When General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the troops in advance of the Normandy invasion, he demanded "Full victory--nothing less."  We fast forward to an America which is politically fractured, such that we can legitimately ask whether, in fact, we're all dedicated to victory, defined as stability in Iraq.  We might also wonder whether that noble sense of unflagging American resolve has dissipated, yet another casualty of the onslaught by the post-modern liberal sensibility, which is morosely preoccupied with blaming America for every global ill.  Call it imperialism redux.

We segue to our predicament in Iraq where the facts on the ground ought to be compelling evidence of the profound change that has recently evolved, but Democrats nationwide have clearly started with a conclusion and have meticulously selected obsolete data and information that has been forced through the mainstream media's bias filter to produce a prefabricated result that neatly comports with their political assumptions and goals.

For a balanced and rigorous analysis of the impact of President Bush's change in strategy, we turn to retired General Barry McCaffrey, now an adjunct professor of International Affairs at West Point.  The general doesn't pull punches and begins with a candid--which is to say somewhat gruesome--analysis of our core problems in Iraq, and it's a wrenching exercise to work your way through it.  However, he then moves to an itemized analysis of progress, in particular, how Gen. Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy is transforming the tactical calculus to our benefit.

He finishes with a review of what is needed, in terms of equipment and personnel, and emphasizes the importance of a "regional dialog led by the Iraqis with U.S. active participation."  That's the crucial diplomatic front which, as the general correctly states, may not bear any fruit in the near-term, but is a "prerequisite to U.S. military withdrawal."

Readers won't be surprised to learn that absent in his analysis is the ingeniously ill-advised notion of withdrawal time table.  Informing one's enemy of the length of time he must wait until the target country will be unguarded raises stupidity to the level of a virtue, but that apparently constitutes the full range of intelligence--all the way from A to B--that many Democrats are bringing to this issue.

Yesterday, the Colorado senate voted along party lines for a resolution to oppose President Bush's troop increase in Iraq.  The debate was punctuated with the predictable blend of blinkered liberal catchphrases, including references to Vietnam, allegations that U.S. troops are abetting violence, and that only by withdrawing will the chances for a peaceful end be possible.

Twenty-eight states have passed similar resolutions and the legislators in all of them seem to be singing from the same defeatist hymnal, with verses and refrains inartfully lifted from the 1960s.

That takes us to a timely and trenchant analysis by historian Arthur Herman in the April edition of Commentary Magazine, wherein he provides a compelling antidote to the bracing ignorance emanating from our brethren on the left.  Using the example of the French in Algeria in the 1950s, Mr. Herman dissects the defeatist attitude of the contemporary liberal sensibility by demonstrating that insurgencies are inherently unique among military conflicts.

He employs the template used by a virtually unknown French lieutenant colonial, David Galula, who led French troops in Algeria and subsequently wrote the blue print for counterinsurgency, Counterinsurgency Warfare:  Theory and Practice.  Drawing from Galula's thinking, Mr. Herman notes that this kind of warfare demands a special strategy, one that relies as much on local military personnel and, crucially, the power of political momentum at home, to convince the indiginous population--in this case the Iraqis--that victory is absolutely inevitable.  He also makes clear the current U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who wrote the Army's counterinsurgency manual, used Mr. Galula's work as a prototype.

The most critical variable in a counterinsurgency movement is the need for a durable political consensus, and Mr. Herman notes that for France, it was  Jean-Paul Sartre who played the role of homeland iconoclast which effectively undermined that consensus.  In America's Vietnam years we had Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, and now it's a veritable rogues gallery featuring Cindy Sheehan but also a legion of defeatists in the House and Senate, from Sens. Reid, Schumer, and Durbin to Reps. Pelosi and Murtha.

Whether they are laudatory or ignoble, all legacies are indelibly written into the fabric of a nation.  America certainly has its share of both, but we might ask whether ours is a Kafkaesque fate wherein we're obliged to forever rehearse the same script for failure. 

Prescriptive warfare is a contradiction in terms, yet that is precisely what the Democrats demand of this--and all--wars.  Unless it's the antiseptic bombing in the Balkans or a one-time missile strike--compliments of Mr. Clinton--the attention span that controls their patience is best measured in nanoseconds.  There is no human endeavor, from putting a man on the moon to winning a war, that can be achieved under those circumstances--and that, perhaps, is the subtext of their antiwar agenda.

Proving once again that a pattern of appeasement only strengthens a belligerent, Iran has illegally captured a group of British Royal Marines and has thus far ignored Prime Minister Tony Blair's demands for their release. 

