Sarah Palin has a son named Trig. Trig was born roughly four months ago. Trig has Down's Syndrome. Sarah and her family have a tough road ahead of them, as my grandparents did when my uncle was diagnosed with what is, apparently, a much more severe case than Trig has.

Sarah Palin is pro-life, and unabashedly so. Given that ninety percent of children diagnosed with Down's are murdered in utero, and that she is a woman in her mid-forties staring at a challenge for which she must plan not only the rest of her life, but beyond -- Trig will need certain kinds of medical and everyday life assistance for the rest of his existence -- she is rather walking the walk.

Sarah Palin is, by all accounts, a devout, or at least a frequently-church-attending, Evangelical. This probably influences, or at the very least, overlaps with, her pro-life views.

Sarah Palin is a Republican, and she is about to be formally nominated for the Vice Presidency of the United States. That alone would make her a hate object for the mouth-breathing Left. That she's a Christian, an ardent pro-lifer, and had the temerity to withstand the eugenicist impulse that animates the modern Left has driven them to apoplexy.

Sarah Palin has, based on what we know, three weak points for attack in the modern political world. The first is her relative lack of significant political experience. Given the empty suit at the top of the Democrat ticket, this is a profoundly unwise avenue on which to launch a frontal assault. The second is a "scandal" in which her husband apparently said mean things to a corrupt Alaska politician to coerce said corrupt Alaska politician into doing damage to the career of a police officer who, married to Ms. Palin's sister, had taken it upon himself to beat the living Hell out of her. If the Democrats and their pet yard apes in the media and blogosphere want to finish off the Lifetime-viewing demographic as Democrat votes, they are welcome to do so; if not, they'd probably need to stand clear of that.

So now it's family, everyone's weak point -- well, everyone not named Kennedy, anyway. The eliminationists cannot bring themselves to blame her publicly for not murdering her son in the womb, so they've decided instead to assert that (1) Trig is not her son but (2) her teenage daughter's and (3) Mrs. Palin chose to hide this from the world and lie about Trig's parentage.

As proof, they offer the following (no links; I don't generally link hate sites): Ms. Palin's pregnancy was not revealed until she was seven months along with Trig; she "doesn't look pregnant" with Trig in photos around that time; 43 year-olds have a hard time getting pregnant; and Mrs. Palin's daughter was out of school for mononucleosis for five months around Trig's birth, and everyone knows that mono only lasts three months, tops.

Pretty much all of these "facts" stem from a combination of basic scientific illiteracy and unfamiliarity with childbirth. Given that the average reader/diarist at Daily Kos is in her seventies and spent her entire life making sure that the percentage of the population that buys into Lefty fantasies decreases as a result of differential birthrates, the latter cannot be helped. The former is simply yet another reflection of the American public school system, and indeed, how science is taught and portrayed in our culture. Fortunately, some of us paid attention to science in high school (and college!) and some of us still have children.

It falls upon us to teach the barren, frigid Left a few things.

First, let's deal with how much Mrs. Palin was "showing." You folks may not be aware of this, but different women carry different ways. Generally speaking, for a healthy, full-term, ~8 pound baby, the mom is going to add an average of twenty-five pounds -- baby, amniotic fluid, placenta, breast engorgement, and, yes, some fat. Folks differ, though. My wife puts on around forty pounds, no matter how much she exercises or controls her diet. My mother put on fifty. My longest-running female friend has had three children, with add-ons of 15, 17, and 16 pounds. Her children came in at almost exactly 7.5 pounds each time, well within the healthy range.

But this is her fifth child, they say. Surely that would make her show more! The answer is Probably, but not definitely. By all accounts, Mrs. Palin is a determined athlete even in middle life. A big part of why women show more with more children is that their abdominal muscles get detached during their first pregnancy. (I'm sparing the science because I try not to confuse the reality-based community with things more elementary than a third-grader can comprehend. I'm therefore pushing them to reach up a grade.) However, as my wife, who was on a vigorous martial arts and exercise program well before our latest (our fifth) started coming along will attest, exercise can help correct this somewhat; and with a little rest and a break from childbearing, the situation is corrected even more.

Regardless of all that, if Mrs. Palin carries low and inside generally -- or even carried low and inside this time -- then this is a nonsensical point. Indeed, and this is ungentlemanly of me (even though I think it quite attractive): You'll note that photos of Mrs. Palin from around the time she announced Trig's incubation show a, er, softening under the chin and jaw. This happens to pregnant women, and rarely happens to other women without fat gain elsewhere.

So, um, given that her waist looks a scotch wider that before and now in those photos, and she gained that extra tissue under the chin, and that her activity level remained high, and that she looked like about fifteen percent of women look when having a child, we're going to have to chalk those remarks about her appearance to ignorance.

Now, the next one is going to skirt dangerously close to a human biology lesson, so any Lefties reading this, I strongly advise you to pop a couple of Excedrin before we start. Come back and read after you've given them about twenty minutes to take effect.

The next "fact" is that forty-three year olds have a hard time getting pregnant, ergo, it is unlikely that Palin spontaneously got pregnant with her fifth child. It is true that women trying for the first time to get pregnant in their forties encounter enormous difficulties. It is true that some women trying on their second, or third, child, have trouble conceiving in their forties. It is not true that women with multiple children have a hard time conceiving in their forties. This was a well-known thing just a couple of generations ago, as my grandmother could have attested when she bore my aunt at the age of forty-three, her twelfth child; as one of my oldest friends' mother could have attested when he, her third, was a pleasant surprise at age forty-four; or, throughout history, when women would find themselves with a fifteenth, a twentieth, or a twenty-seventh child on the way in her forties. Multiple long- or full-term pregnancies prolong a woman's fertility.

This is elementary medicine. My wife and I -- we try to be devout Catholics, though God alone knows if we're succeeding -- are trying to figure out how to stop having children before our forties hit. My solution is quiet contemplation. Hers is Smith & Wesson. Regardless of which method we choose, given how many we've already had, and how young we were when we started, an age basically identical to Mr. and Mrs. Palin's when they first got running, we know that births in our forties are not a small likelihood if we don't find some other way to channel our energies.

