The following words were delivered last night by Sen. Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon), a 10-year veteran of the Senate: I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way,…
According to the AP Conservative leaders voiced dismay Wednesday at news that Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Dick Cheney, is pregnant, while a gay-rights group said the vice president faces "a lifetime of sleepless nights" for serving in an administration that has opposed recognition of same-sex couples. How bad is…
Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital. According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”
The lead story starts with this assertion:
The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.
This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States. Publishing such information is unpatriotic. Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently.
It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course. It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however. And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.” It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground. The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know.
For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places. It simply wasn’t deemed news …
We've heard a lot about the alleged attack on Christmas (and Christianity), especially from Bill O'Reilly. Here's a site that suggests what it would really be like if there were a war on Chistianity in the U.S.
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …