Why Today Is 1979, Not 1995
This column by ACRU General Counsel Peter Ferrara appeared January 26 on The American Spectator website.
In 1979, of course, Jimmy Carter was the incumbent President, and no sophisticated, intelligent person in Washington thought Ronald Reagan had a serious chance of beating him. The RNC was convinced Reagan would be another Goldwater, and its entire focus was to deny him the 1980 nomination. You know what happened.
In 1995, President Clinton had just suffered a shocking, historic defeat in the midterms, with the Republicans taking both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. At first, he seemed to be on the same trajectory as Carter. But he pivoted to embrace the policies of the new Republican Congress, while still managing to play off them to hold his Democrat party base. The Republicans nominated the clueless Bob Dole in 1996, and you know what happened.
Hence the question, is today 1979, or 1995? You can’t answer that question by looking at where we are today. You have to look at the underlying trends to gauge where we are going to be in the fall of 2012.
Obama and the “Constitutional” House of Horrors
This column by ACRU Senior Legal Analyst Jan LaRue appeared January 24 on Townhall.com.
January 22nd was the 38th anniversary of the mother of all absurd Supreme Court rulings, Roe. v. Wade. Unsurprisingly, America’s most pro-abortion President even chose to celebrate Roe in a public statement while ignoring the atrocities uncovered in a Philadelphia abortion clinic a few days earlier.
The Philadelphia clinic isn’t one of those illegal “back-alley” clinics the pro-abortion crowd howls about whenever they’re trying to defeat a reasonable regulation of abortion. No. This “squalid” hell-hole was operated by a licensed medical doctor.
Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the owner, is charged with eight counts of murder of seven infants and a woman who died after a “late-term abortion.” The clinic hadn’t been inspected in more than 16 years despite the fact that Gosnell “had been sued at least 15 times for malpractice,” and “[t]wo women died while under his care,” according to Sabrina Tavernise writing for The New York Times.
When Science Goes Mad
This column by ACRU Senior Fellow Robert Knight was published January 21 on The Washington Times website.
On any given day, scientists jolt us with new findings – and possibilities.
The white coats in China are busily creating chimeras, the offspring of humans mated with animals (via Petri dish) in order to develop vaccines. With cloning and genetic engineering upon us, the question of whether something should be done is fast being eclipsed by what can be done. But we must keep asking the first question as if our lives depend on it.
In 1943, in “The Abolition of Man,” C.S. Lewis warned that not all scientific advances are benign because human beings are not benign:
Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
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