That leads to a point missing in all this: The older a woman is, the more likely she is to conceive a child with Down's. The statistics are skewed on live births, with the majority of Down's children being born to younger mothers, but this is influenced by (1) higher overall births to younger mothers, (2) the lower rate of conception among older mothers overall, (3) the higher affinities for abortion among the older segment relative to the younger, and (4) relatedly, a stronger cost:benefit ratio to those already inclined to exercise abortion, given the difficulties attendant in raising a retarded child with numerous physiological impediments. But when conception occurs, older women are significantly more likely, starting around thirty-five (decreasing somewhat with more prior children) to conceive a child with Down's Syndrome.

So, just to summarize this in one sentence: Is it really more likely that a seventeen year old girl raised in an extremely healthy environment with no history of fragile X or any other inherited condition of which we're aware would conceive a child with Down's than her forty-three year-old mother?

Now, this might be -- and will be, by the illiterate -- dismissed as ascientific ranting by some wingnut Quiverfull (or whatever they're called -- we're Catholic, not Protestant) theocrat. Concededly, I haven't bothered to cite or link anything in all of this, because I'm already spending valuable time offering basic science and human biology lessons to yard apes. But, as a sign of good faith, I'm going to offer you a resource that will show you that all of this is pretty elementary: Williams Obstetrics. Concededly, it's right-wing propaganda cloaked as the most-used obstetrics textbook of the last 100 years, updated every few years in a new edition. But check it out, just for giggles.

That leads to the third point: Mrs. Palin's daughter was out of school for mononucleosis for five months, and that's way too long, ergo, this is something like the average Daily Kos reader remembers from her youth in the Roaring Twenties, when diseases like that were used as cover for when a girl got herself in a family way.

I had mono. I was twenty-two years old and in law school. At the time, this was my daily regimen:

Wake up. Eat breakfast and two Snickers bars. Run two miles. Wind sprint one mile. Lift weights and do weighted situps for forty-five minutes. Jog a mile to cool down. Go to class, eating a candy bar or Power Bar on the way. Class, then lunch, then class, then home to read/study/play a video game/whatever. One hour of martial arts. Dinner. Read Shakespeare. Do 200 situps. Sleep. Repeat.

I was in, if I dare say so myself, damned good shape. I hadn't even had a cold in a year and a half.

I got mono just as I was writing on to journal at the end of my 1L year, so around May 20th or so. I weighed 170 pounds. I felt kinda feverish, a little tired, couldn't seem to muster enough energy to do everything I needed to. No big deal. Finished my write-on (and got my first pick!), went home.

Crashed.

I don't remember most of that summer. I remember losing twenty-five pounds. I remember sleeping and watching The Bold and the Beautiful. (TAYLOR!) I remember trying to pick firms to interview with when I got back to school. I remember breaking up with my girlfriend of the time.

I got back to D.C. in early August, and was still sleeping around 19 hours a day. I could barely eat. I started classes in August. I don't remember most of that. I remember meeting the woman who is now my wife. I remember our first dates. I was barely back up to 150 pounds. I ran fevers at odd hours. I was soaked walking half a mile in the cool mornings. This went on through November, six months later. I was never able to get back in the kind of shape I'd been in before.

Mononucleosis, more even than most infectious diseases, has a lifespan based on a host of factors. It is not a rote disease. It is not the common cold.

And more importantly than that, if anyone thinks folks in rural America are still using the "she went to the country" excuse to hide a teenage girl's pregnancy, well, that leads to the next point.

I know Lefties are very bitter, still clinging to their BUSH LIED sandwich boards and their Alinsky, but I have to offer them a warning nevertheless: It is a profoundly bad idea to attack Mrs. Palin on this route, even if it's true. Out beyond the limits of whatever city or suburb they're currently in, there are still a lot of Americans who live in unincorporated areas, or who live in cities of 20,000 or fewer. Many, many of these people are Democrats. Many, many of them, perhaps as a result of their own clinging, urge their daughters not to murder their grandchildren in the womb. Frequently, their daughters, obviously filled with false consciousness, heed this urging. Those rural Democrats then go on to raise said grandchildren either as their own, or virtually as their own.

Now, the bad part: A lot of those rural Democrats are -- in the parlance with which Daily Kos readers are most familiar from their upbringing -- Negroes. Coloreds. Darkies. (I'm trying, and failing, to remember what you people called blacks in the 1910s, without using the N-word or the equivalent. Comments are open. Help me out, if you can clear the cobwebs from your minds.) Your entire electoral strategy this year is to energize blacks and stupid college students/young professionals who haven't lived as adults long enough to realize how stupid voting for "change" really is. Do you really want to shave a few points off the former? How about those young voters who maybe had their idiot grandparents and parents save them from the abortionist?

And don't forget the Lifetime voters who might do the exact same thing you allege that Mrs. Palin did. Probably don't want to lose those, either.

(I presume you guys are cool losing poor white voters. God knows you've thumbed your noses at them every other way possible.)

Eh, then again, continue down this path. I love our odds this way. Life always beats death, in the end.

A farewell from a midget.

Worry not, hilzoy: I hold you in just about as much respect as you hold me. What brought us together? This:

This is not the only time that Thomas has committed the sin of presumption by claiming to know God's will not just in general cases -- e.g., His disapproval of murder or idolatry -- but in specifics as well.

Your ability -- demonstrated time and again -- to reason from the general to the specific (not to mention your honesty about it!) has brought Mohammed to the Mountain. Well done, hon.

UPDATE: I love you too, Charles. I'm impressed that you shared this with the folks at Obsidian Wings, where because of Moe, few of us ever went, rather than, say, in an email to me.

If you ever want to say that to my face, you know where to find me.

This post is from January 31, 2005.

To all those who always see another Vietnam, and who would have cut and run and left Iraqis to the same fate as the South Vietnamese;

To the sunshine lovers of liberty;

To those for whom defeating Bush, at all costs means more than celebrating liberty;

To those who've torn shoulder muscles moving the goalposts;

To those who saw another Stalingrad (and secretly hoped it would be so) in the fall of Baghdad;

To the Party that wanted to see the Eastern Europeans and South and Central Americans languish under Soviet domination into eternity, and that seems to feel the same way about Arabs;

To those who rallied to ANSWER's side, Stalinism be damned, the lives and fortunes of millions be damned;

To those who could not shake the habits of a lifetime of calculated isolationism;

To those who glorify tyrants everywhere, to the point of treating as legitimate Potemkin elections:

I echo two great men, the first:

America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally. ..

Now we are standing inside this symbol of our democracy. Now we hear again the echoes of our past: a general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air.

