Let me wish y'all a Happy 4th with the following assignments for your edification and consideration:

1. Read through the Declaration of Independence.  It's actually not that long, but is fraught with significance as our founding document.

2. Watch this version of the Pledge of Allegiance as rendered by Red Skelton.

3. Remember that we are currently at war with an implacable enemy that hates our freedoms and has as his only goal either our total assimilation or our total annihilation.

The liberal mind does not appear to grasp the possibility that it is wrong on any point of its ideology. Its grasp on reality becomes increasingly tenuous the farther into the leftist swamp it tries to go, and this is becoming apparent to many more in this country thanks to the blogosphere and alternate media sources. The mainstream media is so caught up in the agenda of the left that it is only trusted by those already over on the left.

Perhaps the classic recent example is how prominent members of the Democratic Congress continue to propound the illusion that there is no progress in Iraq and that we are loosing and need to just throw in the towel and leave as fast as we can. While the more extravagant statements have been made by Reid and Pelosi, statements that leave one wondering what they have been smoking, the neuronal rot extends even to the Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Obama. As Charles Krauthammer so eloquently puts it:

In his St. Paul victory speech, Barack Obama pledged again to pull out of Iraq. Rather than “continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians,… [i]t's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future.”

We know Obama hasn't been to Iraq in more than two years, but does he not read the papers? Does he not know anything about developments on the ground? Here is the “nothing” that Iraqis have been doing in the past few months:

1. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki sent the Iraqi army into Basra. It achieved in a few weeks what the British had failed to do in four years: take the city, drive out the Mahdi Army and seize the ports from Iranian-backed militias.

2. When Mahdi fighters rose up in support of their Basra brethren, the Iraqi army at Maliki's direction confronted them and prevailed in every town -- Najaf, Karbala, Hilla, Kut, Nasiriyah and Diwaniyah -- from Basra to Baghdad.

3. Without any American ground forces, the Iraqi army entered and occupied Sadr City, the Mahdi Army stronghold.

4. Maliki flew to Mosul, directing a joint Iraqi-U.S. offensive against the last redoubt of al-Qaeda, which had already been driven out of Anbar, Baghdad and Diyala provinces.

5. The Iraqi parliament enacted a de-Baathification law, a major Democratic benchmark for political reconciliation.

6. Parliament also passed the other reconciliation benchmarks -- a pension law, an amnesty law, and a provincial elections and powers law. Oil revenue is being distributed to the provinces through the annual budget.

7. With Maliki having demonstrated that he would fight not just Sunni insurgents (e.g., in Mosul) but Shiite militias (e.g., the Mahdi Army), the Sunni parliamentary bloc began negotiations to join the Shiite-led government. (The final sticking point is a squabble over a sixth cabinet position.)

Here are just seven of a multiplicity of objectively verifiable facts pointing to the opposite conclusion of the Democrats and the left in this country that the left chooses to ignore. This willful ignorance begins to enter the territory of the asylum of ignorance, that mental sanctuary constructed by those in conflict with reality, in which sanctuary one asserts the truth of a statement or set of statements regardless of any facts. It is the realm of meaninglessness whose occupants cannot make meaningful statements precisely because they are so disconnected from the reality in which the rest of us live. Krauthammer’s conclusion is succinct (emphases added):

The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions.

With this as the context, it was with amused surprise I found the opinion piece by the title I used for this post in, of all places, the June 15, 2008 (Vol. 28, No. 12) issue of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (affectionately known to many of us scientists as GEN). The author of the piece, Henry I. Miller, M.D., is a physician and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and was an official at the NIH and FDA from 1977 to 1994. The subtitle to his essay tells you the basic idea of his ruminations, why I was both surprised and amused, and suggests the connection to this post’s introduction: Should Politicians Be Required to Take Periodic Intelligence and Mental Status Tests?

Dr. Miller starts out:

Most Americans are unhappy with the performance of the U.S. Congress, which has granted no favors recently to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Both regulation and its congressional oversight are broken with no repair in sight.

Recent polls have found congressional approval ratings in the range of 20–28%, but we continue to elect and re-elect scoundrels, liars, and the intellectually challenged. The elusive quality of electability seems not to correlate with truthfulness, integrity, courage, or intelligence but only with a certain affability—and with the ability to raise funds for campaigns.

It’s no coincidence that the intelligence level of members of Congress has so often been spoofed. “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” quipped Mark Twain. Milton Berle observed, “You can lead a man to Congress but you can’t make him think.” Will Rogers addressed the consequences of these deficiencies: “When Congress makes a joke it’s a law, and when they make a law, it’s a joke.”

After treating us with some specific modern day examples (at least the quotes of Twain, Berle, and Rogers lets us know the problem has been around for some time and is not unique to our day and age), Dr. Miller continues,

As a voter and taxpayer but also as a physician, I worry about whether such people are fit to serve. Nor are these isolated examples. The two U.S. senators who are supposed to represent my own interests are dubious: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), 74, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), 67, give me cause for concern. Boxer usually seems befuddled, and flaws in knowledge and judgment make Feinstein a liability.

