The folks at the Weakly Substandard have joined the ranks of “conservatives” calling for a crackdown on journalists who “leak” national security “secrets.” In an essay entitled “Leaks and the Law,” Gabriel Schoenfeld tries to make “the case for prosecuting the New York Times“:

Can journalists really be prosecuted for publishing national security secrets? In the wake of a series of New York Times stories revealing highly sensitive counterterrorism programs, that question is increasingly the talk of newsrooms across the country …… Although the editors of the Times act as if prosecution is not a possibility, not everyone concurs. One person who is still mulling the matter over is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Asked in late May about the prospect of prosecuting the Times and others who publish classified information, he by no means ruled it out. “There are some statutes on the books,” he said, “which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility.”

Schoenfeld goes on to mention a 1949 Senate report which noted that a book published in the early 1930s about U.S. successes in breaking Japanese codes had caused “irreparable harm” to our national security because it supposedly prompted the Japanese to come up with more secure codes. The report concluded that this was why we weren’t able to “decode the important Japanese military communications in the days immediately leading up to Pearl Harbor.”

It is therefore Schoenfeld’s conclusion that Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with economic sanctions, oil embargoes, or naval blockades. No, the devastating attack was made possible “by leaks of classified information.”

Schoenfeld sums up his criticism of a free press this way:

At stake here for Attorney General Gonzales to contemplate is not just the right to defend ourselves from another Pearl Harbor. Can it really be the government’s position that, in the middle of a war in which we have been attacked on our own soil, the power to classify or declassify vital secrets should be taken away from elected officials acting in accord with laws set by Congress and bestowed on a private institution accountable to no one?

“Accountable to no one?” That sounds a lot like the ruling elite in Washington. After all, they are the ones with the power to fine, imprison, and kill with impunity. Despite what “conservatives” like to think about their enemies in the mainstream press, the fact remains that the New York Times does not have that kind of power. But since when did facts matter?

We have already seen similar assaults on liberty in our nation’s history. Abraham Lincoln, for example, fought against freedom of the press during his war against the South. He shut down newspapers that were critical of his illegal invasion and arrested editors who were sympathetic toward the Southern states and their right to secede.

Now it seems the Bush administration is prepared to pick up where Lincoln left off. And, as Schoenfeld’s article demonstrates, there is no shortage of “conservatives” willing to go along with the plan.

It isn’t difficult to spot the usual suspects. Those who support the prosecution of journalists for reporting the truth are the same ones who supported every other encroachment on our civil liberties under the current administration. They stood proudly by President Bush when he signed the anti-free speech Incumbent Politician Protection Act (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act) into law. They cheered when the PATRIOT Act made every American citizen a potential terrorist suspect. They praised the REAL ID Act and its creation of a de facto national ID card.

As a reminder of the kind of nation we once had, here’s what Thomas Jefferson said about freedom of the press: “The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” How soon we forget.

Have WMDs been found In Iraq? Are wicked MSM outlets covering it all up? Congressman Peter Hoekstra and Rick Santorum claim that the public has been “deceived” and that, in fact, hordes of WMDs have been found in Iraq. All of this flim-flam has been debunked by, among others, Scott Richert. Scott Ritter comments:

Regardless of what Sen. Rick Santorum and the lunatic neoconservative fringe want to think, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Citing a classified Department of Defense report that claims some 500 artillery shells have been found in Iraq by U.S. forces since the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq in March 2003, Santorum and his cronies in the right-wing media have been spouting nonsense about how Bush got it right all along, that there were WMD in Iraq after all. He conveniently fails to report that there is nothing “secret” about this data, it has all been reported before (by the Bush administration, nonetheless), and that the shells in question constitute old artillery munitions manufactured well prior to 1991 (the year of the first Gulf War, and a time after which the government of Saddam Hussein stated — correctly, it turned out — that no WMD were produced in Iraq). The degraded sarin nerve agent and mustard blister agent contained in the discovered munitions had long since lost their viability, and as such represented no threat whatsoever. Furthermore, the haphazard way in which they were “discovered” (lying about the ground, as opposed to carefully stored away) only reinforces the Iraqi government’s past claims that many chemical munitions were scattered about the desert countryside in remote areas following U.S. bombing attacks on the ammunition storage depots during the first Gulf War. Having personally inspected scores of these bombed-out depots, I can vouch for the veracity of the past Iraqi claims, as well as the absurdity of the claims made today by Santorum and others, who continue to hold personal political gain as being worth more than the blood of over 2,500 dead Americans.

