David Harsanyi isn't on Team Jesus - more like Team Heretic - but he's not happy with the ACLU. Here's a taste:
Last week, a group of Democrats in Congress tried to pass a measure condemning the Air Force Academy for allowing religious proselytizing at the school before the report [on religious discrimination] was released.
In response, an Indiana Republican injected a bit of high drama, contending that "like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians."
Now, describing all Democrats as anti-Christian is about as intelligent as calling all Republicans white Christians.
Yet there are some groups, like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union, with the help of some Democrats in Congress, that denigrate and undercut religious freedom at every turn.
And if these congressmen were genuinely interested in condemning even the "perception" of religious intolerance or "perceived" bias, they could start in their own backyards.
Last week, for instance, a mock impeachment hearing regarding President Bush (nothing wrong with fantasizing) run by the dependably outlandish Congressman John Conyers featured a bunch of Father Coughlin types like Virginia's Jim Moran.
The meeting was replete with malicious anti-Semitism.
No condemnation.
Bill Roggio at Winds of Change writes:
The brutal acts of violence directed at civilians and Iraqi police is losing favor among some of the members of the Iraqi insurgency. During Operation Matador, we saw examples of the local tribes, some of whom are sympathetic or even participating in the insurgency, rise up to fight the foreign jihadis after their attempts to impose a Taliban-like rule of law in Western Anbar. Today’s New York Times reports further cases of ‘red-on-red’, AKA the enemy fighting amongst themselves.
I could do with a bit more red-on-red action over there.
Mug tip to Instapundit.
Apropos of an earlier post, here's something on the lack of American history knowledge in America:
Ann Applebaum visited the Smithsonian:
Just about the only thing that the Museum of American History does not do, in fact, is teach anyone American history. That is, it doesn't tell the whole American story, or even chunks of the American story, in chronological order, from Washington to Adams to Jefferson, or from Roosevelt to Truman to Eisenhower. When the museum was built in 1964, this sort of thing probably wasn't necessary. But judging from a group of teenagers whom I recently heard lapse into silence when asked if they could identify Lewis and Clark, I suspect it's now very necessary indeed.
Opinion polls bear out my suspicions. According to one poll, more U.S. teenagers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government. Even fewer can state the first three words of the Constitution. A San Francisco reporter once did an informal survey of teenagers watching Fourth of July fireworks in a park and found that only half could name the country from which the United States had won its independence. ("Japan or something, China," said one seventh-grader. "Somewhere out there on the other side of the world.") We're not talking about ignorance of semi-obscure facts here: We're talking about ignorance of basic information.
And more:
David Gelernter in the LA Times also:
My son told me about a high school event that (at first) I didn't understand. A girl in his English class praised the Vietnam War-era draft dodgers: "If I'd lived at that time and been drafted," she said, "I would've gone to Canada too."
I thought she was merely endorsing the anti-war position. But my son set me straight. This student actually believed that if she had lived at the time, she might have been drafted. She didn't understand that conscription in the United States has always applied to males only. How could she have known? Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth. They teach history as if males and females have always played equal roles. They are propaganda machines.
Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot — an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died from 1918 through 1956 in the prisons and labor camps of the Soviet gulag. Historian Robert Conquest gives some facts. A prisoner at the Kholodnaya Gora prison had to stuff his ears with bread before sleeping on account of the shrieks of women being interrogated. At the Kolyma in Siberia, inmates labored through 12-hour days in cheap canvas shoes, on almost no food, in temperatures that could go to minus-58. At one camp, 1,300 of 3,000 inmates died in one year.
Mug tip to Instapundit.
And that concludes our round-up this evening. Please tune in for further plagiarism reporting at your local AGIP affiliate. Er, or something.
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