Echoes in Eternity

John McCain could save lives with his vice-presidential pick.

“I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection. Yeah, he has an extra chromosome. I keep thinking, in our world, what is normal and what is perfect?”

That’s Alaska’s Republican governor, Sarah Palin, talking about her infant son, Trig, born with Down Syndrome. When Todd and Sarah Palin learned last December that their baby would have Down Syndrome, they not only saved a life but made a decision that would touch the lives of families living with similar gifts across the country.
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Not only are children with Down Syndrome people too, they inspire a deep love and enthusiastic appreciation. Especially in the face of a culture that wants to expunge them. According to a study cited in the New York Times last year, “About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome diagnosis have chosen to have an abortion.” (Emphasis added.) Most American women are given prenatal tests.

At 44, Governor Palin is a bit young and relatively new to the political scene yet. These are no small considerations when electing someone who could assume the role of president (Democrats: Check out your nominee with that reservation . . . ). But if the youngest life she and her husband care for can wake up a nation that’s blind to the eugenics in its midst, a routine part of medicine today, she and John McCain would be offering human rights and dignity a great, honorable service. In contrast to Barack Obama, who would let the survivors of botched abortion attempts be killed, the Palins could serve as a great clarifier for voters this fall — and an education.

[T]he new rules require teachers to accept late work and prevent them from penalizing students for missed deadlines. Homework grades that would drag down a student's overall average will be thrown out.

OBAMA: I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people.

OBAMA: I retain from my childhood and my experiences growing up a suspicion of dogma. And I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.

OBAMA: When I’m talking to a group and I’m saying something truthful, I can feel a power that comes out of those statements that is different than when I’m just being glib or clever.

GG: What’s that power? Is it the holy spirit? God?

OBAMA: Well, I think it’s the power of the recognition of God, or the recognition of a larger truth that is being shared between me and an audience.

GG: Who’s Jesus to you?

OBAMA: Right. Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher. And he’s also a wonderful teacher. I think it’s important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

OBAMA: There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell. … I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell.

OBAMA: What I believe in is that if I live my life as well as I can, that I will be rewarded. I don’t presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die. But I feel very strongly that whether the reward is in the here and now or in the hereafter, the aligning myself to my faith and my values is a good thing.

GG: What is sin?

OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values. {emphasis mine}

GG: What happens if you have sin in your life?

OBAMA: I think it’s the same thing as the question about heaven. In the same way that if I’m true to myself and my faith that that is its own reward, when I’m not true to it, it’s its own punishment.

GG: What are you doing when you feel the most centered, the most aligned spiritually?

OBAMA: I think I already described it. It’s when I’m being true to myself.

"During his trip as part of the CODEL to Afghanistan and Iraq, Senator Obama visited the combat support hospital in the Green Zone in Baghdad and had a number of other visits with the troops," Obama strategist Robert Gibbs said in a statement. "For the second part of his trip, the senator wanted to visit the men and women at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center to express his gratitude for their service and sacrifice. The senator decided out of respect for these servicemen and women that it would be inappropriate to make a stop to visit troops at a U.S. military facility as part of a trip funded by the campaign."
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One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama's representatives were told, "he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers." In addition,
"Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."

The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."

There’s been nothing like it since Beatlemania. As the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama arrives in Britain tomorrow on the last leg of his world tour, Obamania seems to be sweeping across the Atlantic and carrying all before it.

In giant rallies across the U.S., Obama induces hysteria among his adoring multitude, with women fainting from the effects of his soaring oratory and rock-star charisma.

On both sides of the Atlantic the media are swooning over him. Like Berlin and Paris, he is expected to receive a rapturous reception here.
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The U.S. election may not take place until November, but in Europe Obama has already won by a landslide.

Nor does he do anything to disabuse people of the view that he is ‘the One’. He is going to win the war in Iraq. He’s going to break the deadlock in the Middle East.

