Vulcan's Mercy

THE CHRISTIAN FIFTH COLUMN

I learned that Leonard Peikoff, the director of the Ayn Rand Institute and the enforcer of orthodoxy among the fractious Objectivist progeny of novelist Ayn Rand, issued a fatwa denouncing all those who either vote for the Republicans or sit out the election next week instead of voting for the Democrats.  Apparently Peikoff is more fearful of the theocracy that Christians want to impose upon America through the Republicans than the socialist multicultural environmentally-pure utopia that the secular progressives want through the Democrats.  It looks like many Objectivists are following the call.  But not all.  Linz Perigo, proprietor of SOLO Passion, thinks Peikoff and his supporters on this issue (Diana Hsieh in particular), are batty for any number of reasons -- the biggest of which is that the threat of a Christian theocracy engulfing America is nonsense.

Well, not so fast.  I thought I had better clue Linz in as to the takeover we subversive Christians have been plotting.  So I posted this revelation about our secret meeting at SOLO Passion ...

Linz threw down the gauntlet to Peikoff and the gang: “Demonstrate that a Christian theocracy is indeed imminent, bar toppling the Republicans now.”

Sorry, Linz. You know I think you’re a swell guy in the war against the Mohammedans and all that, but Peikoff and Diana have got it right. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you what we Christians have in store for America. In fact, I just got back from a Theocracy Now! planning session. I’m the Vatican representative. (Well, the truth is that I’m subbing for John Kerry, who had to go out on a black op earlier this week to subvert the Democrats.)

Anyway, we’ve been busy hammering out what the new regime will be like. We’ve agreed that all the atheists will have to go to re-education camps, although we aren't certain if that should include the Episcopalians. The Baptists also wanted to send the homosexuals to the camps, but I said, “Whoa! There’s no way we Catholics are going to agree to locking up half of our priests.” Then they got pissy about wine at mass and said grape juice will have to do. The Calvinists stepped in and argued, “Let the papists have their liquor. They’re all predestined to Hell anyway.”

Now everything was about to come to blows, when a Quaker rushed in to stop us crying, “Give peace a chance.”  So, we all beat the hell out of him instead. Boy, we really did a number on him, and we told the Christian Scientist to take the Quaker to the hospital. But he refused because he would have no truck with modern medicine. Well, you can guess where that led us. A long wonky debate on a properly theocratic health care policy. For example, do you cover a snake-handling Pentecostalist when he gets bitten? Yeah, and everybody thinks theocracy is a snap.

So, we’ve got a few bugs to work out yet, Linz. But, believe me, we’re coming!

Regards, Bill

KERRY'S REMARK IS CONTEMPTIBLE, BUT ...

... enough with the demands that he apologize for insulting the troops in Iraq.

On Monday, Sen. John Kerry delivered an address to students at Pasadena City College in California.  He was doing the usual Democratic shtick of demonizing Bush for the war in Iraq.  Then, during the course of his speech, he told the students, "You know, education -- if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.  If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Clearly Kerry insulted as fools and idiots those young Americans who have chosen to man the wall in defense of our country than spend four or five years getting drunk at college.  Since Monday, instead of coming clean on his insult, Kerry did the usual politician's jig of confessing to everything but the real reason for his gaffe.  Presently the senator from Massachusetts is claiming that it was a mangled joke at Bush's expense.  Yeah, right.

If words mean anything -- and they do -- Kerry's meaning was plain:  Only losers end up enlisting in the armed forces.  It's a condescending opinion of our volunteer soldiers, sailors, and airmen that was fostered during the Vietnam War and became conventional wisdom for a long while with the end of the draft three decades ago.  I know it well, having encountered it personally on numerous occasions when I said to hell with college and volunteered for the Air Force in 1980.  The best decision I ever made (after, of course, marrying the beautiful Bridget).

Plus we can take into account Kerry's history of high profile slanders of U.S. troops, starting in 1971 when he returned from his combat tour in Vietnam and accused his comrades of being murderers and villains at a congressional hearing and, until Monday's "joke", ending last year with his slur that our soldiers in Iraq are terrorizing innocent civilians.  Kerry apparently cannot comprehend why anyone would volunteer to serve in the armed forces, except to fill in a blank on a political resume as he did, if he or she had any other option in life.  But then Kerry is a most uncharitable man and so probably doesn't grasp that it is the virtue of charity (along with a healthy lust for adventure) that motivates many of our best young men and women to join the military.

So, as I said, Kerry's remark is contemptible.  But the demands that he apologize are getting sanctimonious.  After all, only those he insulted, specifically the troops in Iraq, have standing to call upon him to apologize -- and I don't hear that call coming from them.  If our fighting men in Iraq have anything like the attitude that I and my fellow cold warriors had in the '80s for the fashionably leftist disdain for servicemen, I suspect they couldn't care less what a washed-up weasel of a pol in the twilight of his career has to say about them.  They've got better things to do than complain about insults.

And so do those politicians and pundits demanding an apology from Kerry.  It's not theirs to ask for.  By all means criticize, even eviscerate, the man for his blueblood contempt of the regular Joes who volunteer for the armed forces.  Of course, show that his statement about the intelligence of our troops is false.  Make the case that Kerry is saying what too many liberal politicians think about the military and so we cannot trust them with political power.  But don't play our fighting men, who have chosen to risk life and limb in foreign lands to safeguard our freedom here at home, for victims by arguing that they need an apology.  It's the flip side of the same coin Kerry minted when he reduced our troops to victims of the military.  If our warriors want an apology, let them call for it.  But I doubt they will.  They've got better things to do.