Yes we can elect Barack Obama president, but…
No we can’t mention his middle name.
No we can’t win the war in Iraq.
No we can’t expand oil exploration, drilling or refining.
No we can’t build nuclear power plants.
No we can’t convert coal to oil.
No we can’t extract oil from shale.
No we can’t punish companies for knowingly hiring illegal aliens and conspiring with them to commit tax fraud and identity theft on an unprecedented scale.
No we can’t build a security fence on our southern border.
No we can’t deport people who’ve entered our country illegally.
No we can’t allow a small percentage of social security funds to be held in individual retirement accounts.
No we can’t reduce government spending, waste and corruption.
No we can’t adopt a less complicated tax system that would help to expand the economy.
No we can’t allow medical professionals and their patients to control the healthcare system.
No we can’t create a voucher program that would allow millions of poor children to attend schools that are capable of teaching them how to read and write.
No we can’t allow parents to be involved in the reproductive decisions of their minor children.
No we can’t fund technologically advanced weapons systems for our military.
No we can’t thin out our nation’s forests in order to prevent massive wildfires from erupting on a regular basis.
No we can’t tolerate free speech on talk radio.
No we can’t cut off government funding to “artists” who use our money to insult our religious beliefs.
No we can’t allow the general public to determine the definition of marriage.
No we can’t prevent the government from seizing private property for the purpose of selling it to large corporations which generate greater tax revenues than individuals.
No we can’t scrutinize the scientific evidence behind the man-made global warming hypothesis.
No we can’t tolerate religious leaders who denounce homosexuality.
No we can’t smoke cigarettes on private property.
No we can’t outlaw the murder of unborn children.
No we can’t allow Christian symbols to be displayed in public squares at Christmas time.
No we can’t employ terrorist profiling techniques at airports.
No we can’t fire Marxist teachers from institutions of higher learning who spew anti-American rhetoric in class and seek to erode the moral foundation of their students.
No we can’t carry handguns for personal protection.
No we can’t order foods that contain trans fats at our favorite restaurants.
No we can’t stop Iran from building nuclear weapons.
No we can’t question the patriotism of neo-communist radicals and terrorist sympathizers.
No we can’t impose the death penalty on unrepentant serial killers.
And no we can’t remove from office judges who rewrite our Constitution from the bench.

Yes we can vote into the highest public office in the land a completely unqualified liberal activist just because he happens to be half black, but no we can’t live as our forebears intended, with limited government interference in our lives, an expectation of equality under the law, and genuine pride in our country.

I have no trouble in apologizing for atrocities involving my religious tradition, though I wasn’t personally responsible, except for the guilt by association in claiming to be personally a Christian. Presumably, if I called myself an atheist, I wouldn’t have been held ideologically culpable by this detractor.

However, critics must be honest and objective in their condemnations of atrocities whether caused by religion or secular movements, lest we believe their intentions are really gratuitous attacks against religion, not condemnation against atrocities altogether.

Therefore, to atheists and humanists who want to make this charge, you should be equally considerate, apologizing for the proportionally larger atrocities committed by cultural leaders, espousing godless, non-theistic Utopian ideologies, within the “enlightened” 20th century alone. Because whatever principle makes me guilty of the former, makes you equally guilty of the latter.

The point is not that any such examples of secular violence would excuse or diminish religious atrocities, but rather, that the critic who uses examples of religious atrocities without making reference to crimes motivated by secular ideologies, is obviously biased and short-sighted in his approach.

Critics will say that demagogues, such as Stalin, Poll-Pot, and Mao (who are among the greatest mass murderers of all time), didn’t really act on the basis of their atheism, but because of fanatical political and economic objectives.

Yet their policies were informed by a view of man consistent with metaphysical atheistic/evolutionary dogmas. Lenin retorted that, you have to crack a few eggs to get an omelet, and Stalin obliged him as the short-order cook, carrying out his purges that viewed the masses of humanity as expendable instruments to achieve a cause.

We must also be careful to observe that when people commit atrocities in the “name of Christ,” or under some similar ecclesiastical declaration of authority, these acts are clearly abuses, for they do not represent the values of Christ himself. We never see acts of violence carried out by Christians in the first century. These violent activities largely result from improper convolutions of the jurisdictions in church/state spheres of sovereignty. These errors can be corrected though a proper application of the Christian world view.

