God bless the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady. She’s a defender of liberty. Her March 1^st column, “Viva Zapata,” urges us to remember the Cuban human rights champion, Orlando Zapata. This humble stone mason died in a military prison in Havana last week. Zapata was only 42. He had gone on an 84-day hunger strike to protest Fidel Castro’s inhuman treatment of thousands of prisoners of conscience in Cuba, one of the last of the Stalinist regimes in the world.

I say “one of the last” in a spirit of hope. Surely China is a Stalinist regime. So is North Korea. What does it mean to call Castro’s island prison a Stalinist regime?

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin died on this day in 1953. Then, Fidel Castro was already planning an invasion of his homeland. The bearded revolutionary had not yet brought down his iron fist on Cuba, the “pearl of the Antilles.” Orlando Zapata had not even been born yet. Nor had any of today’s tyrants in Beijing or Pyongyang.

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President Obama was surrounded by doctors and nurses in white coats for the second time this week. Yesterday, he was on national television, pumping for his health care plan. But before that video performance, he was at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. He went there for his first physical as President.

I sure have to hand it to him: He’s practicing what he’s preaching. Bethesda is government health care. I should know: my life was saved there by a top-notch Navy doctor in 1985. I had been stricken with viral meningitis, an often fatal illness.

My heart went out to the President when the report on his physical exam came back. He is having a hard time quitting smoking. This is a hard addiction to shake. I quit in 1977. Cold turkey. Haven’t had a cigarette since. Or a cigar. Or a pipe. (I found through many attempts to quit that going to a cigar or pipe just whetted the appetite and sent me right back to cigarettes.)

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This is not, I hope, a trivial pursuit. We have now lost the meaning of “March Forth!” But from 1793 to 1937, Americans recognized the pun–and the date. March 4th was not so much a military order as it was Americans’ Inauguration Day. That’s why all those Presidents, from George Washington’s second term to FDR’s second, were inaugurated on that day.

The long delay between Election Day–by tradition, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November–and Inauguration Day on March 4th was originally intended to permit an orderly transfer of government. Recall that the Founders’ plan was for Presidential Electors to be chosen on Election Day. They would then have to have several weeks to assemble in their respective state capitols. Electors still do this, in obedience to the Constitution. It could take weeks in those days for Electors to travel from the mountains of (Western) Virginia to Richmond or for those near Buffalo, New York, to make their way to Albany. Once the Electors had cast their ballots, it would take more weeks to carry those sealed ballots to the nation’s capital. New York was the first capital (1789-90), followed in a year by Philadelphia (1790-1800), and only after ten years by Washington, D.C. (1800-present).

Once received in the capital, it would be the duty of the Vice President of the United States to open the envelopes and read the results to the Congress. A few times in our history, this responsibility would fall upon a man who actually lost the recently concluded Presidential campaign. These included John C. Breckenridge in 1861, who lost to Abraham Lincoln (and who later became a Confederate Brigadier General), Richard Nixon in 1961, who lost to John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey in 1969, who lost to Nixon, and Albert Gore, who lost to George W. Bush in 2001.

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The ACLU is at it again. This time, they are demanding an apology from a Montgomery County, Maryland, public school teacher. Behind this demand is, as always with this federally-funded outfit, the bludgeon-like threat of a huge lawsuit.

What was the teacher’s offense? Apparently, the teacher threatened a student with detention if she refused—as she repeatedly did—to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher sent the student to the counselor’s office for her refusal to stand.

The ACLU immediately invoked the Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). That case is often cited as a hallmark of American civil liberties, especially remarkable because it was handed down while the United States was engaged in a world war to defend democracy.

But the Court in 1943 said that students cannot be required to salute the flag or recite the Pledge. That was quite right.

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The New York Times Magazine is at it again. They’ve just published a long article asking “How Christian were the Founders?” Their short answer: Not very. My response would be: Very.

Let’s start with George Washington. Washington was termed by biographer James Thomas Flexner “the gentlest of Christendom’s captains.”

Flexner was referring of course to Washington’s deeds, not his inner faith. Still, try to imagine this situation: Your army has been driven out of New York by the British and their Hessian mercenaries. These German-speaking foes regularly refused to give “quarter” to young American soldiers who threw down their weapons and surrendered.

Instead, they cruelly ran our boys through with their 17-inch bayonets. These same Hessians chased your army across New Jersey. Once, they captured one of your army chaplains, a Presbyterian. The Presbyterians were especially hated by the British for fomenting revolution from their pulpits. The Hessians stripped the unfortunate cleric and stabbed him thirteen times, leaving his naked body in the road. They then proceeded to rape their way across New Jersey. When, on Christmas Night, you defeat these same Hessians and take eight hundred of them prisoner, wouldn’t that be a time to exact revenge? If only to show your enemy that their cruelties would not go unanswered?

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When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to China last year, she chose to remain silent about human rights abuses by the world’s remaining Communist giant. Apparently more worried about not curtailing China’s financial services to the US, Mrs. Clinton and her boss in the White House sent a clear signal: The Obama Administration would give China a “bye” on religious and political persecution.

The hint was not lost on the Chinese leaders, who on February 8, 2009 arrested Gao Zhisheng.  He has been imprisoned, and unheard from, ever since.

Gao Zhisheng was once a darling of the Chinese Communists. A distinguished lawyer, he had a bright future ahead of him. He was named in 2001 as one of China’s sharpest legal talents. But Gao made a bad career move: He spoke out in defense of persecuted Christians in China.

That was enough to arouse Beijing’s party cadres against him. What made matters worse for Gao was the attention his extraordinary moral courage garnered for him in the West.  The New York Times even gave his story front-page coverage in 2005.

Last year, he was seized by authorities and is undergoing horrible torture, if he is even still alive. The New Yorker Magazine, to its great credit, has published stories by their Beijing correspondent, Evan Osnos, on Gao Zhisheng. Osnos related the stories coming out on Gao’s treament by the brutal guo bao, China’s euphemistically titled “Public Security Bureau.”  George Orwell’s “ministry of truth” couldn’t have said it better.  Here is part of what Osnos has written:

(One) account not only accused his captors of holding burning cigarettes to his eyes, beating and starving him, and applying electric shocks to his genitals, but it also revealed their warning that he would die if he told anyone about the ordeal. …It is time for the court of world opinion to insist: “Show us the prisoner and justify his detention.”

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President Obama’s powerful words at today’s National Prayer Breakfast were rightly examined by my dear colleague, Cathy Ruse. How can the same man who wants to force us to pay for the slaughter of innocents seem so convincing? He is surely right to say we must see the face of God in our fellow human beings. We must. Does he?

Abraham Lincoln said it well in 1858. He said the Founders believed that “nothing stamped in the divine image was sent into the world to be trod upon.” Our question to President Obama, with all due respect, is: Are not unborn children so stamped? Can we not see the face of God in their faces?

Lincoln condemned no one in his Second Inaugural, but he said it must seem strange for anyone to ask the help of a just God in wringing his bread from the sweat of another man’s brow. Then the President quoted Scripture: Let us not judge lest we be judged. So we must not judge.

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Last year, it was as if we had all been inundated by the great Wave. Barack Obama as candidate said he felt “a righteous wind” at his back. For many of us, though, his support–so broad, so overpowering, so irresistible–was a force of nature.

That great Wave threatened to sweep all before it. The work of decades would be undone. The people had spoken. For many in this democratic republic, the voice of the people is the voice of God. To say no to anything President Obama wanted was to risk being called an obstructionist, a blinkered reactionary, or worse, a racist, a terrorist.

Mr. Obama took the advice of those who specialize in doing things the smart way. If you’re going to do something many of the people might not like, do it fast, do it early, and give them time to forget about it.

It’s the same cynical advice these smart types gave to John Edwards. Wait until an earthquake happens in Haiti, or a revolution occurs in Massachusetts, before you admit paternity, before you stop your relentless lying. And then hope nobody notices. The roar of the Wave might mask whatever you say.

So, President Obama very quickly cast down the Mexico City Doctrine of Ronald Reagan. That policy was duly reaffirmed by both Presidents Bush. Who cares about this stuff, anyway? Wingers? Thumpers? People who are, in the dismissive words of the Washington Post, “poor, uneducated, easy to command?”

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Most of us recall the story of Joan of Arc, the young French maid who donned male armor and battled the English to save her country during the Hundred Years’ War. Another famous story from that war involves the Burghers of Calais. This coastal town was abandoned by the French Army in 1347 and faced annihilation by vengeful English troops under King Edward III. Six of the town’s merchants—or burghers (from which we get the word bourgeoisie) offered their own lives as a ransom, if only the King would spare the town his wrath.

The King agreed to take these men’s lives and spare the city. He fully intended to hang them, as a terrible example to other towns who resisted his might. But the King’s young wife, Queen Phillippa, fearing for their unborn child, begged the King to spare the Burghers’ lives. The King relented.

The Burghers of Calais were memorialized in a famous group of statues by the great 19^th century French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. We have a copy of the statues in Washington at the Hirschhorn Museum.

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My good friend Tom McClusky had the wit and the heart to remind us all of Ronald Reagan’s speech on the occasion of the Challenger disaster in 1986. Tom circulated the video clip of Reagan speaking to the nation that very night.

The morning had been clear and cold–in Washington as it was in Florida. I was working at the U.S. Department of Education then. We were all watching on TV as the rocket launched the Space Shuttle into the skies over Cape Kennedy. We were more interested in this flight than in many shuttle flights because a teacher was on board. In fact, we had seen Krista McAuliffe and her fellow astronauts in the elevators of F.O.B. 6–our department’s office building. That’s because NASA occupied the top three floors of our building.

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OK. I’ll admit it. I skipped the President’s State of the Union Address last night. It’s not the first time I’ve done that. Since I have to be up before five to get to the pool on time, I decided not to lose sleep over Barack Obama. And, with the wonders of technology, I knew I could get it all online. Which I did, over a strong cup of morning coffee.

I managed to see Justice Alito mouthing the words—simply not true when the President totally mischaracterized the Supreme Court’s latest ruling on free speech and campaign finance. Alito was so right. His silent dissent thundered through the House Chamber. If this President is going to make a charade of the State of the Union, there are obviously others skilled at the game of charades, too. How proud I am that I worked to get him confirmed.

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That day—22 January 1973–was a day very much like today, cold, gray, threatening. I was walking around the House Office Buildings, hunting for a job. The previous November, I had been defeated for the State Assembly in New York. I hadn’t wanted to campaign on abortion one way or the other, but I couldn’t avoid it. After anguishing over my decision for weeks, I came out strongly anti-abortion. Immediately, the $25,000 promised to my struggling campaign—a huge sum in those days—was withheld by the New York State Democratic Party. Although I never met him, I was told that Harold Ickes, Jr. had made the decision. “We’re not going to have anyone in the Democratic Party who is anti-abortion,” he was quoted as saying. With that, I lost the race that was said to be a sure thing.

Job-hunting for an anti-abortion Democrat wasn’t easy then. It’s not easy now. Then, in the midst of my search came the thunderous news—the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the abortion laws of all fifty states.

Broke, unemployed, I could not have been more dejected. With the Court’s radical ruling, I thought it would be this way forever. In my experience, no one—at least no one who was not a segregationist—had spoken out against a ruling of the Supreme Court. We had been schooled to believe that the Supreme Court had the final word.

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Is the unborn child a human life? President Reagan used to say if you were in doubt whether a body you found on the sidewalk was dead or alive, you would never just assume it was dead.

President Obama, by contrast, famously answered Rev. Rick Warren’s question about when the unborn child begins to have human and civil rights by saying “that question is above my pay grade.” But Mr. Obama’s policies all assume the body on the sidewalk is dead.

There’s yet another thing you will never learn reading the papers about Roe. Just where were those abortion laws of the fifty states that were struck down by the Supreme Court that dread day? They were not in the family law codes. Nor in the child custody codes. Not in the medical licensing statutes.

The abortion laws of the fifty states were typically found in the “Homicide” sections.

No state made abortion a homicide in the first degree (“pre-meditated murder,” to most of

us lay people.) This may have been due to wise 19^th century state lawmakers who did not want to prosecute women. And it may have taken account of the difficulty of obtaining convictions where the evidence of the unborn child’s body was hard to find.

Still, that these laws were homicide laws tells you volumes. Some of our younger pro-life friends believe that the Court could not have known about the humanity of the unborn child in 1973. Not so. Yes, we know so very much more now. Yes, we have 4D ultra-sound that we did not have then.

But they knew in 1973. Everyone knew. I recall sitting in the Catholic hospital where my mother worked in the late 1960s. Across from me in the waiting room was an expectant  Filipino woman. She could hardly speak English, but she wore a tee shirt with an arrow pointing down at her tummy. The tee shirt said: “Baby.” Everyone knew what that meant.

The state lawmakers knew as early as 1857, when science discovered that human life begins at conception. And every accurate scientific and medical textbook since has acknowledged this inescapable but, to politicians like Al Gore, inconvenient truth:
“The chromosomes of the oocyte and sperm are…respectively enclosed within female and male pronuclei. These pronuclei fuse with each other to produce the single, diploid, 2N nucleus of the fertilized zygote. This moment of zygote formation may be taken as the beginning or zero time point of embryonic development.”
[Larsen, William J. Human Embryology. 2nd edition. New York: Churchill Livingstone, 1997, p. 17]

President Obama: I have the honor to present to you the human oocyte and sperm. And they didn’t even have to crash your White House dinner. I was introduced to them in high school biology. Sir, I wanted you to meet them.

Since the public has been deliberately misled about Roe v. Wade, it will be necessary to educate people about it. That’s why, when confronted with insistent media questions on “overturning” Roe v. Wade, I hope the pro-life community will resolutely respond:

Roe overturned all fifty state laws that protected unborn children and their mothers. Roe needs to be corrected.

“Overturn” is what happens to SUVs in a ditch. “Overturn” is radical and dangerous. The American people are inherently conservative and reflexively reject that which is radical and dangerous. Liberal activists and journalists know this. That’s why they always frame every question about abortion—or at least the ones they lob at pro-life candidates—in terms of “overturning” Roe.

They know what they are doing. Shouldn’t we?

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The Gallup Company created quite a stir last spring when they announced that, for the first time, a majority (51%) of Americans consider themselves pro-life. We would think, therefore, that a majority would also favor “overturning” Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that gave us abortion-on-demand. Not necessarily.

First, we must remember that the American people have been misled by the major news media about Roe v. Wade since that dark and dreary day 36 years ago.

The media regularly call Roe a “landmark decision.” Landmark is a good thing. It connotes something historic and of great weight. You never hear the infamous 1857  Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery in the territories called “landmark.”

Almost never will a story about Roe include the critique of Yale Law School Dean, John Hart Ely. Prof. Ely, although he favored liberalizing our abortion laws, was unimpressed by the legal reasoning behind Justice Harry Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade ruling: “It is not constitutional law and it gives no impression of an obligation to be constitutional law.” According to Bob Woodruff’s behind-the-scenes book on the Supreme Court, the Justices’ clerks were even more dismissive, calling the opinion “Harry’s abortion.”

Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was a friend of the Kennedy family. He, too, was not impressed with the land that Roe was marking:

[Blackmun’s opinion] fails even to consider what I would suppose to be the most important compelling interest of the State in prohibiting abortion: the interest in maintaining that respect for the paramount sanctity of human life which has always been at the centre of Western civilization, not merely by guarding life itself, however defined, but by safeguarding the penumbra, whether at the beginning, through some overwhelming disability of mind or body, or at death.

Continuing to blast Roe, Cox wrote:

The failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations, whose validity is good enough this week but will be destroyed with new statistics upon the medical risks of child-birth and abortion or new advances in providing for the separate existence of a fetus. . . . Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.

President Kennedy’s appointee to the Supreme Court, Justice Byron R. “Whizzer” White was one of two votes against Roe on January 22, 1973, and faithfully ever after. Justice White condemned the ruling as an example of “raw judicial power.”

But the media, in their worshipful treatment of Roe, rarely include such comments. Nor do they remind Americans that Roe was so radical it overturned the abortion laws of all fifty states. Even the most liberal state laws on abortion—like those of New York, Washington, California, and Colorado—were overturned by Roe’s yet more radical rule.

Further, the media regularly report that the Supreme Court “legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.” That’s true, but misleading.

Yes, the Court made abortion legal in the first trimester (three months), but it also so strictly limited the protections a state might afford to unborn children after the first trimester as to effectively give us abortion-on-demand until birth. (And, in some horrific cases, even after birth.)

Describing Roe this way is like describing Hitler’s blitzkrieg in Western Europe like this:

“German forces today overran Belgium and Luxemburg.” Surely they did. But they also simultaneously invaded France!

In practice, Roe legalized abortion in all three trimesters. This makes U.S. abortion law more radical than any other advanced democracy.

So the public has been consistently misinformed about the radical nature of Roe v. Wade.

But it is also misinformed about the reasons given for most abortions. Well over 90% of abortions are done today–and have been done since 1973 for reasons that the American people do not support–reasons of financial hardship or emotional distress.

Liberal Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, who retired earlier this year, famously wrote that the three reasons for abortion are “rape, incest, and me.” She was candidly admitting that pro-abortion groups use the horrors of rape and incest to conceal their true agenda: abortion-on-demand.

The numbers of abortions are typically reported in decimal form—1.2 million. Cynical Communist dictator Joe Stalin said it: “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” He should know. By not reporting the annual deaths from abortion as 1,200,000, or the total since Roe was issued as 49,000,000, the press collaborates in minimizing the impact.

By way of comparison, America’s Civil War claimed the lives of 630,000 young men, World War II cost us 424,000. Is there any other way to assess the gravity of a war? The worst riots? The worst flood? The worst earthquake? They’re judged by the numbers of human lives they take.

(continued in Part II)

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He’s probably the world’s funniest vegan. Fred Grandy is known to millions of Americans as “Gopher” from the hit 70s comedy series, The Love Boat. The Harvard-educated Grandy is the former four-term Republican Congressman from Iowa. He narrowly lost the GOP nomination for Governor in 1994 and went on to serve ably as president of Goodwill Industries. Since 2003, he had had a better platform to reach workers in the nation’s capital as co-host of the drive-time Grandy and Andy [Parks] Morning Show on radio station WMAL. I’ll confess that when I should be listening to books-on-disk, I often give an ear to Fred Grandy’s offbeat humor and generally smart conservative chatter. He’s not reflexively right wing. Few Iowans are. But, in addition to some side-splitting jokes, he brings some Midwest common sense to a capital badly in need of somebody’s common sense.

That’s why it matters when a good man like Fred Grandy launches into a shtick that includes this: “Oh, the Founders, they thought black people were just three-fifths of a person.” Maybe Fred was joking. Maybe he was pulling everyone’s leg. But it didn’t sound like it.

Political theorists can get pretty heavy duty. Which is why morning drive time includes very few of them as talk show hosts. Bill Bennett is one of the few who can pull it off successfully. But political theorists talk about “ideological hegemony.” That means you get the other guy–your opponent–to think in categories that you’ve determined in advance. Another phrase would be “setting the terms of the debate.”

If even conservatives seriously think that the Founders were so racist as to deny the full humanity of black people, then, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Grandy’s “three-fifths” crack echoes Al Gore’s infamous rants during the 2000 campaign. Gore demagogically whipped up crowds in Pennsylvania saying that those who favored “original intent” in constitutional interpretation wanted to deprive black people of their civil rights. They thought you were only three-fifths of a person, Gore suggested.

The Founders thought no such thing. The much-misunderstood Three-Fifths Compromise was just that, a compromise. Northern, anti-slavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention would have preferred not to count slaves at all for purposes of representation in Congress. This would have penalized slaveholding states and given them lesser influence in the House of Representatives. Just as important, it would have penalized them in the Electoral College that chooses our Presidents. Delegates from slaveholding states would have preferred to count slaves fully for purposes of representation, but they didn’t want to be taxed fully for slaves.

So the Founders compromised. It’s important to point out that such a compromise also existed in the Articles of Confederation, prior to the Constitution, when all taxation was by state.

A little-noted feature of the Three-Fifths Compromise is that it gave a reward–an electoral bump, if you will–to all states that emancipated their slaves. Free the black people of your state, and you get to count them fully for Congress. Then, American you can increase your numbers in the House and in the Electoral College.

Seven of the original Thirteen States got that reward. Tragically, six of the original thirteen failed to free their slaves. And other slaveholding states were later admitted to the Union.

The Founders were anti-slavery. They took pains never to use the words “slave,” “Negro,” “African,” etc, in the great charter of freedom they gave us.

Abraham Lincoln’s Midwest common sense exceeded even that of Fred Grandy. Lincoln said the Founders hid away in the Constitution the fact that we had slavery, just as a man who has a tumor or wen or other defect tries to hide it from view. Frederick Douglass hailed the Founders’ Constitution and said not of word of it would have to be changed if the states would only agree to free their slaves. They were both right.

Why does any of this matter today? Because President Barack Obama is using the tragedy of American slavery in 1787 as a pretext for casting aspersions on the Founders’ great work. Why should we listen to the authors of the Constitution? They allowed slavery to exist. They thought black people were only three-fifths of a person. So goes the liberal take on the Constitution.

It wasn’t true then. It’s not true now. Lincoln knew that if the Founders had tried to ban slavery outright in 1787, the liberty-promoting Constitution would never have been adopted. But the principles of the Declaration of Independence as embodied in the Constitution were, Lincoln said, like “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Lincoln used the words of Scripture to speak of his awe and reverence for the Founders’ work. Should we have less?

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I remember when NBC would annually air the Christmas special Amahl and the Night Visitors. It was ages ago, but my parents loved the Hallmark Hall of Fame. This beautiful story of faith and hope was the first opera ever composed especially for the new medium of television. We watched those Christmas specials every year when I was growing up.

Half a century later, I sat next to Amal—the first man I ever met to bear that name. Amal  is one of the “Lost Boys of the Sudan.” And Amal’s visitors were not Wise Men searching for the Christ child that they might worship Him. My friend Amal gave his testimony to my Men’s Bible Study last Saturday. Amal’s visitors came by day. And they sought to kill eight-year old Amal and all his fellow village boys who were tending their cattle herds in rural Sudan.

The day visitors were soldiers of the National Islamic Front (NIF), the cruel jihadist government of Sudan. Amal had never heard the sound of a rifle before. The first time he ever heard a shot from an AK-47, it was pointed at him.

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Theologian Al Mohler has written a provocative column on the move to grant personhood to whales and dolphins. Federal law already protects marine mammals. I had the honor of serving in the U.S. Coast Guard where, among our other duties, we boarded foreign fishing trawlers to make sure none of them was taking these magnificent creatures in violation of our Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Anyone who has been dolphins body-surfing along the bow of a cruise ship or, in my case, the mighty Coast Guard Cutter Boutwell, has felt a thrill. It’s impossible even to see these wonderful animals and not share in the joy they seem to feel.

Rev. Mohler quotes the London Times about these cetaceans:

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This week marks the 21^st anniversary of President Reagan’s Farewell Address to the Nation. It’s especially appropriate to recall it today, for the wisdom he shared, for the good feeling he evoked. There are many parts to the address I could recommend. I especially liked the part where he warned about a loss of national memory. He wanted Americans to remember their history. “If we forget what we did, we will forget who we are.”

One part of that January 11, 1989 address jumps out at us—or should. That decade began with great tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Reagan was heavily criticized. Liberals feared he would get us into a war. They feared World War III. They didn’t want him to take tough action against the Soviets and their aggression. They nearly wilted when he called the Soviet Union “an evil empire.” Yet, at the end of the decade, the Cold War was over. The tensions had eased. And everyone breathed a great sigh of relief. President Reagan had a warning here too:

We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust. My view is that President Gorbachev is different from previous Soviet leaders. I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we’ll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one.

What it all boils down to is this. I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don’t, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It’s still trust but verify. It’s still play, but cut the cards. It’s still watch closely. And don’t be afraid to see what you see.

Don’t be afraid to see what you see. How many times have we recently heard people from the current administration referring to Abdulmutallab as the “suspect,” or the “accused.” They say he “allegedly” tried to bomb the incoming Northwest Flight 253 on its final approach to Detroit.

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For those of us who have to read the Washington Post, it can often be a trial. We are used to having our political, economic, social, and foreign policy principles trashed on a daily basis. We know that the Post considers us “poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” Our hometown paper regards us Christians as, at best, interlopers here. One of the prime examples I cite was the cartoon done by the late Herblock. He depicted anti-abortion demonstrators as decidedly déclassé. The woman bearing a placard looked mean-spirited and frowsy. But at least she was a woman. The man in the cartoon wore a ragged black frock coat, a broad-brimmed hat, and nasty little granny glasses perched on his long and disapproving nose. Here was the best part: in the pocket of down-at-the-heels preacher was a snake. Oh my. How very tolerant the tolerance troopers are.

For sheer leer and sneer, however, you’d be hard-pressed to top the Post’s TV critic, Tom Shales. Shales has made a career of looking down his nose at just about everything that we cherish. They are the beliefs of tens of millions of us from outside-the-Beltway (and tens of thousands inside-the-Beltway, too)  Shales came down like the big ball in Times Square this new year on Brit Hume.

