Jay Reding.com

Welcome to Preston Davis Green son of Steven Green of VodkaPundit and his wife Melissa.

Now, how long before the little one has his own blog?

Rassmussen has released a poll that indicates that 64% of Americans support wiretaps on terror suspects even if they may be Americans:

Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans believe the NSA should be allowed to listen in on conversations between terror suspects and people living in the United States. That view is shared by 51% of Democrats and 57% of those not affiliated with either major political party.

Which seems like good news, but what about the fact that these intercepts are done without a warrant? It’s not clear from the free report how the question was worded - I’d imagine that would have some substantial impact on the results, although not necessarily by much.

It still seems clear that the near-hysteria of The New York Times and certain Congressional Democrats is not shared by the general public. While there’s nothing untoward or unreasonable about keeping a close watch on government, the fact remains that we are in a war that was begun by terrorists operating within the continental United States who committed an act of mass murder on American soil. Tying the hands our our intelligence services with the inefficiencies of the FISA Court doesn’t seem like a sound policy, and the Democratic position on this issue may play well with the Democratic base, but it will only continue to cement the Democrats as a party of weakness on national security issues - a reputation that has cost them politically in the past two elections.

The Chicago Tribune has an in-depth analysis of the Bush Administration’s rationales for war against the Hussein regime in 2003 compared to what we now know to have been the case. After weighing the evidence their conclusion is that the “Bush lied” argument holds no water:

After reassessing the administration’s nine arguments for war, we do not see the conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege. Example: The accusation that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs overlooks years of global intelligence warnings that, by February 2003, had convinced even French President Jacques Chirac of “the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq.” We also know that, as early as 1997, U.S. intel agencies began repeatedly warning the Clinton White House that Iraq, with fissile material from a foreign source, could have a crude nuclear bomb within a year.

Seventeen days before the war, this page reluctantly urged the president to launch it. We said that every earnest tool of diplomacy with Iraq had failed to improve the world’s security, stop the butchery–or rationalize years of UN inaction. We contended that Saddam Hussein, not George W. Bush, had demanded this conflict.

Many people of patriotism and integrity disagreed with us and still do. But the totality of what we know now–what this matrix chronicles– affirms for us our verdict of March 2, 2003. We hope these editorials help Tribune readers assess theirs.

The whole “Bush lied” argument is a completely facile and utterly groundless one. Time after time it’s been demolished into the ground by every investigation into the matter from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to the Butler Inquest in the UK. The idea that Bush deliberately manipulated intelligence to “fix” the case for war is less an example of a rational reading of the facts and more a sign of the resurgence of The Paranoid Style in American Politics - this time on the part of an increasingly radicalized left. The idée fixé that Bush somehow “misled” the nation into war is nothing more than an ideological crutch for the left to justify the fact that they have lost control of the levers of power in the country. By convincing themselves that they are the “reality based community” and everyone else is a bunch of deluded fools, it justifies their ideology despite the fact that it keeps losing.

As much as the partisan in me relishes the continued self-destruction of the Democratic Party, the anti-Bush line has become increasingly anti-American as well - and a responsible opposition party is what is good for the country.

The fact is that the evidence as of 2003 led to the conclusion that Saddam Hussein was systematically in violation of UN disarmament resolutions, that the Hussein regime was developing technologies in violation of UN sanctions including missiles with a range greater than 150km, and that the Hussein regime was a tyrannical and thoroughly evil regime. While the WMD evidence was shoddy and based on poor sourcing, that is part of a larger problem of US intelligence, and not some evidence of malevolent intent on the part of the Bush Administration.

The argument that “Bush lied” or that Bush “misled” us into war is not a coherent or supportable argument. Yet there’s little doubt that it won’t be going away any time soon. It’s simply too easy to engage in partisan cheap shots than to rationally deal with this war, it’s beginnings, and its consequences. There are rational arguments that say that the war in Iraq was a mistake, but those rational arguments have been drowned out in an unending time of infantile partisan attacks. Not only that, but the anti-war side often used Iraq’s non-existent WMDs to argue against the war, stating that Saddam would use those weapons and widen the war across the Middle East.

I’ve long said that history will judge the Iraq War far more dispassionately and far more positively than its contemporary critics. The fall of the Hussein regime has already been a seminal event in the region, and if successful will remake the map and dramatically alter the political and social trends in the Middle East. Granted, Iraq could fall tomorrow, but the prophets of doom continue to utterly miss the shape of events in Iraq. Even the results of this disputed election are being resolved in negotiations rather than sectarian battles, and the idea of Iraq becoming a theocracy is contradicted by a Constitution which gives full social and political rights to women and enshrines the basic concepts of pluralism and democracy.

