But forget the man’s ego (and the world’s inverted moral compass) for a minute, and think about the man’s balls. That’s right, his balls. In his acceptance speech this morning, he said the award represents all of those working for peace and opportunity, and specifically mentioned activists working for democracy even though it puts them at risk. Pretty amazing to praise the same folks whom you’ve just abandoned in Iran by refusing modest funding to the organization that documents their persecution.

Here’s an idea for you, Mr. President. Take your prize money and give it to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center.  That should provide about half the funding you just refused them.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie at Reason suggests Obama should decline the award “on principle” and one of his commenters takes it one step further: “If he accepts it, he is every bit the megelomaniac [sic] his worst critics say he is.”

UPDATE #2: Finally found a transcript of Obama’s acceptance speech. Here’s the passage I’m referring to (emphasis mine):

And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity; for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard, even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometime their lives for the cause of peace.

If you really care about those folks, Mr. President, send these folks the prize money.

UPDATE #3: Michelle Malkin is soliciting suggestions for what Obama should do with the $1.4 million prize.

“As corny as it sounds, damn, I’m proud to be an American,” Biden said, according to the pool report. “Thanks for choosing us; you are the reason why America is strong.”

Corny? Corny? Nice sentiment from the effin’ Vice President. Sure glad we’re not being embarrassed by Sarah Palin!

First up, courtesy of The Patriot Room, a group of 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds singing Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA:

And this, courtesy of Booker Rising, Ray Charles’s rendition of America the Beautiful:

Sometimes, it can be hard to argue the case for American exceptionalism in light of the temptations of the secular European model. Europe seems so pleasant.  So clean. People seem so content, have government-provided health care, child care, and fantastic employment and retirement benefits.  And their cell phone and public wi-fi systems kick ass, as do many of their consumer goods. Who needs family, community, vocation or faith — the sources of “deep satisfaction,” according to Murray — when you’ve got all that?

Well, the answer is, everyone who wants a meaningful life. As Murray pointed out on Dennis Prager’s radio show (listen here), an advancing mindset among youth in Europe is that the human body is merely a conglomeration of chemicals that is activated at birth and later is “deactivated,” and the point of life is to make the intervening time as pleasant as possible.

I’ve mentioned before how my Swedish father-in-law (Swedish as in he has lived there all his life, not as in an American of Swedish descent) often chides me good-naturedly about European supremacy in this or that endeavor (see “cell phone and public wi-fi systems,” above), and even that the Swedish government is more conservative than the American one since Sweden put the center-right party in power a few years ago.  But even he has noted that the younger generation in Sweden is less and less willing to work hard because so much is given to them.

He hasn’t visited since Barack Obama was elected, so I can only imagine what he’ll have to say now! Perhaps he’ll bring up this, from Will’s piece:

TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

Or maybe he’ll cite Newsweek’s article, barely two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, that claimed “[i]n many ways our economy already resembles a European one.”

The European socialist model reminds me of the human society in the movie WALL-E. Those humans had grown fat and lazy, were provided for in every respect, and lived solely for amusement. We’re supposed to deplore that society, but I see little difference between that and the European social model.

Are there parts of the secular European model that we could adopt, perhaps just in part, without losing our American-ness? Maybe, in small bits and pieces. But it is, as Murray points out, a dangerously slippery slope once we tread onto it. It will be horrendously difficult, if not impossible, to reverse moves toward the European social model that President Obama is likely to try to implement. And it will be hard to stop them with a Republican party that has lost virtually all conservative credentials.

Murray says the answer may be in 21st century science:

This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.

And yet there is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, 21st-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.

The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled Consilience. As the 21st century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.

I think he’s overly optimistic. In one of their typical projections, liberals accuse conservatives of bending science to politics while doing it themselves, and I’m sure they will do the same with anything Murray envisions. For instance, I’m sure he’s wrong about the Harvard faculty of 2020:

Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. Gender differences will be first, because the growth in knowledge about the ways that men and women are different is growing by far the most rapidly. I’m betting that the Harvard faculty of the year 2020 will look back on the Larry Summers affair in the same way that they think about the Scopes trial—the enlightened versus the benighted—and will have achieved complete amnesia about their own formerly benighted opinions.

All we can do is resist, and hope Murray is right.

We remain a center-right nation in many ways—particularly culturally, and our instinct, once the crisis passes, will be to try to revert to a more free-market style of capitalism—but it was, again, under a conservative GOP administration that we enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state in 30 years: prescription drugs for the elderly. People on the right and the left want government to invest in alternative energies in order to break our addiction to foreign oil. And it is unlikely that even the reddest of states will decline federal money for infrastructural improvements.

If we fail to acknowledge the reality of the growing role of government in the economy, insisting instead on fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century terms and tactics, then we are doomed to a fractious and unedifying debate. The sooner we understand where we truly stand, the sooner we can think more clearly about how to use government in today’s world.

As the Obama administration presses the largest fiscal bill in American history, caps the salaries of executives at institutions receiving federal aid at $500,000 and introduces a new plan to rescue the banking industry, the unemployment rate is at its highest in 16 years. The Dow has slumped to 1998 levels, and last year mortgage foreclosures rose 81 percent.

All of this is unfolding in an economy that can no longer be understood, even in passing, as the Great Society vs. the Gipper. Whether we like it or not—or even whether many people have thought much about it or not—the numbers clearly suggest that we are headed in a more European direction. A decade ago U.S. government spending was 34.3 percent of GDP, compared with 48.2 percent in the euro zone—a roughly 14-point gap, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2010 U.S. spending is expected to be 39.9 percent of GDP, compared with 47.1 percent in the euro zone—a gap of less than 8 points. As entitlement spending rises over the next decade, we will become even more French.

