George Tiller assassinated; may God have mercy on his soul

For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, "a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion]," largely because his clinic "is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy."  He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.

I'd missed this story earlier today, and I expect I'll be processing this for a while, but I've seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly.  Most basically, Princeton's Robert George was right to say,

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Robert Stacy McCain had some equally wise and true words:

One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .

Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat's death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth's pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.

He also notes,

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has some excellent comments as well:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.

The president, of course, has weighed in with a condemnation of the assassination; that's part of his job, and it's unquestionably warranted.  That said, I have to agree with the folks at Stop the ACLU about this:

On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?

Finally, go read Sister Toldjah's superb post, which I'm not going to try to excerpt.

I'm not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they've written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil.  Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it's a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong.  It's ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain's diagnosis is spot-on.  It's also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.

And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don't believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul.  No, he doesn't deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.

Obama administration ticks off Brits . . . again

. . . Wait, wasn't this supposed to be the administration that was so in tune with the international community that they'd make us popular around the world again?  So far, it doesn't seem to be working, at least where the UK is concerned; Barack Obama has been doing a good job of ticking off our (historically) closest and most reliable ally since his second month in office, and now his (overmatched) press secretary, Robert Gibbs, has just made matters worse.  Apparently Gibbs didn't know that deliberately antagonizing Fleet Street is a bad idea, or he wouldn't have said this:

"I want to speak generally about some of reports I've witnessed over the past few years in the British media and in some ways I'm surprised it filtered down," Gibbs said.

"Let's just say that if I wanted to look up, if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper," he continued.

"If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not sure that would be the first stack of clips I picked up."

Mind you, that arrogant, petulant little tantrum was in response to a single article in the Telegraph.  One article, and he can't take the heat.  I hate to see what Gibbs would do if his boss ever had to take the volume of abuse, calumny, and slander that Sarah Palin gets.

Not only does this not speak well about Gibbs' emotional maturity and ability to deal with criticism (and perhaps that of his boss, for that matter), it says very bad things about his judgment.  Actually, what it suggests is that he's gotten so accustomed to the craven, supine submission of the OSM that he takes that as his due, and thinks everyone should cower before him likewise.  He reminds me rather of Prince Rabadash, actually:

Then Rabadash rolled his eyes and spread out his mouth into a horrible, long mirthless grin like a shark, and wagged his ears up and down (anyone can learn how to do this if they take the trouble). He had always found this very effective in Calormen. The bravest had trembled when he made these faces, and ordinary people had fallen to the floor, and sensitive people had often fainted. But what Rabadash hadn't realized is that it is very easy to frighten people who know you can have them boiled alive the moment you give the word. The grimaces didn't look at all alarming in Archenland; indeed Lucy only thought Rabadash was going to be sick.

Unfortunately for Rabadash Gibbs, the British press are the Archenlanders in this scenario, and they aren't about to be cowed, as the Telegraph's James Delingpole made abundantly clear with this response to Gibbs' comments:

Your treatment not just of the British media but of Britain generally smacks of a risible ineptitude. First, you let President Obama send back the Winston Churchill bust. Then, you insult our visiting prime minister with a dismally low-key reception (worthy of a minor African head of state, not your closest and most loyal ally) and shoddy gifts (those DVDs). Then you compound the insult by having one of your monkeys declare, Chicago-politics-style, "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment." OK so we know Obama's not much interested in foreign affairs and has a special loathing for Britain because it roughed up his Kenyan granddad during the Mau Mau insurrection. But don't you realise, that one of your jobs as his press secretary is to make out like he loves us so much even his underpants have a union flag on them? . . .

We know we're not angels. We know we can go over the top sometimes. But unfortunately that's a much bigger problem for you than it is for us. You see, while a lot of your mainstream media will hold fire on stories which they think may reflect poorly on your wondrous Obamamessiah—what his half-brother has been up to, say—we have fewer qualms about telling it like it is. So far, you've had a pretty easy ride. . . . But just you wait till we start showing our teeth. . . .

A lot of Americans know this. They appreciate our irreverence. They enjoy our frank criticisms of all the myriad areas where Obama is getting it so badly wrong—everything from his disastrous cap and trade measures, to his brutal treatment of Chrysler dealerships which didn't support him, to his pork barrelling, to his failure to do anything that looks remotely like rescuing the US economy. That's why they come to read us online: because they can and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

If Delingpole opted to hit the press secretary and his administration low, Nile Gardiner decided to swing high:

Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

Robert Gibbs' completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

For all its talk of "raising America's standing" in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America's public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs—you've just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President's message.

Even given Gibbs' previously established (low) standard of competence, this is a most remarkable fiasco; but the most remarkable thing is that no one at the White House seems to recognize it as such.  Barring a groveling apology from the administration to the British media (and Britain more generally), I think we'll have to conclude that the solipsism and self-absorption of this administration is so great that they really honestly don't see the harm in antagonizing the Brits.  If that's in fact the case, it's going to come back and bite them in the end.  Badly.

Front-line leadership vs. rear-echelon dithering

So North Korea is testing nuclear warheads and long-range missiles—and announcing that they will no longer abide by the armistice that ended the Korean War—and so far, Sarah Palin is sounding more presidential about it than Barack Obama.  Maybe back during the campaign when she stressed the significance of Alaska’s position on the front line of America’s defenses as support for her readiness to deal with foreign policy, she wasn’t just talking through her hat; whether it’s the fact that Alaska is now in range of a North Korean nuke or not, she certainly seems to have more of a grasp of the strategic realities here than the president does, even when limited to 140 characters:

More N Korea nuke tests: why consider US missile program cuts now? AK military program helps secure US. Now is NOT time to cut our defense.

Check out this good read on N. Korea that sheds light on need for strong US defense tools & economic sanctions. http://tinyurl.com/oaf2rm

Must Read: Here's link to article concerning N.Korea's missile range & progress. http://tinyurl.com/kre9lh

Yet as North Korea accelerates its pattern of provocations, the governor of Alaska may be standing firm, but the Obama administration can’t even make up its mind whether Kim Jong-Il is a threat; they may declare that “The United States will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state,” but they don’t seem willing to do anything more than “respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’”  The situation is critical, but the White House seems to want nothing more than for North Korea to recede back below the threshold of public consciousness so they can get back to more important things (like rescinding some of the restrictions on lobbyists that President Obama announced with such self-righteous, self-aggrandizing fanfare back in January).  “Speak softly and carry a big teleprompter,” indeed.

Headlong for God

Jared Wilson posted a concert video of Keith Green singing "The Victor," and that got me off on a Keith Green kick; in that spirit, here are concert videos of a couple more of my favorites of his songs.

He'll Take Care of the Rest

Make My Life a Prayer to You

Only by the Holy Spirit

A couple weeks ago, our presbytery held a leadership training event.  During the course of the table discussion that morning, one of the co-executives of our synod made a most interesting comment. We were talking about the difference between the experience of the people of God in the Old Testament and ours today, that we have the Spirit of God where they did not, and he noted that we often don’t want to talk about that, or even think about that.  That isn't true in every stream of the Christian tradition, of course, but it does tend to be a problem among Presbyterians:  we shy away from taking the Spirit seriously.

I think that much of our reluctance is driven in large part by fear—our fear of letting go, giving up our sense of control over our lives and letting the Spirit lead us—and that’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate because it keeps us from experiencing the full reality of our redemption and our new life in Christ, part of which is being set free from fear; we wind up living as if we had no more power than anyone else in this world, but a higher standard to live up to. That makes trying to be Christian a painful slog, rather than the easy yoke and the life of joy and peace that Christ promises us.

Unfortunately, as a pastor I knew in college put it one time, Presbyterians believe in doing things “decently and in order,” but tend to forget that when Paul uses those words, he’s talking about the proper place of prophecy and tongues in worship. The idea is that there needs to be a balance, so that the church doesn’t descend into emotionalism and chaos, on the one hand, but there’s room for the Spirit to move, on the other.

I think a lot of times people who aren’t Pentecostal or charismatic look at those churches and just see emotionalism and chaos—and sometimes they’re right, to be sure; I’ve endured services like that—and overreact in the other direction, shutting off the Spirit. We don’t have a very good feel for the middle ground, because we don’t have a very clear idea of why we need the Holy Spirit; we have this vague idea that the Spirit is supposed to make people jump up and down, fall over, and say things we don’t understand, and maybe that frightens us, and we really don’t understand the Spirit’s work beyond that. Those sorts of manifestations are particular signs of the Spirit’s presence and activity, but in most cases they aren’t the point of the Spirit’s presence and activity; in focusing on them, we miss the forest for the trees.

In truth, the work of the Holy Spirit in and among us is far broader and deeper and more important than just the flashy stuff. There’s a reason that God’s final solution to his people’s unbelieving disobedience is, “I will put my Spirit in you”; there’s a reason that the conclusion of Christ’s work and the birth of the church as the new Israel is the fulfillment of that promise, as the Spirit is poured out on all of Jesus’ disciples. Everything that we say is true about life in Christ is true in us and for us because of the Holy Spirit; it’s the Spirit who unites us with Christ and holds us in the presence of God. It’s the Spirit of God who makes all things possible.

(Excerpted, edited, from “By the Power of the Spirit”)

Wow . . . liberal writer takes hatchet to Barack Obama

I can’t say I’ve ever been very aware of Ted Rall, but apparently he’s a syndicated columnist and editorial cartoonist of some significance; apparently he’s also an atheist and very liberal, but apparently willing to call out Democrats if he thinks they have it coming, rather than take the party line as a straightjacket.  I think he does a remarkable job of proving that with this column (HT:  Mark Hemingway):

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory. This guy makes Bill Clinton look like a paragon of integrity and follow-through.

From health care to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied. So timid and so owned is he that he trembles in fear of offending, of all things, the government of Turkey. Obama has officially reneged on his campaign promise to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. When a president doesn’t have the nerve to annoy the Turks, why does he bother to show up for work in the morning?

Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now—before he drags us further into the abyss.

My oh my.  I’m not sure any conservatives have dared to cut loose with a broadside like that (and if they had, they would have been torn to shreds for it by the OSM); to read this coming from a liberal is nothing short of amazing.  But then, I think the issue that provoked him to this point is one on which liberals and conservatives should agree, and unite in opposing the White House:

I refer here to Obama’s plan for “preventive detentions.” If a cop or other government official thinks you might want to commit a crime someday, you could be held in “prolonged detention.” Reports in U.S. state-controlled media imply that Obama’s shocking new policy would only apply to Islamic terrorists (or, in this case, wannabe Islamic terrorists, and also kinda-sorta-maybe-thinking-about-terrorism dudes). As if that made it OK. . . .

Preventive detention is the classic defining characteristic of a military dictatorship. Because dictatorial regimes rely on fear rather than consensus, their priority is self-preservation rather than improving their people’s lives. They worry obsessively over the one thing they can’t control, what George Orwell called “thoughtcrime”—contempt for rulers that might someday translate to direct action.

He’s right about that; this proposal would be exactly the sort of banana-republic behavior I’ve been worrying about (as in this post) ever since the campaign, given some of the tactics we saw from Barack Obama and his flunkies then.  In truth, the whole idea here is profoundly illiberal, and really rather hard to explain.  Either President Obama is one of those folks who has a sneaking hidden admiration for totalitarian techniques (something more common on the Left than one would think, as we saw with Code Pink and other leftist organizations when they snuggled up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad), or else this is his solution to the dilemma he faces.  After all, if he’s committed to giving captured terrorists the same rights as any American, and giving them the rights Americans have now would be a threat to national security, what else is he going to do?

The question is, will people go along with it?  Not if Rall has anything to say about it, we won’t—and again, it’s hard to argue with his point:

Locking up people who haven’t done anything wrong is worse than un-American and a violent attack on the most basic principles of Western jurisprudence. It is contrary to the most essential notion of human decency. That anyone has ever been subjected to “preventive detention” is an outrage. That the president of the United States, a man who won an election because he promised to elevate our moral and political discourse, would even entertain such a revolting idea offends the idea of civilization itself.

Rall is here addressing the issue of terrorism, but this is in fact a much broader concern and temptation in jurisprudence, perhaps especially with regard to sexual predators—if preventive detention ever becomes a reality in the American criminal-justice system, it won’t be long before the clamor arises to have it applied to violent rapists; there are more than a few people even now who think it would be perfectly appropriate to pre-emptively imprison folks like that until they’re too frail to feed themselves.  (Science fiction plays with this theme at various points; the apotheosis of this would of course be Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” and the 2002 film based on it, with his concept of the “Precrime” unit that identifies and arrests criminals before they commit their crimes.)

