Hugh Hewitt says:

On the other hand, it’s not like anyone really believes Rather. More like the collective embarrassment for him will operate to let him fade away with a shred of dignity –a dignity he does not deserve.

There is an old-boy network at work. This old-boy network let the hired gals take a hit to protect the old lion. That is the way old boy networks function. Old viewers will let the old boy go on reading yesterday’s blog news between commercials for geriatric products.

But I have one question from the back row (I am no journalist): If politics was not the motive, then why did CBS, one of the big three networks, produce such a shoddy piece in a political season?

They knew the report would be trouble for the President. They knew people would howl. CBS knows that many people think they “tilt left.” Why wouldn’t they be more cautious, not less? What harm in a delay to get the facts right?

Everyone admits that the documents were fakes, pretty bad fakes. Everyone admits there was not a good “chain of possession” established. Everyone knows that the source for the documents was, well, not so great. Why wouldn’t they be more cautious than normal, not less?

The logical conclusion, in the absence of any other plausible motive, is that in a political season, politically savvy people played politics. Can I prove this? To what level? Beyond a reasonable doubt? No, I cannot. However, this study, this whitewash, was not a criminal case. People lost their jobs, highly paid jobs, in this case without a trial. It seems to me the facts, as shown by the account, point to only one plausible scenario. Rather and company played politics. There is a complete lack of any other motive that fits the facts.

The best explanation would seem unseemly haste to “break a story” and “be first.” Of course, in any news organization that is a temptation that is not always resisted. Such pressure is constant. The question is: does this sort of haste happen a great deal at CBS (and so damn the entire organization) or was it in this case only? If only in this case, then why? Why in this case did CBS over ride the normal checks and balances? What was the motive that tipped the scale in favor of tarnishing the President of the United States in war time with documents that bloggers quickly uncovered as frauds?

I do not know if Rather could be convicted in a court of law for a political motive. I do know that serving as anchor of a major newscast is not a right, it is an honor. It does not take iron clad evidence to be stripped of an honor. One should not do it on a whim. One should give the benefit of the doubt, but suppress great doubt in search of legal certainty. Rather is a rich man who either allowed his co-workers to convince him to folly or who tried to take down the President. With such savvy folk, there is almost no chance that a “smoking gun” memo will exist (”TO: Dan RE: Story Please ignore problems. These documents really get that gutless wonder Bush.”)

Instead, judicious men, not judges, but just men, must make the best decision that they can not punt behind legalese. They should have stripped Rather of his plush job and title, because they proved that he was seriously in error and that he could have cost the nation its war time leader by his blunder. They all but proved that politics was involved. They owed us their best opinion about the motive. They might have been wrong, but an innocent man would not have suffered. At worst, they would have overestimated Rather and made a fool into a Machiavelli. However, now they have likely made a Machiavelli out to be a dunce. That is dangerous for it leaves Rather with his fangs for as Cronkite proves, he will have the rest of his life to speak from highly paid platforms.

Still there is one sphere in which Rather has been found guilty: the American people have, brought our President back to office. Society has judged. They overwhelmingly have learned to distrust the mainstream media. Fewer people will watch the nightly news than ever. Fewer will read the print papers. The mainstream media can whitewash, but cannot hide the fact that CBS is full of dead men’s bones still aimlessly reading a teleprompter.

I am reminded by Phillip E. Johnson, godfather of Right Thinking, that the Farve era is almost over in Green Bay. Yesterday proved it. It also proved that though Farve has better tools than Starr, he is not Bart Starr’s equal. Now Starr played on better all around teams, but he also saved his best games for big games. Look at his interception rate in the playoffs. The Starr Packers never lost a home playoff game. Don’t get me wrong: Farve is a hall-of-fame quarterback and the best of my football watching lifetime (I don’t remember Starr the player). However, he did not elevate his game the way Starr did in the Big Ones.

So now the Pack is moving into the post-Farve era. If it is as long as the post-Starr era, we are in trouble!

Question: why do Packer quarterbacks who are good have “perfect” names . . . a quarterback named Starr? Farve? (See their kicker Longwell.) On the other hand, their best quarterback from the losing years was named Dickey. No explanation provided. I rest my case.

So if the Pack wants to win they need a prospect named “Cool” or “Touchdown” and need to pass on their backup “Nall” whose name sounds too much like “null.”

The Three Essentials for Education: Part One- Community

If I tell you to be a good student, you think of being alone in a library or sitting in a room chewing on the end of a pencil as you work on a hard problem. There is little doubt that learning anything difficult requires a great deal of work, some of it solitary. However, no one learns alone.