It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage; that is our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old, as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound—sound in unity, affection, and love—one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world.

And the man who built on that:

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

And I say this:

FREEDOM.

And it's just beginning.

This post is from April 19, 2005.

I've commented before that Benedict XVI seems to, ahem, arouse some odd emotions in a certain wing of the Church.

However, this is nothing on the rampant idiocy that must see every Pope as a political figure. Of course, the Pope is not so easily rendered as that. This doesn't stop the sort of hysteria and rampant (incorrect) politicization to which the Left inevitably descends:

This particular pope has risen by being the enforcer for doctrinal purity in the Papacy of John Paul II. It is this that makes his former affiliations an issue, because he demands that people die for their faith, or suffer tremendous hardships for it. And yet he was unwilling to do so. His youth is often offered as an excuse - but he is no older than other people he demands die for their faith.

He is also part of the apparatus which has covered up peadophilia in the church, giving Bernard Law an honoured place in the festivities at Rome. Again, the issue is hypocrisy. A man who forgives so easily lies and cover ups, and yet will not forgive others who he disapproves of, is a hypocrite.

He is also part of the apparatus which meddles in the politics of other nations. And yet, his defenders demand that those who are not Catholic say nothing. I would be happy to stay out of the politics of the Church of Rome, if only it would stay out of my politics.

He is the most forward figure in manking anti-privacy and anti-choice the central moral tennet of the Catholic Church - a movement that regularly accuses its opponents of engaging in a "holocaust of abortion". It will not be right to call Ratzinger a Nazi, when Ratzinger tells his faithful to stop calling other people Nazis. Again, hypocrisy is the issue.

Yes, well. It is not enough to ramble on, without sentence structure, and accuse a man grown of hypocrisy for a youth lived against his will; rather (meanderingly), one must also pretend that the infallible teachings of the Church are mere bullet-points of political doctrine, to be treated as malleably as Newberry repeatedly treats English grammar. One must engage in non sequiturs of epic proportions to make a point that could be summed up thusly: The Church has no right to judge, so SHUT UP!! One must, in other words, throw a temper tantrum over a joyous day for the world's billion Catholics.

Look on the modern Left, and laugh.

Update [2005-4-19 21:12:53 by Thomas]: Oh, and Benedict is right about the Holocaust of abortion, too.

This one is from August 31, 2005.

“We haven't even buried the dead yet, and they're trying to pin the untold lives and livelihoods lost on an opponent for political gain.”

In what would, once, have been a surprise, the ever-decent Left is attempting to use another human tragedy as a club in their unending holy war against Chimpy McBushitlerCo. (One supposes that they need a new weapon with their cheap use of a now-gone grieving mother at an end.) As the Left long ago abandoned the pretense of original thought, they’re apparently relying on this piece to do so, to the effect that recent budget cuts for the levee projects are to blame for this disaster.

As one of the two Louisiana sons among the Editorial staff here, my two cents:

This is not unlike peeing on a grave. And, worse, it's stupid and factually incorrect to boot.

Let's count all of the ways that this is simply wrong. But first, some useful background information for those carping from the sidelines.

I address this next especially to the highly sensitive Left, most of whom have never been to Louisiana, and think of it as That state where Mississippi Burning happened, or maybe it was In the Heat of the Night?

If you're from that state, you simply know the levees are a sinking project. For most people, the words "Army Corps of Engineers" are not part of everyday conversation. If you live there, or trace your family there within a generation, it's stamped on you at birth. You know that they're fighting a losing battle, or if you don't, you're deluding yourself. If you've ever seen any of the relevant bodies of water up close, you have an instinctive understanding that the ACE is fighting a rearguard action.

One might also benefit from knowing things like the fact that the levees are fifteen feet high. When the storm surge is, oh, say, 22 feet, just to refresh your basic math, the water will be carried past the levees. Ponder that for a moment.

Or consider that the pumping stations are maintained by the City of New Orleans, with assistance from the ACE.

Most of these geniuses are also blissfully insulated from what a hurricane is, and have no idea what storm surge is, or exactly how much water and wind is poured onto an area before, during, and in the wake of a Category 4 Hurricane.

Let me share. I live in Florida. Part -- most -- of my job this last year has revolved around the wreckage of the four hurricanes that slammed into my State last year. You don't actually appreciate the power of these things unless you see things like the Escambia Bay Bridge (you know, part of I-10) simply missing in places, or the wreckage that has been Punta Gorda for the last year. Buildings blown up. Parts of streets missing. Trees smashed all the way through houses. Much of Florida is still a set of blue tarp roofs, when seen from the sky.

And those were in areas above sea level.

With the facts nicely out of the way, the Left has decided to use the bodies floating in the streets as a perverse sort of political ammunition, so let's put this little meme into the ground now. With a stake in its heart.

The Left would have us believe that the Bush Administration purposefully underfunded the levees, and that this underfunding directly caused (or at minimum, contributed to) the catastrophe in New Orleans. This is wholly false.

The idea that the White House and Congress should have magically foreseen a Cat4-5 coming down almost head-on onto New Orleans, and should have therefore increased funding for the levees, and that doing so would somehow have stopped this tragedy, is absurd. It wouldn't last five minutes in even the most Plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions in the Union.

Even accepting this idiocy on its own terms, and we'll get to the core of this shortly, from the E&P article that these ghasts are relying on, we learn that they spent $450,000,000 on the levees over ten years, "[b]ut at least $250,000,000 in crucial projects remained." At the rate they'd been going (about $45,000,000 per year) that's almost six years' worth of "crucial" projects yet to be done. The money was reduced starting in FY 2004, so in fact no more than 1.5 years of the remaining six years' worth of projects was incomplete due to funding cuts. All the rest wouldn't have been done yet anyway. But somehow, finishing 25% of the "crucial" projects remaining would have saved the city. Of course, we don't know what those "crucial" projects are, but hey, this is still all about Iraq, so who cares?

Now, if we're going to lay blame at the hands of the Federal government -- and why not? They're Republicans -- let's not forget that there were other governments, shall we say, nearer to the scene.

If we're going to get into the politics of this (and they haven't even found all of the bodies yet, so why not?), let's not skew any of the blame from the highly efficient, corruption free government of Louisiana. Their preparation for a disaster they've feared for decades should have them lined up in the street and shot, if we're gonna go this route. That's one hell of a lot of dead Democrats. In New Orleans, they don't bury their dead in the ground; instead, the dead are placed in mausoleums. Why? Well, it can't be religion, as that old Catholic town would have no reason not to place the dead in the Earth. It's actually because they fear more or less precisely what happened here: Massive flooding washing coffins -- wooden air bubbles, essentially -- into the streets.

As the Weather Channel adroitly puts it:

Florence added, "So, what you can only imagine happening is that they're burying on the levee, you've got flood levels coming over the banks of the river. You've got floating caskets that are pushed up above the ground. And you can only imagine. These levees sloped down into the city. If there was enough water, you could have caskets floating through the streets of the city."

After experiencing this enough times, residents decided to do something about it, according to Florence. The solution was to begin burying loved ones in tombs above ground. ...

Today, the city owns seven cemeteries that house such tombs, but there are many others in which caskets have been buried underground.

Engineering now allows underground burial in the sub-sea level city, and floating caskets are a thing of the past. "That no longer really never happens in New Orleans because the land has been drained since the turn of the century. A system of water pumps... drains water out from under the city 24 hours a day."

And don't get me started on the hurricane evacuation routes. The city of New Orleans lies below sea level; if they want to live there, why couldn't they just raise the $45,000,000 a year locally to maintain their own dikes? They could have covered that with a hotel bed tax and a property tax hike of less than $50 a year. The city's budget is already a half-billion per year. Which $45 million out of that was more important than the levees?

But of course, we shouldn't take them on their own terms, because their terms are simply wrong. From Popular Science in May 2005:

Today, parts of New Orleans lie up to 20 feet below sea level, and the city is sinking at a rate of about nine millimeters a year. "This makes New Orleans the most vulnerable major city to hurricanes," says John Hall of the Army Corps of Engineers. "That's because the water has to go down, not up, to reach it."

The Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale defines a category-5 storm as one with "winds greater than 155 miles per hour and storm surge generally greater than 18 feet." Although hurricanes of this magnitude slamming directly into New Orleans are extremely rare—occurring perhaps every 500 to 1,000 years—should one come ashore, the resulting storm surge would swell Lake Pontchartrain (a brackish sea adjoining the Gulf of Mexico), overtop the levees, and submerge the city under up to 40 feet of water. Once this happened, the levees would "serve as a bathtub," explains Harley Winer, chief of coastal engineering for the Army Corps's New Orleans District. The water would get trapped between the Mississippi levees and the hurricane-protection levees. "This is a highly improbable event," Winer points out, "but within the realm of possibility."

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

To determine exactly where and how high to build these levees, the engineers have enlisted the aid of a 3-D computer-simulation program called ADCIRC (Advanced Circulation Model). ADCIRC incorporates dozens of data points—including seabed and coastal topography, wind speed, tidal variation, ocean depth and water temperature—and charts a precise map of where the storm surge would inundate New Orleans. The category-5 levee idea, though, is still in the early planning stages; it may be decades before the new barriers are completed. Until then, locals had better keep praying to Helios.

And that is from May 2005 -- when they were looking at bringing the levees past their ability to withstand a Category Three hurricane.

Of course, if the gibbering yard apes would read their own links instead of trying to throw human corpses at their opponents, they'd note that the budget cut is for a study to examine a future levee to upgrade from Cat3 protection to Cat5 protection.

Katrina was a Cat4-5.

Of course, in the ever-maddening need to lay human bodies at George Bush’s feet, the ghouls can’t be bothered with the facts:

Engineers developed several possible scenarios for what might have caused the catastrophic breach in a levee, which is essentially an earthen berm topped by several feet of concrete.

Corps of Engineers officials said their analysis indicated that a limited amount of water washed over the top of the levee in waves, scouring and weakening the foundation on the levee's dry side.

Suhayda said that's possible. But another possibility is that, during the half-day floodwaters built up in Lake Pontchartrain and the canal, water may have percolated through the earthen part of the berm, undermining it.

That effect, combined with the cumulative pressure over time, may have caused a breakthrough.

"There's no question that those kind of conditions might have just reached the limit of what that particular levee could handle," said James "Bob" Bailey, a flood and wind hazard risk expert with ABS consulting in Houston.

It's also possible the levee was older and had degraded as all earthen and concrete structures do, he said.

A final possibility is that an unknown, massive chunk of debris struck the levee at some point during the night, causing a breach.

Today's breach came after New Orleans had, almost miraculously, survived a hurricane many engineers feared would send water gushing over the long, 15-foot levee that protects the city's north shore from Lake Pontchartrain."

In other words, even if the Federal government had sent trillions of dollars, it wouldn't have made a difference. A 15-foot wall doesn't contain a 22-foot surge. Once the water is over the levee in any quantity, it starts scouring the levee from the face of the earth.

And then of course there’s this, from that arm of the VRWC, the Times-Picayune:

A large section of the vital 17th Street Canal levee, where it connects to the brand new "hurricane proof" Old Hammond Highway bridge, gave way late Monday morning in Bucktown after Katrina's fiercest winds were well north. The breach sent a churning sea of water from Lake Pontchartrain coursing across Lakeview and into Mid-City, Carrollton, Gentilly, City Park and neighborhoods farther south and east.

Or this, from NeoUltraFascistConCentral, the New York Times:

The levees, which provide a tenuous barrier between the city and the waters that surround most of it, have long had many weak spots and were not designed to withstand the full force of a storm like Hurricane Katrina.

Both major breaches took place along canals built in decades past as conduits for commerce, Army Corps officials said.

The other failure occurred along the Industrial Canal, an 80-year-old channel that had been identified as a weak spot in computer simulations of storm surges from hypothetical hurricanes.

Mr. Hall said that as the surge from the storm swept in through Lake Pontchartrain - actually a broad inlet off the gulf - it began sloshing over the vertical steel and concrete wall and the earthen berm behind it.

"Once it got over, it began to scour down at the base of that flood wall on the protected side," he said.

The rising waters in the canal pushed in on the high part of the retaining wall while water cascading over the top ate away at the base, Mr. Hall said, adding: "The effect is like a high-low tackle in football. You hit the head and feet at the same time from opposite directions, and it goes down."