We will examine two editorials that inadvertently demonstrate that the preconditions of Iran's action effectively proved to them that the threat of military action was nonexistent.  First, is Gerard Baker, of the Times of London, who uses the example of the 'Falklands war' (which might be a somewhat inflated characterization) to illustrate how Britain's approach to such crises has changed diametrically in the ensuing 25 years. 

Mr. Baker becomes somewhat lost in his convoluted argument about the cause of the Falklands crisis, Mrs. Thatcher's response, and the role of the U.S., but politics has a way of driving arguments off their course to satisfy a tangential point.

Readers may recall how PM Thatcher quickly responded to the Argentinian military action by asserting that their outrageous attack would not stand.  Contrast that with Mr. Blair's assertive but anemic response, which amounted to strong words without the benefit of clarified consequences for failure to comply.  That's because in the years since the Falklands the historically unquestioned efficacy of an unequivocal threat of military action has been supplanted by the emasculated 'soft diplomacy' that is guaranteed to elicit from the enemy a yawning indifference, jeers, or both.

Next we move to David Warren's piece in the Ottawa Citizen.  After an eloquent if rhetorically inconsequential foray in literary illusions a la Hamlet, Mr. Warren works diligently to convince us that the most prudent possible to Iran is inaction--yes, nothing.  Perhaps he's mired in Hamlet's own indecisiveness, but it's a hard sell that an inert response--isn't that tantamount to appeasement?--will leverage anything but boldness on the part of the Iranians.

His argument is that if we permit an illegal action to fester long enough the next stage will surely incite enough outrage among Western nations to muster some kind of response.  Evident in this kind of contorted logic, is a fervent infatuation with paralysis, which is the strategic equivalent of burying one's head in the sand.

Inaction, he is apparently saying, is safe because it neither antagonizes the enemy nor risks the possible failure of a tough response.  There is, of course, a time for contemplative restraint, which allows you to bring the full brunt of your forces to bear.  But this is clearly not one of them.  Indeed, when Mr. Blair issued the threat that the Iranians' failure to release the hostages will result in Britain entering "a different phase," we can only imagine, as Mr. Warren himself states, that the prime minister will only "yell louder."

Diplomacy also has its place, but in instances such as this it's like touching third base on the way to home plate--you have do it but you know you have no intention of stopping.  Middle East diplomacy is a functional oxymoron because the notion of a good faith interlocutor is nonexistent in that benighted region where the vast majority of people live in autocratic regimes.

So, the only action that would produce the intended response--the threat of military action--is the one we have selected for obsolescence, and the Iranians know it.

 Pete du Pont, the former Republican governor of Delaware, is a reliable voice of constructive criticism, in particular, the kind that stands sufficiently far away from the canvass of events to afford us needed perspective.  His editorial in today's Wall Street Journal usefully illustrates the glaring dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats on the key issues of our day.

Mr. du Pont focuses on five central policy issues which will likely form the core of the 2008 presidential debate:  The war against radical Islam, the economy, trade, energy, and "global warming."  We might add health care to that list because the allure of a universal system--that is to say, a lethargic bureaucracy at the helm--is probably too much to resist.

We'll let you absorb his arguments which highlight the way in which the Democratic Party is listing further left on a glide-path that will wittingly or otherwise take them into waters not entered since the benighted 60s, and that is our topic for today.

The motivation to provide stark policy distinctions is a trustworthy proxy for the degree of political desperation for the party in power.  The more the apparent distance they seek between themselves and their opponents the greater their desperation.  At some point--and we can argue whether it's in the offing or the rear view mirror--the elasticity of their arguments reaches a revealing threshold and begins to lose traction, at which point it's obvious to even the casual observer that their platform is ripe for becoming the subject of late-night comedy.

If expressed with conviction and charisma, new ideas can become a politically electrifying phenomenon, but when ideas are trotted out, dusted off, still smelling of moth balls, even the most convincing orator has no chance of attracting attention.

So it is with the Democratic Party which is working feverishly to convince us that retreat is actually a responsible and strategically viable option in Iraq, that President Bush's tax cuts, which have led to optimal growth and productivity and over 7 million new jobs, should be eliminated, that protectionism is a prudent way to handle global competition, that developing new oil and gas reserves to reduce foreign dependence makes no sense, and that Draconian, Kyoto-like responses to unsettled science is in America's best interest.

Examining that list of retreaded ideas, a high school student can pick out the medley of motifs that one way or another informs them all:  Strategic myopia, trust in government as opposed to private enterprise, a stunningly naive love of bureaucracy, and a brazen willingness to use half-baked science to achieve a political goal that has heretofore been out of reach.

What is truly disturbing is that the Democrats' nostrums are resonating to the degree they are, although that may reflect an understandable disdain with Republicans.  Indeed, the party of smaller government, a robust military, and historically staunch defender of all things conservative, has wandered into a political desert of its own design.

The irony is that although the Democrats are providing the most target rich political profile in decades, the Republicans seem inclined to keep their six guns holstered.  For nominal conservatives that is as vexing a scene to witness as it is infuriating. 

The Democrats' poltical platform is a deftly crafted edifice of threadbare ideas predicated on a faithfully nursed illusion, whose underlying tenet is that policies derived from a fundamental misinterpretation of human nature and motivation can be sufficiently re-engineered to produce long-lasting, positive results. 

Perhaps, as we approach a large-scale political immolation, a few key Republicans will take action against this sea of troubles.  We can only pray it won't be too late.

Religious schisms typically occur when the moral fault lines become so conspicuously burdensome that a prospective breach is seen as worth the pain in light of the long-term vision of a renewal of fundamental precepts.  As reported in today's Gazette, here in Colorado Springs, the leaders of one of the state's largest Episcopal churches voted to break with the denomination over an irreconcilable ideological divide.

Following the lead of many other Episcopal churches in America, Grace Church and St. Stephen's Parish has renounced the liberal trajectory that the U.S. Episcopal Church has taken and joined the Convocation of Anglicans of North America, which ascribes to traditional beliefs, in particular in the area of human sexuality.

Noteworthy in Gazette's article are assertions by liberal church leaders that homosexuals are welcome because "they live lives of great faithfulness and holiness."  However, when our chosen behavior contravenes the core principles and guiding moral precepts that inform our religion the presence or absence of holiness is not at issue.

We have observed that in our contemporary culture, compared with assault or wanton neglect, exercising one's judgment in a rational way is tantamount to felonious behavior, because to do so inevitably creates a hierarchical scale, and that confers an inferior status to some people, cultures, or religions.

Political differences are usually resolved--or at least addressed--in elections, and although there are elements of the democratic process in religious organizations, they differ fundamentally in character by their adherence to an inviolable set of moral principles.  That translates into a body governed not by a civic plebiscite but by authority--another word that send shivers down the collective spine of liberals.

Moving deeper into the core of this issue, we are obliged to confront the central premise:  That is, whether it's the U.S. Constitution, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or the core beliefs of the Episcopalian Church, do we believe these principles are timeless or should they be susceptible to the vagaries of cultural influences?

Arguments that support such an approach typically argue that human knowledge is always expanding, as is our scientific understanding and technological advancements; therefore, the application of moral and ethical standards must evolve in concert with those changes. 

In that regard, we hear liberals argue that our Founding Fathers could not have envisioned the machine gun and so they could not have had that in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment.  Although adult stem cell research is far more promising, the left argues that embryonic stem cell research should be pursued and that a loving God would not what us to halt that inquiry because it may help those with degenerative diseases.

The list is as endless as it is subject to abuse, and therein lies the problem.  To wit, the adroit application of arguments founded in a relativistic interpretation of moral absolutes is guaranteed to produce moral anarchy because, in the process, the unambiguous authority that is obtained by adherence to principle rapidly fragments, and exceptions--which are Hydra-like in their genesis--become the rule. 

A corollary argument in this vein is that at the moment of its inception Protestantism itself created the moral genetics for its own incremental degeneration.  When the human intellect, which is so often at the mercy of its moral imagination, is unmoored from a core set of beliefs, the results are as myriad and disconcerting as the universe itself.  So it is that there is a Protestant religion for every flavor of human understanding, and, not unlike biological evolution, they are incessantly being created and are dying based on the fluctuations of human caprice.

That secondary argument aside, we whole heartedly support this development among the conservative Episcopal faithful because fractures lead to realignments and renewed energy, which is to say, a return to the basics.  As such, although the process will be painful, the results will be a reinvigorated Episcopalian Church, confident that it stands on the kind of principle that has withstood the test of time.

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, which is the beginning of Jesus in His human nature.  If the virginity of Mary before, during and after the conception of her divine son was always considered part of the deposit of faith, this was done only on account of the historical facts and testimonials.

The Incarnation of the Son of God did not in itself necessitate this exception from the laws of nature.  Only reasons of expedience are given for it, chiefly the end of the Incarnation.  Many holy fathers, including Sts. Jerome, Cyril, Ephrem, and Augustine, say that the consent of Mary was essential to the redemption.

The Annunciation is a mystery that belongs to the temporal rather than to the sanctoral cycle in the Church's calendar, for the feast commemorates the most sublime moment in the history of time, the moment when the Second Divine Person of the Holy Trinity assumed human nature in the womb of Mary.

It was the will of God, as St. Thomas wrote in his seminal work the Summa Theologica (III:  30), that the redemption of mankind should depend upon the consent of the Virgin Mary.  This does not mean that God in His plans was bound by the will of a creature, and that man would not have been redeemed if Mary had not consented.  It only means that the consent of Mary was forseen from all eternity, and therefore was received as essential to the design of God.

Courage, it has been observed, is a virtue.  However, society's definition of courage is inherently fluid, evolving as it must with cultural influences and the degree to which  people instinctively rise to or shrink from the challenges that trigger it.  As C.S. Lewis wrote:

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Although there are notable exceptions, most of us will live out our lives without ever having our mortality tested in ways that threaten our very existence.  That's not an oblique criticism but, more accurately, a testimony of how far our civilization has taken us in terms of a system that allows us a quality of life unprecedented in recorded history. 

Indeed, our most daunting challenges, especially for men, typically surround our chosen avocation, with some being more demanding than others.  More specifically, it is nearly impossible to replicate the kind of protracted courage and sacrifice required to subsist in an agrarian setting in the prior century of your choice, and the further back you go the stronger the argument that, in the well-rehearsed words of Thomas Hobbes, life was "nasty, short, and brutish." 

Today, the individual who blogs at The Colorado Index provided readers with a poignant and evocative insight into his family's farming history, one where the modern conveniences we take for granted were nonexistent. 

It's illustrative because as we achieve technological advances that arguably make our lives easier, the historical threshold that defined hard work, sacrifice, and the point at which we are prone to complain about our lot, is progressively shortened. 

That is to say, while modern challenges revolve around completing a project at work on schedule, our forebears were more concerned repairing a leaking roof or the fate of a sick child--which often meant the very real possibility of death--or, more broadly, the haunting speculation of whether one's children would enjoy a better life, or at least one not hobbled with the grinding demands of ensuring that food was on the table each evening.

This line of reasoning inevitably leads us to the intersection of courage and self-discipline, and it's a prosaic observation that the latter is yet another virtue that in modern times has been deemed expendable.  It's curious, because the ease with which we incrementally depreciate those formerly hallowed values and principles moves in a linear fashion with our sense that life is unfair or our nascent frustration at not finding the secret of short-circuiting the rigors of the workaday world, to, in effect, achieve instant gratification.

In truth, the relative proximity of gratification at any given moment has no bearing whatsoever on our happiness, unless one defines that exclusively on the degree to which we have satisfied our primordial human desires, which is to say those with the shortest spiritual half-life.

As we move through the decades of our lives, and in particular when the revelation looms that there is more sand in the bottom than the top of our mortal hourglass, and with a measure of grace and humility, some of these realities--which were latent in prior decades, if they existed at all--move to the forefront of our thinking. 

At that point, we begin measuring our lives and our contributions less in terms reducible to economic production than the quality and tenor of how well we advanced those timeless values and principles, as well as the character of our daily interactions with others.

For readers familiar with one of the central arguments in Mark Steyn's America Alone, there was a certain inevitability in the recent story of a judge in Germany who allowed  Islamic law and the Koran to supersede German law.  That led her to decline to prosecute a man who was charged with assaulting his wife.

Besides the obvious gloss that the lens of multiculturalism has finally become so clouded by the cataract known as liberalism, Muslim organizations expressed their disapproval by arguing that the judge's unthoughtful interpretation of the Koran was a major setback to forward thinking Muslims who wish to relegate archaic interpretations to the dustbin of history.

Not unlike Christianity, which has evolved with the times and meticulously reinterpreted many scriptural passages in light of advancement of civil liberties, Muslims on the cutting edge of the movement to disabuse the world that theirs is a religion of hatred and violence should be taken seriously.  The judge's actions, the product of the left's insipid insistence that we scrupulously adhere to a code that views all religions and cultures as equals, foreshadows the slow but, we can only pray, steady demise of the modern liberal sensibility.

Were Shakespeare writing today, he might be inclined to pen a social comedy that featured a retooling of his famous line from Hamlet:  "To judge or not to judge, that is the question," because therein lies the core of the left's seamlessly stupid ban on criticizing cultures and religions whose beliefs are fundamentally hostile to the civic advancements of Western civilization.

