Summer
Thoughts
August 19, 1999
Let me
see if I have this straight: I can’t be trusted with a pistol,
but Bill Clinton can be trusted with a nuclear arsenal.
***
The Constitution says I have the right to
keep and bear arms; but then, the same Constitution says Congress, not the
president, must declare war, and nobody takes that clause seriously
either.
***
Discretionary bombing has become a
presidential prerogative. There’s no penalty for it, even if the
president bombs the wrong target. Yet our alleged enemies are always
called “dictators” and “strongmen.”
***
When I saw the pictures of earthquake-
ravaged Turkish cities, I nearly forgot that Turkey is a member of NATO. It
looked more like a country that had somehow offended NATO.
***
George W. Bush, when pressed about
whether he has ever used illegal drugs, should offer to release a urine
sample for medical examination if Clinton will do likewise.
***
![[Breaker quote: On gun
control, George W., Boy Scouts, and the historial Jesus]](breakers/990819.gif)
***
Bush’s free use of the Bad Word
(formerly the Really Bad Word) in a recent magazine profile suggests a
boy who is trying to be jauntily “naughty.” He seems to have
inherited some of his father’s goofiness. Remember those pork
rinds? Sometimes the elder Bush seemed to be under the influence of
controlled substances.
***
The $90,000 fine imposed on Clinton for
lying under oath to an Arkansas court should remind us that a legal
acquittal in an impeachment trial is entirely different from an
exoneration of his character. After all, he was acquitted by his moral
peers. Yet media coverage of him now is so respectful that you’d
think he’d been proved innocent.
***
Liberals are applauding, not protesting,
recent court rulings in Illinois and New Jersey finding the Boy Scouts in
violation of the law for excluding active homosexuals. That guardian of
our freedoms, the American Civil Liberties Union, is fighting against the
Scouts.
***
Liberals are also denouncing the Kansas
state board of education’s decision to make the teaching of
Darwinism optional. But at the high-school level, kids can’t judge
scientific questions for themselves; they have to accept whatever
they’re taught on faith, whether the authority is Darwin or Genesis.
Most liberals don’t know beans about science; they merely prefer
Darwinism to the burden of obeying God.
***
If Darwinism is true, may we hope that
liberals will someday evolve into a higher life form? (Not necessarily in
our lifetime, of course.)
***
A friend of mine asks: “How did
birds’ wings ‘evolve’? They would have been worse
than useless — they’d have been actual impediments to survival
—
until they were fully developed.”
***
Every attempt to find the
“historical Jesus” produces a bland, well-meaning chap who
somehow agrees with the modern liberal on all the issues of our own time,
from capitalism to gay rights. Quite a feat for a first-century Jew, living
before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Playboy Philosophy.
Nothing, in fact, is more ahistorical than the “historical
Jesus.”
Joseph Sobran
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