Going Down!

The western world continues its descent into inanity with the latest "findings" from a Swiss committee. We should all sit back and welcome the era of PLANT RIGHTS.

In a report on "the dignity of the creature in the plant world," the federal Ethics Committee on non-human Gene Technology condemned the decapitation of flowers without reason, among other sins.

Still, commission member Bernard Baertsche suggested at a press conference the body weighed such cruel acts on a case-by-case basis, noting "the simple pleasure of picking the petals off a daisy might suffice as a reason."

Similarly "all action that involves plants in the aim to conserve the human species is morally justified," the commission, tasked to offer an ethical take on all areas of biotechnology and genetic engineering, said in its report.

Nor did the commission object to genetic engineering, since this did not threaten plants' "autonomy — that is their capacity to reproduce or their capacity of adaptation."

We look forward to the antics of PETP (People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants) which should begin any time now. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard, however, intend to fully respect the proper place of plants.

Next to the steak.

“She Won’t Think Anything About It.”

According to Wikipedia, those words, spoken in reply to the question, ""What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?" asked by Mary Todd Lincoln, were the last words of Abraham Lincoln. Shortly thereafter, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the back of the head at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. The date was April 14, 1865, just after 9 PM. Abraham Lincoln would die the next morning at 7:22 AM, laid diagonally across a boarding house bed across the street from Ford's Theater. He was too tall a man to lie in the bed normally.

Somehow, it seems fitting that Lincoln's last official act as President of the United States was to pardon a man who had been convicted three times of spying for the Confederacy and sentenced to death.

Now, as then, he belongs to the ages.

Berlusconi’s Big Win

Silvio Berlusconi has a major electoral win today. The center-right politician has romped to a huge win in the Italian elections and will take over as Prime Minister sometime in May. He will take office with large majorities in both houses of the Italian parliament. The big losers in the election? The hard left. They may have no seats at all after being devastated at the ballot box.

Pollsters' projections, based on partial results, gave Berlusconi a 99-seat majority in the 630-member lower house and an advantage of up to 30 seats in the Senate, which has 315 elected and seven lifetime senators.

That contrasts with the two-seat Senate majority that the last government had under Romano Prodi, who resigned in January 20 months into his five-year term. Berlusconi had set his sights on a 20-seat majority in the Senate…..

…..The big loser of the election was the left. Excluded from Veltroni's Democratic Party, the Rainbow Left, made up of communists and greens, fared so badly it may not win any seats.

With many smaller parties facing a similar fate, Christian Democratic chief Pierferdinando Casini said parliament may have only five parties, compared with some 20 last time — a major turnaround for Italy's traditionally fragmented politics.

Trying to follow Italian politics is not for the weak of course. This is something like the four thousandth government they have had since World War Two (yes, I'm exaggerating - it has been 62 governments). Still, it's interesting that the left element has been effectively pushed completely out of power. It will be worth watching to see whether that makes things a little calmer in Italian politics.

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen at NRO says that the win is even bigger - and more stable - than the Associated Press reports indicate.

Tomorrow's papers will pretend that this didn't happen, and warn that Berlusconi's allies in the Northern League are mercurial and dangerous, and that his majority isn't as stable as it looks. But it is. And there's an even more annoying feature to these elections, as seen by the chattering classes: Berlusconi is an outspoken, even passionate admirer of George W. Bush and the United States of America. Reminds one of the elections that brought Sarkozy to the Elysee, doesn't it? Best to keep that quiet, or somebody might notice that hatred of America doesn't seem to affect the voters in Italy, France or Germany.

Bitterness All Around

I think Hugh Hewitt has it nailed with his analysis of Barack Obama and the wildly distorted view the candidate holds about America and Americans in "flyover" country. Obama's "small town" remarks reflect a great deal about the beliefs Obama holds - and the contempt he feels - for small town America. That small town America includes pretty much all of the United States that is not in heavily urbanized areas.

There is a furious amount of spinning underway to save Senator Obama from the consequences of his candid assessment of Americans who don't live in the big cities or on the coasts.  Howard Kurtz, for example, wants to narrow the impact of Obama's slight to just small town Keystone staters, and also asserts that everyone knows what Obama meant.

"And yet, most people (and most journalists) know what he was trying to say," Howard opined. "Not that small towners are gun nuts. Or religious nuts, not from a regular churchgoer. The senator was trying to say that these folks voted on social issues, distracting wedge issues, when their real problem was economic."

I don't think that's what he meant at all.  He meant that most Americans are bitter. And Senator Obama agrees with me.

Senator Obama doubled down in this appearance at the Compassion Forum last night.  (RCP has the transcript here.)  In fielding a question about poverty from Jim Wallis, Obama added this explanation:

You know, this actually goes back to the earlier point you raised where Senator Clinton suggested I was being elitist when I said that people are frustrated and bitter. That is absolutely true. That's not just true in small towns. That's true in urban areas. That's true in my community of the South Side of Chicago. Because people feel forgotten. They feel as if nobody is listening in Washington.

Politics as therapy; Americans as bitter, failed people.  That's the senator's story and he's sticking with it.  It is the very vision that motivated Jimmy Carter's malaise speech –"It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession"– recycled and with a much better delivery.