All of this leads Rall to a remarkably strong statement:

Obama is cute. He is charming. But there is something rotten inside him. Unlike the Republicans who backed George W. Bush, I won’t follow a terrible leader just because I voted for him. Obama has revealed himself. He is a monster, and he should remove himself from power.

Now, the conclusion that President Bush was a terrible leader is Rall’s, not mine; I don’t happen to think he was.  I do, however, think that all too many Republicans fell into line behind him when we shouldn’t have out of political calculation (calculation which, ultimately, proved incorrect, as that behavior turned out to be unwise politically as well as philosophically).  I also don’t think it correct or fair to call President Obama “a monster”—that’s hysterical hyperbole of the worst sort.

The man’s a politician, nothing more and nothing less—though to be specific, he’s a Chicago politician, which is about the most cynical and manipulative sort our country has—and if there’s “something rotten inside him,” well, there’s something rotten inside each and every one of us.  Traditionally, it’s called sin, though I would imagine that as an atheist, Rall doesn’t think he’s supposed to believe in it.  And yet, it’s there all the same, in Barack Obama no less than in anyone else.

And that, I suspect, is the reason for Rall’s harshness in going after the president:  Barack Obama was supposed to be better, and so far (and here I agree with Rall completely) he’s been worse.  What you hear in this scream of rage is, I think, the anguished fury of severe disillusionment, as it has become apparent that Candidate Obama played the Left the same way he played everyone else.  Such political principles and impulses as he has are hard-left, that much is clear, but (as with Bill Clinton) they are secondary to the main goal of gaining, maintaining, and extending power.  If it suits his particular sort of Realpolitik to keep his promises, then he’ll keep them; if it doesn’t, he won’t; and if he can duck responsibility for not keeping them, or keeping them, or (if most advantageous) for addressing an issue at all, he’ll do that, too.

The political lesson of Ted Rall’s column (apart from its message) is this:  the true believers aren’t going to stand for that very long.  E. J. Dionne, in recognizing (and celebrating!) the fact that President Obama and his administration have been quite deliberately selling different stories to different ideological groups as a tactic for advancing his agenda and isolating conservatives, worried a little that the president might overreach, and that it might not ultimately work:

But establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.

Dionne is correct in his concerns; and given the case of Ted Rall, I suspect that this approach ultimately won’t work, that the president will find that his mastery is ultimately too limited to pull off what he’s attempting.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,
but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

—Abraham Lincoln (attributed)

Another Alaskan energy solution

While drilling in ANWR is on the shelf with this administration, Investor's Business Daily points out that another potential Alaskan energy source has turned out to be far more significant than first thought:

Back in July, when IBD first interviewed the then-little-known governor, [Sarah] Palin emphasized developing Alaska's Chukchi Sea resources. . . .

At the time, it was thought that Chukchi's waters northwest of Alaska's landmass held 30 billion cubic feet of natural gas.

Today, Science magazine reports that the U.S. Geological Survey now finds it holds more than anyone thought—1.6 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world's supply and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of the global conventional resources.

That's enough U.S. energy to achieve self-sufficiency and never worry about it as a national security question again.

Of course, as with ANWR, there are those who will object, claiming environmental reasons; but here, the calculus is a bit different.  Leaving aside the strong proven safety and environmental record of our offshore drilling operations, the fact is that this isn't a choice between drilling in the Chukchi Sea or not drilling there.  As the IBD points out, Russia also has territorial rights in the Chukchi Sea, and they won't be restrained by our environmental niceties—they're bound to drill there whether we do or not.  The question, rather, is this:  do we want Russia to take all that oil and natural gas, or do we want to take our fair share?

HT:  Ron Devito

The Obama administration strong-arming continues

A few weeks ago I posted on reports that the White House had intervened with some of Chrysler's creditors to force them to give up their rights for the benefit of the UAW, changing the rules after the fact to pay off a political debt; I got a couple responses from liberals saying, in essence, "What's the problem here?"  I posted at greater length answering that question, though I got no comments that time.  Now, in the parallel situation with GM, even the Washington Post has been forced to take notice of the rancid favoritism being shown by the White House, declaring,

GM's new owner (the Obama administration) should stop bullying the company's bondholders. . . .

While the Obama administration has been playing hardball with bondholders, it has been more than happy to play nice with the United Auto Workers. How else to explain why a retiree health-care fund controlled by the UAW is slated to get a 39 percent equity stake in GM for its remaining $10 billion in claims while bondholders are being pressured to take a 10 percent stake for their $27 billion?

I realize that liberals don't see anything wrong with this—after all, it's a liberal Democratic president funneling money to a liberal organization that's practically a wing of the Democratic party—but I can just imagine the ear-splitting shrieks we'd be hearing about "the rule of law" and "undue influence" and "political thuggery" if a Republican administration had tried anything of this sort.

Nor is this the end of the administration's blatant manipulation of the process.  Last week, I took note briefly of a case in Florida where a Dodge dealer in Florida had his dealership taken away from him without due process for no good reason whatsoever; now it comes out that there's reason to suspect partisan manipulation in Chrysler's dealership structure.  A blogger named Doug Ross writes,

A cursory review by that person showed that many of the Chrysler dealers on the closing list were heavy Republican donors.

To quickly review the situation, I took all dealer owners whose names appeared more than once in the list. And, of those who contributed to political campaigns, every single one had donated almost exclusively to GOP candidates. While this isn't an exhaustive review, it does have some ominous implications if it can be verified. . . .

I have thus far found only a single Obama donor (and a minor one at that: $200 from Jeffrey Hunter of Waco, Texas) on the closing list.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal rightly notes that "Ross's evidence is suggestive, not conclusive. It does not appear that anyone has yet conducted a complete analysis of Chrysler dealers' political contributions "; but it's mighty suggestive indeed, especially as it fits right in with an emerging pattern.  But then, as Taranto says, "Political intervention in private business is an invitation for the most brazen sort of corruption."

Love without truth is dead (and vice versa)

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part
is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.

—Ephesians 4:11-16 (ESV)

Philip over at The Thinklings has an excellent post up from yesterday entitled “Love Without Truth Isn’t Love At All”; I agree with him wholeheartedly and commend it to your attention.  I believe his point is a critically important one, and one which has been largely lost not only in our culture but in much of the church in this country, in large part because we’ve lost sight of Paul’s definition of spiritual maturity—and perhaps, in many cases, of any concept of spiritual maturity at all, or at least of any sense that it’s something to be greatly desired.

That’s our loss, because Paul is right (and so is Philip):  love cannot exist without truth—and of equal importance, neither can truth exist without love, and we’ve largely lost sight of that, too.  When Paul characterizes spiritual maturity as a matter of “speaking the truth in love,” he gives us what seems to me to be one of the most luminous statements in Scripture, capturing the way Christ calls us to live in one single, balanced phrase.  We are called to speak the truth in love as a way of life, compromising neither, setting neither above the other, and for good reason: neither can exist in its pure state without the other.

Love without truth decays, because true love seeks only what is best for the beloved; when truth is taken out, whether because the truth seems too hard, too painful, too inconvenient, too much work, too risky, too unpleasant, or what have you, the heart of love is gone, for it is seeking, in one way or another, its own perceived benefit. It may believe that it’s trying to spare the other person unnecessary pain, or something of that sort, but in reality it’s trying to spare itself; and that way leads the decline of love into the mere sentimentality which declares, “Love is blind.” No, love has its eyes wide open, because love is founded on truth. It’s precisely the fact that Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and exactly whom he was doing it for, with no illusions as to our worthiness or anything else, that made his death on the cross an act of love. Had he been blind to all that, it would have been worthless.

At the same time, truth without love also decays. It’s not just the words we say that make our statements true or false, it’s how we say them, and in what spirit; which is why it’s possible for us to combine true statements in such a way that those who hear us will draw a false conclusion. Without love, truth hardens, growing cold and brittle, like a coal removed from the fire; to say that God hates sin is to speak truth, but to say it without love is to give the very distinct impression that he hates sinners, too, which is most decidedly not true. Indeed, to grasp the truth that God hates sin without also understanding that he is love and that he loves all whom he has made is very likely to come to believe that God hates sinners.

The reason for this is that God is truth, and God is love, and neither truth nor love has any meaning or reality apart from him; and thus to sever one from the other is to sever both from their source. What’s left is something very much akin to cut flowers: they may retain their beauty, and they can be kept alive for a little while, but they’re dying. To have either truth or love, we must have both.

Keeping victory straight

I’ve argued that the Christian life is a life lived in the victory of the gospel, and that we need to understand life in Christ as the victory of Christ overcoming the sin in our hearts by the power of his Holy Spirit.  At the same time, I noted that we have to be careful in using this language, because we have a tendency to cast the word “victory” in worldly terms and fill it with worldly expectations, and that’s just not on; this isn’t our victory for our purposes, it’s God’s victory for his purposes, and he has shared it with us not for our glory but for his own. As such, his victory is not about us getting what we want, or making us look good, or keeping us from hard times, or things going the way we think they should—no matter how much we want it to be.

That’s the mistake all those folks made who were prophesying that John McCain would win back in November, because they were sure they knew what God’s victory had to look like. Some of them, their faith was shaken when they turned up wrong, because they had more faith in their own ideas about how things had to be than in God.  For my part, I agree with them that Sen. McCain would have been a better president than Barack Obama, but that’s not the victory God intended, and not the victory toward which he was working; and we don’t get our victory, we get God’s.

Which means that if we make the mistake of identifying our own preferred causes with God’s—if we think that God’s glory requires that we get rich or that our church have more people, if we forget that America is not the kingdom of God to which we pledge our highest allegiance, if we start to believe that God’s victory has to mean the fulfillment of our own worldly ambitions—we’re going to get those kinds of unwanted surprises, because we’re going to build up expectations that have nothing at all to do with what God’s actually on about. God may be intending to do what we want him to do, but then again, he may not—and even if he is, it might not come the way we expect, or look the way we think it will look. He does not promise to fulfill our expectations, he promises to glorify his name, and what glorifies him in our lives isn’t always what we think of as glorious.  Sometimes it even means our suffering.

(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)

On this blog in history: February 10-21, 2008

A clear-eyed view of the Middle East
On how the situation there didn't look like the media made it look (and still doesn't).

Two cheers for political polarization
Has political polarization actually improved our public life?  There's good reason to think so.

Abiding in the light
On disagreeing like Christ.

Inconvenient truth?
I think there are several very good reasons to reduce pollution, but the alleged scientific case for anthropogenic global warming still doesn't hold water.

The value of experience
James Buchanan vs. Abraham Lincoln.

Is Judge Sotomayor the best conservatives could hope for?

On reflection, I think so.  It was obvious from the beginning that Barack Obama was going to pick a woman to replace David Souter, which of course meant a liberal woman.  While there were rumblings that he might name a non-judge such as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm or Homeland Security Secretary (and former Arizona governor) Janet Napolitano to the vacancy, the smart betting seemed to have it going to one of three people:  Solicitor General Elena Kagan (the former dean of Harvard Law School), Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and Judge Diane Wood.  Of the three, the most talked-about leading up to the nomination was Judge Wood, which made perfect sense to me since she's the one who worried me the most; I don't really want any of these folks on the Court, but given the likely options, I was hoping vaguely for Solicitor General Kagan, who seems to me to be the most reasonable of them.

As for Judge Sotomayor, she's not only hard-left, she's also a comparative lightweight (not that she's not a very bright woman, just that she's not in the same ballpark as, say, Diane Wood, or Antonin Scalia) and so when she was announced as President Obama's pick, I was more than a little non-plussed; sure, she's qualified, but hardly the best-qualified nominee, even off that very short list.  Her record at the 2nd Circuit Court is uninspiring, to say the least, as Ed Morrissey notes:

The current court, including Souter, has already heard oral arguments on [Ricci v. Destefano]. They should rule on this before the end of their current session, which will come next month. If they overturn Sotomayor, that will emphasize both her incorrect decision on the merits as well as a lack of intellectual curiosity, an issue raised by her colleague Judge Cabranes.

A reversal on Ricci will raise the issue of the several reversals Sotomayor has received over her 11 years on the 2nd Circuit (the Washington Times says she bats .400 at the Supreme Court—not a confidence builder). The Supreme Court has reversed her at least four times already, at least one of those a unanimous 8-0 reversal, which makes her look either more liberal than anyone currently on the court or less competent. One of the times the court upheld Sotomayor, the majority scolded her for misrepresenting the statute in her opinion.

So why did President Obama choose her?  Part of it was no doubt the identity-politics aspect of naming the first Hispanic to the court, along with the third woman.  Part of it may well have been that he thought she was a safer nominee.  It will almost certainly take Democratic defections to sustain a filibuster, which isn't at all likely under normal conditions, but there's been the suggestion that Judge Wood's recent record on national-security issues was a red flag; the recent refusal by the Senate to support the closure of the Guantanamo detention center suggests that if Judge Wood's views on national security worried the Blue Dog Democrats enough, a successful filibuster might be possible.  Judge Sotomayor might lack the sheer intellectual firepower of Judge Wood, but she'll be an equally reliable liberal vote and the identity politics works in her favor.  Since the president will have a reasonable shot at filling three slots on the court over the course of this term, it appears he decided to take a safer and more politically appealing course for his first shot.

Now, this isn't to say that Judge Sotomayor has no baggage; she does, and particularly the following remarks:

All of the legal defense funds out there, they’re looking for people with Court of Appeals experience. Because it is—Court of Appeals is where policy is made. And I know, and I know, that this is on tape, and I should never say that. Because we don’t “make law,” I know. [audience laughter] Okay, I know. I know. I’m not promoting it, and I’m not advocating it. I’m, you know. [audience laughter] Having said that, the Court of Appeals is where, before the Supreme Court makes the final decision, the law is percolating. Its interpretation, its application.

That line came from a 2005 panel discussion at Duke; I think Michael Eden is right to say from this that “Sotomayor clearly acknowledges her view, even as she recognizes how radical and wrong it is, and therefore says the pro forma things to cover [herself].”  The other much-quoted passage of her thought will likely be this one, from a 2001 speech at Berkeley:

I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that—it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. . . .

Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

From this, one can see why some Republicans are talking filibuster; but barring the unforeseen, it won't work.  They wouldn't keep Maine in the fold on filibustering Judge Sotomayor, and these sorts of issues aren't going to cause mass Senate defections.  Aside from discovering that she's five years in arrears on her taxes, or something like that, Judge Sotomayor will be Justice Sotomayor as soon as the appointed time arrives.

And for that, I think the GOP should be grateful; if they did somehow manage to block her nomination, I believe they'd end up regretting it.  As a matter of pure Realpolitik, Barack Obama is going to put a liberal in that seat and that's all there is to it; the only question is what kind of liberal he'll put there.  Given that, I think the party and its leaders need to listen very carefully to Jonathan Turley's complaints about the nomination (video below):

You know, we are not selecting a house pet. We're selecting a Supreme Court justice and as an academic I have a certain bias. And that is does she have the intellectual throw weight to make a difference on the court? And I have to tell you the optics are better than the opinions in this case. I've read a couple of dozen of her opinions. They don't speak well to her being a nominee on the Supreme Court. . . . I think that a lot of academics are a little bit disappointed. I am in the sense that Diane Wood, Harold Koh, were not the ultimate people to prevail. These are people that are blazingly brilliant. They would have brought to the court intellects that would frame in the conceptual way. . . .

I've read roughly about 30 of these opinions. She has a much larger library of opinions. But they are notable in one thing and that it's a lack of depth. There's nothing particularly profound in her past decisions. She's been a judge a long time. That's opposed to people like Judge Wood on the 7th Circuit and she was viewed as a real intellectual powerhouse. You really can't read the opinions of this nominee and say, “Oh yeah, this person is a natural choice for the Supreme Court.” . . . I have to say that liberals obviously are enjoying rightfully a certain short term elation with this twofer, a woman and a Latina, being put on the court. But in terms of long term satisfaction she does not naturally suggest that she is going to be the equal of Scalia and I think that was the model for liberals. They wanted someone who would shape the intellectual foundations of the court. Her past opinions do not suggest that she is like that. . . .

Ultimately questions about empathy and temperament are less important than whether this person is going to have a profound impact to help shape the court and this nominee really doesn't have a history to suggest that.

Dr. Turley is unhappy because in his estimation, Justice Sotomayor is unlikely to be anything but a vote on the Court.  She'll be a reliable leftist vote, to be sure, but she will probably have little effect on the votes of her colleagues—a point which is supported by how unpersuasive they've tended to find her reasoning as it's come to them in her opinions from the 2nd Circuit.  President Obama had the chance to nominate a liberal who would not only be a vote, but would influence the overall direction of the court; as far as we can tell at this point (which is, admittedly, never as far as we think it is), Sonia Sotomayor will not be that kind of justice.  For that, Republicans should be thankful—and should hope that somehow the political climate changes enough between now and the next Supreme Court vacancy that the president will have to nominate someone more moderate.

And in that hope, this nomination may well be useful.  The concerns about Judge Sotomayor won't be enough to create Democratic opposition, but they may help the GOP make its case to the electorate, as Ed Morrissey argues:

The Republicans have an opportunity with Sotomayor that doesn’t involve knocking her off the court. They have an opportunity to use the hearings to show Sotomayor as a routine appellate jurist with a spotty record who got elevated to this position as an act of political hackery by a President who couldn’t care less about his responsibilities to find the best and brightest for the job. Like many of Obama’s other appointments, it demonstrates a lack of executive talent and intellectual curiosity on his part. This appointment makes an argument for more Republicans in the Senate after the midterms, if for no other reason than to force Obama to start putting a little effort in making his nominations.

Taken all in all, as a conservative, I don't like the pick, but I think it could and should have been a lot worse.  Given that elections have consequences, and wipeouts have big consequences, that's practically the best-case scenario.

Can goes boom

I think my little office refrigerator was turned a wee bit too cold . . .  (Sorry for the low image quality—I was having trouble holding the shot perfectly still.)

