Discussing Issues with a Friend

A liberal friend of mine and I were discussing issues today, and I wanted to highlight some of his claims  and my responses to those claims.

Claim: “If conservatives *really* cared about abortion they would have created a constitutional amendment to ban it outright?”

Well, I have moved a little bit to the left on this issue over the years. As a young evangelical, a ban was just what I wanted. However, I think there is a strong case to be made in the case of rape, incest, and the life (not health, but life - ironically because, well we value life!) of the mother. That doesn’t mean the pro-abortion arguments in these cases are unassailable, but it means that I personally don’t have all the answers nor the time to formulate them and I just prefer to say that abortions should be illegal except in those three cases, and leave it at that.

[I would add - and the thought just occurred to me now, that the notion that conservatives "would have created a Constitutional amendment to ban" abortion is flawed, because conservatives by themselves do not have, nor have they had in my lifetime, majorities sufficient to pass a Constitutional amendment (2/3 of both houses of Congress, and 3/4 of the state legislatures).]

Claim: “We wage war in other countries and *know* there will be civilian casualties — a good number of them young children. But those are the costs of the war on terrorism so we do bother ourselves.”

In any war there are civilian casualties. That is a given throughout all of history. You cannot exclusively blame the US for this. That is unfair.

Rather, you have to look at this against the following backdrop. Yes, there have been errant strikes which have inadvertently - through the malfunction of weaponry, or weather, or human error - killed children and civilian non-combatants. But through technological advancement, the United States has done more than any nation in the history of warfare to limit the number of civilian casualties in warfare. Furthermore, quite unlike our enemies, we do NOT intentionally target non-terrorists in our “war on terror.” We target the terrorists. I blame the terrorists when they keep children in their hideouts or use innocents as human shields full well knowing that a US bomb could drop on them at anytime from anywhere and the children will be killed. Do they not do this so that they can then say, “the US imperialist aggressors murder children?” So, when you talk about the costs of the WOT, you have to also state that we as a moral society go to enormous lengths to target those and only those who are the enemy.

Claim: “Even in our own country we don’t care about the life of children. We have hundreds of thousands of children who are abused, neglected, hungry and we turn a blind eye to them because it might cost us some money.”

I can’t help but be reminded of Howard Dean’s quote, “our moral values, in contradistinction to that of Republicans, is that we don’t want to see kids go to bed hungry at night.”

When you say, “it might cost us some money,” what do you mean? Churches and charities in this country do enormous work in treating the abused, neglected, and in feeding the hungry. Americans contribute billions to these causes every year. So I don’t think that it’s because “it might cost us some money.” The issue is that liberals like yourself prefer that there is a government solution to helping the kids and conservatives believe that while there may be a small role for government to play, the work of private organizations in this regard is far more necessary and important. So the issue is not do we have the money. The issue is HOW we do it - through government or through the private sector.

“There is more to it than that. But I never get the sense that those who are so apposed to abortion really are pro-life so much as “pro-neonata”

[He means pro-neonatal life.] I think I know what you are going to say here, even though it cut off.  I understand what you’re getting at but I would want to back up a step. I think we need to ask ourselves what does “supporting the cause of human life” actually mean? For example, most liberals support wide abortion rights but do not support the death penalty. Most conservatives support a pro-life position but also support the death penalty. Liberals respond by saying how can you be “pro-life” (in the wider, not just abortion sense of the term) when you support capital punishment. Conservatives say, how can you be pro-life when you support abortion? So I think we have to understand what “supporting human life” means in the context of each side….another example. Conservatives support doing some killing to take out a tyrant whereas liberals generally shudder at the notion of doing any killing at all, regardless of the evil of the tyrant. So again, both sides can claim to support the “cause of human life” but then arrive at totally opposite conclusions.

I think the difference then between left and right is rooted in how high a value is place on life. For the liberal [on the abortion issue], life is above all other values. This explains why many liberals take the position that a woman can do what she wants with her body. To deny her that right is to deny her life - her quality of life - her right to function as an autonomous being. By the same token, in taking the life of a convicted murderer most liberals would say that although the murderer has taken a life we have no right to deny [i.e. take] his life - again, life uber alis, life above all.

The right believes that human life is an extraordinarily high value, however we believe that goodness and morality are even higher values. That is why we distinguish between the innocent (good) life and the guilty/evil (the bad life). We make distinctions between the value of the life of a Saddam Hussein and a newborn infant or unborn baby. We say that because the latter is innocent, we value that life much more than the life of the convicted murderer. We do not believe that those who have murdered and wrongfully taken a life deserve to keep their own. We recognize that some murderers who are not put to death will go on to murder again, either in prison or out of prison. We realize that more innocents will die if we do not execute some murderers than if we allow all murderers to keep their lives.

Now, I realize that for some folks these distinctions are difficult to make…they believe, and rightly so, that since each person is created in God’s image, and since each life is of infinite worth to God, how do we ever have the right to take any human life at all? As idyllic as this sounds, it’s not the understanding given to us by the Old Testament or for that matter the New Testament. I’ll leave the theology for a different day, but it suffices to say that this understanding, which in my view is quite flawed, comes from a misinterpretation of the sixth commandment, which is “thou shalt not murder” not “thou shalt not kill.” Christ Himself affirms the commandment in the New Testament, quoting from the Septuagint [see St. Matthew 19:18].

The Fake Olympics

Here is the google cache of the original post that shows little Lin Miaoke being praised for singing “Ode to the Motherland” at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games. Here is her “story” as reported by the China Daily, later acknowledged to be a lie by Chen Qigang, the ceremony’s music director:

In April, she and thousands of other talented tots took part in auditions for the parts of the 56 children who accompanied the national flag into the stadium.

Lin’s father Lin Hui, who works as a photojournalist at Beijing’s Legal Evening News, said he was not that confident about his daughter’s chances until June, when he was told she had made it into the final four.

He then found out she would be singing the lead just 15 minutes before the opening ceremony began, he said.

The 9-year-old songbird said she was thrilled to be part of Friday night’s performance, mostly “because I felt so beautiful in my red dress”, she told China Daily yesterday.

The problem is that Lin Miaoke didn’t actually sing the song that a billion people heard “her” sing on TV. The song was actually sung by Yang Peiyi. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude that she probably didn’t take part in this competition, as she was already a fairly well-known child actress, having appeared in several ads since age 6.

Of course the Chinese government removed this post once it was discovered that Lin Miaoke was a fraud.

Some of my friends don’t seem to be able to acknowledge how dishonest this whole incident really is. Here are the two comparisons I have heard so far from friends who either don’t think this is a big deal or who refuse to label  the regime as dishonest, or both: One, lip-syncing is done in Hollywood all the time for TV shows and movies. Two, Luciano Pavarotti used to lip-sync his own performances late in his career.

To the point that this is done in Hollywood all the time, television and the movies are a fantasy-land. They are not reality, they don’t represent reality. The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is reality. It’s not a movie or a TV where the viewer knows a priori that what he sees in the show is not reflective of reality.TV and the movies are fiction; the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games is reality.

To the point that Pavarotti may have lip-synced his own voice, there is a moral difference between lip-syncing one’s own voice, and impersonating another person and claiming her voice as one’s own. If that isn’t obvious then I don’t know what is.

We then add the fake fireworks, the fake cheering squads, and we get something that is pretty much straight out of a 1950s Chinese Communist propaganda film. The whole opening ceremony was one giant deception.

The most absurd comparison by far came from a Chinese government spokesman speaking with a French accent who likened replacing Peiyi with Miaoke to a rowing coach who replaces one of the four rowers on a team for another rower!

Any student of Communism knows that truth doesn’t matter to Communist regimes. Honesty and morality don’t matter to these regimes either - the nation–the regime uber alis. They made a fraud out of Lin Miaoke, and they have denied Yang Peiyi of the chance of a lifetime - which she earned, by the way:

According to an interview that ceremony’s musical designer, Chen Qigang, made with a Beijing radio station, Yang Peiyi had gone through and won a grueling singing competition - the prize of which was to perform the song, live, in front of the world.

Yang Peiyi won the competition and was practicing feverishly to perfect the song, but at the last moment a member of the Chinese politburo who was watching her rehearse decided that while Yang Peiyi might have the perfect voice for the role, she was far too unattractive to actually represent China.

How disgusting. But then, we’re not exactly talking about a regime that is a great moral beacon either.

Chen Qigang, the ceremony’s music director, had been asked last minute by the Politburo official to replace Peiyi with Miaoke, according to an interview with Beijing Radio.

“The audience will understand that it’s in the national interest,” Chen said in a video of the interview posted online Sunday night.

No, Mr. Chen, we do not understand. Your country’s decision to use another girl to lip-sync Peiyi’s voice was morally wrong and it was dishonest. Your politburo brought great shame and dishonor upon China. Your politburo took away something that rightfully belonged to one little girl and gave it to another because of her looks.

One wonders why China was chosen to host these games to begin with. The answer is that there is no group of people for whom morality matters less than the International Olympic Committee - what matters to the IOCC is sports: sports uber alis.

Barack’s Germany Speech, deconstructed - Part II

In a previous column, Dennis offered his thoughts on Barack Obama’s Germany speech, hailed by some to be the greatest address of an American politician in Europe since JFK’s speech in Berlin. Dennis continues his analysis in this week’s column.

Ambassador John Bolton also discusses dithering diplomats in his column today.

UPDATE: President Bush’s remarks in Thailand

Social Responsibility and the Bottom Line - Prof. Matthew Gilley, St. Mary’s University

It is refreshing to see a morally balanced presentation on big business in American life (see page 8), and from my alma mater, no less! The wholesale demonization of business has been very damaging as it often results in real evils being ignored; however, it would be foolish to say that some businesses are not “ethically challenged,” as Professor Gilley ably demonstrates.

When businesses do bad (i.e. pay their execs a so-called “unjustified” salary) that makes front-page news, but the good that businesses do on an everyday basis is rarely noted in the mainstream media.

Barack’s Germany Speech, deconstructed

I was going to comment on Obama’s address to the world, but it looks like Dennis Prager has already done so.

US Winning in Iraq

Here it is, straight from Yahoo! News/AP: [Emphasis mine]

The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had.

Well, President Bush was referring to the combat operations to topple Saddam Hussein, but that’s neither here nor there.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the AP on Thursday that the insurgency as a whole has withered to the point where it is no longer a threat to Iraq’s future.

“Very clearly, the insurgency is in no position to overthrow the government or, really, even to challenge it,” Crocker said. “It’s actually almost in no position to try to confront it. By and large, what’s left of the insurgency is just trying to hang on.”

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Also unthinkable, by the way, under the Saddam regime…

We are WINNING in Iraq. Make no mistake about it. A vote for Barack Obama is a vote to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I’m with Merkel!

The gushing treatment that Barack Obama has received at the hands of foreign leaders is breathtaking:

Jordan’s King Abdullah flew back early from Aspen, Colo., to host dinner at his palace, then personally took the wheel of the royal Mercedes to drive his guest to the airport.

“God bless you,” Israeli President Shimon Peres greeted Obama the next morning in Jerusalem.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy virtually endorsed the man he called “my dear Barack Obama.” He observed puckishly he wasn’t meddling in the U.S. election when he suggested Obama follow his own lead by winning the top political office in the United States.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, himself an aspirant for higher office, rarely strayed from Obama’s side during a photo opportunity-rich trip to the village of Sderot near the Gaza Strip targeted by Hamas rockets.

And Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced — twice — in the days surrounding Obama’s visit to his country that he favors a timeline for the withdrawal of American combat troops that is remarkably similar to the one the Democratic presidential contender favors. [Take this with a grain of salt.]

In London, David Cameron, head of the opposition Conservative Party, made sure British as well as American television cameras recorded him with his guest in three separate locations in less than an hour.