By the way, The Opinion Journal piece linked to above was brought to my attention via a daily email from Albert Mohler. I also see that Andrew Sandlin linked to the Fox News story on the “missing” WMDs and said, “Chalk one up for George W. Bush, and take a point away from the lefties.” As you can see, Christians are buying this all lock, stock, and barrel–which should come as no surprise.

Speaking of Christian warmongers, World Magazine interviewed Chris Hitchens. Hitch may or may not have been sober during the discussion, but he did manage to spew out this little bit of blasphemy: “[Jesus on the cross] is scapegoating that absolves one of all responsibility in return for the acceptance of the incredible and the undesirable. And then with the other shoe, the other hand, says if you don’t believe it, then we have a real program of torture that will go on forever. It’s disgusting.” Though a Christ-hater, Hitchens has gained many admirers on the Right, “Christian” and Neocon, for his unabashed bloodthirstiness. As Gene Healy says, “Insult our Savior, defame our religion, support the president: you’re pretty swell, all things considered. The war must be very, very important to Christian conservatives.”

It isn’t really that strange, I suppose, that Neocons have embraced Hitch. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, they’re all Trotskyists now. But here is a recent essay by Albert Mohler on Hitchens that, while generally critical, makes this startling claim, “Rejecting this moral relativism as both dangerous and intellectually bankrupt, Christopher Hitchens took many observers in the literary and political worlds by surprise when he became an ardent supporter of the ‘War on Terror’ and declared himself the sworn enemy of any relativistic ideology that would confuse the evil of terrorism with the good of freedom.”

So here are a couple of quick examples of Hichen’s moral sturdiness. When asked about “9-11,” Hitchens explained his sense of excitement and exhiliration:

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

Speaking of the Iraq war, Hitch said, “It is glorious and it IS my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war. And we are going to kill every Al Qaida terrist and Baathist in the country and that’s a good thing. They need to be killed and we will kill them.”

Dismissing “moral relativsim,” Hitchens also claims Mother Teresa “helped to kill millions of people” and blames Pope John Paul for the deaths of “millions” from AIDS. Meanwhile, Hitch venerates the likes of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin. Yet according to Mohler, this joker has become “the sworn enemy of any relativistic ideology that would confuse the evil of terrorism with the good of freedom.”

Gary North concludes that home schools are better than private schools. Chad Degenart’s comments on North’s revelation are of interest.

It was no surprise that Sunni’s would oppose occupation.

I’ll probably throw up some quotes later, but Aaron Wolfe has a funny little essay poking fun at “church growth” wackiness in the latest issue of Chronicles. Effectively, Wolfe says that catering to the whims of “church shoppers” and the ever present “unchurched” does little more than foster a cultue of individualism. From the NY Times is an example of marketing the church, “Mr. Hur and the other pastors at the church are big soccer fans, and in their quest for new missionary methods, they have organized the viewings of games in this year’s tournament in the hope of drawing new members to the church, and to Christ. Some of the games have drawn more than 1,000 fans, they said.”

Who said this? You’ll never guess!

When I converted to the Reformed Faith, I embraced the Reformed distinctive of applying my Christianity to all spheres of life. That included politics. I was, as some of you, a dedicated Republican throughout the 80s, voting an almost straight Republican ticket in local and state races, and deeming Ronald Reagan’s Presidential election almost fourteen years ago a true godsend. But I no longer hold this view. I hold now that Christians should vote exclusively for Christians-that is, those who with an explicit Christian profession dedicate themselves to applying their Faith in public office. I am less enthusiastic about the two-party system in the United States, and am a firm supporter of a fledgling third party, the U. S. Taxpayer’s Party, whose platform, if not perfect, nonetheless observes that, “Our republic is a nation governed by a Constitution which is rooted in Biblical law . . . .” That assertion is open to serious debate among those of us of the NRA, but the party itself is expressly Christian. And I am convinced that it is through such vehicles rather than the present system in which both parties are mirror images of each other that Christians-at least this Christian-should effect godly political change. I reject both the separatist approach-that we should not vote, as well as the pragmatic approach-that we should vote for the lesser of two evils. Instead, I hold what is, I believe, the principled approach-that Christians should vote for God-fearing Christians.