On the other hand, secular violence can be directly related to the faithful application of materialist/evolutionist metaphysical narratives carried out to their logical end. Fortunately, most secularists are inconsistent, in that they do not live or reason in a way that comports with their stated ultimate view of reality. The correct application of such world views would themselves lead to the violent ends that secularists claim to loath while pointing their collective fingers derisively at religion.

One must honestly ask the question, which claim about reality is likely to produce a more harmonious world, if carried out faithfully to its logical end? The assertion “God created man in his own image,” representing the Judeo-Christian tradition, or the manifesto by atheist/evolutionist Richard Dawkins, representing the ideological epitome of the atheist movement, “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.”

We must point out that if Dawkins’ assessment of an atheist universe is correct, it leaves critics, such as the one remonstrating in my newspaper, with nothing left to complain about.

This bad pun, and others like it, may soon be coming to a restaurant near you. That is, at least, if the environmental activists get their way, as they always seem to do.

A May 29th Time magazine article extolling the virtues of “entomophagy,” or bug-eating, has drawn a few snickers from conservative commentators. When viewed in the context of a broader public relations campaign, however, it becomes apparent that it won’t be laughed off so easily. Since the United Nations held a symposium on the issue in February, its conclusions have become the template for a series of stories in American and British publications like the New York Times, Discover magazine, the Independent and the Evening Standard.

The first bullet point they touch is usually an admonition that North Americans and Europeans are among their world’s minority in their aversion to entomophagy. In the Far East, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, they tell us, bugs are often seen as a delicacy. Gosh, when they put it that way, refusing to eat a tarantula seems downright racist.

As if to emphasize our alleged cultural inferiority, the stories inform us that Westerners have a phobia about bugs, which are not as filthy as we think. As the Times explains it, “we regard cockroaches as unclean.” Got that? It’s not that cockroaches are unclean, but that “we regard” them as such. The obvious question is how such a slur has been allowed to pass for so long. The Invertebrate Anti-Defamation League must have been lying down on the job.

The Time magazine story describes insects as “crawling packets of nutrition,” and points out that “[w]ater bugs have four times as much iron as beef.” To translate that into American: one quarter-pounder, plus one Flintstones vitamin, equals no need to eat a quarter pound of water bugs.

Both British papers condemn pesticides through the telling of how locusts were devouring all the crops in Thailand, so the Thai government encouraged the people to eat the locusts instead. In a way, this ranks people below even the locusts, because at least the pests get to feast on all those flavorful vegetables, whereas the people are left to eat bugs.

The main point, as if you couldn’t have guessed, is that bugs are more eco-friendly than livestock. That’s because they require less land and water to produce, and they supposedly contribute less to “climate change.” Activist David Gracer, who seemingly aspires to be the Al Gore of entomophagy, ominously hints at what’s to come when he says, “Cows and pigs are the SUVs; bugs are the bicycles.”

If this comparison holds true, we can expect the media to become participants in a relentless publicity war against meat, to the point where steaks and chops are depicted as vicious criminals. Before long, we’ll be reading headlines like, “Sausage chokes child to death, shows no remorse.”

Next, the government will adopt measures designed to drive meat prices out of sight, a process which our ethanol policy will by then have already started. If all goes according to plan, the only ones who will be regularly eating meat will be the elitists who tell the rest of us not to. Don’t expect to see Barbra Streisand dining on scorpion thermidor, for instance. The greenies will always find a way to justify their own eating habits, perhaps through the purchase of “meat credits.”

Like so many other liberal causes, the entomophagy movement uses environmentalism as a means to its true end, which is the debasement of Western civilization. This conclusion is supported by the activists’ lack of curiosity about the repercussions should they succeed. If they really believed, as they claim, that the ecosystem is precariously balanced, then the prospect of Americans and Europeans gobbling up every wasp, worm and grasshopper in sight would surely give them pause. Yet none of these articles stops to question the purported ecological benefits of eating bugs, because that would impede the advancement of “economic justice.”

As long as it causes the people of Kansas to live more like the people of Cambodia, liberals will declare their mission a success, regardless of what else ensues. If this result fails to materialize, it will only be because the greenies themselves don’t believe they can pull it off. It’s one thing to browbeat us into driving around in wind-up clown cars, but the image of Americans subsisting on vermin might strike them as just too good to be true.