My entire professional life has been devoted to saving and enhancing lives. Thus, the thought of abortion for the sake of convenience does not appeal to me. I have personally met several people who have told me that their mothers had considered abortion, but happily decided against it.

Most of us instinctively want to protect helpless creatures and sometimes go to great lengths to do so. The television commercials about abused animals are very poignant and as a society, we sometimes delay or cancel large construction projects to protect an "endangered" insect, amphibian or fish.

Yet many of us turn a blind eye to the wanton slaughter of millions of helpless human babies who are much more sophisticated than some of the other creatures, when nothing is at stake other than the convenience of one or both parents. I am not saying that we should abandon our efforts to save baby seals and a host of other animals.

Rather I am saying shouldn't we consider adding human fetuses and babies to the list?

[This commencement address was originally published five years ago. We  rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]

Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:

It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line:  college, goodbye, we're outta here.  Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.

But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things.  So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies.  If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago.  His most famous movie was Gone With The Wind.

He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy.  It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost.  Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs.  Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.

Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something where you least expect it.  Out of the blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:

For many conservatives, the most infuriating outrage of the Bush Presidency has been the prosecution and imprisonment of two Border Patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler in the ass.

It is the drug smuggler, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, and the federal prosecutor, Johnny Sutton, who belong in jail, not them.

For defending our border from mass foreign invasion, Ramos and Compean will be spending Christmas in solitary confinement, rather than with their families.

It's hard to think of a more Christian, a more pro-American thing you could do this Christmas than send them a message of support and a donation to their wives and children.

Here's how:

Every day I am amazed at the insanity I witness in our America and here is another example.

According to a report in The Hill, Attorney General Eric Holder is at it again with his racial preference policies:

Attorney General Eric Holder called upon the nation's school districts Wednesday to rethink "zero tolerance" disciplinary policies that he said disproportionately punish minorities and push too many students into the justice system. Alarming numbers of young people are suspended, expelled or even arrested for relatively minor transgressions like school uniform violations, schoolyard fights or showing ‘disrespect' by laughing in class," Holder said during a speech in Baltimore.

Last week, we learned that Afghanistan is The Doormat of Empires.  Yet the ignorant myth of the mighty invincible Afghan keeps getting repeated - even by conservative writers who really ought to know better.

Washington Times columnist Jeff Kuhner is an example, who has proclaimed (6/24) that Petraeus is "doomed to fail," that "the jihadist iceberg is about to sink the American juggernaut," because: 

Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is the graveyard of empires - a nation whose rugged terrain and collection of disparate warlords and tribes is ideally suited for guerrilla warfare. The vaunted Soviet Red Army was crushed in the 1980s. Imperial Britain was defeated - not once, but twice - during the 19th century. The reason: They got dragged into protracted wars of attrition. Eventually, the fierce, primitive mountains, caves and fighters of Afghanistan wore down much superior forces, slowly bleeding them to death.