Indeed, it's as though in the course of one brief generation nearly every heretofore unquestioned societal construct--unquestioned because they have been so thoroughly tested over centuries in our cultural crucible--has been tarnished, dismissed, or outright abrogated.

The result is that the Western world is fumbling along the path of life sans the civic guideposts and prefabricated cultural contours that lighted the way for numerous generations.  However, the judge in Germany may have inadvertently provided just enough cultural kindling to spark a revelation in the collective conscience of our liberal brethren worldwide, demonstrating that there are obvious and irrefutable differences in the world's cultures and systems of government. 

In particular that Western civilization, whose flaws and foibles are many, is yet the best guarantor of individual freedoms and the rule of law, and that succumbing to the temptation to bring a forced parity to all cultures does a profound disservice to the cause of civic progress by obtusely supporting the ill-informed supposition that the theocracies of the Middle East are on a par with the advanced nations of the West. 

It also abets the already pronounced tendency of those in the West to look to itself and, most crucially, to America, as the source of ill in the world, when the exact opposite is true.

An argument encouraging Democrats to support a strong anti-war posture for Iraq is gathering momentum among the intellectual elite, and Peter Beinart, writing in Time is its most most notable proponent.

He supports his argument with references to the post-Vietnam years, stating that "Despite today's conventional wisdom, the Democrats didn't pay a price in the 1970s for opposing Vietnam."  He cites the Democrats' victory in 1974 midterm elections, but has to retreat when he references Richard Nixon's landslide victory in 1972, but counters that he ran on a "peace platform."

The problem with these superficial arguments is that given their inherent brevity they are obliged to polemically cherry pick pieces of the past that neatly fit with the current argument.  It may be true that the Democrats didn't suffer in specific elections, but can we in good conscience forget what happened in Cambodia with the Kymer Rouge after our departure?  A million souls who were slaughtered should provide a strong moral argument to the contrary.

Mr. Beirnart then moves on to pre-emptively acquit Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pilosi, asserting that although they're against the war in Iraq, they are not against the "war on terror," indicating that they're lobbying for an increase in funds for Afghanistan.  But the left's support for that war is not a cogent litmus test for their support for the war against radical Islam, and the fact that Beinart uses the euphemized "war on terror" instead of the more accurate--if politically incorrect--war against "radical Islam," credibly makes that case.

Indeed, when it comes to the real war--the one at home where decisions such as the NSA electronic surveillance program inconveniently intersect with the left's mythically naive preoccupation with civil liberties, Reid and Piloso head for the political tall grass.  Further, the contemporary Democratic Party has a weak center because its left flank is incessantly pummeling it for its reticence to end the war by cutting off funds.

No, the lessons of Vietnam for the left were and remain poorly learned and the fact that intellectually deft but politically atonal acolytes of defeatism such as Beinart frame their arguments in electoral rather than military terms proves the point.

To wit, if the Democratic leadership truly supports the war against the radical Islamists--or "terrorists"--how can they look the American people in the eye and say that telegraphing a departure date to our enemy in Iraq will do anything but embolden them?  That leaving before security is achieved won't create a power vacuum into which al-Qaeda and its sundry savages will descend, creating an Islamic extremist redoubt in the Middle East?

Because we're facing an asymmetrical enemy there is no single front on the war against this menace, but Iraq is clearly the current center stage.  Further, reading Thomas P.M. Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map, one is struck with the grim reality that we are obliged to view any nation with a weak system of government as susceptible to the ravages of these ideological extremists. 

That is to say, Iraq is but Exhibit A in a long line of nations that these radicals intend to insidiously infiltrate and dominate by exploiting their own internal weaknesses.  So, unless we prevail in our current war it will only provide the momentum they so desperately crave to extend their global reach.

Therefore, when the likes of Peter Beinart argues that the Democrats push to exit Iraq on a strict timetable actually buttresses their case that they are adamant supporters in the war against the radical Islamists, those who subscribe to traditional notions of logic should be scratching their heads.

That the regulatory reflex is alive and well on the editorial page of the Denver Post has never been seriously called into question.  Our cultural high priests in perpetual search of earthly nirvana have once again weighed in on the merits of eliminating the smoking ban exemption for Colorado's casinos, which went into effect last year.

A cursory analysis of their argument might inadvertently lead one to believe that central issue is one of the degree of intrusiveness of government in the lives of private property owners.  So hopelessly lost are these crusaders for a sanitized world in the labyrinth of liberalism that the quaint convention known as the Constitution is never provided an even gratuitous consideration.