Suffering and the glory of God

One of the uncomfortable truths of the Christian life is that it’s often in our suffering that God is most glorified in our lives. John Piper captures this well in this full-throated assault on the so-called “prosperity gospel”:

God wants us to know, even in the moments of the deepest agony our hearts could ever conceive, that he is enough; that he is good, that he will take care of us, that he will get us through it—and to be able, even through our tears and our pain, to affirm that in faith. As Dr. Piper says, it is that more than anything else that makes God look glorious as God, “not as giver of cars or safety or health,” but as God, because that shows his real power in our lives. The gods of this world can give us prosperity, though they are hard and demanding and fickle and can take it away again just as quickly; what they cannot do is sustain us in times of pain. Only God can do that, and so it’s in our times of suffering that the world can actually see the reality of our faith.  As Howard Vanderwell of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship put it in discussing 1 Peter 1:1-9, “God had in mind to use [our trials] as an exhibit of genuine faith. The exhibit of such genuine faith lifts others, defeats the schemes of Satan, and brings glory to Christ.”

This is a strange thought to us, that God would want to be glorified in our suffering; but I think it’s strange in part because of the ideas the world gives us about glory. For God to be glorified means that he is seen and recognized for who he is in his true nature and character; this is why the Bible talks of Christ being glorified on the cross, because on the cross he showed the depths of his love for us, and how far he was willing to go and how much he was willing to endure and bear for our sake. It’s in his death on the cross that we see most clearly the nature and character of our God.

Similarly, what is the greatest thing God does in our lives? What shows his power and character and love most clearly? It isn’t the good times, because most people have good times, and they come for a lot of different reasons. It isn’t the times that nothing bad happens, because we quickly grow accustomed to that—we think of that as “normal life,” and don’t see all the bad things that could happen that he prevents. We don’t see the times that we don’t get into a nasty traffic accident because that driver over there took a different route across town this morning, or maybe called in sick with a bad cold instead of trying to fight it off and go to work, and so we don’t give God credit for those times. It isn’t our successes, because we usually take them for our own—we may thank God for them, but most of the time we really believe that we made them happen ourselves, and so does everyone else (both of our successes and their own). In all these things and all these times, there is really nothing to distinguish the people of God from those who are not his people, for as the Scriptures tell us, the rain that gives life to the crops falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Where we are distinguished from those who do not walk with Christ, where we see the power of God and the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives most clearly, is in the hard times in our lives, in our times of loss and suffering and struggle, as we see him lift us up and support us. This is when we see his character most clearly, because we can see that his goodness to us goes beyond giving us things to caring for us when we’re in need, when we’re in pain, when we’re hurting and blaming it on him, when we’re angry at him for allowing us to suffer. We can see that God doesn’t return anger for anger and blame for blame, nor does he expect or even want us to lie to him and tell him things are fine when he knows as well as we do that they aren’t. Instead, he takes it all, and he loves us and cares for us and supports us—directly, by his Spirit, and indirectly, through his people—and he gives us hope that there is a better future coming, when all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, as Julian of Norwich wrote. He enables us to sing songs of praise at funerals, because we know by his faithfulness that pain and death and grief and loss do not have the last word, for there is a resurrection. He enables us to overcome, to find his victory in the midst of our circumstances, and to keep going, finding comfort in him as we journey through the valley of the shadow of death, trusting that we will emerge at last on the other side.

(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)

Jihadis in US prisons = big "Hit it Here" sign

I hadn't gotten around to reading Beldar of late, so I missed his post on why moving the Gitmo detainees to the US would be a really bad idea—a post which raises a far scarier scenario than the one I considered:

The most serious risk is that the same type of terrorist organization that mounted a simultaneous four-plane multi-state flying bomb assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/01 would welcome the opportunity to assault any holding facility on American soil, or whatever community was closest thereto, in an attempt to force the captured terrorists' release. Simply put, friends and neighbors: Any holding facility for radical Islamic terrorists on American soil would be a target and a potential "rescue mission" for which al Qaeda or its like would delightedly create dozens or hundreds of new "martyrs" from among their own ranks.

Right now—as has been continuously true since the first prisoners were shipped there after we began operating against the Taliban in Afghanistan—these terrorists' would-be "rescuers" can't assault Gitmo without first getting to Cuba and then defeating the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps at sea, on land, and in the air. That's not the kind of fight they want; those aren't the kind of logistical hurdles they can ever overcome. Keeping all the captured terrorists at Gitmo, in other words, has played directly to our strongest suit as a nation—our superb, unparalleled, and highly professional military strength as continuously projected in a place of our choosing without risk of collateral casualties among American civilians.

But once the scene shifts to American soil, we lose virtually all of that combination of power and flexibility, and surrender back to the terrorists all the advantages upon which they regularly depend. Getting into the U.S., or using "sleepers" already here? In a fight against some local sheriffs or prison guards armed mostly with revolvers and tasers (perhaps supplemented with shotguns or even a few assault rifles, but no heavy weaponry at all)? With the fighting to take place in or even near any American population center? Can the Obama Administration possibly be so stupid as to forfeit all of our own advantages, and give all of the terrorists' advantages back to them?

(Emphasis in the original.)  Read the whole thing, and you'll understand why such a move would amount to designating Target #1 for al'Qaeda's next attack.

The incorrigible Michael Ingham

John Stackhouse writes,

Monday morning, May 25, a trial begins that will make history in Canada with reverberations for the worldwide Anglican Communion. Four Anglican congregations here in the Vancouver area have petitioned the Supreme Court of British Columbia to rule on who are and who aren’t the genuine trustees of their buildings and property.

Now, I'm not sure that this will really have that great a ripple effect on the Anglican Communion as a whole; while this is a new thing for Canada, it's been going on for a while in the US, where Episcopal congregations have been seceding left, right and sideways for years now.  Still, it's a very big deal for Canada, indeed, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.

Why have they done so? They have done so because their bishop, Michael Ingham, has told them as clergy and as congregations that he wants them to obey him and the local synod or get out. Obey on what? Well, depending on whom you ask, that’s a matter that is either simple or complicated. You can read what the main dissenting church says about the matter here, and read what the diocesan authorities say here (about same-sex blessings, the precipitating factor) and here (on the court case).

The church Dr. Stackhouse references is St. John's Shaughnessy, which was the home church for a fair number of folks I knew during my time at Regent; it's a significant church as Vancouver churches go.  It's also staunchly orthodox and (in my knowledge of it) gospel-centered, which is why so many folks I knew attended there, including Dr. J. I. Packer and at least one Presbyterian minister.