Science advances with community. Though the experiments may be dreamed up in the private, it is the community, through journals and conferences that test ideas. A scientist without the scientific community is as useless as a single button left on a shirt. It might work, but it cannot do its job.

This is even truer in music, theater, and all the arts. The image of the mad artist, the unique genius, sitting in a room producing great things is a myth. Though there have been great artists who worked that way, most great works are the product of a large community working together. No movie is the production of one man. No orchestra can be reduced to one instrumentalist. Even in the case of a solo or a sculpture, the role of the person attending the event or viewing the work of art cannot be forgotten. Traditionally, a work that can only be understood by the so-called artist is no artist at all.

Our culture has cultivated the image of the rebel musician playing alone and composing alone. It is all nonsense. Even as great a composer as Handel had help with his divine oratorio. Perhaps our music has become so ugly, and us with it, because we have locked ourselves into garages instead of finding a community of artists with whom we can collaborate and bring our private visions to sanity.

The rock of the Word of God or of classical civilization prevented even the most isolated artist from working alone. In his mind were the lessons of hundreds of years of culture. Shakespeare. The King James Bible. The Book of Common Prayer. Our generation is cut off from any common heritage or has only the thin shared experience of the Super Bowl or re-runs of television. Irony, which can be shared with only a little effort, rules in this world. It makes fun of has-been artists like William Shatner when tastes change and then takes him seriously all over again when the common folk learn to mock.

We pick our culture, ever our religion to our taste. In this way, when we are alone, we are more alone than any person who ever lived. The most isolated hermit of the Middle Ages standing on a pole was surrounded by a cultural consensus, by saints, and shared values. He was valued by those around him while he was alone and so he was not alone. He was performing a solitary task within a community. Most of us have jobs where we perform busy tasks with empty and lonely souls.

School taught us to learn alone, to choose our world view for self. It has robbed us of the value of community in education that was the basis for all Western education for thousands of years. Groups of men gathered and gave four years of their lives in monastic conditions to learn just over one hundred years ago. They forged friendships that would prove stronger than falling Empires or changing fads.

Any good college program will allow for solitude. A good University will cultivate quiet. It will then encourage those quiet souls, full of shared values and texts, to come together and learn.

Of course, working together gets a bad reputation in high school. Who can forget the group project where one person did all the work and everyone else floated? Of course, such false communities only point to the need for the real thing. In a real community, the lazy jerk in the back row would (eventually!) be confronted by his peers. The driven student who drives everyone crazy with drive and hustle would be allowed to wind down. When a group of students get together in this way, there is nothing finer in this life.

There are moments of beauty with a good class that cause time to stop. I sit and watch as the bodies lean forward, the room becomes more hushed, every comment takes on weight. In the hands of a masterful guide, like Al Geier of the University of Rochester, the group is led to see vision that they could not see alone. There are moments when the faces of my students shine so brightly it is like looking at a room full of stars pulled down from a summer sky at the sea. At that moment, I can grasp just a little bit of heaven.
It often takes weeks of hard labor together to reach such a point. One gets a very hard text and says nonsense about it at first. The talkative one in the group, how often I have played that role, says his piece and re-says it until he learns to be quiet. The silent student in the corner is at last provoked to say something and we discover that the one who has said nothing has something to say. Both are tempered. The louder one is mellowed to leadership, the silent one grows deeper and wise.

A school that rings bells, that changes groups often, that deals with textbooks instead of real books, and that does not value the soul (but tests and grades) will never know that moment. Once a student has known it, he would not lose it for anything. Learning of a sort can take place alone, but the divine vision for human beings comes only at the shared moment. It is not accident that Lord Christ left a Church, a gathering of people, and told us not to forsake it. It is in that shared experience, in the breaking of Word and Sacrament that all education is prefigured, at once deeply personal and communal. I hear the Divine Words with you and share in grace with you and together we see the face of God.
That is the purpose of real education: to see the face of God with your brother and sister.

FOXNews.com - Politics - Newt Gingrich Considers Presidential Run: “‘Anything seems possible,’ including a White House race, Gingrich told the Associated Press.”

Anything may be possible, but somethings are not very likely. It is not likely Elvis is really at your local 7/11. It is not likely that Dan Brown will donate the proceeds of DaVinci Code to the Catholic Church. It is not likely that Bill Clinton will marry Monica. In the same way, Gingrich is engaged in the strange fantasy of older men at the end of their careers that having come to an end in their chosen field, they should retire by becoming President.

