The following is a redacted transcript of an interview I conducted with a seasoned professional print journalist.

Doctor Demex:  Thanks for your time.  I want to ask you first why today's so-called journalists insist on covering every possible point of view no matter how unreasonable or obviously invalid the "opposing" view might be.  It makes it difficult for readers to ascertain the truth from your stories.

Seasoned Professional Print Journalist:  Well, you have to understand, whenever anyone says anything against his own interest, the statement is assumed to be true, because no one would do such a thing if it were not true.  Accordingly, whenever someone makes a statement to the press, it must be assumed that he is choosing his words in a way to make himself look as good as possible.

D. D.:  Are you saying that everyone is a liar?

S. P. P. J.:  No, not exactly.  Well, let me rephrase that.  Yes, actually I am.  At a certain level, telling an untruth is lying.  Trying to pad one's resume is lying.  Telling your side of the story might be lying. As a reporter it is my job to get to the truth, but if I cannot get to the truth, at least to write both sides of the story so that the reader can decide for himself what the truth is.

D. D.:  Is that the way things should work, with each reader deciding for himself what the truth is?  The truth is the truth, isn't it?  Shouldn't you be trying to get at the real truth instead of promoting a million different distortions of the truth based on too much information whose veracity cannot be determined for sure?

S. P. P. J.:  The truth is the truth?  How quaint!  Weren't you taught in school that everyone must find his own truth?

D. D.:  No, not that some teachers didn't try.  That approach never made any sense to me.  If everyone operates according to his own truth and his own rules, civilization, not to mention reasonable personal interaction, become impossible.

S. P. P. J.:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you sound like a right-winger to me, trying to make everyone think the same way.

D. D.:  That's a discussion for a different day, not to mention a patently insulting piece of disinformation.  But before Watergate, the news media were skeptical of newsmakers, but not downright hostile.  What happened?

S. P. P. J.:  Well, we learned that everyone twists his story to serve himself.  If the president of the United States did it, then everyone did it.  To get to the truth, we have to supply some twist in the opposite direction to straighten things out.  We do this in an objective way by finding a spokesman for the other side.  You know, no matter what someone tells you the truth is, you can always find someone else who will say the opposite.

D. D.:  It's your responsibility to sort it out.

S. P. P. J.:  It might be.  It even might have used to be.  But really, it's not our responsibility to sort it out.  How could we possible know?  "We report.  You decide."  Isn't that what your favorite right-wing network says?

D. D.:  It isn't my favorite network, necessarily.  Something that is slightly less left-wing than you are is not necessarily right wing.  That's a bit of a stretch isn't it?

S. P. P. J.:  Well, yes and no.  No, because I deny it, and yes, because I don't really care.  If we cannot find an opposing voice, we'll apply our own opposite twist in the tone of the article.  This is why we are criticized for being biased.  But we're being biased toward the truth.

D. D.:  Look, I have seen time and time again where someone will report a finding that is supported by all the available evidence and all the experts who know anything about it, but the media STILL must report a minority voice in dissent even if it's a lone voice and an unreasonable one at that.

S. P. P. J.:  We have to report both sides of the story—

D. D.:  Yes, but you make it look like opinion on the main assertion in the story is split right down the middle, 50/50, undermining the central truth of the story and making its information worse than worthless.  

S. P. P. J.:  What do you mean by "worse than worthless"?

D. D.:  I mean worse than worthless, because you try to crease a false impression that something is controversial when it really isn't or that most people do not think a certain way when they actually do.  You give equal time to a statistically insignificant minority without disclosing how insignificant the minority is.  That doesn't reveal truth.  That hides the truth.

S. P. P. J.:  Just because a majority believes something doesn't make it true.  By introducing that element of doubt into the story, people have to reevaluate their own thinking and make up their own minds about what's true or not.

D. D.:  People don't wake up in the morning looking forward to reinventing the wheel every time they go to the bathroom, as though life were like a more horrible version of the film Groundhog Day.

S. P. P. J.:  Well, it is what it is.

D. D.:  What the heck does that mean?  And besides, I see your publication writes stories that begin with assumptions that are completely wrong, but politically correct, like "Although a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, . . . ."  What kind of responsible journalism is that?