The headlines on this one will no doubt focus on homosexuality, but the issues run a lot broader and deeper.  For one thing, the problems with Bishop Ingham's theology are far broader than one issue, as St. John's statement points out:

The core issue is a deeply profound theological difference in the understanding and interpretation of scripture and what it means to be “Anglican”. It is clear that the Diocesan leadership [i.e., the bishop and his minions] no longer believes, adheres to and or seeks to preserve the core doctrines of the Anglican Christian faith, such as the uniqueness of Jesus, the physical resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, or the accepted teachings of the Anglican Communion.

For another, this isn't just about Bishop Ingham's theology, but also about the bishop himself.  As St. John's notes, the four churches that have gone to court have done so not on their own initiative but in defense against the rapacity of the diocese.

Over the last ten years, the leadership of St. John’s has been working through local, national and international processes to resolve this issue. There has been no resolution that would keep St. John’s in communion with the world wide Anglican Church for this generation and the next. We have sought mediated solutions but none has proved successful. In August 2008, after the Diocese of New Westminster sought to seize the property and replace the clergy and trustees at St. Matthew’s Abbotsford and St. Matthias & St. Luke, the trustees of these churches, along with St. John’s Shaughnessy and Church of the Good Shepherd, were forced to go to the courts for clarification. This decision, as with all the decisions related to this matter in the last 10 years, was done after much prayer and the reviewing of alternatives. It was not done in haste.

Anyone who's paid attention to the way in which Bishop Ingham runs the Diocese of New Westminster will be unsurprised by this.  I had a number of friends at Regent who were trying to work their way through the Anglican ordination process, and the bishop was a problem for all of them—not just for reasons of differing theology, though that certainly didn't help, but also due to the way he treated people.  He showed, let's just say, a very high sense of his own position and the dignities due him as a consequence; I also got the impression that he was a real micromanager and very controlling, though I can't say that with certainty.  He is certainly not one to respond to disagreement with grace, as those who disagree with him have discovered.

The threat of idolatry in worship

The Devil hates it when we worship God. Any time the body of Christ gathers to worship God, to give him glory and hear the gospel preached, he loses; and so he’ll do anything in his power to prevent it. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come, but that doesn’t work on everyone; for all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and you should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship by turning our hearts away from our Lord and getting us to worship something other than Christ.

Tim Keller talked about this at the Gospel Coalition conference last month, that we all have our idols and our temptations to idolatry—our spouses; our kids; our reputations; our jobs; our possessions; anything of real value to us, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives, can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our lives. The church can become an idol—usually the local congregation, but I know folks for whom I’d say their denomination has become an idol—and so can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, of course, style of music is an idol; for some, the building becomes an idol. That was a problem in Colorado, for example. (It probably still is.)

These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families, we ought to love our churches, we ought to love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here, and certainly we ought to value the work he has given us to do. We ought to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some kinds to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God; it’s not that we need to love them less, but that we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them, and our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure, with our love for all those other people and things falling in order behind our love for him.  Our worship needs to be directed to God and God alone, and we cannot afford to let anything else creep in.

(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)

A little-known memorial to our nation's fallen

Thanks to Ed Morrissey for posting pictures of his visit a few years ago to the 9/11 memorial at the Pentagon.  Check it out.

Memorial Day

Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner yesterday; it’s an excellent evocation of what this observance means:

Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”

And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous-might in the face of evil.

Turning prisons into spring training for terrorists

After the president tried (and failed, it appears) to one-up Dick Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post put together a useful video combining excerpts from both speeches.

HT:  Shane Vander Hart

What conclusions one draws from this will of course depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing; to my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney's serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama's language.  Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as "violating our core values," as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don't see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore.  I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn't seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.

Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons.  That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:

U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . . 

[President Obama's] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.

The danger here is succinctly summarized by a commenter on one of Jennifer Rubin's posts on Contentions:

I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.

We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threat in this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons.  The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who've been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who've carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al'Qaeda.  It's hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.

We get the government we deserve

and here's who we got:

My thanks to my gifted fellow C4P contributor Seth Adam Smith for creating this video.

Gas prices: onward and upward

I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama's Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete.  I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker's chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down.  I left out a couple other reasons, though.

First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don't think higher gas prices are a bad thing.  Ideologically, they're committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they've been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they're all in favor of gas prices going up.  If they weren't, they wouldn't be pushing their "cap and trade" bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who's leading the charge on this, hasn't even read) so hard; after all, let's call a spade a spade here, what is this thing?  It's an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they'll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it's going toboost the price of gas even more.

Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez.  It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America).  As such, they're going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer.  It's an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about "the useful idiots in the White House."

Susan Boyle strikes again

HT:  Allahpundit

I have to say, I don't think she actually sang as well this time—her pitch was a bit wobbly starting off, I thought, and her phrasing could have stood some work—though part of that is likely the fact that I'm no great fact of the song she chose; but I'll admit, lyrically, it was a perfect fit for her this time (as was her previous choice; she does seem to have a knack for that).  I have to say, while I admire the ease with which she just sails through the high passages, I think my favorite part of this clip is the opening, and the utterly different reception she gets this time as opposed to the beginning of her first appearance.  Gone is the skepticism (along with some of the dowdiness); she's a star now, and she's greeted with eager and affectionate anticipation.  It's really cool.

Using faith for political ends

I’ve written a couple posts now on the dangers of what I’ve called “theologized politics,” which may be briefly defined as the appropriation of religion and religious believers by political parties as tools to be used to achieve political ends (chiefly, winning elections).  A good illustration of this would be recent Democratic efforts to draw religious (primarily Christian) voters away from the Republican party. Most such efforts have been rooted in the work of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and particularly his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. In Dr. Lakoff’s view, the reason for the political success conservatives had been having through 2004 lay not in conservative ideas and policies but rather in conservative manipulation of language. As he put it,

Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing.

Dr. Lakoff’s response was to found a think tank of his own, the Rockridge Institute. The purpose of this think tank, as he described it, is “to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective,” by asking, “What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?”

Dr. Lakoff first published his book in 1997, but his ideas really began to catch on following the 2004 presidential election. Ellen Goodman’s column of November 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe, which explicitly cites his work, provides one example: “This is the time for the losers to go back to basics, to restate their views into a basic simple, straightforward language of values and morals. It’s the time to parse what we believe in. Especially right and wrong.”