Four reasons Newt will never be president:

1. Clinton problems. Forgiveness? Sure, but you have to be sorry and stop. If the party base is going to overlook bad behavior in a Republican, it will be 9/11 Rudy not yesterday’s Newt.
2. Bad look. Heavy, Southern, white men better look like Clinton or they look like villians in bad television movies.
3. Dated ideas. Gingrich has been running on autopilot for years. Watch him on television and count the minutes before he mentions the “Contract with America.” Memo to Newt: This years freshman college class was born in 1987.
4. No executive experience. Gingrich can join every other successful presidential candidate from the House in the last one hundred years.

Doesn’t someone near him help Newt with self-irony?

To celebrate I am offering a copy of Blog, by that other national host with sterling mind and athletic pretensions, to the best blog post on an external blog (mail here) to any of the following question set:

What are the best three reasons for Frank Pastore to start a blog?

OR

If Frank guest hosted on the Hewitt blog, would people still be missing him one year later?

OR

Will Frank’s exposure of the Canon Dale Owen remove all accountability from the show?

(Frank pointed out to his anniversary audience that, ahem, your not-humble-enough blogger
was the Canon Dale Owen. End of joke.)

Let’s start a blog storm to force Frank to blog!

Which brings us to the bonus question:

Can someone with no blog be impacted by a blog storm about his not blogging?

Navel Gazing - Why even feminists are obsessed with fat. By Laura Kipnis: “There’s simply an irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity, two largely incompatible strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the playing field with men.

The reason they’re incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing, because whatever you do, there’s always that straggly inch-long chin hair or pot belly or just the inexorable march of time. (Even the dewiest ingenue is a Norma Desmond waiting to happen.)”

Is this ignorance of history, a knowing lie, or just a very young writer trying to save a system at war with reality?

The writer begins by acknowledging that feminism and femininity are incompatible. To her horror, women decades after being liberated still want to be feminine. They still care about personal appearance and about what men think of them.

My grandmother who is about ninety would simply roll her eyes, shrug, and say, “Mercy,” the early twentieth century equivalent of “Whatever.”

Feminine women like my grandmother lived in a culture where the idea for men was being a gentleman. A gentleman wanted to “marry a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad.” He recognized the divine beauty of his gray haired mother, the subject of many a sadly forgotten song. Women did not wear clothing to prop themselves up and though no body much rejoiced in looking older, the sisterhood and all gentlemen made sure that anyone wicked enough to value bodily beauty over spiritual beauty was cut socially.

Feminism banned the gentleman. It pretended men and women are just the same or that women are not all that interested in traditional roles. It did a good thing in allowing more choice for women and destroying the misogyny that sometimes lurked in the corners of the old system. Feminism of the best sort recognized women’s work as valuable, though the old culture had done that as well. Feminism has never produced a culture that could reproduce itself at the most basic level of making enough babies. It has destroyed the old system that raised most babies in reasonable happiness. It replaced it with empty cribs or single children into which a family poured all their resources.

At an even deeper level, however, it left all of men’s desires for physical beauty, and natural admiration of the same, intact without any divine system of moral values to check it. Men could get what they wanted, in fact were encouraged to do so by the assault on “Victorian” values. Women somehow convinced themselves that men would outgrow what their grandmothers knew had to be trained out of them. Virtue in this area was not cheap for men and even the best trained fellow was likely to go off the rails. Still society encouraged men to value gray hair in women, to respect (even venerate) motherhood, and love “the wife of their youth.” Of course it did not always work, but it left society with fewer woman single by no choice of their own and with more babies in more stable home situations.

In traditional culture every dewey ingenue is the woman about whom one could write and sing:

By the old mill stream there sits a couple old and gray
Though years have rolled away
Their hearts are young today.
Mother Dear looks up at Dad with love light in her
He steals a kiss, a fond embrace
While evening breezes sigh,
They’re as happy as can be,
So that’s the kind of love for me. . .

The problem with Nora Desmond, as my grandmother would say, is that she refused to grow up. She allowed one kind of beauty to dominate her thinking and so became a sad clown. She also attracted the sort of people who use such women. As a young ingenue she should have found a gentleman and grown old together.

Early in my life, I was no gentleman. I did not know the value of it and instead embraced feminism. My sorrow for those days is great, but this much I know. There is a better way. My grandmother and mother knew it and together we can all take the long road back home. We can have a femininity, though this time with more freedom and options. We will honor motherhood as the greatest role a woman can have outside the Church and we will learn to love the beauty of all God’s ladies.