Critics of the war owe it to themselves and to the nation than to do better than the juvenile partisan attacks that they’ve been continually launching. The same arguments rehashed ad nauseam aren’t working - if the anti-war faction wants to be taken seriously they have to behave in a serious manner, and the constant claims of “lying” or “misleading” only reveal a profound lack of seriousness.

James Q. Wilson has an excellent piece that explains why ID isn’t science:

People use “theory” when they mean a guess, a faith or an idea. A theory in this sense does not state a testable relationship between two or more things. It is a belief that may be true, but its truth cannot be tested by scientific inquiry. One such theory is that God exists and intervenes in human life in ways that affect the outcome of human life. God may well exist, and He may well help people overcome problems or even (if we believe certain athletes) determine the outcome of a game. But that theory cannot be tested. There is no way anyone has found that we can prove empirically that God exists or that His action has affected some human life. If such a test could be found, the scientist who executed it would overnight become a hero.

I understand how Christians can feel marginalized and persecuted in today’s politically correct world - but an insistance on teaching ID most certainly doesn’t help. Intelligent Design doesn’t belong in a science class because it isn’t testible. You can’t make God appear in a beaker, but you can observe changes through the fossil record. The arguments about “irriducable complexity” being proof of a grand Designer also fail to be persuasive. There are many things we don’t know about how things like the eye developed, but we have enough clues to piece the story together. A gap in a theory is not proof of a Creator.

Science cannot, nor should it, try and argue in favor or agaist the existence of the Almighty. Science can tell us that fifteen billion or so years ago the Universe popped into existence from some priomordial and unknowable state - but it can never answer the question as to why. Science can tell us that a spacecraft thrusting at this velocity and this bearing will hit the orbit of this planet at this time, but they can’t answer the questions of the soul. Science and religion are only in conflict when one steps on the shoes of the other - when the zealous believer challenges scientific theory or the arrogant theorist argues that only a fool would believe in God. Both are arguing points based on the unknowable and neither is a sound argument.

ID most assuredly is a religious, not a scientific belief, and therefore isn’t something that should be taught in high school science courses. But theologically, which argument best illustrates the majesty of God - a diety who constantly tinkers with His creation, or a diety with the omniscience to create everything in one single thought? The ID argument always struck me as a theologically unsound principle, an argument that tries to put the Creator on a more understandable level - and there’s just a certain amount of hubris in that. It’s one thing to see God in the small miracles of life - it’s quite another to constantly demand His presence in everything.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on The Conservative Mind and the American conservative movement. Every American conservative should read Russell Kirk’s seminal work at some point, as it outlines some of the rhetorical and philosophical foundations of the modern conservative movement.

Kirk, who borrows heavily from the genius of Edmund Burke, is not an easy author to read, but he does an excellent job of bringing together the various threads of conservative thought from Burke’s time to the modern day. Before 1955, American conservativism was a fringe movement - it was Kirk and William F. Buckley who rediscovered the values of conservatism and helped shape them into a relevant political force. It would be 1980 before conservatism made the jump from an ideological movement to a political one (prior Republican Presidents were hardly conservative - witness Nixon’s Keynesianism), and today conservatives outnumber liberals in this country by a wide margin.

None of that would have happened without the intellectual rigor of Russell Kirk and the other founders of the American conservative movement, which is why their works remain vital today while the typical Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh screeds are very much the products of our times. One of the strengths of conservatism is its willingness to go back and reexamine the wisdom of the past - and Kirk provides a treasure trove of insight for the future of the conservative movement in America.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has some comments on the article. One of the mistakes I think Hart does make is broadly arguing that certain current positions are not conservative or utopian. For instance, I don’t think that prohibitions against abortion are a utopian ideology any more so that laws against murder are designed to stop all murders - the pro-life position merely argues that the state recognizing what they see as an act of murder is morally untenable. Furthermore, I don’t think Iraq is an expressly “Wilsonian” or utopian in nature - it’s more of a mixture of Jacksonianism (the war on terrorism) and Jeffersonianism (the reconstruction of Iraq and the focus on democratization). A truly “Wilsonian” approach would have been to leverage the UN to try to change Iraq - exactly the course of action the anti-war crowd would have had the world take. The current Administration simply does not have the faith in international institutions that the Wilsonians did, nor is Wilsonianism alone in its belief in the transformational power of democracy. (For background on the four main traditions in American foreign policy see this critically important piece by Walter Russell Mead.)