A bill banning smoking in all 44 Colorado casinos was thrown a curve by Aurora Democrat, Sen. Bob Hagedorn, who submitted an amendment that prevents a ban on casinos as long as smoking is allowed in cigar bars and at Denver International Airport (DIA).  The bill's original form was intended to repeal the casino exemption, but Mr. Hagedorn's amendment was an oblique attempt to have all exemptions repealed and it has thrown the entire bill's future into doubt.  As such, it's a prototypical example of the excesses of liberalism's reach causing unintended consequences, and a reminder that even some Democrats understand the limits of government intervention.

The ever-vigilant editors at the Post can always be counted on to champion the rights of all humans save those such as property owners or the innocent unborn who can't speak for themselves.  Those constituencies are the expendable political detritus whose voices, in the case of the former, are discounted, and the latter, are silenced before they can speak.

However, the Constitutional considerations aside--because, again, for the left, they are of no consequence--the Statist Post seems to forget that employees at casinos as well as their guests do enjoy the freedom to work at and patronize those establishments--or not, as they see fit. 

Indeed, they return to the sacrosanct desire to reduce health care costs as a justification, and therein lies the early edge of a long and dangerous slippery slope:  To wit, with the likes of New York City banning trans fatty acids and the so-called green organizations using their muscle to force Starbucks to eliminate them in their breakfast foods, it won't be long before our liberal health Nazis begin taxing or regulating these businesses into extinction.

Ignored in their march towards a fully regulated society is the tectonic diminution of individual freedoms and the oppressive weight of an ever expanding tax burden.  But, freedom for the left is a right whose very existence is predicated on political considerations, because when their goal is deemed politically worthy, the byproduct in terms of the abridgment of individual rights is, in their perverse view of our Republic's founding principles, not at issue.

As we wrote on March 14th, it didn't take Colorado Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter long to find a creative and politically astute way to increase taxes. But, as the editorial in today's Gazette observes, Mr. Ritter and band of fellow taxaholics may have launched this initiative prematurely.

As is often the case with Democrats, who burn the midnight oil devising ways to ensure that tax increases are politically encrypted, this one featured freezing property taxes and denying tax payers the accrued reductions under Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights (TABOR).  That, through anything but the prism of liberalism, is a tax increase, but their gleefulness at crafting a plan to indirectly lighten the wallets of hardworking Coloradoans clouded their judgment. 

That has led the governor's legal staff and Attorney General John Suthers to take a hard look at whether the measure passes constitutional muster.  TABOR has explicit provisions that mandate voter approval for any concessions granted to the government concerning the retention of tax revenues.

We'll let the lawyers perform their due diligence, but we can't resist the temptation to highlight the craven way in which the governor and his Democratic allies at the capital came to their newly found majority status with their revenue feed bags securely tied around their necks.

That the measure would benefit our educational bureaucracy--itself a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party--is yet another example of the left's political blind spot, but one that has not to date leveraged any restraint on their passion for solidifying their iron grip on our education system.

What is particularly disturbing for those who understand the virtues of a smaller footprint for government is the Democrats' unflattering instinct to reflexively feed the established bureaucratic machinery, be it in education, welfare, or unions. 

Indeed, the awarding of taxpayer funds is a heady and intoxicating experience for politicians because it temporarily satiates their voracious appetites for power and confirms their misguided conviction that their primary role as elected officials is to redistribute wealth.

Our Founding Fathers, of course, had a rather different vision, one that has been so thoroughly abused as to be all but unrecognizable by our contemporary politicians and many citizens as well.

Remarkably, here in Colorado Springs, which is home to Ft. Carson, two air force bases, and the Air Force Academy, the pacifists are much in evidence.  As recently report in the Gazette, a small cabal of aging 60s anti-war types protested by crashing the St. Patrick's Day parade, an annual, family-focused day that is deliberately apolitical.

However, as we are all aware, the rules of engagement for so-called activists such as these are written in a language that can only be parsed by reference to their self-serving, self-referential world where logic is proscribed.  Therefore, families hoping to enjoy some semblance of an innocuous holiday celebration were faced with anti-war signs, protesters calling the police "Nazis," and then subsequently complaining when they were arrested for not dispersing.

The main editorial in today's Gazette argued that although the police might have been more sensitive--our word, not theirs--they acquitted them of any wrongdoing and, crucially, clarifyed that peaceful expressions of protest are welcome in here but not when they're disruptive and impinge upon the rights of others.