But Obama's vision just isn't true for the majority of Americans.  Most Americans are productive and generally happy; hard-working and actively involved in their communities through church and their children's schools.

Most Americans are generous, and favorably disposed towards strangers and eager to help the world.

Obama doesn't know this America, which is certainly the backbone of most suburbs, small towns and rural communities in flyover-country and, truth be told, on most of the coasts outside of the largest urban centers. 

What Obama knows is the world in which he has lived, which is a strange combination of some of the toughest neighborhoods in the U.S. and its most elite institutions.  He belonged to a church that indulged radical politics in its weekly bulletin and from its pulpit even as it struggled to help some devastated neighborhoods.  He did so after attending and absorbing the attitudes of America's most elite law school and having been taught by its –mostly– hard-left professors.  He does so from the lofty perch of the U.S. Senate.  He's had a schizophrenic life that combined the toughest aspects of America and its most indulgent.

Do read it all. Hugh is on a roll here. And he's right. Non-urban America has a solid majority of helpful, hopeful people who do volunteer, who do try to make their town a better place. Are there bitter people? Of course. But most people are trying to do their best regardless of circumstances. My little town just moved its food pantry to a much larger building because the old one was too small to handle the donations. I used to pass the small, old pantry and there would be bags and boxes, bicycles and appliances, furniture and all manner of things piled high in front of the place waiting for it to open. Small town? Yes, about 5,000 people. Big hearts? No doubt at all. Bitterness? Not a trace.

When the school bands have concerts, it is standing room only in the high school gym. Tonight when I drove past the high school, all the lots were overflowing with cars. People had come to watch a soccer game. Small town America isn't the bitter, gun-crazed, overly-religious, xenophobic, anti-trade hinterland that Obama thinks it is. But go read Hugh's analysis of why Obama formed that distorted idea of the country he wants to lead.

And Now The Bad News

It seems that Barack Obama has an even bigger problem with his "small town" comments than I suspected. A flat majority of Americans, 56%, think he is wrong. Worse yet, a huge majority of independents, 51% to 27%, disagree with his stance. Obama did not even get a majority agreeing with him among Democrats, getting only 46% to agree while 33% disagree.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters nationwide disagree with Barack Obama’s statement that people in small towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% agree with the Democratic frontrunner while 19% are not sure.

Partisan and ideological differences suggest that the comments are more likely to be a factor in the General Election than in the Primaries. A plurality of politically liberal voters—46%–agree with Obama’s statement while 33% disagree. Moderate voters take the opposite view and disagree by a 51% to 27% margin. Seventy-four percent (74%) of conservatives disagree with Obama’s statement, only 12% agree.

While everyone knew full well that conservatives thought he was badly out of line, the independent numbers show the real problem. As does the revolt among members of his own party. Or should I say revulsion. This was a serious blunder on Obama's part, one that is very likely a campaign killer for him in the general election. Count on this being a major line of atack on Obama. It is more powerful even than the Wright issue, because it comes from Obama's own mouth.

I Guess Adding One And One Is Now Forbidden

It begins with Bill Kristol's criticism of Obama: The Mask Slips

I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980s, when I taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Still, it didn’t take me long this weekend to find my copy of “The Marx-Engels Reader,” edited by Robert C. Tucker — a book that was assigned in thousands of college courses in the 1970s and 80s, and that now must lie, unopened and un-remarked upon, on an awful lot of rec-room bookshelves.

My occasion for spending a little time once again with the old Communist was Barack Obama’s now-famous comment at an April 6 San Francisco fund-raiser. Obama was explaining his trouble winning over small-town, working-class voters: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

This sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion in the introduction to his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”:

“Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.”

Or, more succinctly, and in the original German in which Marx somehow always sounds better: “Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes.”

This rather obvious observation sends Andrew Sullivan into mild hyperventilation: Now He's A Godless Commie

Bill Kristol, trained in the same politics as Hillary Clinton, now argues that Obama's remarks in a fundraiser q and a are the "real Obama" - and that his voluminous writing and speaking about the sincerity of his own religious faith, and of others, are presumably "masks." The reason for inferring Obama's Marxism is the following point Obama artlessly made about the way in which economic distress can alter people's tolerance for others:

"It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Is this indistinguishable from saying, along with Marx, that all religion is an obviously false consciousness caused by the alienation of the world-historical class struggle? No, it obviously isn't. It's saying that economic distress does often in human history express itself in more rigid forms of religion, more reactionary cultural identification, less tolerance of "the other." Since large swathes of human history have shown this to be true - and perfectly arguable without any materialist understanding of religion - Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He's calling him a lying, Godless communist.

Where would anyone have gotten the notion that Obama was not perfectly sincere in his religious pronouncements?  Oh, I don't know, maybe The New Republic:

Obama learned that part of his problem as an organizer was that he was trying to build a confederation of churches but wasn't showing up in the pews on Sunday. When pastors asked him the inevitable questions about his own spiritual life, Obama would duck them uncomfortably. A Reverend Philips put the problem to him squarely when he learned that Obama didn't attend services. "It might help your mission if you had a church home," he told Obama. "It doesn't matter where, really. What you're asking from pastors requires us to set aside some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophesy. That requires a good deal of faith on our part. It makes us want to know just where you're getting yours from."