In other words:

In the rational world -- which the "reality-based" community increasingly does not inhabit -- governance is an exercise in prioritization. Was it rational and defensible to shift funding from any source toward defense- and war-related activities in the aftermath of 9/11? Of course. Did that shift leave the levees unready to handle Katrina's deadly burden? No. The levees were inherently unready: even at maximum proposed funding, their design was only for a Cat3 storm, not the Cat4/5 that Katrina was. It is true that in 2004, proposals were floated to upgrade to a Cat4/5-capable levee system; it is also true that even in an ideal situation, the studies -- not the construction! -- necessary to assess what that would entail would not be finished before 2008.

This madness is all of a piece with the "Bush was on vacation when this happened" idiocy. Yes, we could have used his heat vision to seal some of the levees at weak points, and his superhuman strength might have been enough to save some collapsing concrete. But what we really needed was for him to get the rest of the Justice League out there, especially Green Lantern. Or at least to reverse the Earth's rotation and save us from this disaster.

This is obscene. It's actually worse than obscene, because not all of those bodies floating down there right now are from the mausoleums. How distorted is our political discourse -- excuse me, their political discourse -- that they start pointing fingers before the bodies are in the damned ground? We haven't even buried the dead yet, and they're trying to pin the untold lives and livelihoods lost on an opponent for political gain. I'd say something about shame, but the Left long ago forgot that.

Gee, guys, if you have the courage of your convictions, join the National Guard. They could use a few, ahem, bodies right now. Or at least act out your more lurid dreams and head down to New Orleans or Gulfport. Grab a body floating by. Reporters are thick on the ground -- scream at Bush and shake the body in front of the camera to good effect.

I no longer see the Left as a set of political opponents. I understand them now to be what they are: An uncompromising, barely human mass of malignancy, that exists only to be crushed electorally and culturally once and for all. Or, as a wiser man than I put it, The Evil Party.

This dates to January 7, 2006.

My kudos to Wisonsin Governor Jim Doyle (surprise! a Democrat!) for once more giving the lie to the third adjective in the Evil Party's formulation on abortion: Safe, legal, and "rare."

Gov. Jim Doyle on Friday vetoed a bill that would have forced doctors to tell women seeking abortions after their fifth month of pregnancy that their fetuses could suffer pain.

Doyle, a Democrat, said there is no evidence conclusively proving when a fetus can feel pain. The Republican-controlled Legislature should not be allowed to decide scientific fact, he said.

"It would be reckless to inject a requirement that doctors communicate unproven science to their patients during an already difficult and sometimes traumatic time," Doyle wrote in his veto message. "This bill intrudes on the doctor-patient relationship ... and contravenes the requirement that doctors provide objective and accurate information to their patients."

Putting everything else to the side, what the good Democrat is really saying is not merely the absurdity that viable children have no sense of pain -- obviously, only the class of abortion rights supporters are without that sensibility, and only in the moral and intellectual spheres -- but that anything that might slow a mother's approach to Moloch's altar must be stopped. Carthago delenda est, indeed.

But, seriously, thanks, Jim. Every time I wonder why I'm still a Republican, along comes a Democrat to remind me that the alternative, for once, is truly Manichaean.

This dates to January 23, 2006.

I am no fan of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In order to avoid speaking ill of the dead, I'll simply repeat what I've said before: He was a man of powerful conscience, albeit not one that could ever get him to vote against his own Party with any regularity when there was a conflict between the two.

But, credit where it's due: He articulated something that we now take for granted: That over time, sins and moral weakenings are viewed as right and normal; or, in his memorable phrase, we define deviancy down.

And so, yet another innocent is being marched to the abattoir, her fate consigned by the State, despite signs of life.

Haleigh Poutre will die, ladies and gentlemen. This much is certain.

But what is increasingly certain is that she will die at the hands of the State, a State that arrogated the power to protect her from abuse and failed; a State that hid that abuse; a State that now wants to dispose of yet another inconvenient life. And make no mistake: A court is as surely an agent of the State as a police officer.

No "libertarians" in any numbers will rise up to demand that the State not exert its power over an unwitting innocent; no "liberals" will cry out in rage at the execution of an innocent (when there are so many misunderstood criminals duly convicted by their peers to gnash teeth over); and far too many "conservatives" will simply wash their hands of this much blood (what's a little more?), reluctant to wade into these waters again soon, or perhaps mutter something about federalism, as if that solves the moral issue involved.

Her blood on all our hands. And the blood of the next child killed for convenience, who maybe shows a few more vital signs. Yesterday's deviance is today's standard.

This post dates to June 24, 2006.

An archive scrub? Awfully mature. I guess crashing the gates is traditionally done with bullet-proof armor? And that your bullet-proof armor undies were soiled this morning?

Gee, Jerome, very public and personal humiliation can suck, huh? Of course, the good news is that you can reasonably expect to be be held up to this, being a public person and all.

Feels pretty good, huh?

This dates to August 3, 2006.

Ned Lamont is going to lose.

How do I know this? Because Stinky Stoller famously opined that candidates for office must run from racist blogs at all costs. And Ned Lamont, who all but employs a real racist -- the kind who thinks blackface is funny satire -- assuredly wants to get elected, right? I mean, sure, I believe him when he says that he has no idea about blogs, has never associated with them, and probably has no idea who all these people are following him around. Surely he'll take Stinky's sage, well-written advice, and drop Racist Hamster like there's no tomorrow.

But wait! Lamont is standing behind his woman! Why? I'd suggest that there are two alternatives, neither of which is mutually exclusive, both of which are probably true: The lefty netroots aren't ready for primetime, and no one cares, as Democrats are ok with racists anyway.

Stinky, by the way, fearless, pasty, smelly crusader against online racism, thinks that blackface is "edgy".

This dates to February 11, 2005.

Arthur Miller is no longer wasting precious oxygen.

Rest in Stalinist peace, fellow-traveler. May the cries of the innocents whose death you helped excuse and make possible waft their way into your holding cell in Hell.

Update [2005-2-11 20:22:2 by Thomas]: For those who think this is a bit much, ask yourself this:

Would it be a bit much if he were a Nazi, instead of an ardent communist?

Oh, wait, I forgot. It's ok to be a member of a totalitarian movement that slaughters by economic group, instead of (merely) by racial group. Silly me.

This is from February 23, 2006.

We are constantly heckled, in the endless abortion debate, that pro-life fears of a slippery slope leading from the devaluation of human life in the womb to the devaluation of human life elsewhere, are merely that: The unrestrained fantasies of a group of religious fanatics.