S. P. P. J.:  I wrote that story.  It's responsible journalism because I feel strongly that people should support same-sex marriage, and if I state at the outset that most Americans support it, then I can do something to bring about the happy day when all the world's problems are solved.

D. D.:  By same-sex marriage?

S. P. P. J.:  By that, and other things, yes.

D. D.:  I don't like you.

S. P. P. J.:  I know.

Here are my thoughts on yesterday's interview with the successful criminal trial lawyer.

There are theoretical limits on the extent to which an American lawyer may argue his client's case, because the lawyer is not only his client's advocate, but also an "officer of the court."  The court's purpose is to ascertain the truth and to render justice.  There was a time when a lawyer who was convinced of his client's guilt would diligently make sure that his client's rights were protected, but would not insult the court by making frivolous arguments to cause chaos and confuse the jury so that justice could not be done.  Today, of course, thanks to cases like the O. J. Simpson trial, the public is painfully aware that the practice of law has changed in a significant way.  The lawyer's role as an officer of the court, duty-bound to get to the truth, is viewed in a different light even by the lawyers themselves.  If a lawyer's skills can keep an innocent man out of jail, just think how good (and valuable) his skills must be if he can keep an obviously guilty client out of jail.  

It's one thing to possess the training and skills to keep an innocent man from being found guilty.  It's quite another to be able to keep a guilty man from being found guilty.  The latter ability requires a lawyer to have two things: a superior set of litigation skills and a complete disregard for his role as an officer of the court.

Too many lawyers today assume the risk of insulting the court by making arguments so ridiculous that anyone with an IQ above 70 would see right through them.  As insurance, these same lawyers try to populate juries with as many morons as possible.  

When I worked on Capitol Hill, there were intractable partisans, as there always have been, but the only thing enabling anything to get done in spite of the obstructionism were the nonpartisans who worked behind the scenes to make things happen.  The nonpartisans I'm talking about weren't weak-kneed compromisers, as the reader might incorrectly assume, but people who knew what the facts were and how the world worked.  They didn't twist facts into lies just to fool the public into believing their favored fantasies.  This was back in the day when the two political parties were not as closely aligned with their current liberal and conservative philosophies of government.  (In other words, there were still liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats.) There were people who postured and others who made things work.  In my experience, these were completely separate groups of people who did their work in spite of the other.  In my view, this is how lawyers were supposed to be:  more interested in winning for truth and justice than in winning at the expense of truth and justice.

A criminal doesn't just hire a lawyer to protect his rights.  He hires a lawyer to get him off.  Today's criminal lawyer will pull out all the stops in the organ of implausibility to confuse the judge and jury so that his client will get off, even if it means ruining the trial.

The theory is that the prosecution presents evidence to convince the judge or jury that the defendant is guilty while the defense tries to cast doubt on that evidence.  The truth emerges from the arguments.  As we saw in the Simpson trial, the truth won't come out if the system is not treated with proper respect.  Even if the defense attorney knows that the defendant is guilty, there is no longer any minimum standard of reasonableness or even of shamefulness that any argument must meet before it is offered in an attempt to get the defendant back out on the street to commit more crimes.  The defense attorneys no long believe that they have a responsibility to help the court reach the truth.  Their responsibility is to throw as many arguments as possible up against the wall to see what sticks.  The judge and jury decide the truth, while the lawyers have so narrowly defined their roles that the truth is irrelevant to what they do.

In one sense, one could argue that these lawyers can sleep at night because they have so much faith in our system of justice that they know that whatever decision the system makes is the right one, even if it is the wrong one.  Perhaps they are free-market jurists, devising more effective ways to get criminals back out on the street so that prosecutors will have to respond to the competition by becoming better themselves.  Competition improves the breed, as it were.  High-priced defense attorneys also do not like to lose to their much lower paid government counterparts.  Perhaps people today simply feel justified in lying to the government.  

If the result of a particular trial is wrong, that will give the government incentive to improve its abilities and skills (within constitutional parameters, of course), which in turn will encourage more outrageous tactics for getting the criminal back on the street.  Too many defense attorneys view their jobs as having nothing to do with truth, justice, or even what we used to call the American way.  No, whether their clients are guilty or innocent is not really their concern either.  Their only job is to get their defendant back out on the street as soon as possible, nothing more, nothing less.  Any concerns beyond that are the concerns of other officers of the court.

