SOTU V

Sabotage! Just lost 20 minutes of brilliant commentary. Dr. Potomac was momentarily distracted by Rosa De Lauro's scarf. She appears to have been kicked out of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft.

Alito gets a standing O welcoming him to the Supreme Court. Very nice. Salt in the wounds, one would think. Buh-bye, Sandra Day. The doors to the chamber are heavy -- don't let one hit you on the way out.

The Levin brothers are sitting together, one from the House and the other from the Senate. They appear to be Disney escapees from the set of Snow White. Grumpy and Dopy or perhaps Grumpy and Sneezy. Hard to tell them apart.

Can someone tell me why Lloyd Ogylvie, former chaplain of the Senate, is in attendance this evening?

SOTU IV

We appear to be edging into the domestic security portion of the speech now. He asks for reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Silent Dems, minority Dems. W claims constitutional authoritiy on wiretaps. "If there are people on our country talking to Al Qaeda we want to know about it because we won't sit back and wait to be hit again." It is an unanswerable argument. Prepare for dithering in the Democratic response.
(By the way, how galling it must be for the likes of Maria Cantwell to stand and applaud a person and policies for which she has no sympathy. Dr. Potomac wonders whether they all go get drunk after its over.)

SOTU III

Wow. W takes on radical Islam as the primary threat to freedom of the world. "We love our freedom, and will fight to keep it." Most of the Democrats refuse to join in the applause on the main "victory in Iraq" points. Shameful. There it is: the Democratic party's real problem. A significant portion of it has no will to defend the country's core principles and values. What is the sound of one Lieberman clapping?

The President looks grim. "We must stand behind our military in this vital mission". Finally the Ds clap ("it isn't the troops we oppose; just the policies that put them there." Do they honestly believe the public is going to make such a distinction or vote for people who do?)

Prolonged applause for "no nukes for Iran." Some one should move a resolution giving our president the authority he needs to prevent that. How about you, Senator Schumer?

SOTU II

A nice grace note: the tribute to Coretta Scott King to kick off the address.

Looks as though the female Senators and Representatives have cleaned out Washington department stores of their red gowns.

I see in the balcony Dr. Gary Slutkin of Ceasefire Chicago. This is a very interesting violence reduction program that takes a public health/epidemeological approach to gang activity. A favorite of the First Lady.

The State of the Union I

What a pleasure. There he is, Samuel Alito, newly minted Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Quite a victory to deliver the President just before addressing the nation. Could there be just a little more life in this presidency (and in the Republican majority in Congress) than the media would have us believe?

Fun with BHL

The gentlemen at Powerline are greatly exercised about M. Bertrand Henri Levy. Yikes, they're cross.

Not me! I have been reading his reviews and, as FDR was wont to say, "what a gas"! [Ed-You mean M. Levy? Him, too!] Laughter is the best medicine when the diagnosis is "French Intellectual".

Let us first lovingly and admiringly consider M. Alex Beam (sorry, it's contagious) of the Boston Globe. He begins by explaining just who the hell M. Levy is:

Sophisticated people everywhere -- Tina Brown! Adam Gopnik! -- are taking French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy's new book, ''American Vertigo," very, very seriously. BHL, as he is known chez lui, figuratively retraced the 1831 American journey of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, spinning out his impressions first in a series of Atlantic magazine articles and now in a book.

Color me skeptical. I can't take Levy seriously at all. I stuck with his first Atlantic article until I tripped across the phrase ''Detroit, sublime Detroit." I burst out laughing.

Me too! I think I might have held on until M. Levy sought to understand the Native American question by talking to Russell Means, or someone. Then I moved on to see who Benjamin Schwartz was snarling at this month.

Beam does say that BHL gives a celebrity appearance worth the price of admission:

I heard Levy talk last spring at the New York Public Library, and it was magnifique. Catch him if you can. Levy's English is quite good, but even he couldn't decipher a meandering inquiry from his acolyte, loony-left actor Richard Dreyfuss, who seemed to want to talk about the First Amendment. ''What did he say? What did he say?" Levy kept asking his handlers, but alas no English-to-English translator was present.

