It’s Saturday, and time for my favorite letters to the editor of the Wall Street Journal for this week. I picked only two letters, because there were two excellent “Notable & Quotable” pieces I wanted to add.
Great Persuasiveness Should Serve Truth
Daniel Henninger's "100 Days: 'Harry, I Have a Gift'" (Wonder Land, April 30) points to Barack Obama's remarkable ability to convince people on both sides of an argument that he agrees with them. Mr. Henninger quotes from a 2007 story about Mr. Obama's tenure as president of the Harvard Law Review: "Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once."
One is reminded of ancient Greek culture when teachers of Sophism were much admired, highly paid and widely sought by young noblemen, especially those who aspired to public office. Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, emphasized the relativity of truth. Students were taught to praise and blame the same things. Because truth is always subject to interpretation, Protagoras believed a correct action on a topic would be that which was most advantageous to the individual.
Mr. Obama has the gift of Sophistry. But as Socrates later noted, the Sophist is not really concerned with truth and justice, but instead seeks power.
John Staige Davis, IV Charlottesville, Va.
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Release of Pictures Will Show Commitment to Change
The ACLU long ago dropped the fig leaf of working on behalf of ordinary Americans to protect them against the tyranny of a powerful federal government. When the rights of U.S. citizens are violated by Democratic politicians, whether it's Sarah Palin's emails, Joe the Plumber's private records, or the property rights of bondholders of auto companies being destroyed to force their compliance, the ACLU is nowhere in sight. Give it the chance to act as an attack dog against a Republican administration and the ACLU is present and relentless.
Steve Heitner Port Jefferson Station, N.Y.
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Notable & Quotable
British historian Andrew Roberts writing at the Daily Beast Web site:
A slight air of unreality has permeated the debate over "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the war against terror, with historians embarrassedly studying their toecaps over the issue. For the truth is that there has not been a war in history in which torture has not been employed in some form or another, and sometimes to excellent effect. When troops need information about enemy capabilities and intentions -- and they usually need it fast -- moral and ethical conventions (especially the one signed in Geneva in 1929) have repeatedly been ignored in the bid to save lives.
In the conflict generally regarded today the most ethical in history, World War II, enhanced interrogation techniques were regularly used by the Allies, and senior politicians knew it perfectly well, just as we now discover that Nancy Pelosi did in the early stages of the war against terror. The very success of the D-Day landings themselves can largely be put down to the enhanced interrogation techniques that were visited upon several of the 19 Nazi agents who were infiltrated into Great Britain and "turned" by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) between 1939 and 1945. Operation Fortitude -- the deception plan that fooled the Germans into stationing 450,000 Wehrmacht troops 130 miles north of the Normandy beaches -- entirely depended upon German intelligence (the Abwehr) believing that the real attack was going to take place at the Pas de Calais instead. The reason that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, was utterly convinced of this, was because every single one of his 19 agents, who he did not know had been turned, told him so.
If anyone believes that SIS persuaded each of these 19 hard-bitten Nazi spies to fall in with Operation Fortitude by merely offering them tea, biscuits, and lectures in democracy, they're being profoundly naïve.
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Notable & Quotable
Jon Basil Utley writing at Reason.com:
It's only a matter of time before President Barack Obama's vast popularity runs aground on his energy policies. In the name of saving the planet from global warming, he has delayed new oil drilling, an action that will have major political repercussions once the world economy recovers. Instead of using some [of] the stimulus billions to produce more gas and oil, Obama's wild-eyed supporters dream of "renewable" energy derived from corn, wind, sunshine, and even grass.
With the appointment of extremists like climate czar Carol Browner and science adviser John Holdren, Obama has placed his administration's environmental policy in the hands of radicals. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposes replacing oil and coal with windmills. Yet Barron's recently reported that America would need to build 500,000 giant offshore windmills and transmission lines to produce Salazar's specified 1,900 gigawatts of electricity. In contrast, oil and gas drilling could provide hundreds of thousands of solid, well-paying blue-collar jobs. . . .
All of these things are happening at a time when natural gas is abundant and cheap. The new technology of horizontal fraccing has made it economically feasible to drill into vast shale deposits in many states, even famously difficult ones like Michigan and New York. Many cars could run on natural gas, much like many buses do already. On a recent trip to Peru, I learned that most taxicabs have been converted to natural gas for a cost of about $1,000 each. New technologies continually revive old oil and gas fields and make new ones economically viable. So it's little more than socialist Malthusianism to argue that the world is running out of cheap energy. Science will always find and harness new sources.
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