The venerated Anglo-American adversarial approach to finding truth has suffered by perverting it in extreme ways, and now it has been perverted into a complete misapplication in the field of journalism.  I will explain this next time.

The following is a redacted transcript of an interview I conducted with a successful criminal trial lawyer.

Doctor Demex:  So what's the deal with lawyers today?  When I was in law school we used to think up ridiculous arguments just because we could, but we would never consider using such arguments in court for fear of being thrown behind bars for contempt.

Successful Criminal Trial Lawyer:  Well, people get offended at the slightest things today, but if you do something that really offends them, sometimes they don't even know what hit them.  Even judges let us get away with murder in the courtroom.  If that's the way they want to play, fine.  When a client comes to me, he might be guilty or he might be innocent.  I don't really care.  Remember that scene in "The Fugitive" when Harrison Ford protests to U.S. Marshal Tommy Lee Jones that he didn't kill his wife?  The marshal says, "I don't care!"  It was the marshal's job to take the fugitive into custody, that's all.  It's my job to get my clients off.  Whether he's guilty or not is not my concern.  It's not for me to judge.  He's hiring me to be as partisan in his defense as I can be, and if sometimes it means introducing reasonable doubt into the proceedings, then I'll do it for my client.  It's the job of the judge and the jury to determine guilt or innocence.  My only task is to earn my pay by getting the guy off.  If I succeed, it's because I did a better job than my opponents.  Frankly, I think I'm better at getting clients off than my opponents are in proving their guilt.  The sharpest knives in the drawer don't usually become prosecutors; the job doesn't pay enough, in my opinion.  

D. D.:  But aren't you concerned that your partisanship "games" the system so that it falters in the pursuit of justice?

S. C. T. L.:  Look, the United States has the best system of justice that has ever existed.  But it works because each actor in the play is a specialist.  I am not the judge.  I am not the jury.  I am not the prosecutor.  I argue for the defense.  If I succeed, whether it's because I'm good or because the other actors are incompetent doesn't really matter, does it?  Besides, I believe in the system enough to know that whatever result it reaches is the one it probably should reach.  And if I keep winning because the other actors in the system are incompetent, then I create an incentive for getting better judges and prosecutors, don't I?  When better prosecutors come along, then I have an incentive to improve.  It's "free-market" law and very much in the spirit of America, if you ask me.

D. D.:  I didn't ask you, but it's an interesting insight nevertheless.  So you're saying that if you get a serial killer back on the street and he kills more people, you can sleep at night?  

S. C. T. L.:  Sure, why not?  A serial killer is entitled to legal representation, too, and my job is to get him off.  If he kills again, it's regrettable in many ways, but it's not my fault because I was just doing my job and happened to be doing it better than the people who want to put my client away.

D. D.:  Forgive me, but you don't see yourself as making the world a worse place, do you?

S. C. T. L.:  I think I told you.  No, I do not!  I view my role in very narrow terms, but I think that by doing that role as well as I do, I make the entire system work better by creating a demand for others to become better at what they do.  As I said, my job is to do whatever I can to get my client off, not to help the prosecution make its own case against my client.  That would be a violation of my duty to my client, now wouldn't it?

D. D.:  Well, yes, but—

S. C. T. L.:  But nothing!  I have a job to do and I do it.  Other people have jobs to do, and it's not my responsibility to do their jobs for them!  What kind of society would we have if everyone did everyone else's job?  The gap between the competent and the incompetent would widen.  If we removed market forces from the equation, society would become even more dysfunctional than it is.  No, sir!  I'm just doing my part to make society better.

I'm pleased that "Merry Christmas" made a comeback this year.  If someone wishes me a happy Ramadan, I always reply "Thank you!  And a happy Ramadan to you!"  I do this because I don't consider the courteous wish for a joyous season to be a threat of conversion by the sword, as in "Happy Ramadan or else!"

When I wish someone a merry Christmas and it turns out that the person to whom I was trying to be courteous is Jewish, sometimes I might get, "We're Jewish, but thanks anyway and merry Christmas to you!"  I usually respond further with "Well, alrighty then!  Happy Hanukkah!"  

