-capitalist.  They believe that capitalists get rich at the expense of the poor, so capitalists must be cut down to size whenever possible.  I believe this is a suicidal failure in our educational system.  

If the president of the United States made the following statement, "The enemy is at the gates, run for your lives!"  Papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post would report it thus: