Jay Reding.com

I had intended to write about the Able Danger scandal last week, but held off on it due to the questions surrounding Rep. Curt Weldon’s charges. However, now it appears that the 9/11 Commission missed vital leads that indicated that the terrorist plot could have been stopped well before those 19 hijackers got on board those aircraft.

Judicial Watch has filed a FOIA request and located key documents that show that the State Department warned the Clinton Administration about allowing Osama bin Laden to escape to Afghanistan:

According to the declassified documents, bin Laden’s many passports and his private plane allow him considerable freedom to travel “with little fear of being intercepted or tracked.” Bin Laden reportedly even traveled to London where he gave a press interview subsequent to his departure from Sudan. The report also warns that bin Laden’s prolonged stay in Afghanistan “could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum.” One analysis document, dated July 18, 1996, asks the provocative question: “Terrorism/Usama bin Ladin: Who’s Chasing Whom.”

The documents predict that even if bin Laden were forced to keep on the move, it would prove no more than an inconvenience since, “. . . his informal and transnational network of businesses and associates remains resilient.” The report goes on to explain that bin Ladin on the move, “. . .can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost worldwide.”

“This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These documents prove the Clinton administration knew the danger Osama bin Laden posed to the United States back in 1996 and yet failed to take any meaningful action to stop him.”

As blogger TigerHawk notes, this memo disproves former terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s argument that Clinton was serious about terrorism. Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton Administration systematically failed to address the rising threat of al-Qaeda’s terrorist campaign against the United States. Former President Clinton even went as far as to say this:

“I also wish,” he continues, “I desperately wish, that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don’t know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it.”

Except that argument is ridiculous on its face. It was quite clear that al-Qaeda was responsible for the Cole attack - bin Laden himself was bragging about it. Waiting for the FBI and the CIA to official confirm al-Qaeda involvement would have taken months - which is why nothing was done. That sort of attitude is precisely why the 9/11 attacks happened - an attitude towards terrorism that treats Osama bin Laden as a Middle Eastern Tony Soprano rather than a hostile military leader is doomed to failure.

Compounding this evidence is the Able Danger information. A credible source is confirming the veracity of the Able Danger information which states that the Department of Defense had flagged several of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000, but were not allowed to share that information with the FBI for fear of breaching “the wall” between military intelligence and law enforcement created by the Clinton Administration Justice Department. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer has a long and distinguished career with the DoD and would have been in a position to know about the Able Danger information.

Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White warned the Justice Department that this artificial separation was harming our counter-terrorism efforts, but her warnings fell on deaf ears. White was involved in the prosecutions of the terrorists responsible for the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993. This was the first attack by what would later become al-Qaeda and should have been a wake-up call to inform us of the danger of Islamic extremist terrorism. Yet it would be just 8 years later that the World Trade Center would be attacked again, and this time the terrorists would be successful in destroying the Twin Towers.

The person responsible for creating “the well” was none other than 9/11 Commissioner Jaime Gorelick herself. Gorelick should have recused herself from the Commission due to her clear and obvious conflict of interest. She did not do so, and that choice continues to haunt her and the Commission.

As it stands, the Commission is now claiming that they never received the Able Danger materials despite the fact that Lt. Col. Shaffer makes it clear that they were briefed on the material. Given that the 9/11 Commission has changed its tune on Able Danger several times in the course of the last week, it’s not difficult to believe that Shaffer is correct. The 9/11 Commission initially regarded the Able Danger information as “not historically significant” when it now seems clear that Able Danger’s information could have made a vital difference in preventing the worst assault on American soil since the War of 1812.

It is becoming quite clear that the 9/11 Commission utterly failed to do its job and fully and completely investigate the lapses of intelligence that led up to the September 11 attacks. If the Commission ignored the Able Danger information, what other crucial pieces did they miss? Was the fact that Mohammad Atta’s cellphone was used in Florida enough to dismiss the Czech government’s official stance that Mohammad Atta was in Prague in April of 2001? What of information that would seem to connect the German cells of al-Qaeda that spawned Mohammad Atta with Iraqi intelligence? What was in the classified documents deliberately destroyed by former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger? Berger took and destroyed documents relating to the thwarted attempt by al-Qaeda agents to attack millennium celebrations across the West Coast - and the documents that Berger illegally removed from the National Archives and destroyed contained hand-written notes that may have provided damning indictments of the Clinton Administration’s handling of counter-terrorism.

These questions all deserve serious answers, and the efforts of the career bureaucrats to sweep all of this under the rug have failed. If the Able Danger information is correct, it means that the last 5 years of history must be completely reevaluated. It means that our government utterly failed us due to an excessively legalist approach to counter-terrorism that prevented key information to reach the right policymakers.

George Satayana once wrote that those who failed to remember history are doomed to repeat it - when our history contains the death of 3,000 people in a horrific terrorist attack, we cannot fail to learn the truth about what happened before 9/11 and how to prevent another one. Yet thanks to the combination of conflict of interest and ideological blindness we’re learning that the truth has been obscured. That is unacceptable, it is time that a full, thorough, and pointed investigation occur to ensure that this country does not make the mistakes that led to the death of so many again.

Jonah Goldberg has a brilliantly perceptive article on Cindy Sheehan and “moral authority” at National Review Online. Goldberg notes an aspect of left-wing rhetoric these days:

Obsessed with “authenticity” and the evil of hypocrisy — as they see it — they think the message and the messenger are inextricably linked. Two plus two is four only if the right person says so. We hear this logic most often from adherents of identity politics, who give more weight to the statements of women, blacks, Jews, and others for the sole reason that they were uttered by people born female, black, Jewish or whatever. People who grew up poor are supposed to have a more “authentic” perspective on economic policy than people who didn’t, and so on.

Goldberg hits on a crucial point – that the left is based on the politics of identity. Modern leftism’s obsession over the tripartite axis of Race, Gender, and Class inevitably leads in that direction. The concept of group rights is based on the elevation of the group above the individual. The very basis of leftist thought is grounded in identity politics - certain classes of people should be treated differently than others based not on what they’ve done, but who they are. This philosophical idée fixé shows up throughout left-wing political thought: affirmative action, economic redistributionism, foreign affairs.

Cindy Sheehan isn’t being held up as the anti-war movement’s newest poster child (and next sacrificial lamb) because she’s saying anything unique. The same cheap “no blood for oil” arguments and thinly-veiled anti-Semitic slurs about “Zionists” can be found everywhere in the left wing of the blogosphere. If Cindy Sheehan were just another deranged denizen of Democratic Underground no one would care.

But the fact that the memory of her son (a legitimate war hero who sacrificed himself in an effort to save members of his unit) can be used to make her into a martyr figure makes her valuable to the left. It’s a deeply cynical ploy - Specialist Casey Sheehan can’t defend himself or state what his opinion would be, and the left can use a mother’s grief like a rhetorical bludgeon - which is exactly what they have done in this case.

There’s a major problem with that beyond the ghoulishness of using a fallen soldier’s mother as little more than a political prop - it’s that these arguments inevitably lead to totalitarian ends. Freedom can’t exist when the truth is subsumed by a political agenda - and Jeff Goldstein does an excellent job of nothing that the last thing that Sheehan and her crowd really want is the truth:

In short, the last thing the Cindyphiles want are answers, because answers foreclose the debate and attenuate the emotional force Cindy Sheehan, as a grieving Mom, brings to bear on war supporters. Or, put another way, the “answers” they want to hear rightwingers give, from the President on down, are answers that many in the anti-war crowd have already reached—a rather unreasonable demand, given that it is precisely our refusal to answer in those ways that defines our political position, but a demand that nevertheless proves valuable (from the anti-war perspective) for its ability to extend the controversy.

This entire affair is emblematic of why modern leftism is such a dangerous and corrosive ideology. Whenever you have a philosophy that places the group above the individual and subsumes the truth to ideology, you have a recipe for disaster. And while all groups do that to a certain extent, the political left combines this with a shocking affinity for thugs like Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, or Hugo Chavez. Groups like International ANSWER are explicitly Stalinist. “Pro-Palestinian” groups peddle anti-Semitic lies and provide support to groups like Hamas and Hizb’Allah. “Moderate” Muslim groups too often are either tied to terrorism or far too willing to provide it with rhetorical cover.

And the entire movement is based on the idea that the US is worse than the head-lopping theocratic paramilitary terrorists who are murdering dozens of innocent Iraqi civilians every day.

Meanwhile, the left continues to peddle the idea that Iraq is an endless quagmire, while those who are actually there in the front lines paint a picture that contradicts that notion. But the metanarrative has already been written, and the media is less concerned with reporting the facts than shaping their reporting to match their preconceived notions.

The left exists in its own echo chamber in which groups like MoveOn.org and others assume that they’re part of some brave mass movement that will overthrow the object of the hatred any day now. The truth is that the left can’t appeal outside their own narrow borders not because they haven’t “framed” their arguments correctly or that they’re not shouting loud enough, or that they’re not using enough profanity and juvenile insults. It’s that the quality of their ideas is poor. If the US left Iraq tomorrow, what would follow besides misery and oppression for the people of Iraq? When the Iraqi people were left to the cruel devices of the fanatics, where will be the sympathy for the suffering of the Iraqi people? If Bush deliberately “lied” to the American people about weapons in Iraq, why in the world wouldn’t he not have had some planted to vindicate his arguments?

“Authenticity” is no match for wisdom, and no substitute for experience. The cheap symbolism of Cindy Sheehan isn’t a sign of moral authority, it’s a ghoulish reminder that there’s an ideology in this country that places their own partisan agenda above everything else.

There’s yet another Windows worm going around and causing IT workers grief. This worm uses a previously-patched vulnerability in Windows to spread itself around and clog up corporate networks.

This is another reason why not being part of the dominant monoculture is such a great thing. Mac and Linux users don’t have to worry about worms like that because the source code of their systems is under constant review and correction. Plus, they’re based on systems that have been designed to be run on networks since 1970 and are built from the ground-up with security in mind. The vast majority of Windows users run as full Administrators, opening themselves up to all sorts of problems. Of course, most Windows users have to run as Administrators because Windows software won’t run without full system access. Even games like The Sims 2 require users to become Administrators before playing. (Although I believe this was later fixed.)

Having your kids have to have low-level access to the system just to play a game is an example of why Windows is fundamentally insecure. Both Mac and Linux make users run under a limited user account and verify that they want to give a program permission to access the rest of the system. That sort of design should be the standard for Windows, but Windows hasn’t really shed it’s single-user roots yet - and that’s why the poor schmucks using Windows have to spend inordinate amounts of time running virus scanners, anti-spyware programs, and worrying about some drive-by download stealing their identity.

Windows Vista is supposed to fix many of these problems. Windows Vista is also a year off, and could be delayed even further. Meanwhile, everyone else has a sensible security architecture already in place and have significantly fewer vulnerabilities like the ones exploited by the Zotob worm.

No operating system is totally security, and security is a process, not a destination, but that certainly doesn’t mean that us Mac/Linux users can’t still get a bit of schadenfreude when the next big Windows worm makes the news…

Iraqi Constitution Delayed

The delegates trying to write the Iraqi Constitution are asking for 7-10 more days to complete the document as issues of women’s rights and federalism remain unresolved.

I’m not one who sees meeting an arbitrary deadline as a particularly important thing. The writers of Iraq’s new constitution have one and only one goal: create a document that will help make Iraq a stable and prosperous society. That goal should come before any particular deadline.

The US Constitution took months to draft, and required several major compromises. The Southern delegates and the Northern delegates didn’t agree on key issues like federalism, the nature of Congressional representation, slavery, and other issues. Our first government (the Articles of Confederation) was an unworkable mess. And even then, less than a century later the major flaw of our Union caused an incredibly bloody Civil War.

Compared to that, another week or two of deliberations doesn’t seem like a particularly great setback.

Humor = Tragedy + Time

I’m not sure what to think about this…

The left has found its next cause célébre in the form of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who was killed in Iraq.

Sheehan is being exploited, pure and simple. She herself is exploiting the memory of her son for partisan talking points. This entire affair is ghoulish in the extreme.

Spc. Casey Sheehan joined the military of his own free will. He reenlisted in the military of his own free will - apparently against the wishes of his mother. He made the honorable choice to serve his country, and he lost is life in the service of this country - joining millions of other Americans who have given their lives during times of war. Cindy Sheehan has ensured that his memory is being turned into a deeply divisive partisan campaign in which she’s appropriating her son for herself.

Sheehan had already met with the President once before. This is what she said then:

The 10 minutes of face time with the president could have given the family a chance to vent their frustrations or ask Bush some of the difficult questions they have been asking themselves, such as whether Casey’s sacrifice would make the world a safer place.

But in the end, the family decided against such talk, deferring to how they believed Casey would have wanted them to act. In addition, Pat noted that Bush wasn’t stumping for votes or trying to gain a political edge for the upcoming election.

“We have a lot of respect for the office of the president, and I have a new respect for him because he was sincere and he didn’t have to take the time to meet with us,” Pat said.

Sincerity was something Cindy had hoped to find in the meeting. Shortly after Casey died, Bush sent the family a form letter expressing his condolences, and Cindy said she felt it was an impersonal gesture.

“I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,” Cindy said after their meeting. “I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.”

And now Cindy Sheehan is sitting in Crawford, Texas making herself into a media whore and spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Cindy Sheehan, the woman who met with the President and stated that President Bush was “sincere” is now spouting the same kind of inane rhetoric one would expect from the deepest fever swamps of the left.

Mrs. Sheehan has the right to express her opinion. She can protest - within the law - all she wants. However, she doesn’t deserve a pass on her lies and her actions. She’s turned her personal grief into a political spectacle, and the more she speaks the worse things come. No doubt that once she becomes too hot to handle the leftist media will drop her just like they’ve dropped the cavalcade of anti-Bush figures that they’ve propped up in their continual attempts to manufacture dissent.

Furthermore, to anyone who understands anything about Bush knows that the President cares deeply about the soldiers. We’ve all seen it in his face, at the RNC Convention last year, in his speeches, and in his actions:

Privately, Bush has met with about 900 family members of some 270 soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The conversations are closed to the press, and Bush does not like to talk about what goes on in these grieving sessions, though there have been hints. An hour after he met with the families at Fort Bragg in June, he gave a hard-line speech on national TV. When he mentioned the sacrifice of military families, his lips visibly quivered.

Newsweek’s article gives a view of the President that he deliberately hides. Anyone with even a smidgeon of doubt that assumes that Bush doesn’t care about the families of the soldiers killed in this war doesn’t know the President in the slightest.

Spc. Casey Sheehan gave his life for his country of his own free will, reenlisting in the Army and serving with honor. He was an adult, a citizen, a patriot, and a hero.

Cindy Sheehan is a woman whose private grief has been systematically exploited for political gain. She is tarnishing the cause for which her son died, and systematically aiding the enemy in their propaganda campaign - endangering the lives of his fellow soldiers in Iraq.

But Sheehan isn’t the worst player in this whole sordid affair. That title belongs to the ghouls who are using a mother’s grief to further their own political ends.

The way to honor Spc. Casey Sheehan and all the other soldiers who died in this conflict as well as those who continue to serve in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else in this global conflict against Islamic extremism is to support their mission and see to it that the cause for which they died shall not have been in vain.

UPDATE: This is why Casey Sheehan is the person who should be getting the media attention here.

Specialist Sheehan was a mechanic with an artillery unit attached to the 1st Cavalry who reenlisted in the military at the age of 24. During his final tour in Iraq, a group of soldiers from his unit were attacked by terrorists in the Sadr City district of Baghdad. Specialist Sheehan volunteered to go in which a rapid rescue force to get those men out of that firefight. His commanding sergeant told him that as a mechanic he did not have to go into that fight.

His response: “I go where my chief goes.”

Specialist Sheehan never returned from that mission.

That is bravery and heroism, and that is why it is soldiers like him, not the peanut gallery back home who should be getting the attention of the media.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein is on a roll with this story, and he’s pulling no punches in mocking the moonbats who are trying to milk this story for all its worth. Meanwhile, La Shawn Barber makes the impassioned argument that we should all just let this whole thing go. Were Sheehan not being used as a tool by the anti-Bush left, I’d agree, but when she’s making herself into a public figure she’s opened herself up to a great deal of very well-deserved criticism.

Mena Trott has a hilarious view of what it would be like if bloggers had been around throughout history. Although the history nerd in my says that Samuel Pepys was really the first blogger…

Listening To Radical Islam

Victor Davis Hanson has another brilliant column in which he reminds us of what radical Islamists really want. The left keeps trying to project their pet beliefs onto radical Islamists, but the truth is that their radical Salafist agenda won’t be satiated by merely withdrawing from the Middle East and allowing it to be taken over by dozens of Taliban-like governments - the demands of radical Islam is to subjugate all the world under shari’a.

We want “peace”? Stop educating women, kill Jews and homosexuals, and submit to life as a dhimmi. Elsewise the only true peace will be when this radical ideology joins Communism and fascism on the ash-heap of history.

Brother Against Brother

Slate has a heartbreaking piece on the Gaza withdrawal by Israel:

Earlier this month, army psychologists and brigade commanders coaxed soldiers into confronting their worst fears for disengagement. “What would make you freeze?” asked an officer at one session. The young soldiers eyed each other nervously before responding. The most common answers weren’t the stuff of typical battlefield nightmares: A familiar face. A wheelchair-bound grandmother. One nervous woman stood and spoke softly. “I worry about a crying child,” she said hesitantly, playing with the hair at the back of her neck. To carry off obstructing settlers, the unit has been broken into teams of four, by gender and size; female soldiers have been instructed to handle resisting children if their parents won’t. “I don’t want to separate a mother from her child. I don’t know how I would handle that. I don’t want to think about that.”

The Israelis are doing something that is virtually unprecedented in history. The Gaza withdrawal is a bold and dangerous move for Sharon. It puts the Likud hawk against a good segment of Israeli society including a good portion of his own party, and threatens to tear Israel apart. Yet he is doing it because it is the only way to make Israel more defensible. Sharon, who has a deserved reputation as a course and tactless man has shown far more strength and wisdom than the erudite and intelligent Binyamin Netanyahu who used this difficult moment to engage in some decidedly unhelpful political grandstanding. The choices Sharon’s being forced to make are truly wrenching.

Would any Arab country do the same were those roles reversed? Despite Israel’s efforts to disengaged itself from Gaza, the same old anti-Semitic slurs will still echo from the left. Israel is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t, and all they can do is to try to protect themselves as best they can.

I feel for the settlers in Gaza who are now being forced to abandon their homes for an uncertain future - but I feel worse for the IDF troops forced to rip them away from their land.

As for the Palestinians, if I thought they’d turn Gaza into something more than the slum it currently is, it would be some comfort. Knowing that it will probably get worse makes me wonder if Israel’s pullout really was the right thing to do.

Thomas Frank (author of What’s The Matter With Kansas?), Howard Dean, and other liberals keep wondering why the Democratic Party can’t gain any traction with the American electorate. In Ohio’s Second Congressional District an Iraq war vet running as a centrist against an exceptionally weak candidate who was eminently defeatable only managed to come close in a special election. While Democrats are saying that this special election is some kind of a bellwether, the reality is something different. Despite the fact that voters are unsettled with the Iraq war, and Bush’s popularity is as low as it has ever been (although still above the 40% mark), the Democrats can’t seem to make much headway.

The reason is simple – it’s the culture, stupid.

Democrats have expressed bewilderment over Republican gains among lower-income, less-educated voters, saying they are voting against their economic self-interest by supporting Republican candidates. But the new Democracy Corps study concludes that cultural issues trump economic issues by a wide margin for many of these voters — giving the GOP a significant electoral advantage.

The study is based on focus groups of rural voters in Wisconsin and Arkansas and disaffected supporters of President Bush in Colorado and Kentucky. The good news for Democrats: All the groups expressed dissatisfaction with the direction of the country and with the leadership of the president and the GOP-controlled Congress.

Then came the bad news: “As powerful as the concern over these issues is, the introduction of cultural themes — specifically gay marriage, abortion, the importance of the traditional family unit and the role of religion in public life — quickly renders them almost irrelevant in terms of electoral politics at the national level,” the study said.