Maybe.

My good and esteemed friends Josh Trevino and Paul Cella like to heckle me for abandoning Europe to its death-throes, arguing that we are bound to that Continent in a hundred ways, and that at any rate, if for no other reason than this, we should stand by Europe to see what lies in store for us.

Maybe.

So I give you this:

A pro-abortion city councilwoman in Rotterdam says that forced abortions should be used to curb the "problem" of unwanted children in Holland and its territories.

Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam (LR) party says the forced abortion and contraception would reduce the incidence of child abuse. ...

Van den Anker said Antillean teenage mothers, drug addicts and those who are mentally disabled should be forced to have abortions and use contraception if they are having sex.

Otherwise, an "unacceptable risk" of some children exposed to "violence, neglect, mistreatment and sexual abuse."

She indicated courts would determine when women should be forced to have abortions and that social workers "can see in 95 percent or even 100 percent of cases whether the child has a chance of growing up with love."

Every child a wanted one, indeed.

Oh, I know, this is different somehow. And I'd be dishonest if I told you I expect this to pass on the first try. Heavens no. There's a certain ... griminess here that won't take.

Right now. In ten years, the unthinkable will be normal. And there will be good, wise judges to make sure that no unloved child is allowed to enter this world. And we'll all shrug.

Hat tip to Orrin Judd.

This dates to January 31, 2007.

In Catholic theology, the term scandal has a very specific meaning, that's usually lost on the outside population and the overwhelming majority of Catholics. The Catechism -- or, as liberal Catholics would have it, "that silly rule-summary-thing" -- identifies scandal thus:

2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor's tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is deliberately led into a grave offense.

2285 Scandal takes on a particular gravity by reason of the authority of those who cause it or the weakness of those who are scandalized. It prompted our Lord to utter this curse: "Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea."[85] Scandal is grave when given by those who by nature or office are obliged to teach and educate others. Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees on this account: he likens them to wolves in sheep's clothing.[86]

2286 Scandal can be provoked by laws or institutions, by fashion or opinion.

Therefore, they are guilty of scandal who establish laws or social structures leading to the decline of morals and the corruption of religious practice, or to "social conditions that, intentionally or not, make Christian conduct and obedience to the Commandments difficult and practically impossible."[87] This is also true of business leaders who make rules encouraging fraud, teachers who provoke their children to anger,[88] or manipulators of public opinion who turn it away from moral values.

2287 Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged. "Temptations to sin are sure to come; but woe to him by whom they come!"[89]

(Emphasis added.) And that brings us to Hell's newest permanent resident: Robert Drinan.

A more vicious, nastier human being has rarely lived -- not because he was a lawyer (although that's a good first step); not because he voted for, and avidly supported, the Evil Party (also a good step); and not because he was John Kerry's nominally Catholic shield during the 2004 campaign (y'know, these parentheticals are beginning to add up...).

Robert Drinan is as surely in Hell right now as I will be someday, for the evil he effected, directly through his own acts, and indirectly through the scandal he flouted with his every public act.

Let's begin with the obvious. The Silly-Rule-Summary-Thing has a great deal to say about deliberately induced abortion, and none of it is nice. You'll note something about excommunication by nature of the act itself. You may, if you read very carefully, even note some stuff taken from or inspired by that John Paul II-created, fascist document, the Didache, stuff like "The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined."

For this -- for one of the oldest teachings of the Church of whom he was nominally a priest, for the words that should have been a lifeblood given his nominal Order -- Drinan had nothing but contempt.

Conservative Catholics are often accused, by the Protestants who sit in our pews and pretend to be Catholic more liberal of our brethren, of whom Robert Drinan was one, of being obsessed with abortion, and overlooking issues like poverty, general social and economic justice, and burning topics like whether we should have married priests. What they -- let's be kind -- forget is that, putting to the side that the second sin in the Bible was a murder, that, to use Lockean language, life is the prerequisite right from which all other rights flow. Put differently, no one cares about insufficient housing if he's dead. The unshaken -- all too often ignored, but unchanged -- rule of the Catholic Church has been that deliberate murder of an innocent human life (and, explicitly, therefore abortion) is "gravely contrary to the dignity of the human being, to the golden rule, and to the holiness of the Creator. The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere."

And this -- one of the cornerstones of our nominally shared Faith -- he flouted. He derided, and called "no great thing." He praised President Clinton's veto of the partial birth abortion ban -- and thereby defended a practice so awful that even Supreme Court justices recognize its evil. And he did this from a position of authority. He did it as a prominent Congressman and former Congressman; as a priest (and a well-known one); as a law professor; and as a public activist. He defended the murder of the unborn day after day, and did so from authority; for that scandal alone, our Fallen world is cleaner for his absence.

That's the easy part. Then, there's this:

He grew up in Hyde Park and was educated at Boston College when it was a small school atop the heights of Chestnut Hill. He became a Jesuit, got his law degree at Georgetown, and became dean of the BC Law School in 1956 as it was moving from a downtown location to a new building near the college. He could have been content to let the law school serve a Catholic population in more spacious surroundings, but he had greater ambitions.

"He stood for inclusivity, opening up the law school to faculty and students of all faiths, colors, and genders," professor Sanford Katz said in a telephone interview yesterday. Drinan set up a presidential scholars program to attract top students from around the country. He established the law review and a legal aid clinic in Waltham to help the poor. He was in the vanguard of those who transformed Boston College into a national institution.

I see nothing wrong with a law school open to students of all faiths, colors, and sexes. I can overlook someone being pretentious enough to use "inclusivity" instead of "inclusiveness"; I think we can safely assume that the Faculty of Boston College recently formally decided that the former word is now doubleplusgood. The crime for which Drinan must answer is being one of the breakers of higher-level Catholic education in this country. Georgetown is as Catholic as Boston College, which is to say, as Catholic as Adolf Hitler (who had been Catholic until he was ten! Seriously! That proves the Holocaust was a Catholic event!). The degradation of the Catholic model of education -- to the point where there are Hemlock Society, Communist Party, and NARAL chapters on nominally Catholic campuses -- is a more pervasive (if not so grave) sin against humankind, and a more direct one than all his blathering and activism combined. Catholic universities, as a rule, are now neither. For this, Robert Drinan bears at least part of the blame.

I could go on, for days, if not weeks -- and I think there is a credible argument that his calls for the abandonment of the many Catholic and Buddhist South Vietnamese to the death camps, and his votes to do the same, will weigh on his soul at Judgment -- but suffice it to say we are well-rid of the man.

To Hell with you, old man. I'll be seeing you there soon enough.

This dates to August 15, 2005.

I normally eschew this sort of thing for reasons that will become clearer below. But I want to say something about this Cindy Sheehan nonsense that I think hasn't gone said anywhere else.

There is nothing special about losing a child. Or, more accurately, there is nothing special about losing a child, given that many people lose children. I did.

Many folks would say I did not, as my wife was only a few months along when we lost the child. Some might even think it funny. I did not. I'll spare you the personal details, except to say this: I would have given my life for that child. I begged God to take me instead. With pain, if need be. He did not.

My wife made the same offer, same result.

I understand the pain of losing a child. I understand what it can do to your head. I understand wanting to die as a result. I understand being angry. I also understand that you're emotionally vulnerable on that count.

So here's my point, and it's two-fold: Cindy Sheehan has no more right to argue against the Iraq War than I have to argue against legalized abortion. I do not bring up my loss when discussing abortion or embryonic stem cell research because, simply, it seems ghoulish beyond compare to drag one's lost little ones into your personal war. Does it animate my arguments? Take a guess. Frankly, what motivates me isn't anyone else's concern. But I'll be damned before I drag a child over whom I still cry sometimes into a political mudfight. And having lost a child that way, or indeed, any other, I understand wanting to rage at everything in sight.

And now let me get to the real target of all this: The ghoulish, deranged Left. Shame on you. Each and every one. Sheehan's anger is understandable. Your behavior is not. You've taken her as a Judas goat, torn her family apart, and paraded her in front of the cameras so you can have one more small cut inflicted on Chimpy McHitlerburton. Or BushCo. Or whatever it is you call the man you hate so much.

Oh, I'm sure she's gone along willingly at every turn. I'm sure the Left takes comfort in this. You have no freaking idea what it's like to have every parent's worst nightmare come true. I would have stormed Heaven's ramparts for my child when the moment came that we all knew was coming.

Ms. Sheehan should have our humble thanks for the sacrifice of her son, and then we should turn our eyes away from her grief. Maybe she needs to protest to get this out of her system. There's still no excuse for our enabling this, or for our voyeurism.

Let it go.

This dates to February 7, 2007.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

"I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less."

"Only by adopting the techniques of the big lie can the vice president make his case that those opposed to the Iraqi war fail to understand the importance of a firm response to terrorists. In fact, given the deleterious effect it has had on our effort in Afghanistan, and the enormous boost it has given to anti-American forces around the world, the big truth is that the Iraq war has damaged our ability to fight terrorism."

In 1974, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians on his hands. The Democrats responded by feeding the Reaper, as they'd been elected to do. To this day, they congratulate themselves for their noble sacrifice of millions of Asian lives.

In 2006, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Iraqis on his hands. The Democrats have responded by offering non-binding resolutions.

For thirty years, the Republican Party sliced off core Democratic voting groups who had become convinced that the Democrats were and are weaklings, cowards, and faithless allies willing -- joyful -- at the prospect of sending millions to the abattoir. The Democrats are now responding to the same kind of mandate by adopting a new pose of cowardice.

Dhimmicrats. DemocRATS. Surrendercrats. The names come as easily to some lips as Rethuglicans come to others. For every yahoo who elides an argument about foreign policy into a slur, however, there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters convinced that Democrats are, to put this charitably, unwilling to engage in war. From the homebuilding tyrant enabler to the youthful pugilist to Mickey Mouse in a tank, the Democrats had to live down their response to Vietnam (again, even while they praised themselves for it). Even the serial adulterer had to waste time that could have been spent on White House Hotties proving he was willing to high-altitude bomb someone into submission. Tough and Strong went out of their way to repudiate Tough's own traditional stand on foreign policy, so that voters would be fooled into thinking that Democrats would be willing to go to war without a direct attack on the country first.

Obviously, that didn't work so well.

But oh, the worm has turned! Behold! They ran in 2006 on, well, very little; but the Democrats' consistent message, for anyone who was listening, was that the little party we call the Iraq War is over. And the voters gave them their marching orders. Now, for the first time in a generation, the voters want to try letting people get massacred en masse, and that's precisely what the Democrats were running on. Thus should begin a symphony of synchronicity.

So where are you, you cowards? You've made clear from the Spring of 2003 that you believe this is an illegal, unjustified, awful, soul-destroying war; that a Congress that wasn't a mere rubber stamp for the President would have pulled the cord a long time ago; and that, by a God you don't believe in, if you came to power, there would be no more Iraq War. You've salivated for the chance to truly make this another Vietnam. Your most prominent loons ran on little else. Now's your chance to exercise the only power Congress has in the exercise of war -- the ultimate power, in every sense of the word -- and end the whole thing. Come on, you fevered, yellow-bellied tucktails. Let's all climb to the top of a building and watch the last helicopter leave. Let's have another commission named after that brave milquetoast Frank Church. Let's remind the international community that Americans will fall in line when they demand it. Let's give your neo-McGovernites -- and the voters who agreed with them -- the blood they want.

Come on, you wastes of political skin. Defund the war. Do it. Cut all allocation for the war from the budget. Allow no supplementals. Consummate your promises. Prove those of us who think you spineless cowards that you have the right kind of spine to roll over and pee yourself when the world demands it.

Do it.

Cowards.

To the men and women who would do this, I maintain that you are nothing but a group of tucktails. If the Iraq War is so bad, so immoral, do everything in your power to stop it. Allocate no funds. Bush vetoes? Keep allocating no funds. Force Bush to choose between literal force protection and a staredown.

Stupid, immoral, cowardly excuses for human beings, the lot of you. If this war is merely a waste of lives and treasure, you are honor-bound to stop it at all costs. So do it. Relive the 1970s. Show us that you accept the inevitable slaughter of millions as irrelevant so that we can all watch the evening news without being bothered. Prove that refugees dying on boats and in camps are merely pictures, and not men, women, and children possessed of human dignity, being tortured because the United States won't live up to its promises. Remind the world again that we are a paper tiger, and then grieve when another embassy is held hostage.

Heck, why wait? Why don't we go slaughter a million Iraqis in bombing runs, so this time the blood will be directly on our hands, and we can avoid the irritating images of boat people and other refugees fleeing genocide?

