Year: 2009

Tortured Logic

Calvin Freiburger Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Islamofascism, national security, torture

Torture is back in the news, thanks in large part to President Barack Obama’s recent speech attacking the national security policies of the Bush Administration (despite reserving for himself the right to authorize torture) and ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech setting the record straight.

Among those outraged by Bush, Cheney and company is Alonzo Fyfe, who argues:

Every political speech describing what the American government may do to foreign captives should be viewed as a speech on what the speaker would allow foreign governments to do to Americans.

Of course, nobody is talking about what the government can do to “foreign captives” or “foreign nationals.”  We’re talking about what it can do to “terrorists,” meaning “foreign nationals whose goal is to kill civilians.”  Advocacy of torturing foreign terrorists cannot be interpreted as moral permission for another country to torture any Americans aside from those engaged in terrorist activities against that country.  And frankly, if a foreign government finds itself in that situation, I certainly wouldn’t object to their torturing an American-born terrorist to obtain information necessary to save lives.

As for the scenario of unjust governments or terrorist groups torturing captive US soldiers or civilians, then pointing to American waterboarding as justification, it’s preposterous.  If our enemies’ actions were only, or even primarily, motivated by a desire to retaliate for comparable grievances, 9/11 never would have happened.  Neither would the USS Cole bombing, the Khobar Towers, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing…you get the point.

Personally, I’ll take saving innocent lives over trying to psychoanalyze what might lead monsters to violate senses of moral restraint they don’t even have.

Conservatism: The Road Ahead

Calvin Freiburger Barack Obama, conservatism, Republican Party, resercons, strategy

With a hard-left president and Congress just one contested seat away from a filibuster-proof Democrat majority, the present condition of the Republican Party has become the talk of the town.  How did this happen?  Can the GOP make a comeback?  How soon?  Does it need to reinvent itself?

Several moderate-to-liberal Republicans—most prominently, Bush speechwriter David Frum, ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Sen. John McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain—claim that the American people “are looking for more government in their life, not less,” but the Republican Party has been hijacked by a cabal of right-wing zealots who, by angrily purging the party of anyone who doesn’t pass a nigh-insurmountable ideological purity test, have set the party on the fast track to irrelevance.

We’ve heard this many times before, usually casting social conservatives as the culprit.  Pro-lifers wary of Rudy Giuliani were chastised for putting their pet issue over the good of the country and told they didn’t understand how politics really worked.  Conservatives were told “Maverick” John McCain was the only candidate who could beat Barack Obama—and we all know how well that went (indeed, it turns out McCain’s strongest consistent showing in the polls came after the addition of Gov. Sarah Palin to the ticket on August 29).  Liberal GOP Senator Arlen Specter became a Democrat last month, complaining that the Republican Party “has moved far to the right” since 1980.

Of course, the GOP actually hasn’t moved to the right—quite the opposite.  Jay Nordlinger offers the following rundown of President George W. Bush’s domestic agenda, which the Republican Party largely supported:

Bush and the Republicans spent massively, especially in Bush’s first term. We [National Review] opposed that, mightily. The president’s most cherished initiative, probably, was the Faith-Based Initiative. We opposed that. Then there was his education policy: No Child Left Behind. We opposed that (mainly on grounds that it wrongly expanded the federal role). He had his new federal entitlement: a prescription-drug benefit. We of course opposed that. He imposed steel tariffs—for a season—which we opposed. He signed the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance—which we opposed. He established a new cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security. We opposed that. He defended race preferences in the University of Michigan Law School case; we were staunchly on the other side. He of course proposed a sweeping new immigration law, which included what amounted to amnesty. We were four-square against that.

The party’s standard-bearer for the past decade was hardly a conservative, and 2008’s standard-bearer even less so.  The Republican National Committee certainly hasn’t been moving to expel liberals like McCain, Specter, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee, or Olympia Snowe from the party; in fact, it’s doing the opposite.  It’s not as if Republicans got burned pursuing an ambitious social-conservative agenda—Congress’ actions on life issues during the Bush years stopped far short of pursuing an outright abortion ban (as Ann Coulter points out in her recent blockbuster Guilty, even public opposition to Congress’ intervention in the Terri Schiavo case was directly proportional to the dishonesty of the poll question).  Americans are becoming more pro-life, and as for gay marriage, it’s not for nothing that many Democrats, including the current president, pay lip service to marriage as a union between a man and a woman.  Hmm, what can we infer from this…?

There’s nothing new about the moderation meme, and it won’t be any more effective this time around than it was then.  And it’s not based on principle, either—as Karl notes, “if the GOP is in danger of being seen as ideologically narrow and too identified with social issues, it is in no small part because its supposedly ‘fiscally conservative, socially liberal’ wing generally has been socially liberal and not fiscally conservative.  Having abandoned the core principles on which Republicans are supposed to agree, they would like the social cons to dump the remainder of their principles as well.”

As I’ve said before, it wasn’t conservatism that soured the American people to the GOP over the past 8 years. It was corruption, amnesty, and a White House that refused to reevaluate its Iraq strategy until the electoral winds of 2006 gave it no choice.  Late in the 2008 race, the economy took center stage among voters’ concerns, and they saw a feckless Republican who seemed not to have a coherent answer.