So that's where Richard Dreyfuss has been since What About Bob? I was wondering...

But for a real, hit'em in the groin, savage takedown, you have to look for a Midwesterner; say, a Professional Midwesterner, like...Garrison Keilor! Who do the Liberal Fogey had it in him?

It's a review so good that I just want to paste the whole thing. Here are some highlights:

It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize...

He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too...

Bombast comes naturally to him...

As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions...

And finally...

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

My lesson is: despite everything that divides me and Garrison, we are united when some French Egoist writes a book.

Let's Play, "Who Wrote This?" !!!

The continual mistake of the Bush administration is to think, based on not much thinking to begin with, that people are people -- pretty much the same the world over. This is why the president extols democracy. (Lenin, more of a cynic, purportedly observed: ``Democracy counts heads without regard to what's in them.'') It must be what everyone wants because it is what everyone here wants. To denigrate this kind of talk suggests racism -- You mean we are not all the same? -- or a musty neocolonialism. But the hard truth is that culture and religion matter, and we should not expect moderation (as we did garlands and ecstatic maidens when U.S. troops entered Baghdad) just because that's how we would react. Toto knows the truth. The Middle East is not Kansas.

Who do you think? George Will? Nope. Brent Scowcroft? Nope. Pat Buchanan? Uh-uh.

The correct answer is: Richard Cohen!

Dr. Potomac long ago observed to me that he had stopped reading Richard Cohen because he was tired of reading whatever had popped into Richard Cohen's head before deadline. Case in point. It doesn't even fit into the opera omnia of Professor Richard Cohen. Skepticism of democracy? A belief that some cultures are better than others? Wuh! Huh! Do I have to even bother to look at old columns to see that this has nothing whatsoever to do with any of his political though in general?

Didn't think so.

A Shake-Up in The Arab Dream House

Unlike some in the commentariat, Dr. Potomac is not seriously disturbed by the fact that the radical Hamas faction has captured control of the Palestinian Authority. On university campuses across America, this is what would be called a "teachable moment."

The dominant feature of Arab politics is that it is buried in so many layers of lies and self-deception that it is paralyzed. The typical Arab government is a strong-man atop a restive populace who plays a double game of eliciting aid from the West while keeping its domestic population satisfied anti-Israeli (and anti-Semetic) rhetoric. (As the late Herman Talmadge said of politics, it is an art of taking votes from the poor and money from the rich while promising to protect them from one another. The Arab strongman simply plays this game at a higher and more dangerous level.)

In this sense, the Hamas victory is clarifying because it begins to wash away layers of political illusion. Namely, it has had the effect of installing a leadership that at least reflects the attitudes and misconceptions of the population it governs. To the extent that its rhetoric is anti-Israeli, it will have the virtue of being sincerly so and can therefore be dealt with in a serious fashion. No more will we have to degrade ourselves or the Palestinians by pretending that we believed their leadership while that leadership pretended to make peace with Israel. If the Hamas government continues in its aggressive ways, we pull the aid plug and no one (possibly not even the French) will say we have gone too far. The collapse of what remains of the economy in the West Bank and Gaza strip will teach its own lessons about elected extremism.

The second layer of this cleansing is merely potential. Elections change things, including the party that wins. In the post-election "man on the street" interviews one heard rather little concerning the destruction of Israel as the top priority of the average voter. One did hear a great deal about corruption, lack of basic services and problems with the local economy. Assuming Hamas must face a second clean election (a dicey assumption, Dr. Potomac admits) there will have to be a rather dramatic overhaul of the Hamas platform if the group intends to maintain its majority. One reason that democratic states don't start wars is that their politicians are too busy attending to the concerns of voters. War is bad for political business and is therefore avoided unless absolutely necessary.