Honestly, sometimes people get upset over the most trivial things.  When I greet someone with "How are you?"  I really am not trying to poke my nose where it doesn't belong.  I'm just trying to exhibit good manners.  Like most people, I hope the response to my question is a sincere "Fine, thank you."  And I do mean sincere, for I don't wish ill on anyone about whose health I inquire, even for the sake of merely being polite.  Still, I don't really want to hear a laundry list of trivial grievances for the next five minutes.

There's a woman in my neighborhood who crosses the street every year to knock on her neighbor's door to remind him that she is Jewish and that the Christmas lights he puts on his house offend her.  It's not that the man spells out any offensive message in the lights, like "Peace on Earth" or "Death to Israel," but merely that colored lights around Christmastime remind the woman that she is a member of an ethnic minority that has a right in America to complain about anything and everything as some sort of positive statement about the Holocaust.  No matter how sincerely the woman might feel offended, she still has a reputation in the neighborhood for being a nut.  Unfortunately, her behavior also promotes negative stereotypes of Jews as being pushy and arrogant.  As people who deal with such issues have come to expect, this woman is also not an orthodox Jew, but a liberal reform Jew.  It seems strange that the most liberal Jews are the most intolerant of other religions today.  Apparently they are under the misapprehension that Hitler was acting in the name of Christianity.  As a result, they try to suppress religious references in every venue they can, with stupefying ignorance of the fact that most aggression against Jews has been from secular sources.  Not that Christian officeholders haven't persecuted Jews in centuries past, but those days are gone, at least for now.  Secular forces caused most global conflict in the 20th century, and Islam has monopolized all the calls for Hebricide so far in the 21st.

People frequently ask me what I think about things.  If what I say makes sense to them and they agree with it, then they thank me for my opinion.  But if they disagree with my opinion, they call me "opinionated."  Let's look at that term.

It's important to have opinions, but people get confused between having opinions and being opinionated.  Is being opinionated bad?  Apparently it is, because calling someone opinionated is an insult.  What's insulting about it?  Well, for one thing, an opinionated person tends to express his opinions freely.  What about syndicated columnists?  Syndicated columnists express their opinions freely, but they are not considered opinionated.  That's because columnists are paid to express their opinions and are usually good at explaining why they hold them.  

So an opinionated person tends to express his opinions a little TOO freely, without provocation, and when others don't really want to hear them.  The opinionated person is usually considered stubborn and unreasonably dismissive of the views of others.  As with most other things, reasonableness is the test.  If someone holds an opinion after careful study, he is entitled to be stubborn in defending his position, because he no doubt believes he holds his position for good reasons.  He is also within his rights to dismiss other people's views as being wrong if he has already considered them and has reasons for rejecting them.  But if he UNREASONABLY dismisses attempts to change his mind, then it's fair to deem him opinionated.  

I'm more interested in being right than in winning, so I never stubbornly refuse to consider an argument from anyone trying to prove me wrong if that person is making an honest, intelligent argument and not parroting bumper-sticker slogans.

Many people fail to discriminate between the opinionated blowhard and the sincere defender who comes by his views honestly.  These indiscriminate people are usually the same lazy thinkers who rail the loudest against stereotypes even while perpetuating them with more fervor than the people they call opinionated.  You know the types; they tend to make themselves stereotypes because of their predictable views:  There is no such thing as good or bad except when they're expressing their own beliefs that all wars are bad, that all guns are bad, that all corporations are bad, or that all Republicans are bad (except President Lincoln, whom they don't know was a Republican).

This is easy to understand, though, because, as I have said before, in most cases not involving criminal behavior, a person can hold an opinion without a reason.  Because it is so easy to hold an opinion without thinking it through, there is a natural tendency to assume that the person holding the opinion has NOT thought it through and therefore is just another stubborn, opinionated fool.

People ask me ask me why I see everything in black and white when the world is made of shades of gray.  They say this as though I were doing something wrong.  I will state up front, probably to no one's surprise, that these people all consider themselves "liberals" or "independents" and that they usually vote for Democrats.  As I have said before, professional liberals, whether they are Democratic Party operatives, journalists, old-line socialists, or activists for homosexuality or environmentalism, have a vested interest in promoting shades of gray, thereby promoting confusion among the electorate.

It's hard to discern right and wrong in the gray moral fog.  This does not mean that people who are determined to do so shouldn't try, but liberals tend to treat "tasks that are difficult" as "tasks that should not be attempted."  