Other states have their own candidates for legislators who belong not in the House or Senate, but in assisted living. Too many are well past their use-by dates.

Dr. Miller does not stop with diagnosis, but presents us with a suggested therapeutic that may seem shocking at first, but is it really not a logical approach to the problem?

Perhaps we should treat dissatisfaction with our representation as a medical rather than a solely political issue. How? By asking candidates and incumbents to volunteer for periodic intelligence and mental status testing. After all, we often demand to know whether a candidate has recovered from open-heart surgery, cancer, or a stroke, and many states require elderly drivers to be relicensed.

A mental status exam by an expert offers an assessment of cognitive abilities, memory, and quality of thought processes. It includes assessments of alertness, speech, behavior, awareness of environment, mood, affect, rationality of thought processes, appropriateness of thought content (presence of delusions, hallucinations, or phobias), memory, ability to perform simple calculations, judgment (“If you found a letter on the ground in front of a mailbox, what would you do with it?”), and higher reasoning such as the ability to interpret proverbs abstractly: “A stitch in time saves nine.”

An intelligence test measures various parameters that are thought to correlate with academic or financial achievement. Every legislator need not be a genius, but I’d like mine to be smarter than the average person in the supermarket or laundromat. I’d like them to know the difference between DNA and the PTA.

Put another way, why should competence be required of other professions, but not for government workers, and most importantly for our representatives who create law and determine policies that impact every area of our lives, and that of our children and grandchildren? As Dr. Miller indicates, he’s not suggesting that our Congress be composed of geniuses, but they should at least be able to discern the reality the rest of us see and use normal logic and common sense with some degree of competence in responding to that reality. That includes having the character to admit when they are wrong and to respond honorably.

Dr. Miller’s final conclusion:

The journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken observed, “Congress consists of one third, more or less, scoundrels; two thirds, more or less, idiots; and three thirds, more or less, poltroons.” Testing might help us to weed out a few idiots. Getting rid of the scoundrels and poltroons will have to wait.

My final plea to any Democrat who might be reading this (as unlikely as it might be that a Democrat might do so): if you must elect Democrats into office, could you at least give us some with functioning grey matter between the ears? We will all be better served by such, even if we disagree with specifics of their platform.

A cake not turned is uncooked on one side; and so Ephraim was, in many respects, untouched by divine grace: though there was some partial obedience, there was very much rebellion left. My soul, I charge thee, see whether this be thy case. Art thou thorough in the things of God? Has grace gone through the very centre of thy being so as to be felt in its divine operations in all thy powers, thy actions, thy words, and thy thoughts? To be sanctified, spirit, soul, and body, should be thine aim and prayer; and although sanctification may not be perfect in thee anywhere in degree, yet it must be universal in its action; there must not be the appearance of holiness in one place and reigning sin in another, else thou, too, wilt be a cake not turned.

A cake not turned is soon burnt on the side nearest the fire, and although no man can have too much religion, there are some who seem burnt black with bigoted zeal for that part of truth which they have received, or are charred to a cinder with a vainglorious Pharisaic ostentation of those religious performances which suit their humour. The assumed appearance of superior sanctity frequently accompanies a total absence of all vital godliness. The saint in public is a devil in private. He deals in flour by day and in soot by night. The cake which is burned on one side, is dough on the other.

If it be so with me, O Lord, turn me! Turn my unsanctified nature to the fire of thy love and let it feel the sacred glow, and let my burnt side cool a little while I learn my own weakness and want of heat when I am removed from thy heavenly flame. Let me not be found a double-minded man, but one entirely under the powerful influence of reigning grace; for well I know if I am left like a cake unturned, and am not on both sides the subject of thy grace, I must be consumed for ever amid everlasting burnings.

 

“It wasn’t Bush, it wasn’t greedy corporations, or free trade, or history’s most over-predicted recession. It was not the oil companies, income inequality, or the excesses of cowboy capitalism. None of these things caused the unemployment rate to jump a half a percentage point in one month. Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge at a time when unemployment compensation claims are historically low? More to the point, how could unemployment spike this much without a coinciding spike in corporate lay-offs? The answer to all of these questions is same: because very few people lost jobs last month. This huge jump in the size of the unemployed comes from new entrants to the economy—hundreds of thousands of them. In short, well over 600,000 people who were not job seekers in April became job seekers in May. And who starts looking for work at the end of Spring? That’s right—students. Hundreds of thousands of students are looking for work right now, and they’re not finding it. Congress is to blame. Last year Congressional Democrats (along with some Stockholm-Syndromed Republicans) passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which started a phased hike of the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25. Free market economists warned them that this would increase unemployment—that rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest. But the class-warriors are running the people’s house now, and they would hear none of that, so they took to the floor, let loose the dogs of demagoguery, and saddled America’s pizza parlors, municipal swimming pools, house painting businesses and lawn mowing services with a huge cost increase. Now, we see the perfectly logical outcome of wage controls—rising unemployment among the most economically vulnerable.”