In the U.S., he declared his presidency would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal’.

Doubtless as the water recedes he will walk on it. His tour is supposed to be merely a fact-finding exercise for an election candidate — but it is being treated as a cross between a coronation and the Second Coming.

So at the risk of being a party pooper, may I pose the question: might not a junior senator with less than four years’ experience on Capitol Hill be advised to show just a smidgen of humility?

Significantly, on his first foreign foray he has achieved the feat of upsetting one of his country’s key allies, the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel.

She took a decidedly dim view of his intention to hold an electioneering rally today at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate — traditionally used as a backdrop only for non-partisan speeches of global significance. Faced with this rebuff, Obama chose the city’s Victory Column as an alternative venue.

How darkly ironic that the column was moved to its present position by Adolf Hitler as a symbol of Germany’s superiority and its victories against Denmark, Austria and France. Oh, dear. Is this what Obama means by ‘change we can believe in’?

Of course, in many respects the enthusiasm for this charismatic man is understandable.

Obama preaches a seductive message of change for an America which is terminally disaffected with President Bush — not just over the Iraq war, but over the handling of such catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina and, above all, the dive in the U.S. economy.

All this spells failure, depression and cynicism. Obama by contrast embodies success, optimism and idealism.
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Americans are, after all, the most optimistic of people. They just don’t do doom and gloom. So a politician who tells them ‘Yes we can’, and says he stands for ‘the audacity of hope’ gets them whooping and hollering for more.

But such Obamania should worry us all, for it is based on emotion and, where the Democrat candidate is concerned, the normal faculties of judgment appear to have been suspended.

Important questions about Obama’s judgment, consistency and honesty are not being asked, let alone answered.

He has got away with the fact that for 20 years he belonged to a church which preaches black power racism against white people.

He disavowed his long-time mentor, pastor Jeremiah Wright, only when his extreme views could no longer be ignored — despite the fact that Wright is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black power Nation of Islam.

The media brush all this aside as ‘personal details’ which are of no interest to voters. But if, say, John McCain’s pastor and mentor had turned out to support the Ku Klux Klan and his church was found to be sympathetic to its philosophy, his candidacy would have been defenestrated and rightly so.

Equally troubling is the way Obama has flip-flopped on issue after issue. From his brief Senate voting record, he appears to be the most Left-wing presidential candidate America has ever had.

Yet once he clinched the nomination, he repositioned himself as a Centrist to win the election.

So while once he was for a ban on handguns, he is now against it. Once for safeguards on wiretaps, he is now against them.

Once he was for a fixed timetable for withdrawal from Iraq — but now that the acclaimed U.S. commander General Petraeus has said this would be deeply unwise, Obama claims he proposes no ‘rigid’ adherence to a timetable. This is just more of the same old politics of dissembling.
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What is even more disturbing, however, is that these matters are being brushed aside or ignored –because so many people want desperately to believe in him.

Such a suspension of disbelief calls to mind someone else closer to home: Princess Diana, who also inspired hysterical adoration because she, too, became an icon of idealism — challenging the established order.

A deeply attractive figure, she seemed to embody hope for a better universe by appealing to emotion rather than reason.
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It was, of course, all pure fantasy. People had fallen for a carefully spun image which bore little relation to the manipulative and unstable woman who was the real Diana, but which spoke to something deep inside them.

So it is with Obama. Americans’ natural optimism makes them want to believe that, as a black man with a Muslim background (another thing he has cleverly obfuscated), he can heal all wounds, including the U.S.’s history of racism, and bring peace to the world just by being who he is.

They see in his attractiveness a flattering reflection of themselves. He doesn’t embarrass them; he makes them feel proud.

He is not a Texas oilman who can’t string a sentence together: he has oratorical skills to die for.

He is not old, frail and nondescript like McCain, but young, vigorous and attractive. He is, in short, everything they want America — and themselves — to be.

