THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WORDISM: INQUISITION, THEN AND NOW | nationalsalvation.net

It looks to me like Obama will be reelected.

As usual, my logic is so simple it will never make a regular column.

Americans have a black president.

Why not reelect him?

There will be no change at all no matter who the Republicans nominate. Without respectable conservatives liberals would have been gone long ago.

There is no alternative. In order to write for National Review or columns with national circulation you must avoid anything that has been Decided.

I capitalize that word Decided because it has legal standing. For example, a lawyer who has defended a person against a charge of Hate Crimes in Europe will be subject to arrest if he does not admit his client was guilty.

It's humorous that for so many years, Communism, Political Correctness, Marxism were considered new. In the Soviet Union if you lost an ideological argument you were routinely arrested. In the Middle Ages the priest assigned by the Church itself to do the necessary job of arguing against sainthood was required, if sainthood was granted, to do penance in the way only Church professionals knew how to do it.

The only new thing is that in the United States, for the time being, losing an argument is not a capital crime.

Our present system follows this Traditional Values approach. There comes a time when someone who makes his living as a respectable conservative knows that a subject can no longer be broached.

The priest who argued against canonization had to declare that he had been, literally, the Devil's Advocate. If you know Medieval history conservative groveling about how they stood in the way of Saint Martin Luther the King will be bone chillingly familiar.

When you read about a French college professor actually screaming and crying in court that he did not mean what he said to be a felonious hint that the Six Million Doctrine was not true, you see how people looked when called before the Inquisition.