I wish I did not think that the must-read for January was Blog.

I wish I did not think that any business leader that does not read it is a fool.

I wish. . . well I wish that every University leader would get a copy. I gave one to one of my associates this week.

Why? If there was ever a book that did not need more blog flogging it was this one. More people who matter have said you should read this book than any screed since the invention of the internet.

My other problem? My blog is also mentioned in it, so liking it makes me look bad. Its virtue forces me to pass on “courage” points of the sort that liberals always give conservatives who have something bad to say about a conservative. It might even get me a free latte at Java Co. Saying something nice about it will put me on a list of billions of blogs who have already made such comments. Sadly, the book is well written, makes a valuable point, and does so in a manner relevent to any leader in any field. Sigh.

But facts are stubborn things and Blog is a must read. It must be read because few leaders are the age to have been exposed to blogging. At best they understand the problems blogging might cause them, but still lack the a vision for the remarkable opportunity that blogs hold.

Get the book. Read it or watch your competitor who did pass you by. Hewitt cannot pick a good football team. He cannot run, from what I hear. People still miss Frank Pastore guest hosting his radio show. . . but he is bright, can write, and has something to say. Sigh.

FOXNews.com - U.S. & World - Al Qaeda Video Shows Police Execution

In the footage, one of the prisoners identified himself as Lt. Bashar Latif Jassim and said his mission was to “prevent terrorists from entering Iraq.” When asked by one his captors- who did not appear on camera- who the terrorists are, Jassim said: “Those who sabotage the country.”

It is clever of the terrorists to show us this brave Iraqui. We will become discouraged and quit after a video like this one is shown to us.

Poirot once noted that criminals are never very clever, but always believe that they are. So it is with terrorists. A brave man died for his country. Thousands more brave men will step up to take his place. There will be an election in January. Soon there will be the first free Middle Eastern nation. It will not be perfect, but it will be better than anything that has been in the region (other than Israel) in the history of the world.

This hard task will be accomplished if we do not falter. Why? Because the people of Iraq are not foolish. They know that the fastest way to get rid of Americans is to be get rid of terrorists. Our interests converge. Their freedom is our freedom from the hard duty of securing the peace in Iraq. Liberty works and it will work in Iraq.

What about Vietnam? Aren’t all occupations doomed to failure? First, historically all occupations have not failed. Ask Poland. However, comparisons to other “occupations” are wrong headed, because we are occupying to liberate. Most other armies claimed they were liberating, but were not. The USA cannot wait to go home. We have no colonial ambitions. The people of Iraq will test this, find it to be true, and learn to trust us.

The left in this nation fears this outcome. Why? Because they know Bush and the Republican party will rightly reap most of the credit. A free Iraq in four years, with a smaller number of American troops living in relative peace, will be the death knell of the modern Democrat party. The war was easier than was anticipated. The occupation has been harder, but we control our destiny. We can go home at any moment we wish. We wish to go home with a free and united Iraq. Wouldn’t you hate to belong to a party that has trapped itself into a position where American success means their failure?

The Guardian decides that this is a good moment to attack theism. Like the village atheist who uses any death of a child to bloviate on his creed, the Guardian decides that at time of raw emotion is a good time for philosophy. Following the normal internet skeptic rule of asking tough questions while ignoring tough minded answers from philosophers of religion, the Guardian uses tragedy to advance the secular agenda. It was bad enough when our own Democrats used the disaster to attack Bush, but their friends in Europe are using it to attack God. Happy New Year.

The good news is that God is not insecure, like the editors of the Guardian, in his world view and so will most likely ignore the whole thing. However, those of us still stuck in the City of Man have no such option. Our Beloved may ignore the insult, but no Gentleman could pass on the chance to defend His God.

The Guardian is in pink. My own thoughts in black.

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however.

Yes, amazingly this thought has occurred to, well, every theist in history. (Next month the Guardian will ask, breathlessly, if God can create a rock so big he cannot move it.) Our thinking on this issue could begin with the Book of Job. A standard Christian response can be found here. A philosopher speaks here. An Oxford don, closer geographically to the Guardian, writes Providence and the Problem of Evil. Writers at the Guardian that cannot use Google are in real trouble in the modern world.

What God sanctions an earthquake?

First, earthquakes serve a good function in the world. Without earthquakes the world system would not function in a dynamic way. Second, the problem (obviously) is not the earthquake, but human suffering in the earthquake.

