Don’t believe everything you hear

Folks assert something one day and then, after a crisis, say just the opposite. Liberals, for example, insist that the Constitution is some kind of organic, morphing, shape-shifting lump of stuff that can be twisted into any shape imaginable. Its meaning, they say, is certainly not limited to that intended by the dead white males who gave it to us.

Then the U.S. House of Representatives had to decide whether lying under oath and obstructing justice were “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which President Bill Clinton could be impeached. Suddenly, the liberals said the Constitution can’t just mean anything we want but must be rock-solid and unchanging. It must be interpreted strictly, perhaps even rigidly, limited to what it meant in 1789 when America’s founders (a.k.a. dead white males) gave it to us. What an education a crisis makes.

The war launched against the United States on September 11 has also spawned its own examples. People who had long talked and acted as if there were no God now flock to churches they never knew existed and pray to some god they had never sought.

Members of Congress assembled on the Capitol steps and burst into a round of “God Bless America.” That looked and sounded nice, but not so long ago many of them voted against a resolution sponsored by Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Ind., calling the nation to prayer and repentance.

A truly astonishing epiphany is the liberals’ apparent discovery that human life might even be sacred. On September 12, a CNN anchor let slip that “we need to value family and human life.” MTV aired a therapeutic edition of its “Total Request Live” program giving so-called artists and viewers the chance to emote about the whole thing. One viewer, Shareese from North Carolina, e-mailed: “May we all take this time to reflect on the value of life.”

At last count, the death toll from all the bombings and crashes is nearly 7,000. That’s less than two days’ work at America’s abortion clinics. Abortion kills living human beings just as certainly as any terrorist’s bomb. The victims in abortion clinics and the sites of the September 11 attacks were all living human beings with no choice in the matter killed by someone for their own personal reasons.

The same liberals who now wring their hands about the value of life also think that sucking out a baby’s brain in a partial-birth abortion is a constitutional right. This makes no sense at all. Had the September 11 war victims been killed earlier in their lives, when their death could be called abortion rather than terrorism, those now struck with the value of human life would not have blinked an eye.

If life itself were truly so precious, these people would try to stop its destruction or, one would hope, at least protest a bit. They don’t because they don’t value life itself at all. They value their own lives. Sure, abortion kills people, but it can no longer kill them so it’s OK to support the killing. The bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon also killed people, but those events demonstrated that terrorism can happen to practically anyone and might well happen again. These folks aren’t struck with altruistic warm fuzzies about the cosmic value of human life, they are struck with fear about protecting the value of their own keesters.

Other strange things came from those so-called artists participating in the telethon broadcast around the world on September 21. On a typical day, of course, many of them are busy teaching children to despise authority, avoid responsibility and reject their parents; promoting indiscriminate sex, drug use, and violence; and pushing the notion that there’s no more to life than money and gear. At the telethon, though, they all had on their empathetic faces with those pained looks, showing us all that they cared.

Fred Durst, lead so-called singer of the band Limp Bizkit, was there doing some slow confusing number about the need to make changes or something like that. In his real job, he does so-called songs such as “Nookie” on the band’s “Significant Other” album. There, he says, “I did it all for the nookie” and laments that “nothing gonna change … I’m just gonna stay here and always be the same.” The band’s usual m.o. is whipping kids into a frenzy of booze, drugs and violence in mosh pits across America. If Mr. Durst really wants to make changes and help heal the country, he should publicly apologize for assaulting and destroying the values of his young consumers and then immediately disband his band.

Crises make some people say the strangest things. Don’t believe everything you hear.