[It should be noted that "tasks that are difficult" are tasks that are difficult but doable.   In contrast, "tasks that are impossible" (like eliminating war, world hunger, and global warming), which are impossible either because they are insurmountable or because they do not even exist, are tasks that liberals tend to focus on with great pretension.  The reason for this behavior seems to be that the problems cannot be solved, so the liberals can express their heartfelt concern without ever having to worry about actually doing anything beyond that.  In other words, they too often worry about all the wrong things.  One other notable example is AIDS, which many liberal activists treat as if its root causes and target populations were something other than what they really are.]

Some liberals want to live in a world where moral fog obscures their behavior.  If one can't see what's happening, then one can't make judgments about it, and many people believe that we are not allowed to make judgments because the Bible (of all sources they would cite!) says that we should not judge lest we be judged.  This is so convenient-sounding that we repeat it with secular piety, even though we don't really know what it means.  We also ignore these prohibitions against making judgments when it comes to our own behavior, even though we are quick to remind people about shades of gray when we don't want them to see what we're up to.  People who try to peer through the fog are viewed with suspicion by others who have been taught it's impossible to break gray into black and white.  Any attempt to do so is treated as cheating, like peeking through the blindfold when you're pinning the tail on the donkey.  I equate it more with peeking through the blindfold when you're being taken for a ride by the mob.

Every decision someone makes is either to do something or to not do something.  Computers think in black and white, on or off, ones and zeros, and they do it because they must.  I would not be surprised if cognitive researchers discovered that the human brain worked similarly, though it's hard to imagine.  Not that I'm pleased to compare myself with a computer, but, like the computer, I think in black and white because I must.  I'm certainly not insisting that others should approach problems the same way I do.  I'm merely trying to come up with an answer to a question I get all the time.  

Let's look at this from the opposite direction.  When a painter makes gray, he mixes black and white.  When I look at gray, I see the black and white.  True, there might be many simple combinations of black and white molecules that add up to a gray of rich complexity.  Still, breaking the gray into bits of black and white is like breaking up an overwhelmingly complex project into smaller, more manageable tasks.  The simplest of all decisions, structurally speaking, is whether or not, yes or no, black or white.

"Don't you believe in 'fuzzy logic'?" a friend asked.  I find this question revealing of the questioner, because fuzzy logic is still nothing more than a series of binary decisions a computer makes to make it look like it's making decisions in a gray area.  In addition, the fuzzy-logic algorithms allow for certain assumptions to be made to reach a useable result without deliberate user input.  The algorithms permit degrees of truth between zero and one.  But no matter which way one describes fuzzy logic, it is still a series of yes-or-no decisions.  If something is 51% true, then it is true, depending on contextual information the computer can ascertain.  There is nothing fuzzy about the question or fuzzy about the answer.  Only the intended input from the user is fuzzy.  Oh, and one more thing:  The purpose of fuzzy logic is to allow a computer to make decisions, not to keep it from making them.

If we apply binary logic to elections, we have two black-and-white decisions: First, whether to vote.  Second, whether to vote for one candidate or the other.  Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between them and we have a humorous name for this process, which is "choosing the lesser of two evils."  Whether we're voting for the greater of two goods or the lesser of two evils doesn't really matter:  We are making a black-and-white decision because we are picking one over the other; even if the split is 49.9 to 50.1, we're going to go with the 50.1.  

Casting a vote is a binary decision, but deciding which candidate is the lesser evil can be more complicated.  Still, breaking a binary decision down into several smaller binary decisions is how we go about choosing candidates on an issue-by-issue basis.

The mind's natural tendency is to break decisions into yes-or-no decisions; that's one reason we have a two-party system.  If we had 20 parties as they do in some countries, the electoral choice would be a gray mess, and so would our government.

Still, just as we break difficult projects down into bite-size smaller bits, we can break down complex and difficult decisions.  Such decisions include the decisions on which opinion to hold.  Whenever we make decisions we make lists in our minds, if not on paper, listing the pros and the cons.  Some people are more thorough about this than others.  Some people have a knack for it and other don't.   Some people go with their gut feeling and are usually right.  Others go with their gut and are usually wrong.  

I am not saying this is easy.  I'm saying that it seems lazy, unreasonable, or both to remain in the fog when informed self-government requires us to do our best to clear it away.