His very incoherence over policy, the fact we don’t know what he really believes in, enables people to project onto him their hopes and desires. He is the perfect fantasy politician. He is America’s very own Princess Obama.

But, of course, the belief that a handsome prince can magic away the troubles of the world is infantile. The idea that there is a new kind of sanitised politics by which problems can be solved without having to make hard choices is a dangerous delusion.

To be fair, there are signs that light may be beginning to dawn in America. Despite — or perhaps because of — the saturation media coverage of Obama’s world tour, his poll numbers are showing no bounce.

This may be because people are beginning to see the media manipulation, with Obama refusing to answer journalists’ questions and participating only in ‘faked’ interviews by the military in Iraq.

While America may be wising up, however, Britain is about to have its Princess Obama moment. Get out the smelling salts and prepare to swoon.

It has been fashionable -- indeed, de rigueur in political and media circles -- to view contemptuously President Bush's assertion that we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them here. Even conservative commentators have tended to tiptoe around the proposition. We are all far too sophisticated to believe such simplicities. Nor will any self-respecting public chatterer even raise the little matter of America not being hit by terrorism on our soil for the almost seven years since Sept. 11.

And yet the undeniable facts certainly would justify a debate -- if not yet a consensus of agreement -- on President Bush's assertions. Regarding killing Islamist terrorists in Iraq rather than New York City, consider the numbers: According to USA Today in September 2007, more than 19,000 insurgents had been killed by coalition forces since 2003. The number obviously has gone up in the nine months since then (these were midsurge numbers), but I don't have reliable updated numbers.

Of course, most of those 19,000 killed insurgents were not foreign terrorists, but local Iraqis moved to action by our occupation. However, according to studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and by the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign-born jihadists in Iraq are believed to number between 4 and10 percent of the total insurgent strength. So it is reasonable to assume that we have killed -- as of nine months ago -- between 800 and 1,900 non-Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade elsewhere. It only took a couple of dozen to commit the atrocities of Sept. 11.

Moreover, we know specifically that Al-Qaida in Iraq has been decimated recently. According to the British newspaper The Times in February: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an 'extraordinary crisis'. ... The terrorist group's security structure suffered 'total collapse'."

And last month, Strategy Page reported: "Al Qaeda web sites are making a lot of noise about 'why we (al-Qaida) lost in Iraq'. Western intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in several Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was steep and catastrophic. ... If you can read Arabic, you can easily find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is trying to explain its own destruction (in Iraq) to its remaining supporters."

Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment. I have been told that by U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq, as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the Iraqi government we support with our blood and wealth), we are proving to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.

Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?

The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.

On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush's political courage -- and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women (and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) -- America's willingness and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around the world. This may prove to be the most important global political fact of the first decade of the 21st century -- with implications even beyond our struggle with radical Islam.

It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq, more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush's side of the argument. This is a debate worth having before November.

A Quebec father has decided to appeal a decision by a judge who ruled he had no right to stop his 12-year-old daughter from going on a school trip, even though the girl has already gone on the outing.

The dispute began in May when the girl had a disagreement with her stepmother. That prompted the father to forbid the girl to go on a three-day outing with her classmates to celebrate their last year in elementary school. The girl then moved to her mother's house.

The parents, who live in the Gatineau region of Quebec, are divorced, and the father has legal custody.

Last week, Quebec Superior Court Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier ruled the girl could attend the outing despite her father's wishes. She went on the trip this week.

Kim Beaudoin, a lawyer handling the father's case, said the judge's ruling raises unsettling questions for families.

"It's dangerous to let kids play their parents. They have to learn to respect rules," Beaudoin said in an interview on Thursday.

Beaudoin said her client feels the judge had undermined his authority over his daughter.

"He doesn't think a judge should be allowed to take away a punishment," she said. "And he doesn't think another parent should be allowed to say 'Well, come live at my house, and you won't have to live that punishment.'"