Amen!

Doubt is in. Certainty is out.

And dare you have any "deeply held views"--a transparent euphemism for religiously grounded views--especially regarding abortion, watch out for Schumer and other Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. They might well declare you disqualified for the bench.

The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers--principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics--bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong--indeed, deeply un-American--about fearing people simply because they believe.

It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you. And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

What nonsense. The campaign against certainty is merely the philosophical veneer for an attempt to politically marginalize and intellectually disenfranchise believers. Instead of arguing the merits of any issue, secularists are trying to win the argument by default on the grounds that the other side displays unhealthy certainty or, even worse, unseemly religiosity.

Why this panic about certainty and people who display it? It is not just, as conventional wisdom has it, that liberals think the last election was lost because of a bloc of benighted Evangelicals. It is because we are almost four years from 9/11 and four years of moral certainty, and firm belief is about all that secular liberalism can tolerate.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Enough. A new day, a new wave. Time again for nuance, doubt and the comforts of relativism. It is not just the restless search for novelty, the artist's Holy Grail. It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity--and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.

Nothing has more aroused and infuriated the sophisticates than the foreign policy of a religiously inclined President, based on the notion of a universal aspiration to freedom and of America's need and duty to advance it around the world. Such liberationism, confident and unapologetic, is portrayed as arrogant crusading, a deep violation of the tradition of American pluralism, ecumenism, modesty and skeptical restraint.

That widespread portrayal is invention masquerading as history. You want certainty? You want religiosity? How about a people who overthrow the political order of the ages, go to war and occasion thousands of deaths in the name of self-evident truths and unalienable rights endowed by the Creator? That was 1776.

The universality, the sacredness and the divine origin of freedom are enshrined in our founding document. The Founders, believers all, signed it. Thomas Jefferson wrote it. And not even Jefferson, the most skeptical of the lot, had the slightest doubt about it.

Deep Throat Revealed

"Vanity Fair" reveals Deep Throat is W. Mark Felt.

Bob Woodard, Ben Bradleee, and Washington Post confirms Felt is Deep Throat.

The Washington Post today confirmed that W. Mark Felt, a former
number-two official at the FBI, was "Deep Throat," the secretive source who
provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard M.
Nixon.

The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two
Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C. Bradlee.

Says a lot about journalists refusing to reveal their sources. As Deep Throat himself would say, "Follow the money".

Felt will be viewed as a heroic patriot or a disgruntled, vengeful, FBI dude who was "passed over".

Either way, Felt had his own reasons for keeping his identity a secret. Leaking information is not always seen in a favorable light. Why not go on record to expose Nixon's illegal activity in an era of secrets?

Deep Throat alone may not have been able to bring Nixon down. But, in combination with Alexander Butterfield's revelation of the existence of secret tapes, Nixon's fate was sealed.

It is important to the historical record that Deep Throat has been identified -- much more credibility than a source listed as a "high ranking government official" -- that is just too secretive.

French Twist

Ironic that the staunchest proponent of the EU has been shot down for now.

Reported in WaPo:

French voters rejected the European Union's first constitution Sunday, a stinging repudiation of President Jacques Chirac's leadership

Chirac's vision of a EU to rival the U.S. forestalled.

Perhaps, Chirac is merely a legend in his own mind.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day

by

Edgar Guest

The finest tribute we can pay

Unto our hero dead today

Is not of speech or roses red,

But living, throbbing hearts instead,

That shall renew the pledge they sealed

With death upon the battlefield:

That freedom's flag shall bear no stain

And free men wear no tyrant's chain.

Judicial Flinching

Judicial nominee filibuster observations from
Charles Krauthammer:

the compromise legitimized the principle of the judicial filibuster. Until 2001, not once in more than 200 years had a judicial nominee been denied appointment to the court by Senate filibuster.

The Democrats broke all precedent by systematically using it to block Bush nominees
in his first term in the hope that they would recapture the presidency in 2004.
They did not, and have continued the filibuster into his second term. This violation of Senate tradition has now been codified in writing as legitimate so long as circumstances (``extraordinary,'' in the eyes of the beholder)
warrant.

Truce, But No Treaty

Sen. Orrin Hatch weighs in on judicial nominees:

Those who founded this republic designed the Senate without the minority’s being
able to filibuster anything at all. After a rules change made the filibuster
possible, the Senate reserved its use to the legislative calendar and by
tradition did not use it for judicial nominees. We could have used the
filibuster to prevent confirmation of judicial nominations, but we did not do so.

In 2003, after 214 years, that tradition changed when Democrats blocked
confirmation of 10 majority-supported appeals court nominees by preventing any
confirmation vote at all.

The ends, however, do not justify the
unconstitutional means. We must restore the Senate tradition of up-or-down votes
for judicial nominations reaching the Senate floor.

First Post

Test post for a newbie blogger.