Democratic Congressman Charles B. Rangel of the 15th Congressional District of New York, plans to introduce a bill to reinstate the military draft.  He says he's doing this to ensure that we have enough soldiers to defend the country.  But make no mistake:  His support for the draft is proportional to his opposition to the West's war against global Islamic jihad.  Mr. Rangel wants antiwar protests to dominate the evening news and affect public opinion as they did in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Vietnam-era antiwar protests did not stop when the war ended.  They stopped before that, when the draft ended.  These protests had less to do with whether the United States needed to undertake military operations to carry out its obligations to the free world than they had to do with the narcissistic cowardice of baby boomers who were too spoiled to appreciate how rights and freedoms sometimes had to be defended by violent means.  In other words, the Vietnam protests weren't anti-war; they were anti-draft.  

Mr. Rangel is trying to tap into the narcissism of new generations to create street theater against President Bush and others who believe that war sometimes IS the answer.  There is no other plausible explanation for his motives, for despite his public rhetoric, which might indicate otherwise, Mr. Rangel is not stupid.  Like most members of congress who keep getting reelected no matter what they do, however, Mr. Rangel seems to think that his constituents are.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rates automobiles on their ability to protect drivers and passengers in crashes.  What steams me up is the way the nanny-state news media buy into the idea that a car without a five-star crash rating should be avoided at all costs.  Everyone has a neighbor who explains away why he bought an ugly, underperforming, inefficient, overpriced vehicle because it was the "safest in class."  But the difference between a five-star crash rating and a three- or four-star rating is probably negligible even if it were intelligible.  Amoral trial lawyers ensure that manufacturers do not bring unreasonably unsafe cars to market.

The Institute does not care about people's safety for any moral reason, but only to the extent that saving lives saves money for the Institute's sponsoring insurance companies.  There is nothing wrong with that per se, but the consumer should be aware that the crash ratings are not intended to benefit the consumer and that the Institute is essentially anti-automobile and anti-capitalist.  Nevertheless, if a consumer wants to shell out a lot of money for a car he dislikes simply because it drives itself and pretends to offer the safety of a living room, then that's his right.

I paid over $700 for antilock brakes on a new car because I was assured that it would save money on my insurance premiums.  It did.  My premium was reduced by a whopping $12 per year.  Now all I have to do to make the expense worthwhile is drive the car for 50 years, long past the time it becomes an otherwise unsafe rust bucket.  Besides, anti-lock brakes were invented to protect the world against poor drivers who stand on the brake pedal when they panic.  Bad braking technique is rewarded and reinforced because insurers want to remove the responsibility of the driver from the act of driving.  

The primary purpose of a car is to move people efficiently from point A to point B, not to ensure the health of its occupants.  If one fears death on the highway so much, he should either take the bus or simply stay home.

Here's an idea:  Why not remove all antilock brakes, airbags, baby seats, and tire-pressure sensors from cars to reduce the feeling of invincibility some drivers have when they get behind the wheel?  Maybe if drivers were more aware of the proper risks of driving they would drive more carefully.  

This is the same argument I apply to health insurance, by the way.  Abolishing health insurance would create two beneficial trends: people would have a direct economic incentive to take better care of their health, and doctors would have a direct economic incentive to lower the price of health care.  There is no incentive to keep costs down when someone else is paying the bill.

The midterm election results probably were not historic in the number of seats the incumbent party lost, but they were historically significant in confirming our enemies' theory that Americans are too self-absorbed and lazy to save their own skins.  Our Islamofascist opponents have called the midterm elections a victory for jihad.  The icing on the cake is the Democratic leadership's bringing back foreign-policy genius George McGovern, whose greatest intellectual achievement is his dreary pontification on the way to lose wars in ways that inflict the greatest possible damage to the reputation of the United States.  When the congressional leadership seeks the advice of a professional surrender advocate to help us lose the war on Islamic terror, then the Muslim world knows that they are making progress in bringing the entire world under Islamic rule.

Moderate Muslims I speak with personally and those notable Islamic scholars interviewed in the media make the same argument about the relationship between Islam and violence.  They condemn violence committed by Muslims, because Islam is not a violent religion.  (They also condemn violence by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and Kmart shoppers, as though these folks commit violence comparable, in either brutality or scale, to those committed by Muslims.)  But, as the peaceful, moderate Muslims insist, Christians and Jews must understand that there are some Muslims who feel that they are being insulted and oppressed.  