But, beyond these somewhat obvious civil rights observations, we would be remiss not to highlight the central fallacy of these pacifists or anti-war activists, which, a cursory glance at any century in history makes plain for all but these intellectual untouchables.  To wit, it is most often the case that any given period of peace in history was the product of a prior military action against aggressors or belligerents.

Further, those whom the left showcases as agents of peace, be they this anonymous clutch in Colorado Springs or nationally lionized shills such as Cindy Sheehan, are the very pinnacle of intellectual cowards because they use the very freedoms of expression that were purchased with the blood of warriors who demonstrated real courage and have a truly profound understanding of the fragility of those values. 

There is simply no evidence whatsoever that responding to an adversary bent upon our destruction by arguing for "peace" has ever produced anything other than dilatory tactics that ultimately increased the death toll of a subsequent military intervention.

Indeed, the intellectually tepid thinking that informs the core of anti-war activists truly strains the imagination and is especially irritating because they tend to be people who are innately disinclined to defend any values, save those of surrender.

To seal the stupidity of their arguments, if our nation is again the target of a successful large-scale attack--which is almost an inevitability--they will continue to peddle their recycled arguments for perpetuating disaster by asserting that our defensive or pre-emptive efforts have done nothing but antagonize the Islamist radicals. 

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth, but since our media is a reliable and uncritical transmitter of these myths, they will achieve a credibility wholly undeserved.

With Western civilization in the cultural cross-hairs of the liberal elite, Andrew Roberts' new book, History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, may be the perfect antidote.  An essay by Michael Barone wends its way through modern history, highlighting the historical evidence that it is the English-speaking nations that have contributed most to the cause of freedom.

Readers for whom that book's title is familiar know that Sir Winston Churchill wrote a seminal four-volume history of the English-speaking peoples to 1900.  It's a long slog working one's way through it, but it provides one of the most comprehensive arguments that the framework for the most advanced and resilient civilizations, which, as Mr. Barone notes, includes the inception and development of "common law, guarantees of freedom, representative government, independent courts," are the unique product of the English-speaking nations.

We might begin to parse the conundrum of why it is so fashionable to loathe America by reflecting on the fact that the teaching of history--not the modern university notion, which is hopelessly entangled with the post-modern liberal reflex to excoriate all things traditional--is a lost art.  Indeed, college students these days are far more apt to be versed in the well-rehearsed anti-Americanisms that form the leftist play-book than about the influence of English Common Law on our Constitution.

Mr. Barone touches on this at the end of his essay, albeit only symptomatically, when he quotes Senator Joseph Lieberman:

There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism.

To begin to understand this perversion of thought we must control for the left's abhorrence of the Bush Administration, and, moving downstream, the remarkable fidelity the mainstream media brings to rendering it in their newspapers and on the evening news.  Indeed, if one deconstructed putatively analytical news stories, be they about Iraq, the minimum wage, or abortion, one would find a consistent political bias that begins with conclusions and works its way backward.

Interwoven into this patchwork of adroit obfuscation is the modern sensibility, born out of the 60s, that is so reticent to exercise the military option as to render it useless.  Against that backdrop the notion of pre-emptive military action causes apoplexy. 

What seems to be at the core of this inbred historical ignorance and concomitant collective diffidence is a studied preoccupation with the idea of equivalence, whether it's moral, civic, or cultural.  That results in an abiding prohibition against any assertion of superiority of thought, system of governance, or civic values.

Once that has taken root, which it clearly has, we have effectively created a generation most comfortable in an intellectually tension-free zone, whose most prominent feature is a keen analytical deficit whose only context is the sway of contemporary passions.

In light of this gloss we should not be surprised that many Americans believe our nation is not the force for good that it once was.  The truth, of course, is the exact opposite, but the cultural undertow against which it must wage incessant war, is simply too powerful at this time to prevail.

There was a time when higher education, in particular in the liberal arts, reflected the broad and rich legacy of thought passed down through the generations by philosophers, writers, and artists. 

When our parents' generation attended college we were told they studied the pre-Socratics, read Cicero, studied Roman art and architecture, and worked their way up through the centuries, including Beowulf into Shakespeare, the Renaissance and modern art.  There was a free exchange of ideas and the rigors of classroom debate and the erudite research papers required reflected the dedication to the pursuit of knowledge inherent in man's timeless search for understanding.

In stark contrast, and as David Horowitz has articulately argued in his book, Indoctrination U, the past three decades have witnessed the closing of the academic mind, a locus where the pretense of diversity is as superficial as the fleeting nature of fashion and where true ideological diversity is anathema.

