Vigorous criticism of President Bush in conservative circles stopped seeming heretical a long time ago. That Bush’s foreign policy has been disastrous is one of the ‘facts’ that many conservatives feel they must grudgingly grant to their liberal antagonists.

No doubt many conservatives came to this conclusion about Bush by independent reflection. But many others have probably succumbed to the natural desire to be within the pale by uncritically embracing received opinion. Edward Luttwak (a Cold War military strategist who took something of a political left turn after the collapse of the Soviet Union) thinks this received opinion happens to be demonstrably false.

Bush, he says, is like Truman: In the main his policies were extremely successful, a fact that his few conspicuous failures unfortunately obscured for some time. Perhaps Bush will have to wait for Iraq, like Korea, to be “half-forgotten” before his achievement in fighting terrorism gets the universal acknowledgment it deserves.

I am not competent to judge Luttwak’s argument, but it certainly seems worth the serious consideration of those who are.

Imagine: One day a police officer knocks on your door. Standing next to him is your son Johnny, who has a look on his face that tells you he’s either done something incredibly dumb and illegal, or he just ate an entire box of Moon Pies. You cross your arms and wait for the officer to tell you the bad news about your little troublemaker. But to your surprise, the officer tells you that little Johnny isn’t the only one in trouble here: “Sorry, ma’am, but we’re going to have to fine you for not preventing your son from making the wrong decisions.”

Scenarios like this will become reality next month when Los Angeles County starts prosecuting parents for their kids’ bad behavior–in this case graffiti:

Seeking to hit graffiti vandals and their parents in the pocketbook, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors today unanimously approved a measure that would allow authorities to hold taggers–and their parents–liable for civil damages.
. . .
The thinking behind the approach, said Supervisor Gloria Molina, who introduced the ordinance, is to shake up parents and guardians who are in denial about their children’s actions, unaware of them or simply don’t care. It is another tool to hold the adults accountable, she said.

Over at The Catholic Thing, Hadley Arkes reflects on the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, and the revelatory role of Senator Obama. When it comes to predicting the ethical tone of an Obama presidency, it shouldn’t be hard to play prophet:

The very point of the bill was to confer protection on the child when it was no longer in the womb, when the child could no longer encumber any “interests” of the mother. The bill sought to establish the point that even a child marked for abortion has, at some time, a claim to the protection of the law. And if that is the case, what was the difference between the child out of the womb and the child several minutes, several weeks, several months earlier?

The National Abortion Rights Action League saw at once the principle that lay at the heart of the bill, which is why they opposed it when it was introduced in July 2000. Barack Obama saw precisely what those activists saw. He voted against the Born-Alive Act, as he said, because he thought it would threaten, down the line, the right to abortion. But there lies the depth of his radicalism. For the sake of protecting that right to abortion, for any reason, he was willing to withdraw even the protection usually offered by the law for children born alive. The one exception would be: the children marked for abortion. For Obama, the right to abortion is nothing less than the right to an “effective abortion” or a dead child. For all of his nimbleness and his Ivy League bearing, that is the unlovely truth of his position; the truth that the media cannot quite grasp or report.

A friend of mine in the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod wrote to tell me about an episode of the radio program Issues Etc. that discussed Bernard of Clairvaux, whom the LCMS remembered on August 19. I was curious to find out what a LCMS scholar would have to say on a strong proponent of ascetic monasticism and the power of the papacy, so I tuned in.

What struck me were the remarks of the host in the beginning of the program: “Some of the greatest preachers we’ve had have been our hymn-writers.” He noted that the sermons preached through hymns are heard not only by one audience in one time, but by countless men and women throughout the ages. In this Bernard was no exception, authoring the hymns we know as “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “O Jesus, King Most Wonderful,” and the variously translated “Jesu, Dulcis Memoria.”

All of these are rich, beautiful, and focused clearly on the adoration of Christ. Which is exactly what liturgical music should be–a supplement to the order of service that lifts our minds to God instead of sinking them back into ourselves. The hymns aren’t complicated either. A second-year Latin student could easily translate all of “Jesu, Dulcis Memoria” without breaking a sweat. And they set the singer on the road to deeper contemplation of the themes they contain.

Simple, strong, and focused on God: not an easy set of criteria for hymns, but a lofty one. Hopefully the writers of the next generation will look to figures like Bernard as models for their craft.

(As an aside, here’s a lovely performance of Victoria’s setting of the first verse of “Jesu, Dulcis Memoria.” I love the way in which Victoria so often captures and distills the feeling behind the text being sung, in this case with the sweet love and deep desire in Bernard’s words.)

Have you ever read the Hippocratic Oath? (It’s a subject not too unfamiliar to the pages of First Things). But if you’ve read it: Which one? While I was sitting in the doctor’s office yesterday, I noticed the Oath on the wall and decided to give it a quick read.

It turns out that the version I was reading was the original one written by Hippocrates himself around the year 400 b.c. Most medical schools today, however, use a “modern” version written in 1964 by a doctor named Louis Lasagna. Interestingly, Dr. Lasagna took a few creative liberties in penning the new version, especially in the matters of life and death:

Original Version:

I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.

Modern Version:

Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

Two days ago, Amanda linked to Harvey Mansfield’s appreciative discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech. Mansfield endorses Solzhenitsyn’s claim that “Legalism is [the West's] substitute for virtue: You don’t have to distinguish good from evil and do good while avoiding evil; all you have to do is obey the law.”

Indeed, we can take that even further. Since a legalistic society finds it hard to account for any prima facie moral obligation even to obey the law, the rule of conduct eventually degenerates to “Obey such laws as are effectively enforced.”

A good example of this is Britain’s efforts to combat alcohol abuse among the young. So far their strategy has been to pass increasingly strict legislation. The result? Fewer young people think it worth the effort to try to drink, but those who do drink with greater abandon.

Time was that they frequented pubs under the supervision of older drinkers and bartenders, who could establish reasonable communal norms regulating their drinking. Now laws have replaced those norms . . . and the laws are disregarded.

Last night I was at a party full of ornery conservatives. At some point the conversation turned to the French, which allowed us to take a break from discursive thought and indulge in the ritual France-baiting that is practically an American bodily function. We finished on an appropriately resounding note, with most everyone agreeing that all the intellectual and political disasters of modernity could be traced back to France. Damn frogs, etc.

I’m fine with mocking France, of course, but to every thing there is a season. There is a time to bash France and a time to praise her very real charms and excellences. And praise is certainly due to any nation civilized and literary enough to erupt into a passionate (and only half ironic) controversy over a punctuation mark.

It seems the semicolon (le point-virgule) is on the wane in France, thanks mostly to the creeping Anglo-Saxon barbarism of shorter sentences. This raises the question: “Is the semicolon worth preservation?” Defenders call it elegant and subtle while opponents call it useless and effeminate.

How do you, Gentle Reader, feel about the semicolon? For my part, I have always appreciated its power to force two potentially alienated sentences to acknowledge their mutual dependence without wholly sacrificing their individuality. But still, Kurt Vonnegut’s indictment of the semicolon has a certain power:

If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.