In other words, the "official" moderate Muslim position seems to be that a minority of violent people who call themselves Muslims are not the responsibility of the rest of the umma, but are the responsibility of the people who provoke them.  The people who provoke them do so merely by existing, apparently, so this is a blame-the-victim argument:  "We condemn violence, but we are powerless to do anything about those who feel compelled to commit violence in retaliation for things they perceive in their deranged little minds as insults.  Therefore, you victims had better beware of insulting them."  I guess in a world entirely subject to Sharia, the victim is always blamed.  Perhaps this is why, for example, Muslim girls who are raped are killed for shaming their families.

Some public grade schools defiantly (and without evidence) teach youngsters that homosexual couples are every bit as desirable as heterosexual couples for rearing children, and that any assertions otherwise constitute "bigotry" against homosexuals in general and homosexual couples in particular.  But look what happens when the two assumptions vital to the argument are put next to each other:
 
1.  A father is unnecessary for rearing a well-adjusted child, so a child reared by two mommies will turn out just as well.

2.  A mother is unnecessary for rearing a well-adjusted child, so a child reared by two daddies will turn out just as well.

If a father is unnecessary and a mother is unnecessary, then two fathers must be particularly unnecessary, as must two mothers.  The proponents of same-sex-couple adoption have trapped themselves into implying that parental figures are altogether unnecessary.  Same-sex couples are "just as good as" heterosexual couples if and only if both types of couples are equally, and completely, ineffective rearing children.  

Pursuing what little logic remains reveals only two other ways for society to produce responsible adults, and the absurdity of these choices is matched only by their undesirability:  The first is to raise children on institutional ranches staffed by androgynous wranglers.  The second is to put the kids out on the street to fend for themselves.

Does anyone else see the folly of funding a public education system that subordinates the Three Rs to teaching children that males and females are functionally equivalent (equally useless, apparently) and that sex between and among any combination of them is all the same?

Things are the way they are for a reason.  When one investigates the origins of a particular tradition or institution, like marriage, for instance, the rules of etiquette, biblical prohibitions on eating pork, or carpenter's warnings to measure twice and cut once, one discovers rational logic behind it.  When one argues with some religious people—Please note that I said "some" and that I do know what the word means—when they get into a logical bind they might pull out their ultimate argument: "Because the Bible says so!"  After all, if the Bible is the word of God, then that's pretty much the last word, isn't it?  More thoughtful Christians can go beyond that argument to the practical reasons the Bible says so.  It is important even for atheists to acknowledge that just because something is in the Bible does not mean that it isn't supported by thousands of years of human experience before and since.
 
Jews have a more direct relationship with God; they question Him and argue with Him in their ongoing effort to know His mind.  Many of them not only know what's in the Tanakh or Written Torah but also, thanks to thousands of years of Talmudic scholarship, have a sense of the practicality of the rules set forth therein. [Please note that I said "many" and that I do know what the word means.]  Many Jews know why certain rules are in there and why they would be good ideas even if they weren't in there.  Some of my Jewish friends might think I'm giving them too much credit, but I don't think so.

Now in discussing serious business with a liberal (religious or not) there is a whole other set of problems.  First of all, where a conservative will argue with you until the apocalypse, most liberals try to end the discussion quickly.  They do this either dishonestly, by making ad hominem attacks (e.g., calling their opponents stupid), or honestly, by admitting that talking about serious subjects makes their heads hurt.  Thinking deeply, particularly about the why of anything or about cause and effect, more than five minutes into the future, is not a distinguishing feature of liberal politics.  If no idea means anything, then the only thing a liberal can feel strongly about is something he literally "feels" strongly about, from deep down in his emotional center.  His modus operandi is, first, to adhere to whatever tradition makes instant, innate, instinctive sense to him or seems to work to his immediate, material advantage and, second, to ignore or reject any tradition that makes no sense to him or that he does not understand after giving it five seconds of thought.  If a liberal can't think of a reason to do something in five seconds, he won't do it.  If he can't think of a reason not to do something in two seconds, he will do it.  In contrast, the conservative might think for more than a minute.