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright's church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for "Buppies"–black urban professionals–and didn't have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles–what the church calls the "Black Value System"–included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"

Anyone who has this as their back story is open to the charge that they are using religion in a cynical manner.  Obama's "church" was adopted in a calculated manner and, if this story is to be believed, with an eye to its politics and not to its Christian identity, of which Trinity has little anyway.  That the specific political character of Trinity is unreservedly hate-filled does not present Obama in the best light, and it certainly offers us no vision of Obama the believer.  As I wrote a while back:

So, what kind of judgements can we draw about Rev. Wright and his church built upon the "black liberation theology" of James Cone? For starters, it doesn't seem to be a particularly Christian church. By that, I mean its motivating principles seem to derive less from the life and teaching of Jesus Christ than they do from the writings of Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. The language of Wright's church is not that of grace and the love of God for his children on Earth. Instead, a vision of a politicized church built upon a rather clumsy and simplistic transposition of Lenin's essay on "Imperialism" (itself not a model of intellectual brilliance) is put forward in place of the Christian gospel. Where Lenin railed against the exploitation of the un-industrialized nations by the industrialized nations in a statist version of the Marxist idea of class struggle, Wright/Cone offer a vision of racial exploitation that can only be overcome by the "destruction" of the criminal race (i.e. whites.)

If this is what this perspective is politically, what can we say about it as a religion? From a religious perspective the question becomes what sort of claim such a view could have to being called "Christian" at all. (This is assuming that something being "Christian" is not merely a question of self-identification. For example, whatever variation there might be in the definition of "Vegan," you cannot legitimately claim to be a Vegan if you wear leather and eat veal four times a week.)

In light of these truths Sullivan's complaining comes across as a demand that no one should be allowed to draw conclusions from the evidence before their eyes. 

It also strains belief that Sullivan is shocked, shocked I say!, to find that when politicians speak they might just be telling us what they think voters want to hear more than what they truly believe.  Sullivan is presumably arguing that we must all be sheep when listening to Obama's bleatings. 

UPDATE: Karl over at Protein Wisdom thinks we have a case of "feeling the elephant":

Excitable Andy and Bill Kristol are talking past each other.  Kristol sees the Marxism; Sullivan sees the religion.  But without an understanding of the Black Liberation Theology foundation of Obama’s church — which imposes a crypto-Marxist hermeneutics on Scripture – these pundits are like the blind men describing the elephant.

Maybe, but in such a view Kristol still gets the better of the intellectual argument.

Still Getting Prepared To Fight An Imaginary GOP

More "reality" based politics from the DK:  The GOP's 800 Pound Gorilla

Being a science writer, I can't help but gravitate toward scientific metaphors. [ed. Astonishingly, this was not meant ironically.] So imagine for a second if two famous primate experts were interviewed for a nature program while an 800 pound gorilla tore the studio apart in the background. And in the midst of that chaos, the scientists avoided any mention of gorillas, while Calmly and Seriously discussing the theoretical danger posed by bunny rabbits. [ed. See that devastatingly on target "scientific metaphor"?  Me neither.]

Something like that happened last weekend: NBC News "chief" Tim Russert interviewed two leading 'conservative intellectuals,' Andrew Sullivan author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, and Christopher Hitchens who wrote God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. [ed. That's right, because when I think of "conservatives" I think of someone who is left of Jimmy Carter (Sullivan), or of someone who is so militant he thinks Mother Theresa is the moral equivalent of a Nazi war criminal (Hitchens).] Both guests have been incessantly congratulated for, as the title of their books indicate, their admirable courage in transcending previously defined conservative boundaries and confronting the pernicious influence fringe ideologues and religious fundamentalists exert on the conservative movement. [ed. In other words, they were praised for calling themselves what they obviously are not.  Since when is fraud courageous?]

Amazingly, during an hour long show, I can't recall either ‘critic’ or host raising a single question or making one comment concerning the stranglehold the religious right has on the modern Republican Party. [ed. As witnessed by the way Mike Huckabee swept all before him to claim the nomination!]  Just for example, there was not one word spoken about conservative foreign cult figure Sun-myung Moon, his ownership of the Washington Times, its sister publication Insight which published the false story that Obama attended a hard-line militant Madrassa as a child, or any of the dozens of other scandalous connections joining ultra right wing religious icons — some of whom who routinely concoct wild and ugly religious fabrications — irrevocably to the Republican Party. The fact that McCain political adviser Charlie Black organized a coronation where Moon was literally crowned the Messiah in a US Senate building, and duped two US lawmakers into not just attending, but physically placing a crown on Mister and Mrs. Messiah's head did not rise to the attention of Russert or his guests. [ed. Gee, Russert didn't want to devote time to presenting a charge that McCain is a closet Moonie?  Sounds like a conspiracy to me!  Somebody get Dan Rather, stat.]

I believe I'm beginning to catch a whiff of desperation in the air.  Can outright panic be far behind?