The following is audio is taken from Hugh Hewitt's radio show on Thursday April 14. It is an interview about Barak Obama and other matters with Mark Steyn. Hewitt and Steyn 4:17:08

My nephew Mark Warkentin and I collaborated on trying to sell a college life series, so I know him as a writer. But there is an aspect of his life -- rough water swimming -- that I know hardly anything about because it is a grueling sport requiring such unrelenting practice and intense concentration as to be alien to my rather comfortable experience of The Sporting Life. Fortunately, Mark can express himself well, and I copied two of his emails from last year's Australian competition, Warkentin Down Under and Postscript: 2.500 Meters. Below, today's Wall Street Journal features a story on swimmers such as Mark who have passions for cold, wet and pain. The timeline link gives you a chance to hear Mark talk about his sport. Perhaps he is a masochist, but he is an articulate one.

A Bruising New Olympic Sport
Open-Water 10K Swim
Requires Endurance
As Well as Aggression
By KEVIN HELLIKER
April 18, 2008; Page W1

During an open-water race early this year, a competitor elbowed American swimmer Micha Burden, fracturing her rib -- and underscoring the brutal potential of this little-known sport.

Even by the standards of open-water swimming, however, the elbowing is likely to be unusually forceful next month in Seville, Spain. That's because something unprecedented is at stake for those who swim long distances in open water: a shot at Olympic gold. For the first time in more than a century, the Summer Games will feature a long-distance open-water swim, and the top 10 finishers in the men's and women's races in Seville will win berths in the Olympic contest this August in Beijing.

"No lines, no lanes. No walls, no mercy. The newest sport at the Olympics," Steven Munatones, a onetime open-water champion, declares on the Web site he recently created called 10Kswim.com.

The 10-kilometer race will plug what many aquatic fans regard as the biggest gap in the Summer Games -- the absence of any swimming event longer than 20 minutes. The roughly two-hour swim -- nearly seven times longer than the previously longest swim, the 1,500-meter -- will give marathon swimmers the same chance for Olympic stardom that marathon runners have had since the 1896 advent of the modern Games.

The 10K debut comes at a time of growing recreational passion for so-called open-water swimming. In part, this growth reflects the fast-rising popularity of the triathlon, an Olympic event since the Sydney Games of 2000. The triathlon's first leg consists of an open-water swim measuring 1.5 kilometers in the Olympics.

Yet open-water swimming is also gaining fans because of its inherent difficulties. Many more people have reached the summit of Mount Everest than have swum across the English Channel. At a time of mounting interest in fitness and adventure, open water increasingly is recognized as the last frontier.

Open water presents challenges rarely encountered in the pool: waves, often icy temperatures, the absence of direction-helping lane lines and collisions between swimmers. "It's common for someone to come out of the water with bruises or a black eye," says Paul Asmuth, a former world-champion American marathon swimmer and current coach of the U.S. team.


Training is risky as well. Few bodies of water contain safe harbors for open-water swimming. Even more dangerous than currents and sharks are boats and jet skis.

To open-water fanatics, the Beijing 10K will seem tame. Instead of a rough sea or a river with currents, it will take place in a lake-like rowing basin built especially for the Games. The race will involve four trips around a 2.5-kilometer course that will likely be free of waves and currents.

But enhancing the difficulty of the swim will be fresh water -- salt water adds buoyancy -- and in any case the pursuit of open-water swimming's first Olympic medals is expected to unleash extraordinary aggression.

"There's going to be a lot of body contact, and the flatter the water is, the more physical the race will be," says Mark Warkentin, winner of the U.S. 10K trials last October. Swimmers will lather grease on their ankles to keep competitors from pulling on them, he says.

Indeed, open-water swimming features an element virtually unknown to pool swimming -- disqualifications for rough-housing. To police the race, referees in boats will line the course. But they can't always see what happens below the surface: The competitor who fractured Ms. Burden's rib received no infraction.

To many stars of the pool, open-water swimming is the sport's Wild West. Superstar Michael Phelps said this week he wouldn't consider swimming outside the pool. "Not a chance. No way. I won't swim open water," he said.

The field will consist largely of former pool swimmers, because little infrastructure exists for developing open-water specialists among children. Parents of swimmers generally prefer their children to stick to pools.

Long-distance swimming dates back to ancient times -- long before the invention of the bicycle -- yet the Olympic 10K swim is making its debut decades later than did long-distance cycling. Blame that on the swimming pool. The Olympics of 1896 included lengthy swims across the icy Aegean Sea. Back then, most swimmers had never laid eyes on a pool.

But early in the new century pools proliferated, and the world's premier swimmers essentially abandoned open water. As a sport, swimming became obsessed with scientific measurement -- strokes per lap, milliseconds per turn -- something that is hard to impose on open seas. Indeed, it is likely that no two swimmers of the English Channel have ever swum the exact same distance.

Still, open-water swimming persisted. Soloists on the English Channel kept alive the tradition. An eight-mile race across Boston Harbor began in 1908. In 1927, gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. staged a 20-some-mile race on the California coast, inducing 102 contestants to brave chilly waters and strong currents for prize money that totaled $40,000, according to Conrad Wennerberg's "Wind, Waves and Sunburn: A Brief History of Marathon Swimming."

In the 1950s, Italy introduced a 33-kilometer swim called Capri-to-Naples. That same decade, Atlantic City, N.J., started the 22.5-mile Around the Island Marathon Swim. By the 1980s, open-water races were common enough that America's Mr. Asmuth could put his accounting business on hold for three months and travel around the world competing, his prize money more than sufficient to cover his expenses.

Leaders of the sport created a federation to run races, raise prize money and designate world champions. But the case of Mr. Asmuth illustrates how obscure the sport remained, largely because it had no slot in the Olympics. One of the most accomplished American swimmers of the past half century, Mr. Asmuth won seven world championships, and 15 years after his retirement, one of his records still stands.

Yet outside marathon swimming, virtually nobody has ever heard of him. "Had the Olympics had a 10K swim in the '80s, I would have been expected to win it," says Mr. Asmuth, who is now general manager of a California winery called Napa Valley Reserve.

After years of lobbying, leaders of the sport persuaded FINA, the century-old regulator of international pool competitions, to embrace open-water swimming. Under FINA's guidance, the popularity of 5K, 10K and 25K championships skyrocketed, putting the sport within reach of its Holy Grail: the Olympics. After a decade of FINA lobbying, the IOC in 2005 agreed to add open-water swimming to the 2008 Games.

Since its acceptance as an Olympic event, the sport has become enormously more competitive, gaining the interest of pool stars such as Australia's Grant Hackett. The world-record holder in the 1,500-meter swim, Mr. Hackett won the gold medal in that event in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics, and hopes to defend that title in Beijing. But he also won his country's 10K trials and is regarded as a likely Olympic medal winner -- assuming he qualifies in Seville.

Just as marathon foot races are less predictable than 100-meter sprints, distance swimming is hard to call. In any given race, a dozen or more swimmers are legitimate candidates to win, says Stephen "Sid" Cassidy, chairman of the open-water committee for FINA.

America's Ms. Burden illustrates that unpredictability. She never excelled as a pool athlete in college. During her first six 10K swims she failed to finish near the front. But at the U.S. trials last October, staged to determine which two women would go to the qualifying race in Seville, Ms. Burden won the 10K race. Now, a top-10 finish in Spain will guarantee her a shot at Olympic gold. At age 26, she says, "This is the moment I've been waiting for."

Write to Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com

This shouldn't be too hard. Imagine a world in which God is in you no matter what you've done. There is no sin; your salvation comes only from within; all ways lead to harmony and therefore you don't have to apologize for your way. Then imagine someone who puts your beliefs into action. But it just so happens that his way is to despise you, to lust after your spouse, to poison your dog and to refuse to pay back a debt. Without an absolute God Who is just and Who is jealous of His justice, broaching no other ways but His way, you end up with a lot of demigods at each other's throats. An observable fact of life is that there are few Janusz Korczaks, Deitrich Bonhoeffers or Mother Theresas in our midst. Most of us have secret thoughts we don't want out in the open, and at some time or other we have done crappy things that we know were bad. That should be cause for a bit of humility. Unfortunately, the more money and power a person has, there's the temptation to believe those blessing indicate that everything is OK. You're not like the herd; your motives are more pure. Humility need not apply. People answer to you, not the other way around. Thus someone like Oraph Winfrey is not likely to square her life to any standard except her own pleasure, her own will. She's thinks she is doing a noble thing by proselytizing her doctrine to people who watch television, don't do much thinking and are consequently as gullible as children. Her ideas ultimately will make them either very unhappy or so self-righteous that they won't know how close they are to Hell.

March 21, 2008
The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- The beauty of a speech is that you don't just give the answers, you provide your own questions. "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." So said Barack Obama, in his Philadelphia speech about his pastor, friend, mentor and spiritual adviser of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.

An interesting, if belated, admission. But the more important question is: which "controversial" remarks?
 
Wright's assertion from the pulpit that the U.S. government invented the HIV virus "as a means of genocide against people of color"? Wright's claim that America was morally responsible for 9/11 -- "chickens coming home to roost" -- because of, among other crimes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Obama says he missed church that day. Had he never heard about it?)

What about the charge that the U.S. government (of Franklin Roosevelt, mind you) knew about Pearl Harbor, but lied about it? Or that the government gives drugs to black people, presumably to enslave and imprison them?

Obama condemns such statements as wrong and divisive, then frames the next question: "There will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church?"

But that is not the question. The question is why didn't he leave that church? Why didn't he leave -- why doesn't he leave even today -- a pastor who thundered not once but three times from the pulpit (on a DVD the church proudly sells) "God damn America"? Obama's 5,000-word speech, fawned over as a great meditation on race, is little more than an elegantly crafted, brilliantly sophistic justification of that scandalous dereliction.

His defense rests on two central propositions: (a) moral equivalence, and (b) white guilt.

(a) Moral equivalence. Sure, says Obama, there's Wright, but at the other "end of the spectrum" there's Geraldine Ferraro, opponents of affirmative action and his own white grandmother, "who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." But did she shout them in a crowded theater to incite, enrage and poison others?

"I can no more disown (Wright) than I can my white grandmother." What exactly was grandma's offense? Jesse Jackson himself once admitted to the fear he feels from the footsteps of black men on the street. And Harry Truman was known to use epithets for blacks and Jews in private, yet is revered for desegregating the armed forces and recognizing the first Jewish state since Jesus' time. He never spread racial hatred. Nor did grandma.

Yet Obama compares her to Wright. Does he not see the moral difference between the occasional private expression of the prejudices of one's time and the use of a public stage to spread racial lies and race hatred?

(b) White guilt. Obama's purpose in the speech was to put Wright's outrages in context. By context, Obama means history. And by history, he means the history of white racism. Obama says, "We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country," and then proceeds to do precisely that. And what lies at the end of his recital of the long train of white racial assaults from slavery to employment discrimination? Jeremiah Wright, of course.

This contextual analysis of Wright's venom, this extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt, while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.

But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.

Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

letters@charleskrauthammer.com