I have seen the same discussion in a few venues, and I’m sure more will be coming in the coming months, as the next presidential election creeps closer (somehow that seemed like an appropriate verb to go with the looming contest): what if a liberal Republican is running against a liberal Democrat, such as (gasp!) Hillary “No Cookies” Clinton? For whom should one vote?

The overwhelming response is…of course, we can’t let Hillary win. We have to vote for the liberal Republican.

Well, I do bake cookies, and I am tempted to use a few of the stale ones as projectiles when I read such balderdash. I’m experiencing a dizzy sense of déjà vu by saying it, but here goes:

CHRISTIANS DON’T HAVE ANY BUSINESS VOTING FOR THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS!!

A lesser of two evils vote may seem like the sensible (aka, pragmatic) thing to do, but a Sunday school knowledge of Old Testament Bible stories ought to give a pretty clear picture that choosing the broad pragmatic way over the narrow principled path does not lead one to flowery beds of political ease. Instead, you are likely to find yourself wallowing with the other pigs in the Okefenokee Swamp, oinking for your share of the pork barrel.

Here’s a little preview of the inhabitants of the swamp for you—a so-called Christian group which purports to have a heart for helping the poor, called Sojourners, run by Jim Wallis, is holding a conference at the end of the month called Pentecost 2006. I’m not sure what the name is meant to signify. The original Pentecost was an outpouring of God’s power and Spirit upon the church, not a work of men and certainly not a plea for government hand-outs. The Sojourner conference is a showcase for political grandstanders who are using God’s Word to further their socialist agendas, and the speakers come from both ends of the political spectrum, if you use the now-meaningless scale of conservative to liberal.

The roster of speakers includes some notorious liberals who are unabashedly pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-feminist:

Senator Barack Obama
Senator Hillary Rodham “Clinton”
“Rev.” Tony Campolo (President Clinton’s “spiritual adviser”)
Marian Wright Edelman (promoter of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)
and others of similar views

Of course, I’m not surprised that Sojourners is hooking up with these types; they are birds of a feather. What disturbs me and what I hope disturbs you, too, is that there are some surprising people hooking up with Sojourners at this conference:

Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS)

Look up the bona fides of this pair and you will find their American Conservative Union ratings peg them as being squeaky clean. Then what in tarnation are they doing hanging out with this gang of thieves? Senator Santorum showed his colors when he campaigned for pro-abort Arlen Specter over the pro-life candidate in his state, and was also found to have taken tens of thousands of dollars from a Pennsylvania charter school to “home school” his children, even though they didn’t live in the district. Senator Brownback has been spending a lot of his time in Iowa lately, where there is an irresistable pull for those with presidential aspirations.

Just being in the company of thieves does not make one a thief, but it does raise eyebrows. Of course, Mark Twain pointed out that Congress is the only native criminal class in America, so perhaps it’s just kismet.

If you think I’m overreacting by tarring the Sojourners gang with that brush (where did those feathers go?), then read what Gary North says about Jim Wallis and his goals. Print it out and refer to it often as you puzzle over what to do when the next “major” election comes around. Here’s a bit to remind you of the implications of the statist policies promoted by the power brokers, no matter what the letter after their name or their ACU rating:

The welfare state exists only because voters have authorized the confiscation of private property through violence by the state. In the name of helping the poor, middle-class voters extract most of the loot: tax-funded education, Social Security, and Medicare. The welfare state is therefore the implementation of covetousness by politics.

The Social Gospel defends this system of compulsory wealth-redistribution in the name of Jesus. It teaches that Jesus implicitly favored economic aid to the poor in the form of government policies that can be enforced only by the threat of systematic violence.

No New Testament account of Jesus offers evidence that He recommended such a view of Christian civil government. This inconvenient fact is regarded as a slight impediment by Social Gospelers, but nothing too serious. They insist that this is what Jesus really meant to say, even though He never actually said it, and despite the fact that the Old Testament adamantly denies such a view of civil justice. God through Moses warned:

Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. (Leviticus 19:15)

When you hear the words Social Gospel, immediately think “Pastors’ justification of armed government agents acting on behalf of certain special-interest voting blocs to take wealth away from other groups of citizens in order to benefit these special interests.” This is exactly what the Social Gospel has always been. The central moral, judicial, and political issue of the Social Gospel is compulsion.