But not German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who essentially brushed Obama aside for the man of arrogance, naivete, and inexperience that he is:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was something of an exception. No welcoming remarks for the cameras, no photos of the two meeting in her office. She did issue a statement calling Obama’s speech before 200,000 people citing a need for a renewed U.S.-European alliance “a positive signal.” But that was after she had embarrassed the presidential hopeful by making it known she did not think the historic Brandenburg Gate was a suitable venue for a political event by a traveling American [presidential aspirant]. (Addition mine).

Merkel’s reception is what a neophyte like Obama should receive.

What has the man done? A few years in the Senate and before that he was a “city organizer,” whatever that is. Alright, he gives good speeches too. So what? Why is he being treated like royalty? Why is he getting far more press coverage than John McCain? What is so special about him?

I grudgingly acknowlege that Obama probably has a better than 50-50 chance to win the White House in November. But if John McCain & Co. pulls an electoral rabbit out of the hat, and somehow manages to beat Obama, it will be a colossal embarrassment - perhaps the most embarrassing electoral loss in the last 30-40 years.

For now, I’m with the German Chancellor.

Washington Post editorial questions Obama’s judgment

The Washington Post, by no means a conservative newspaper, published an editorial questioning the news coverage that Obama is receiving on his “rock-star” trip to the Middle East and Europe. Now, the Washington Post calls his foreign policy vision vis a vis Iraq “eccentric”:

Yet Mr. Obama’s account of his strategic vision remains eccentric. He insists that Afghanistan is “the central front” for the United States, along with the border areas of Pakistan. But there are no known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and any additional U.S. forces sent there would not be able to operate in the Pakistani territories where Osama bin Laden is headquartered. While the United States has an interest in preventing the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, the country’s strategic importance pales beside that of Iraq, which lies at the geopolitical center of the Middle East and contains some of the world’s largest oil reserves. If Mr. Obama’s antiwar stance has blinded him to those realities, that could prove far more debilitating to him as president than any particular timetable.

Osama bin Laden himself has stated that Iraq, not Afghanistan, is the central front in the war on terror. Obama can’t get it right even when his enemies are telling him what the “central front” is!

I have to stress that the Washington Post is not a right-wing newspaper. Yet they have the intellectual honesty to see the multitude of flaws in Obama’s positions.

Al-Maliki: a Font of Misguided Predictions?

An Important piece by Max Boot. Prime Minister Al-Maliki did endorse Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan, but he is wrong that they can handle it on their own.

But Maliki’s public utterances do not provide a reliable guide as to when it will be safe to pull out U.S. troops. Better to listen to the military professionals. The Post recently quoted Brig. Gen. Bilal al-Dayni, commander of Iraqi troops in Basra, as saying of the Americans, “We hope they will stay until 2020.” That is similar to the expectation of Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir, who says his forces cannot assume full responsibility for internal security until 2012 and for external security until 2018.

So apparently folks in the Iraqi military establishment do not agree with Al-Maliki, nor with Obama for that matter.

McCain getting short shrift by New York Times

UPDATE: A Chicago Tribune Op-Ed Columnists says that the New York Times badly erred in its judgment.

John McCain submitted an article to the New York Times as a rebuttal to Barack Obama’s piece on his plans for a troop withdrawal. The New York Times has refused to publish the piece, stating in an email that

The article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory - with troops [sic] levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate.”

Setting aside the question as to whether one ought to go into that much detail in a public opinion piece, I’m curious whether the Obama op-ed which was published less than a week ago “lay[s] out a clear plan for achieving victory,” or whether Obama was asked to rewrite his piece and discuss possible consequences if his plan to withdraw the troops fails?

The New York Times lamely pointed out that “it had published at least seven op-ed pieces by Mr McCain since 1996.” But that was while the NYT was in love with him for being the Senate’s #1 maverick - a maverick being a conservative who “reaches across the aisle” to embrace liberal positions. Now that Barack Obama - the liberal’s liberal - has come onto the scene the NYT is treating McCain just like it treats other conservatives.

Let’s dispense once and for all with this notion that the New York Times, the flagship of the mainstream media, is an objective newspaper. The New York Times is a liberal newspaper, period. Let them state for the record that “this newspaper supports Barack Obama and we are doing everything we can to see to it that he wins.” Then it would be fair because the liberal bias would be out there for a matter of public record.