So how do we set things right?  Dick Morris says moderation is exactly the wrong approach.  He reasons that Obama’s domestic agenda is a sure-fire disaster in the making, which voters will be watching, and “Republicans must be seen as a clear alternative—a strong voice for reversal of the harm the president will have inflicted.” However, “voters will cynically conclude that there is no distinction between the parties” if they instead see a meek, moderate GOP that stands for nothing clear or different.  Morris is right.  Especially considering that both parties are currently tied on economic aptitude, a Republican comeback is entirely possible—if the GOP recognizes what they have to do.

That’s a very big if.  The two biggest obstacles to Republican rebounds in 2010 & 2012 are the temptation to buy the moderation fallacy, and the party’s utter lack of articulate spokesmen who can connect with the people (case in point: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s ineffectual reaction to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent attack on the CIA on Fox News).  And even if Republicans do win back seats—even regain majorities—what are they going to do with their power?  How are they going to ensure lasting Republican victory, and long-term conservative reform?

I believe the answers lie in a drastic reassessment of what the Republican Party and the conservative movement are, or more importantly, are not doing at the federal, state, and local levels.  In the days, weeks, and months to come, we’re going to explore the various aspects of the question.  Stay tuned.

America’s Christian Heritage

Calvin Freiburger Constitution, FdL Reporter, Founding Fathers, history, letters, me, religion

My latest letter to the Fond du Lac Reporter:

George Ciesla’s April 19 letter illustrates a growing problem in America: severe confusion over our nation’s identity.  Is America a “Christian nation”?  What does that phrase even mean?  Let’s try to set the record straight.

As of 2008, 76% of Americans identify themselves as Christians [PDF link].  Accordingly, Christianity has shaped American life since the beginning.  So “Christian nation” is a perfectly legitimate descriptive term.

Furthermore, we are founded in significant part upon the Christian idea that every person is created equal, loved equally by the God who made us all.  In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson said government’s purpose is to secure the inalienable rights “endowed [on us] by our Creator.”  In his Farewell Address, George Washington called religion an “indispensable support” to political prosperity, warning us not “to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”  Ben Franklin proposed opening the Philadelphia Convention each day with prayer, because he believed that “God governs in the affairs of men,” and he feared the prospect of forming a government solely “by Human Wisdom, and leav[ing] it to chance, war, and conquest.”

In his landmark work Democracy in America, French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained that democracy tends to cause each person “to be occupied with himself alone,” but religion combats self-centered narcissism by drawing man “away from contemplation of himself” and imposing “some duties toward the human species or in common with it.”  Modern research demonstrates Tocqueville’s point—in Who Really Cares, Syracuse University Professor Arthur Brooks finds that “religious people are far more charitable than nonreligious people.”

Were all the Framers Christians?  No, but many were, and even those who didn’t accept Christ (namely Franklin and Jefferson) believed in a higher power and recognized religion’s importance to any free society.  Nobody familiar with their writings can deny this—many, many more examples can be found in books such as America’s God & Country Encyclopedia of Quotations by William Federer and God of Our Fathers by Josiah Richards.

To deny America’s Christian heritage, revisionists often cite the Treaty of Tripoli, which states America is “not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”  What they don’t tell you: the treaty was an (unsuccessful) effort to appease the Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast (to whom President John Adams also agreed to pay protection money) attacking American ships at the time—hardly comparable to the scores of public statements and private correspondences that reveal the mark of faith in our forefathers’ thinking, not the least of which is our very Declaration of Independence!

True, the Constitution does not mention God.  True, we have a separation of church and state.  But both statements are irrelevant.  Mr. Ciesla mishears the phrase “Christian nation” as “Christian theocracy” or “Christian government,” but it means neither.  It’s a statement about our ideals, history and culture—not our government.  Maybe the problem is liberalism’s view of government: they idealize it as the solution to everyone’s problems, so they cannot imagine that any part of the nation can be considered separately from the state.

The Founders guaranteed freedom of religion and conscience for all Americans, and rightly so.  They wanted to prevent the state from persecuting churches and churches from oppressing the people, but despite what today’s secular revisionists may tell you, they never intended to keep religion stuffed inside pews and living rooms, never to be seen in the public square.  They never meant to purge religious thought and speech from political debate.  There’s nothing “prejudiced” about telling the truth about our heritage…but there is something “un-American” about suppressing it.

Introducing CFO 2.0

Calvin Freiburger blog, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

I’ve been away from the blogosphere for a while. College responsibilities have taken center stage for the past couple months, and the times I did try to post anything more than a video or a few words, Blogger.com has been less than cooperative. But I’m happy to announce that the blogging will resume in earnest, at CFO’s new home, WordPress! My Blogger posts will still be available here, but from now on, all my new material will be posted at rightcal.wordpress.com!

Quote of the Day

Calvin Freiburger democracy, history, materialism, secularism, Tocqueville
If one encounters among the opinions of a democratic people some of those harmful theories that tend to make it believed that everything perishes with the body, consider the men who profess them as the natural enemies of the people.

There are many things that offend me in the materialists. Their doctrines appear to me pernicious and their haughtiness revolts me. If their system could be of some utility to man, it seems that it would be in giving him a modest idea of himself. But they do not make anyone see that this should be so; and when they believe they have sufficiently established that they are only brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated they were gods.

Materialism is a dangerous malady of the human mind in all nations; but one must dread it particularly in a democratic people because it combines marvelously with the most familiar vice of the heart in these peoples.

– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 519