hell’s handmaiden

Sometimes it is tempting just to quote the people Mark quotes and highlight the information that has been left out. I want to do a bit more than that here, though, as parts of the thinking process have been neglected as well.

Noonan quotes Joseph E. Robert Jr., chairman and chief executive of J.E. Robert Companies, from an article printed in the Washington Post. Mr. Roberts travels to Iraq on a regular basis, it seems, and brings back a report. The first item on the list is that “U.S. forces in Iraq remain focused on their mission.” I’m not surprised but neither is this relevatory, and it has little to do with the major issues surrounding this fight.

Protecting the country? I think not. Try, “corrupting the system that made the country great.”

The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a national security letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without court approval.

My Way News - U.S.: FBI Sought Info Without Court OK

I have mixed views on The American View. Much of what appears is frightfully theocratic– “… all judicial nominees must, first, acknowledge the God of the Bible as the source of law. This would mean a pledge to disregard all human laws and/or court rulings that conflict with God’s Law” for example, and I have taken them to task on an issue or two. On the other, The American View takes Bush, and the Republican Party (admitedly for very different reasons than do I), to task just often enough to keep them, in my estimation, within hiking distance of the good side of sanity.

The issue of proving a negative comes up fairly often in Intelligent Design and creationism debates. The short answer is that you can’t do it. At least, you can’t do it in the real world in any absolute sense. If, however, the rules of the game, the rules of the system, are sufficiently well defined it does become possible to prove that something can’t happen. In short, it is possible to prove negatives conditionally. Mathematics provides probably the best example of this. Within, for example, the normal rules of addition it is quite possible to prove conclusively that two plus two will always equal four. We know this because we know all of the relevant rules. We’ve restricted our statement so that it operates only within those rules. This is fair play, and it is more common than most people realize. Most knowledge, in fact, is of this conditional type. Like it or not, in a world where we are less than omniscient, there isn’t really another option.

I’d just read the AP article that Matt cites, when I noticed that he’d commented on it.

The Associated Press reports that al-Qaeda leaders are losing control of their terror network as a result of “the arrests and deaths of top operational planners.” This news contradicts claims by the left that the “real” war on terror was abandoned when we went into Iraq, and that we’re losing the war on terror.

Blogs for Bush: The White House Of The Blogosphere: Fighting and Winning The War On Terror