 

For any politician, what matters is not his election-year rhetoric, or an election-year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

That track record, that resume, is the critical thing that needs to be evaluated by all voters despite the rhetorical smokescreen Obama and his disciples would have you believe. Thus, Sowell further notes:

There is nothing more real than a man’s character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.

There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of President of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.

There is much to be concerned about Obama’s track record that should shake even a Democrat if he is truly as patriotic as he claims to be. Read Dr. Sowell’s entire article for just a sampling. The office of the President of the United States is not the place you want to be doing on-the-job-training. There is an old axiom of common sense that doesn’t seem to be operative in the world view of Obama’s supporters: actions speak louder than words. Obama’s campaign has been one of words, words, words. His voting record, his resume, is where the actions are to be found, and where his heart and mind are to be truly read.

 

The wisest man ever to live proclaimed this same truth over a thousand years ago:

Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right.   (Proverbs 20:11)

This connection to the divine is, of course, a primary reason for the degradation of the musical arts. Having its roots in Marxist/Leninist philosophy, the liberal worldview knows nothing of God and seeks to chase God from the culture and public discourse in all possible venues. This is not some shadowy conspiracy theory. In a previous post entitled The Enemy Within, I documented goals the Communist Party drafted and published in the 1950's and which they then went about to implement all too successfully into the American cultural milieu to bring us down. Two of them read:

Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

Note the adjectives they chose to describe what they wanted to create: “shapeless, awkward, meaningless, ugly,” and their goal to apply this to “all forms of artistic expression.” While the above only mentions art as found in museums, the art of the concert hall falls under this purview as well, and has suffered under their attack.

What to do?

There is a pattern in all these dilemmas. And it is not conservative-versus-liberal politics, but generational chaos. Those who came of age in the 1960s now hold the reins of power and influence — and we are starting to see why their values have worried almost everyone for nearly a half-century.

What are the baby boomers’ collective traits? Like all perpetual adolescents who suffer arrested development, we always want things both ways: Don’t drill or explore for more energy, but nevertheless demand ever more fuel from other suppliers.

Perhaps the greatest trademark of the 1960s cohort was self-congratulation. Baby boomers alone claimed to have brought about changes in civil rights, women’s liberation and environmental awareness — as if these were not prior concerns of earlier generations.

“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

(John 15:5)

The world does not understand this, and indeed, rebels against it and does its best to ridicule and exterminate those who would adopt this walk. (All too many Christians fail to grasp the concept as well.) A very common attempt at rebutting statements such as this is to call Christianity a crutch, and deny that any such crutch exists, or is needed. Alas for them, they fail to realize that if the broken leg is real, and the crutch is real, then they are twice the stupid fool for rejecting the crutch!

Thus it is that Charles Spurgeon notes more eloquently than I in his morning devotional for May 25^th based on Psalm 38:21 (“Forsake me not, O Lord.” Emphases added):

Frequently we pray that God would not forsake us in the hour of trial and temptation, but we too much forget that we have need to use this prayer at all times. There is no moment of our life, however holy, in which we can do without his constant upholding. Whether in light or in darkness, in communion or in temptation, we alike need the prayer, “Forsake me not, O Lord.” “Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.” A little child, while learning to walk, always needs the nurse’s aid. The ship left by the pilot drifts at once from her course. We cannot do without continued aid from above; let it then be your prayer to-day, “Forsake me not. Father, forsake not thy child, lest he fall by the hand of the enemy. Shepherd, forsake not thy lamb, lest he wander from the safety of the fold. Great Husbandman, forsake not thy plant, lest it wither and die. ‘Forsake me not, O Lord,’ now; and forsake me not at any moment of my life. Forsake me not in my joys, lest they absorb my heart. Forsake me not in my sorrows, lest I murmur against thee. Forsake me not in the day of my repentance, lest I lose the hope of pardon, and fall into despair; and forsake me not in the day of my strongest faith, lest faith degenerate into presumption. Forsake me not, for without thee I am weak, but with thee I am strong. Forsake me not, for my path is dangerous, and full of snares, and I cannot do without thy guidance. The hen forsakes not her brood, do thou then evermore cover me with thy feathers, and permit me under thy wings to find my refuge. ‘Be not far from me, O Lord, for trouble is near, for there is none to help.’ ‘Leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation!’”

Christian, may you and I have the intestinal fortitude to always acknowledge our need of Him who holds all things in His hand. Amen.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A study released on Wednesday reports a decline in fatal attacks of terrorism worldwide and says U.S. think-tank data showing sharp increases were distorted due to the inclusion of killings in Iraq.

“Even if the Iraq ‘terrorism’ data are included, there has still been a substantial decline in the global terrorism toll,” said the 2007 Human Security Brief, an annual report funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Britain.

For example, global terrorism fatalities declined by 40 percent between July and September 2007, driven by a 55 percent decline in the “terrorism” death toll in Iraq after the so-called surge of new U.S. troops and a cease-fire by the Shi’ite militant Mehdi Army, the brief said.

“We have concluded that the expert consensus (on terrorism) is probably misleading,” Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project, told a news conference.

MSM Ignores Poll: 62% of Voters Prefer Fewer Govt. Services with Lower Taxes