This is all speculative, of course, and a whole variety of nightmare scenarios remain all too plausible. On the other hand, the world had just spent forty years on a road to nowhere with Arafat and Company. The Hamas victory at least gives us the chance to begin a frank and open conversation with a part of the world that has for too long been a deception, wrapped in a lie, inside a falsehood. It seems rather hopeful compared to diplomatic nonsense that preceded it.

Reflections on the Beaver State

This week's court ruling on the Oregon assisted suicide legislation provides so many opportunities for comment it is difficult to know where to start. The collapse of medical ehtics and/or Western civilization? The painful irony that is Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, and Ruth Ginsburg upholding the sacred principles of federalism? The laugh-out-loud dissent in which Antonin Scalia points out that Congress probably did not envision suicide as a legtimate form of "health care" when it passed statutes governing the prescription of powerful sedatives? A target rich environment, to be sure.

It would be petty to dwell on these ironies. Too easy, sitting Ducks, as it were. Dr. Potomac would rather take his (and your) precious time fully illuminating how the Oregon law that overturns several thousand years of human wisdom concerning the practice of medicine fits with the avalanche of illogic, denial and wishful thinking that from time to time seizes the state. Follow the story -- if you dare.

Chapter 1: The Tri-Met Honor System

In the mid-1980s, the denizens of the local bus system decreed an end to fare collections. In a fit of civic-minded lunacy, Tri-Met, which served hundreds of thousands of riders across the Portland-metro area, decided that the costs associated with collecting fares exceeded the revenue they generated. How this calculation was achieved Dr. Potomac cannot recall but he thinks the math would have been suspect even to the lower third of his high school algebra class. At any rate, it was decided that fares would now be collected on a sort of a don't-ask-don't-tell policy for public transportation. Riders who didn't drop their coins in the farebox were "assumed" to have purchased a pass elsewhere but didn't have to present one. Local and national news outlets hailed the program as the "next step" in mass transit, one that focused completely on the benefits of public transportation without sullying the concept with profit and loss statements.

Painful, isn't it? Even you, dear reader, can imagine the outcome of the scheme. Ridership skyrocketed, revenues plunged and red-ink, in an already heavily subsidized system, poured out of the Tri-Met offices into the streets. Fares had effectively been repealed but human nature -- you know, that part you heard about in your intro Econ courses called "the free-rider" phenomenon -- remained fully operational. Tri-Met was sinking fast.

Normal human beings would have bowed to defeat and reinstated the fares. But Oregonians are not normal, they are liberals. When confronted with indisputable evidence that the world is not as they wish it to be their response is completely predictable: double the bet. Also like liberals, they fell back on the coercive power of the state to attain their goal of a remade human nature. In this case, the Tri-Met board hired cops -- you know, public employees complete with generous salaries, benefits, and pensions? -- who had the sole purpose of staging raids on buses to catch fare-cheats. Dr. Potomac personally witnessed such a "bus-bust" complete with youths trying to scramble out of the bus windows to avoid capture. After a few months of the Tri-Met police state, a proof-of-fare policy was quitely reinstated.

Chapter 2: Free Bikes

Having learned nothing from the Tri-Met experience, in the early 1990s the City of Portland and a non-profit organization joined hands in a project that combined moral up-lift of the poor and the religious cult of environmentalism. In an effort to reduce traffic in the downtown core, the city and its non-profit partner decided to make bicycles available free of charge, and without locks, in special bike racks across. The bikes would be maintained by troubled youths from poor areas who, it was said, would learn a trade in bicycle repair. (You might well ask: how many bicylce repair-persons did the people of Portland need? Was the local community college undersubscribed in its bicycle repair classes? Were the pleasant folk of Portlandia being left with slipped chains and flat tires on the major thorough fares?) Users, it was thought, would return the bike to any one of the conveniently placed racks so that other car-averse Portlanders could have a turn.