That our Party once knew the value of honor, and words kept, and standing for the weak when they could not; and now accepts in its midst those who would spit on all those things, is a shame to the Republican Party. That the Democrat Party -- a Party that once championed the dignity of all Men -- not only slaughters them in the womb, but would abandon them to slaughter ex utero for political advantage; and that few Americans call them the mass-murdering tyrant enablers they've become -- should shame us all as Americans.

Fall on your face in shame, my fellow Americans, because we are giving away our honor, a piece at a time.

In honor of Steve Gilliard:



Rest whatever way God feels appropriate.

I realized, just the other days, that Normandy was sixty years ago.

The beginning of the end for Hitler (in the West) was sixty years ago. Hitler has been dead (or in Argentina) for almost sixty years. Japan has been without an expeditionary military for almost sixty years.

Think about that for a second: The war that is still the touchstone for everyone when they think of war, the baby boomers notwithstanding, was two to three full generations ago.

The men who stormed Omaha, Juno, and all the rest, and lived, are dying very quickly now. They came back, usually voted for Democrats, raised a bunch of spoiled brats, and grumbled about health benefits for thirty years; they came back, worked their tails off, rarely ran around beating their chests about how heroic they'd been, and never once suggested that America had fought in the Pacific out of racism or imperialism.

Both of my grandfathers served in the Pacific. I was never very close to my maternal grandfather, but neither talked much about it: They simply went out, did their jobs, and returned home. The net effect -- combined with the efforts of millions like them -- was to stamp out right-wing tyranny in the Pacific, and hybridized left/right tyranny in Europe. It's not their fault that we lacked the will to kill off the left-wing tyranny in Asia and Europe on their watch.

Billions of humans are better off for their efforts. Billions more will live and die, wanting, laughing, needing, crying, loving, marrying, reproducing, mourning, praying, without once looking over their shoulders for the dark shadows that love to kill freedom.

The men five years after fought to keep the slow shadow of communism from bringing even more under its long night; it's not their fault that the people they saved have grown soft under the blanket of security they provided.

The men twenty years before them fought in a meat grinder, over some stupid European kerfluffle that should never have been; but without them, there would not be an England. And a France, but again, that's not their fault.

The men sixty years before that fought to preserve the idea of Union. They died by the tens of thousands on beautiful landscapes, near verdant forests and running streams, broad plains and the foothills of mountains. They fought so that government by the people would not perish. They fought -- perhaps incidentally, but bless them for it -- so that some day, all Men would be free.

The men twenty years before that fought so that Texas would remain part of the Union, and ten years before that, so that a petty dictator would not trample the rights of free men and women.

The men fifty years before that fought for the idea that government flows from the people; and that absent their consent, there is no government. We owe them boundless thanks for their pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor; and we owe them an understanding of what it means to pledge those things.

You'll note that I have not referenced any war after Korea. That is because I must segregate:

The men who fought bravely in Vietnam; Grenada; Panama; Kuwait; Somalia; Bosnia; Kosovo; Afghanistan; and Iraq: We owe them our thanks on our knees. They fought when others spurned the words "honor," and "duty"; they fought when it was harder than ever to do so, as so many spit at them for having the unmitigated gall to believe in the American idea, and that it was worth fighting for; they fought for us, and, in some senses, the world.

The men and women who spit at them: We owe them nothing. The men who fought, then came back to spit at the men fighting: We owe them less.

To all the men (and, sadly, now women) who have died for this great Nation: God keep you; God bless; and, from our hearts: Thank you.

So now that I'm back, let's talk about a few things. We'll start with gay marriage. (Why not?)

I'd like, before I go any further, to direct you to my prior words on the subject here. And note a few changes since then. Most of them center around my naivete.

Three weeks after I wrote that, I had a discussion with a senior associate at my firm. Nice guy; if not brilliant (and he probably is), very close; thoughtful; and gay. I mention the last because he told me, in no uncertain terms:

(1) I'm not merely a bigot, but a monster, for trying to stop the legalization of gay marriage.

(2) This is not something that can be debated among rational people. I'm simply evil.

(3) My "noble, but meaningless" belief that "the law matters -- if you strip aside all the trees of the law, you'll have nowhere to hide when Satan comes looking" and my antiquated belief in a separation of powers are either dodges (at best), or more likely naive maliciousness (he explained how that's not oxymoronic; it made sense at the time). And:

(4) No weapon was beyond reach to make gay marriage a reality. The explicit comparison to Jim Crow -- from a man making six figures, with the respect and esteem of not only his immediate colleagues (including myself), but of the profession, who was never, you know, forced to sit at a different lunch counter, or drink from a rusty old water fountain while others were allowed to drink from the clean one -- was breathtaking in its force, conviction, and, let us not forget, absurdity.

So:

I am now wholly in favor of the most restrictive possible Constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage imaginable and politically workable. If it must allow civil unions, so be it; I'd rather it forbade the whole slate. Screw federalism.

I say this because I now understand that I've been thrust into a war for which I did not ask; in which I never expected to be; against enemies whom I had never thought of as enemies, who in turn view this entire conflict as Manichaean in nature, who have absolute conviction behind them; and over an institution at the very base of society, the existence and nature of which no one would have thought to question with any seriousness for centuries. If a man who I would otherwise have thought thoughtful and moderate is actually a raging demon where this is concerned, I can only imagine what the activists preparing papers are like.

Norman Podhoretz once said something to the effect that in a contest between two sides, when one has unlimited aims, and the other has limited aims, the side with the boundless goals wins by definition every time. I therefore adopt a boundless goal: The complete denial of gay marriage throughout this country and, if I have my way, every other country in the world. (Except Europe: They're dying anyway. I don't want to waste the time on them.)

I'd also like to make a rather straightforward point. Conservatism is not an ideology; it's an inclination. It's the subtle but unmistakable certainty that changing things, while sometimes necessary and good, is almost always bad. Not to go all Andrew Sullivan and start casting my ideological opponents into the outer darkness, but you cannot be a conservative and advocate gay marriage, unless you believe that the harm society as a whole experiences is akin to the effects of slavery or Jim Crow. It's precisely that simple. To be in favor of overturning countless years of inherited wisdom and tradition based on a fifteen year old political movement, with spurious claims to victimhood and suffering, is not to be a conservative; it is to be an unapologetic radical.

Just so we're on the same page.