Thought is the enemy of emotion to a liberal, because if he thinks too much, he fears he might think of a reason not to so something that would make him feel good.  The liberal thinks having no coherent logic to his thoughts is a virtue, giving him license to think thoughts without the shackles of logical concepts like supply and demand and cause and effect.  He is therefore free not only to think what he wants, but also to turn the thoughts into actions and do what he wants.  He is not bound by the opinions of anyone else, no matter how wise those opinions might be.  After all, because everyone—even the stupidest idiot—is entitled to an opinion, opinions have no value.

In other words, opinions are like college degrees: everybody has one.

As the alumni of Dartmouth College ponder how to vote on their proposed new alumni association constitution, I am reminded that, as an alumnus myself, I enjoyed for several years the long-established reputation the College had for accepting and graduating what were known as "smart people."  I regret to say, however, that I became more and more embarrassed to be associated with the College every year it drifted further away from using proven educational techniques and became a laboratory for testing the latest fashionable egghead's unproven theories of political pedagogy.  I was still a student there when the College's leadership began sliding down the so-called slippery slope of appeasing politically active, intellectually lazy students' demands to tell the teachers how and what to teach them, thus abrogating all the College's responsibilities to Western civilization.  These narcissistic baby-boomers are narcissistic professors now.

Today, when I tell people I graduated from Dartmouth, they say either, "Ah, yes!  The school that gives condoms to freshmen at orientation and provides graphic how-to manuals for having consequence-free sex with their fellow students!" or, "Isn't that the school that expels students who want to get a real education instead of anti-capitalist indoctrination?"  To be fair, one could say the same thing about any number of colleges and universities these days, sad to say.  Harvard is usually cited as the worst example of an enterprise that takes every penny parents can borrow to unravel two decades of childrearing and turn their children into dissolute adults.  Dartmouth's claim to fame is that it was in the vanguard of the movement to turn American higher education into the costliest of jokes, and I bitterly regret being unable to recommend this most beautiful of campuses to any serious student today.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that there are distinguished Dartmouth alumni younger than I making notable contributions to the United States, but they were negotiating an obstacle course while they were undergrads.  The best alumni of Dartmouth went in with strong "family values" and endured a trial by fire.  Most of Dartmouth's alumni did not escape unscathed.

"If something can go wrong it will go wrong" is sometimes interpreted to mean that if something can go wrong it will go wrong catastrophically.  This is why ersatz environmentalists say that global warming will destroy all life on the planet, just as cutting down a tree, moving a spotted owl two inches to the right, drilling for oil, driving a car, smoking a cigarette, eating at McDonalds, shopping at Walmart, fighting terrorism, or voting for Republicans will also destroy all life on the planet.

The typical leftist environmentalist feels guilty about being human and walks through the woods as though he's a guest in someone else's house, afraid he'll knock over a lamp.  Other plants and animals might occupy the environment, much like flowers and pets reside in our own homes.  And like our own homes, the environment has no meaning to humans other than the way it can be used by humans. 

Humans are as much a part of nature as anything else in the universe, so the environment is very much our home.  We can trash it entirely, though we have little incentive to do that, or we can keep it neat and clean, which we do most of the time.  But we "use" things like forests whether we're clearing them or just admiring their foliage.  For us humans to treat the environment as something on which we must avoid leaving our fingerprints at all costs is pointless to even try because it is impossible.  

The environment is the human's house just as much as it is a place for spotted owls, and humans have at least as much right to use the environment for their purposes as the spotted owls have for theirs.  Every creature and plant on the earth would horn in and displace humans if they could, and humans have just as much right to be here as any other living thing.  If a tree can fall on a human and kill him, why can't a human cut down the tree and do something useful with it?  

Humans who care about the spotted owl (which, I'll wager, perceives its environment differently from the way liberal environmentalists do) care not because they know any spotted owls or any good that spotted owls have done for the world, but for the way they fantasize the spotted owl's fitting into their own perception of their own environment.  Spotted owls are not necessary for human survival.  How do I know this for a fact?  I don't, but I'm reasonably sure I'll never be proven wrong on this one.  I believe it is immoral to subjugate the best interests of humans to the interests of spotted owls. And by the "interests of spotted owls" I mean of course the interests of narcissists who feel that it is more important to be able to "imagine" a spotted owl than it is to be allowed to cut down some of the owl's trees to increase the supply of housing for humans and thereby reduce the cost of housing for the two or three homeless people who are not homeless by choice.