Uh-huh. Well, it didn't turn out that way, of course. The bikes, hundreds of them, had a strange way of disappearing. It seems that the cash value of the bikes was somewhat greater than the non-cash benefits derived by riders or the youth who were building skills. Strike two for Oregon.

Chapter 3: Don't Kill Yourself -- Unless You're Really Sure

Twice now, by referenda, the People's Republic of Oregon has passed its physician assisted suicide legislation. Bad idea, of course, one Dr. Potomac thoroughly disapproves of, top of the slipperiest slope imaginable. What's really interesting, however, is the way Oregonians are responding to their own law.

One evening last fall as Dr. Potomac was driving home from a hard day SERVING THE PEOPLE, he chanced upon an NPR story concerning a curious (to them) phenomenon: a dramatic spike in suicides among elderly Oregonians. Turns out the old and sick were quite sensitive to the signal the public gave them in approving physician assisted suicide. The elderly, few of them terminally ill, were offing themselves in substantial numbers and without the aid of a doctor. The conventional means (carbon dioxide, gunshot and hanging) were quite adequate to the purpose and since the state had sanctioned it, why not?

True to form, Oregonians were agast. A sad, traumatic thing it is when one's mother or father or grandparent decides to shuffle off the mortal coil ahead of schedule. Something must be done, they cried, and so something was. (Can you guess? Wait for it.) Yes, the solution to the problem of elder suicide is a state-financed program...to prevent suicide among the elderly. "But, but," you might sputter, "it's unreasonable, illogical, comi-tragic." Yes, it's Oregon.

To My Faithful Readers -- Both of You

Dr. Potomac is shocked to have found his post concerning Intelligent Design both read, commented on and linked to. In appreciation to the two individuals who took the time to respond to my thoughts, Dr. Potomac answers back.

First, in response to TLKS2MYHRT, Dr. Potomac did not mean to leave the impression that ID and the debate over human origin is somehow unimportant. On the contrary, he believes both subjects to be well worth deep reflection and inquiry. His own ability to argue for the created nature of humanity has been immeasurably strengthened by studying the work of Philip Johnson, Nancy Pearcy and others. This is, quite simply, the most important foundational question any of us can address. Getting these issues wrong has been the source of incalculable harm, and getting them right is essential to a right relationship with God, ourselves and each other. To all those working in the field of ID, Dr. Potomac says, in the words of Winston Churchill, "KBO -- Keep Buggering On!"

To Eric Phillips, Dr. Potomac can't agree that ID is science because it doesn't seek to measure anything nor is it testable or verifiable through observation -- yet. Rather, ID is, at its best, a philosophical and logical objection to Darwinism and a very good one at that. Taking the world as a whole, it asks the question: Is it really possible that the complex beings (human and non-human) are simply the product of chance and time? If one finds a watch on the beach, is it possible that it assembled itself out the raw materials at hand? (Frankly, anyone who believes that will believe anything. According to a chemical engineer I know who has made something of a study of this, the math -- the number of mutations necessary to move from single-cell organisms to homo sapien -- just doesn't work in the available time-frame. Math, he tells me, is where Darwinism really falls apart.)

The other contribution ID makes is to point out the gaps in the Darwinist argument, marshaling the facts that are available to say, "Wait a minute. You have no evidence to support your assertion." Forcing science to clean up its act and behave like a good citizen is all well and good. The problem here is that science is pretty persistent about filling in its gaps, and if we base our case for creation solely on the gaps in the Darwinist system, little by little those gaps will be filled in with a mechanistic explanation. Once the gaps are explained away...what, exactly, will be left?

Dr. Potomac believes that one of the worst aspects of the way that we are engaging in this argument lies in strengthening the notion that the scientific method is the only way by which we can know things. This, he believes, is a betrayal of our full humanity. God created us with more than one faculty for perceiving and understanding the truth we find around us. Let's open as many new fronts in this fight as we can, including a robust engagement of the humanities that speak to the mind and soul.