What God protects against it?

Why should God protect against it? Is all suffering bad for us? Did God force humans to live in places with earthquakes and near water? Has human sin cut us off from hearing the voice of God that may be warning us? Is it just time for some of us to die, something we are all going to do? Does the Guardian claim knowledge that each death was not appropriate or is it just trading off our pain to assume that all the deaths were useless?

Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others?

It strikes these places because God designed a world where earthquakes occur in certain places and rarely, if at all, in others. Humans make a choice that (in a fallen world) they will chose to risk this know problem in exchange for certain benefits (being near the water). Persons take this sort of risk when they get in automobiles. God does not decide to force people to live in such places anymore than he forces people to live in winter climates and drive automobiles.

In a world where death exists, God allows people to choose risky behavior. Humans measure risks against rewards. Sometimes they choose badly. Mostly God allows us to live with our choices, which makes them meaningful. Sometimes He spares us from those choices. Why? There are many possible reasons: a person has some important work left to do in the Divine Economy, a person is not ready for death, a person receives divine mercy. God is a person and so behaves for reasons. In any given case, we cannot know the reason (that is between God and the person), but we can anticipate what some of those reasons might be. This enables the rational believer to know that such reasons do exist.

Why does death exist? Christians believe death exists because humans rebelled against God. Death was God’s divine mercy on humanity which otherwise would have gone on living apart from God. Death is good in that it brings to an end man’s twilight struggle to save himself. It brings us back to God.

What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?

It is exactly a cosmic order that allows such a thing. God is a rational, not a whimsical, person. He acts in a consistent and persistent way and allows the cosmos He has created to do so as well. Men who choose to sleep by the beach in a rational universe are taking a risk. When this risk does not work out, then they demand a whimsical universe where everything is “good.” However, this sort of universe would make science impossible and keep us from being able to count on God.

People do die. It is tragic to us when they die before we wish they would. However, as hard as it seems it is no less tragic when someone dies at one hundred years of age, full of desire, in the heart of Britain. Death is a tragedy not escaped by National Health and wrapping ourselves in bubble wrap.

The paper also seems to want to excuse the human beings who failed to heed American warnings or have a system to warn people when they received those warnings. Humans, native to the area, who knew the sea escaped. Humans who built and lived by the sea but remained ignorant of it did not.

From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes.

Earthquakes make sense. The notion that the cosmos exists as a cosmos (ordered place) is fundamentally a theistic idea. The answer to the problem of evil is not to destroy order, worship randomness, and so end up with a problem of Good. An ordered universe will function as it was designed to do. Humans, ignorant of its workings through being apart from Divine Revelation and with inadequate science,

Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur.

The earthquake is a natural act, part of the cosmos God created. As such it does not discriminate. The Guardian cannot have it both ways. They cannot have a universe that is lawful so as to have science and then blame the Universe when the laws work. Nature is just, it does not discriminate.

Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?

Obviously we are not so cowed as this writer shows. But are we so foolish that we prefer to lose any hope of meaning to this tragedy by getting rid of order and of God? Should we deny any hope that science can exist by denying God’s existence and divine order?

The problem of course with answering this sort of question is that any philosophy at such a time, cool reason, is inappropriate. This is a time for mourning, for hot passion, for being sorry that the human condition is such that these things happen. God mourns with us. He would not have us behave in such ways. He did not create us to be cut off from His loving, warning Father’s voice. Skeptics want to ask a rude question at the wrong time and then mock our answers as insensitive.

God help us to know that this is an ordered universe and we are out of place in it. It is man who is chaotic and who persists in behaving in a multitude of stupid ways. Men live by the sea and refuse to take adequate precautions to prevent tragedy. Men live careless of their own souls, not realizing that they know not their time, and life can slip away quickly and easily. Modern man thinks he knows and is immortal. When his own mortality is exposed, he looks for someone to blame for his human nature: God, government, George Bush. Instead, the problem is us: ignorance, folly, and sin.

Were the people of Asia worse than the people of Britain? No. The people of Britain, every one of them, will also face death that undiscovered country. Most will face it at a time and place not of their own choosing. It will be sad, for God would not have it so, and when they die those left will miss them.

Best reason, and best human experience, tells us this world is but a shadow of the World to Come. In that place, justice will be brought to fruition and all accounts will be paid. From the time of Plato forward, men have known this is true. God help us to use this tragedy to live prepared for death, the one thing certain to come to each one of us in this Shadow Land.