Those findings aren’t terrifically surprising, at least to Republicans. The GOP has been the party of “family values” for a long time now. The fact is that not only are the Democrats seen as being wrong on values issues, the Democrats don’t seem to understand the importance of the issue at all. The way in which Democrats reflexively show outright hostility to values themselves is deeply troubling to a major portion of the American electorate. As the Democratic pollsters found:

Many of these voters still favor Democrats on economic issues. But they see the Democrats as weak on national security, and on cultural and moral issues, they view Democrats as both inconsistent and hostile to traditional values. “Most referred to Democrats as ‘liberal’ on issues of morality, but some even go so far as to label them ‘immoral,’ ‘morally bankrupt,’ or even ‘anti-religious,’ ” according to the Democracy Corps analysis.

Again, no surprise there. The Democrats do tend to be anti-religious. Most Democratic activists seem to be militant atheists. Except, of course, when it’s close to an election. Then the Democrats are perfectly happy to stress their deep and abiding Christian faith - which only makes matters worse as the Democrats have a tendency to moralize, which makes them seem all the more hypocritical. For the vast majority of Christians in America, it takes more than just wrapping oneself in the Good Book to convince values voters - not even in the Republicans get a free pass on values issues from many values voters.

The underlying problem with the Democratic Party is as much philosophical as it is structural. The Democrats equate compassion with government. Unfortunately for them, government is absolutely dispassionate - and should be so. Laws cannot be based in “compassion” because “compassion” is an arbitrary human emotion. It’s also personal. There is no such thing as compassion by proxy. The basic principles of morality isn’t that you can just pass the buck onto someone else - working in a soup kitchen is an example of passion. Demanding that someone else be forced to do so is not.

What the Democrats have forgotten is that the foundation of American society isn’t based on government. It’s based on families and communities. For the last 50 years, the liberal social agenda has undermined both. A culture of divorce, drugs, and casual sex isn’t the sort of culture that is conducive to strong families and healthy communities. What the Democrats fail to understand is that the vast majority of problems they view as economic problems are really cultural problems - the decline of the American family directly correlates with nearly every major social problem we have. Trying to fix the family through the use of economics on the federal level is like trying to perform open heart surgery with a jackhammer - it’s entirely the wrong tool for the job. Raising the minimum wage and spending more money on social programs are basically quick fixes that won’t do anything to solve the basic problem at hand. Only a culture that promotes and strengthens healthy families will.

The Democrats don’t grasp that, and where they do grasp values, it’s only in a tenuous way. Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Grand Theft Auto are designed to be a triangulated appeal to values voters, but the problem isn’t with video games, it’s with a culture of permissiveness that deems such things acceptable for young kids. Hillary’s book It Takes A Village expresses it perfectly - she takes the radical ideal that the “personal is political” to its logical end - children should be raised by the state. The problem with that is that while that ideology may have worked for ancient Sparta, in a democratic society the building blocks of a healthy society come from the bottom up, and the family is the most fundamental building block of a healthy civil society.

While the Democrats want to argue that Republican policies diminish civil society, David Brooks finds that the evidence doesn’t support such a conclusion:

he decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends. To put it in old-fashioned terms, America is becoming more virtuous. Americans today hurt each other less than they did 13 years ago. They are more likely to resist selfish and shortsighted impulses. They are leading more responsible, more organized lives. A result is an improvement in social order across a range of behaviors.

The number of violent crimes is down. The number of abortions has been declining since the early 1990s. Teenage pregnancy is down. Younger married couples are less likely to divorce than Boomer couples were. These key cultural indicators indicate the direct correlation between moral values and societal health.

Despite the GOP’s best efforts to fracture its coalition, the Democrats simply don’t have much political traction these days. The reason why is the same reason that these key indicators of civil society have been steadily getting better:

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We’re in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

That’s the key - not government, but civil society. If government was the key to social order, North Korea would be a wonderland. Totalitarian societies have no shortage of strong governments, but almost no civil society. In fact, there is a tension between civil society and government. More government does not mean more civil society - in fact by taking power away from communities, it most often means less.

The Democrats don’t grasp that key philosophical principle, which is why Frank, Dean, and the rest of the Democrats can’t understand what’s “wrong” with Kansas - or the rest of the country in which moral values remain key issues. The Democratic/liberal worldview simply can’t deliver on its promises, while the values that the GOP espouses (inconsistently applied as they are) works. Until the Democrats stop trying to use government as the solution to all problems and start doing more to foster a healthy civil society, they will continue to find themselves on the wrong side of the issues in regards to moral values.