The Social Gospel movement is committed to guns and butter: the government’s guns and your butter. The more guns the government has, the less butter you will have.

The Social Gospel’s version of Jesus is a long-haired guy in sandals leading a mob of newly registered voters. He is packing a .44 magnum. His motto: “Go ahead, taxpayer. Make my day.”

This time, don’t be content with empty promises, and don’t be fooled by empty rhetoric. And whatever you do, don’t vote based on fear of man (or woman), but fear God and know that if He can make the world in six days, He can take care of His people no matter who is sitting in the White House.

I have often expressed dismay at the lack of principle in the Republican party. G-O-P often stands for “Gone-Our-Principles” or “Good-Ol’-Pragmatism.” Sometimes, though, I am pleasantly surprised by a display of good ol’ gumption from someone who wears the “R” behind his name lightly and doesn’t always play by the rules of the good ol’ boys.

If you’ve ever watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, you have a picture of the importance of procedure when legislators meet. Not everyone behaves himself, but the rules of order are taken pretty seriously, even though all sorts of shenanigans might (and do) go on behind the scenes. If anyone does not abide by the strict code of conduct, then they are smacked down pretty abruptly. A few years ago, our friend and state assemblyman, a godly man, was prepared to address his colleagues regarding an imminent vote on a bill granting special rights to sodomites. He was careful to follow the protocol, and he stood to speak. He proceeded to read from government documents which outlined the behavior and medical consequences of the homosexual lifestyle. It was not for those with weak constitutions. Unfortunately, that describes most of those in the chamber, who proceeded to drown out our friend’s voice (and he was speaking at the proper time…it was his turn), with screaming and shouting, so that the unadorned facts he was presenting in all their hideousness couldn’t be heard. He boldly kept reading, and his speech was entered into the record.

It turns out that such courageous audacity is not totally gone from the political realm. Another assemblyman, in Colorado, recently stood up for righteousness even though he knew he would be castigated for it. In a scene reminiscent of that in Cheaper by the Dozen, when the local representative of Planned Barrenhood was sent to the prolific Gilbreth household by a prankster, Representative Ted Harvey had a surprise for the visitor from Planned Barrenhood who was expecting to receive accolades at the state capitol, but instead received an unwelcome surprise. Rep. Harvey is a man who doesn’t just wear his pro-life credentials on his coat sleeve.

We need to be wise as serpents, harmless as doves. (Matthew 10:16—link takes you to a good article by William Einwechter about how Christians should conduct themselves in politics).

Things are going so fabulously in Iraq that the middle class is scurrying away.  According the New York Times, “In the past 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and an estimated quarter of the Iraqi middle class.”

Christians in the United States have been the most vocal supporters of preemptive war.  Meanwhile, Christians in Iraq are running for their lives.  Lawrence Kaplan writes:

With the remnant of Iraq’s Jewish population having long since fled the country, Christians have become today’s victims of choice. Sunni, Shia, and Kurd may agree on little else, but all have made sport of brutalizing their Christian neighbors, hundreds of whom have been slaughtered since the U.S. invasion. As a result, Iraq’s ancient Christian community, now numbering roughly 800,000 and consisting mostly of Eastern rite Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Orthodox Christians, dwindles by the day. According to Iraqi estimates, between 40,000 and 100,000 have fled since 2004, many following their own road to Damascus across the Syrian border or to Jordan, while many more have been displaced within Iraq. As for the country that loosed the furies against them, the United States refuses to provide Iraqi Christians protection of any kind. 

The stories of attacks on Iraqi civilians continue to mushroom.  Marines may have killed civilians, including five children, execution-style in Haditha.  The BBC has video implicating Americans in the death of 11 civilians in Abu Sifa.  Two Iraqi women were shot attempting to get to the local maternity ward.  The prime minister of Iraq says violence against civilians is a daily phenomenon.  “They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion,” he said. “This is completely unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Iraq has jumped to 60%. 

War Street Journal editor Daniel Henninger is concerned that an “Iraqi syndrome” will cause “a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military engagement” and “feed the dark, inward-turning sentiments already poisoning the country’s mood.” 

Over the past three months, weekly attacks by insurgents averaged more than 600, a 13 percent rise over the previous six months.  What pinko mainstreammedia outlet is putting out that bad news?  Oh, it’s the Pentagon.