HITCH

Well, I see no Bush endorsement. As such. His wisest words are the following, it seems to me:

If I could choose the person whose attitude toward the immediate foe was nearest to mine, I would pick Bush (and Blair). But if I departed from the strictly subjective, and then considered the ways in which this administration has bitched things up, and further imagined what might happen to a Democratic incumbent who was compelled to get real, I could see a case the other way.

Those are my feelings entirely. And in a pinch, because of the established fact of regime change in the only two countries where we had a realistic chance of regime change, I think Kerry is now the better bet. Notice the word: now. The job now is nation-building, alliance-mending, and a more focused attack on al Qaeda. If I had any remaining confidence in the Bush administration’s competence and candor in these three areas, I’d still back Bush. But, sad to say, I don’t. And what persuaded me of this was Bush himself in the debates. He had nothing substantive to say about his record, no actual defense of his war decisions. His campaign was entirely about Kerry, and an appeal to abstract notions of toughness. That’s what you do when you can’t really defend yourself. One more thought from Hitch:

It’s absurd for liberals to talk as if Kristallnacht is impending with Bush, and it’s unwise and indecent for Republicans to equate Kerry with capitulation. There’s no one to whom he can surrender, is there? I think that the nature of the jihadist enemy will decide things in the end.

Amen. Yes, it’s indecent to believe that Kerry would “surrender” to Jihadists, as indecent as the attacks on his war record in Vietnam. We all have the same enemy: the Jihadists. And it is not a surrender to them to adjust tactics to ensure their better defeat.

MARRIAGE STATS: An email on the high rates of dovorce in the Bible Belt:

I teach statistics at North Georgia College & State University. Just wanted to weigh in on the fact that Bible Belt states have higher divorce rates. If you read the article, you find that the divorce statistic has no relationship to religious beliefs. The best statistical predictor of marriage “success” (non-divorce) is getting married the first time after age 25 – 28 (varies depending upon the study). In the South, people get married younger. There is no information on whether this has anything to do with religion. Finally, the other predictors mentioned in the article are socioeconomic status, level of education and Catholicity of the population. Again, religion (pro-Catholic) does influence the marriage success in a positive way.
In sum, there is no provable connection between increased divorce and religion. It would be just as statistically persuasive to say that the warmer climate in the South leads to higher promuscuity rates (and thus to more divorce) because more people are able to show more skin more often. To say being Baptist causes more divorce is taking a second-order correlation and claiming first-order causation. Statistically, that’s a reach. It may be true, but I don’t see anything in this article to back it up.

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