The former FOX News anchor, now a senior commentator, had the temerity to recommend to Tiger Woods that he get right with Jesus. Oh, the humanity! Oh, the horror! Shales thought Hume was “dissing” all the Buddhists in the world by stating Christianity offered forgiveness and redemption that exceeded that of other faiths. And he said it—gasp—on camera.

Okay, Mr. Shales. Let’s talk about Christian forgiveness. I’d like to take you to the Lincoln Memorial. There, the words of the majestic Second Inaugural are inscribed on the wall. President Lincoln offered this thought about the slavery issue that had convulsed the country through four long years of civil war: “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.”

Where do you think that “judge not” phrase came from? Was it a saying of Buddha? Or Mohammed? Or might it possibly have been found in Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 1, and offered by You Know Who?

Frederick Douglass was the first black man ever invited to an inaugural reception at the White House. Unlike today, where the uninvited get in, guards tried to keep President Lincoln’s guest out. When the President saw Douglass after he had climbed through the window, he hailed him. “There’s my friend Douglass.” He motioned for the champion of black Emancipation to come to the head of the line. He asked for Douglass’ opinion of the Address. “Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred effort.”

What? Sacred efforts undertaken on the Capitol steps? Wasn’t Lincoln attempting to shove religion down Americans’ throats? If Tom Shales had been there to report on that scene, would he have carped: “He doesn’t really have the authority, does he, unless one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize?” Was Lincoln trying to—shudder—proselytize?

How else could Ulysses S. Grant treat Robert E. Lee and his ragged rebel hosts with such tenderness, such dignity, at Appomattox? What else could explain Lincoln’s policy of “letting `em up easy” than an understanding of forgiveness and redemption—as taught in the Christian Scriptures?

I am not saying Lincoln and Grant were evangelists. Or born-again Christians. But at their best they lived and acted in a world formed by biblical ideals. They were—as millions of Americans then and now—shaped by scriptural truths.

If Brit Hume had gone to Thailand and there told a TV audience that Buddhism was inadequate, there might be room for protest. If he had confronted the Dalai Lama and urged him to give it all up, there might be room for Shales’ haughty harrumphs. But Brit was reaching out in a most tender-hearted way to a man whom he admired greatly—whom we all admired greatly. Brit was offering Tiger Woods balm in Gilead. You can enter the Kingdom of Heaven with that—and even pass through airport security.

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While the U.S. is drawing down forces in Iraq and building up, by some 30,000, our troops in Afghanistan, thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guard are returning to the homeland. Thanks to Operation Welcome Home Maryland, those who come into Baltimore-Washington International airport will not come home alone.

They’ll be greeted by dozens of people from the local community, many of them former service members themselves. Some of these older veterans can tell sad stories of returning from Vietnam to a cold and sullen airport arrival. No more. Operation Welcome Home is determined to give our all-volunteer servicemen and women the homecoming they deserve.

Incoming flights are posted on the organization’s website—www.operationwelcomehomemd.org.  Greeters are invited to bring “goodie bags” of food, water, and other favors from home. When the uniformed service members come through those arrival gates, many are stunned to see the reception committee yelling, cheering, applauding, and playing “I’m proud to be an American” on iPods. To be hugged by total strangers is an unusual experience, to say the least.

But they are not total strangers. They cannot be total strangers. For those who have worn the uniform, no one in the military will ever again be a total stranger. Perhaps watching the made-for-TV series, Band of Brothers, can explain that all-too-bloodless term “unit cohesion.” It might better be called the Bond of Brothers.

The most shocking thing about Fort Hood is that an obvious traitor in our midst was allowed–for reasons of political correctness–to move freely among our troops. Someone at the highest levels should pay with his stars for allowing such a hostile environment to exist.

Our best young soldiers and sailors today say without hesitation “I’d take a bullet for my brother.” Many of them, sadly, have done just that. No one should ever take a bullet from a traitor in the ranks.

This week, thankfully, hundreds of veterans from Iraq have passed through BWI. They’re given special Christmas cheer as they come home in time for the holidays. They are all volunteers. And the ones who welcome them home are all volunteers, too. It’s another reminder that Liberty is the most precious gift under our tree and that we are the land of the free because of the brave.

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