One thing from the Newsweek article that really grates on me is its repeated insistence on referring to the Bush administration and the Republican congresses during his term as conservative.  Grrr.  Thanks a lot, big-spending Republicans!

I have an in-law from Sweden who visits twice a year, and over the years we’ve had some good-natured give-and-take over the ways in which our respective cultures and governments are better than the other.  A year or two ago, he was happy to see the center-right party in Sweden get voted into power.  The last visit here, he said to me — only partly in jest — that it was the first time he could say that the U.S. government was more liberal than his own.  Ouch.

The bottom line that one can’t get away from . . . we are now about to elect a president, for the first time in our history, who believes, as he as indicated, that we are the moral inferior to most of the rest of the world.

That much I liked.  But I disagree with the optimism she expressed for the country if Obama is elected:

The thought that we must all hold, and very deeply, is that we are a very great country and there is no, no election, and no president, no regime — as they now call democracies — that can possibly undo us, and that’s really quite important to know.

I just don’t think she’s right about that.  The way I see it, a new administration can certainly turn around foreign policy, but domestic policy is another matter.  And changes in the latter will lead to changes in the former.

Sure, we’ll go down a bad road in foreign policy if Obama is elected.  He evaluates good and bad in terms of what the rest of the world thinks or the United Nations thinks instead of in terms of actual good and bad.  (Ironically, people will call this “courageous.”)  But that can be turned around rather quickly by a subsequent administration, even when the career Department of State boneheads are against it.

Domestically, I think we’re screwed.  I’ve explained why before. Entitlements and other big government will never be reversed.  Ever. Tinkered with, maybe, but that’s it.  There will never be a real debate about ending programs.  Instead, the conservative position will simply be how to run them “better.”

And as the American public learns to expect more and more of their personal needs to be taken care of by the government, pretty much anything beyond our borders will be considered someone else’s problem . . . let them solve it.  Whatever we do, we won’t take sides.  Why, that could mean we’ll eventually be drawn into something!  Besides, who are we to say that the country committing genocide for the sake of racial purity is any better than the country trying to stop it?  That question would be, to paraphrase Barack Obama on the question of when life begins, “above our pay grade.”

Well, you ask, why would that be bad?  Hasn’t this worked for Sweden and Spain?  France and Germany?  Why, yes it has.  For one reason: when these countries were creating their socialist utopias, there was still a United States in the world to do the heavy lifting. Who’s going to do it when our country — as we’ve known it since World War II, at least — is gone?

Sarah Palin’s credibility on foreign policy is going to take some time to gel, but the instantaneous criticism that she had no foreign policy experience was a little ridiculous. I mean, if everyone feels that strongly that a candidate has to have foreign policy experience, that pretty much limits your field doesn’t it? You’d never have had an FDR or Reagan, and the left’s criticism of Palin’s foreign policy credentials also would have disqualified Bill Clinton. They were all governors. (Ace has a good post on the “foreign policy experience” of governors generally.)

Some conservatives are getting awfully nervous about Sarah Palin. Some of the criticism is reasonable, some is not.

I think Rich Lowry of The Corner has taken a reasonable approach. I think he was right in his assessment of Palin’s performance regardng the “Bush Doctrine” question from Charlie Gibson: that “the truly pro-Palin position is to think she can, should, and will do better than this.” I also agreed with him when, in a follow-up, he wrote:

The debate about how many versions of the Bush doctrine there are is serving as fog to distract attention from the fact that, on any reasonable reading, Palin didn’t know. I don’t see why we all have to be so resistant to admitting this. Let me try to demonstrate: She is totally new to these issues and has a lot of learning to do. There. Is that so hard?

Kathleen Parker calls on Palin to quit (but she bases her view of Palin’s inadequacy on her supposed inability to handle the present financial crisis, rather than foreign policy). Kat-Mo at Ace of Spades HQ does a pretty good take down of Parker’s piece. Read it all, but this should give you the gist:

Parker gets a load of the Big Financial problem in our face and decides that Palin is incapable of handling the crisis and she should leave the national politics of crashing markets to the idiot national politicians that got us here in the first place.

Brilliant idea.

I have a friend in London, very Euro in outlook, who is terrifically frustrated and worried about the election.

His chief concern: the role of Americans. “It’s a pity that Americans are the ones who elect the president,” he says. “It would be much better if the people of the world voted on the American president.”

Hmmm . . . how about a deal? The people of the world vote on the American president, and Americans vote for the head of every other country on earth. That way, we could get decent leaders around the world (though we’d have to do this quickly, before the American electorate becomes any more infantile, to ensure that) who could apply pressure on the dimwit the world would undoubtedly elect to head the USA. That dimwit would undoubtedly have argued all along that we need to “listen to the rest of the world,” but would he hold to that if the rest of the world were conservative?

I hate this “listen to the rest of the world” crap. Most of the world is a sewer either materially, morally, or both. When lefties say “listen to the rest of the world,” they mean listen to lefties around the world.

UPDATE (7/25/08):   Just heard in my podcast of today’s Dennis Prager show that, in contrast to the 200,000 or so that showed up to listen to Barack Obama in Germany yesterday (and we’ll see if that 200k estimate holds up), when Ronald Reagan spoke in Germany, 100,000 Germans attended to protest.  I’m with Prager that if given a choice between a candidate that attracts German fans and a candidate that attracts German protestors, my candidate is the latter.