In a Book CSPAN program today that originally aired last fall, Mr. Horowitz squared off against Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors.  The script could have been pre-written, with Mr. Nelson--who presents as a quintessential humanities professor--appearing mystified by the charges of classroom inflexibility and narrowness of inquisition. 

Indeed, his response to an audience member's assertion that students often feel intimidated into mutely accepting the professor's preordained conclusions, elicited his response that the student in question was charging the entire system with corruption, something, he demurred, he had never witnessed in his four decades of teaching.

The conspicuous lack of nuance in Mr. Nelson's thinking was only matched by his utter lack of insight.  The truth is far more subtle in that it's not a matter of overt collusion on the part of professors across the academic world, but rather that a tacit and smug set of post-modern polities enjoy the same level of self-evidence as our consensual understanding of mechanical engineering.  That, in fact, so confident are they in the intellectually seamless nature of their shared conclusions, that, to paraphrase a well-known British assertion from another time, "the sun never sets on post-modern liberalism."

Therefore, when a student, whether it's one who is merely challenging assumptions or is wont to question conclusions, raises fundamental counterarguments, it's the rough equivalent of the heresy that led hundreds of Christians to the stake or gallows.  There is, without question, an almost sacrosanct prohibition against questioning the most untouchable tenants of modern liberalism as well as the curious blueprint that underlies its intellectually arrogant assumptions.

Fortunately, we are now witnessing a kind of rebellion, led by the likes of intellectual pioneers such as Mr. Horowitz, and many parents of conservative children who learn about the Inquisition-like atmosphere of many college classrooms, have become instant activists to the cause.  In time we can only pray that true intellectual diversity supplants the ersatz model currently entrenched, that is nothing more than a faithful simulacrum of the modern liberal sensibility, because then we can be nominally assured that our children are being exposed to the great ideas and theories that formed our rich Western legacy of thought. 

Part of that process can and ought to be an in-depth questioning of the foundational thought that informs the basis of that edifice, but it would be a sign of real progress if the process didn't begin with the assumption that the entire legacy is nothing more than a matter of quaint convention based on an oppressive, patriarchal societal construct bent on nothing more than its own perpetuation.

There seems to be a generational inhibition to confronting reality which is most clearly manifested in the fact that nearly half the nation appears to be comfortable with denying that we're at war--not just in Iraq, but with the radical Islamists. 

Kathleen Parker sets the stage for the argument that political correctness, coupled with many politicians' parochial attempts to expand their market share, and against the backdrop of the mainstream media which studiously filters the news so that it comports with their transparent bias, has blinded us to the real enemy in our midst.

That the left has created the most fecund environment for radical Islamists to take root is unequivocal.  As Ms. Parker notes:

...peacefully, and without much notice, Islamists are trying to use our laws of tolerance against us to carve out exceptions for themselves.  The radical Islamist faction that has infiltrated and intimated Europe has found a home in our polite denial.

The politeness to which she refers is best characterized by the firmly established ban against criticizing or singling out the apparently radical Islamists.  In contrast, criticizing Christians, charging them with hypocrisy, gleefully pointing out their moral foibles, is respectable blood sport among the liberal elites.

Further, from our prohibition against profiling, to the left's disdain of the NSA electronic surveillance program, with a political determination rarely seen in America, we've managed to disarm ourselves and welcome with open arms these barbarians.

That stated, Ms. Parker also informs us of a newly formed group that includes Princeton's Bernard Lewis, our nations pre-eminent Islamic scholar, who recently addressed members of Congress on the danger he is convinced is looming largely on our horizon.

Yet, her editorial, while reassuring, doesn't accurately reflect the depths of our self-imposed moratorium on clear thinking, nor does it fully appreciate how acutely invested the left is in its incandescent hatred of President Bush.  Their blinkered view of Iraq and nascent, but abiding preoccupation with 2008 has led them to attack the president at every turn and to exhibit a willingness to compromise national security for political expedience.

Simply stated, there is no evidence that anything short of another cataclysmic attack on our soil would realign the skewed motivations of the Democratic Party.  It's as though the Reids, Schumers, Bidens, and Pelosis of the world speak and read a different language, one that fundamentally mistranslates the events of the past three decades, in particular since 9/11.

We might characterize the difference between contemporary conservatives and liberals as follows:  The former meet in the 'war room' to discuss how to prevail against this enemy; the latter meets in a 'process resolution room' to evaluate how best to deny the enemy's existence.