The title of Goodman’s column, “Taking back ‘values’,” makes the point clear: following Dr. Lakoff, the issue wasn’t Democratic policies, but only the language in which they were presented. Explain to Republican voters that poverty is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue, and so on, and they’ll vote Democratic instead. This is the assumption on which the Democrats have been working ever since; thus for instance we have Howard Dean’s complaint that pollsters “have largely missed the story [in the 2008 primaries] because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans . . . this bias . . . has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”

There is much that could be said in response to and assessment of this approach; for starters, Dean was certainly correct to point out that there are a lot of Christians in this country who vote Democrat, even if this fact does seem to elude most members of the American media. For present purposes, however, the most important point to note is that this is yet another instance of theologizing politics. Rather than subjecting political positions and platforms to theological scrutiny, this approach seeks to take existing positions and apply a veneer of religious language; rather than reflecting on them theologically and seeking to evaluate them accordingly, it assumes a positive evaluation and simply presents them as positions supported by Christian teaching.

Now, this should not be taken as a partisan criticism, for this is not something of which Democrats alone are guilty. Indeed, Dr. Lakoff has at least this much right: the Democratic Party came late to the game on this one. For all the biblical language used in Republican rhetoric, and for all the identification of American evangelicals with the Republican Party, there’s really very little in the way of meaningful theological engagement with much of the party platform. Some issues, certainly, are grounded in biblical and theological statements (most notably abortion), but the argument at these points tends to be issue-specific, not part of any coherent whole with the rest of the platform; on issues such as tax policy or immigration policy, there has been a strong tendency among evangelical Republicans to baptize conservative positions as the properly Christian thing to believe without really evaluating them.

This set the stage for the Obama backlash among a certain subset of self-identified evangelicals in the 2008 election. He didn’t actually gain many evangelical votes, but the ones he did attract tended to be very loud; he also managed to appear sufficiently unthreatening that many other evangelicals felt it safe to indulge their displeasure with John McCain and stay home instead of voting.  Among both groups, there was the sense that the Republican Party has been happy in years past to pay lip service to evangelical concerns in order to raise money and turnout, but has done little or nothing to actually address those concerns in a meaningful way; party leaders haven’t taken voters’ faith seriously, but have only seen it as something to be used and manipulated to their own ends.  This sense has been growing stronger for some time, and in 2006 and 2008, it manifested in voter defections that returned the Democratic Party to power.

In my view, that sense is entirely fair, and entirely unsurprising.  The thing about theologized politics is that it essentially amounts to the subversion of faith for political ends, leaving the political platform—and party—in the dominant position; religious folk are welcomed at the fundraising counter and the volunteer meeting, but when it comes to the actual making of policy we’re expected to just shut up and soldier.  This is what evangelicals found with the GOP—which is why so many of us are backing away from the party, even if we’re just as conservative as we ever were (or maybe especially so, since the party definitely isn’t)—and it’s what those who bought the rhetoric and voted for the candidate of Hopeychangeyness are now finding with the Democrats as well.  It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to use whatever they can with as little return commitment as they can; anything freely offered will be freely taken, with no sense of reciprocal obligation.

As a matter both of faithful Christian discipleship and of intelligent political engagement, then—and make no mistake about it, the former requires the latter—the critical need at this time is for Christians in America to break out of this pattern and assert a new model for the interaction between faith and politics; and to do that, we must begin with ourselves.  We must begin, as I wrote last time,

to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.

And on that ground and no other we must assert ourselves in the political life of this nation, not as docile sheep to be shorn for the advancement of the agendas and ambitions of politicians and parties, but as independent agents for the glory of God and the advancement of the work of his kingdom.

Getting Trek right from the beginning

Sara and I finally got the chance to go see the new Star Trek last night, thanks to a couple in the church who took our kids for the evening (and a wonderful time was had by all, too; we have some great folks in this congregation), and we enjoyed ourselves immensely.  In reinventing Trek, J. J. Abrams and his writers managed to make it what it should have been; they did an amazing job of keeping the characters true to themselves while justifying the reinvention of the series through the story they told.  In a way, the plot exists to explain and validate the creation of a whole new version of the same crew, and it succeeds fully in that.  Of course, that's an ulterior purpose; The Phantom Menace succeeded in its ulterior purpose, too, but failed dismally as an actual movie.  Star Trek, by contrast, is a smashing success.

I've read some complaints about the plot being full of holes and overly dependent on coincidence, but I don't agree; by and large, I'd say that the necessary coincidences arise logically out of the agency of the plot.  The one ringing exception to that is the coincidence of Montgomery Scott's introduction into the movie, which is implausible to the point of indefensibility; I'm not sure it quite rises (or sinks, if you prefer) to the level of deus ex machina, but it's pretty close.  For the rest, though—sure, there are coincidences, but they're reasonable consequences of past events, and as McAndrew would say, "The laws of probability not only permit coincidences, they insist on them."  

I saw someone complain that what the old Spock tells Kirk doesn't square with what he tells young Spock, but it doesn't seem to me there's cause for criticism there; he explains that himself in admitting that he misled Kirk in order to assure that Kirk did not only what he wanted, but in the way that he wanted it, as a way of trying to repair the breach between the two.  As for Eli's comment that "the villain’s method of attack is very creative, but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent"—point taken, but that's Trek.  As a fan of the military SF of folks like David Weber and John Ringo, the idea of an interstellar power without extensive planetary defenses sounds ludicrous to me, too, but Trek never has had them.

In other ways, though, Abrams and company have made Starfleet, and the crew of the Enterprise, a lot more believable.  Everybody has a job that actually means something, and everybody gets to contribute.  Sulu isn't just turning the wheel, and Uhura doesn't just answer the phone; in fact, the changes in the character of Nyota Uhura are the biggest improvement in the whole movie.  Not only is she introduced as a genuinely impressive human being—a tough, intelligent, independent woman who needs that intelligence and independence to do her job—but her specialty, communications, is finally shown to be a real specialty of real and critical importance, one that needs a good xenolinguist (scholar in alien languages—which she is) if it's to be done well.  They've set up the crew as a true ensemble in a way that the original never was.

Roger Ebert, in his review, complained that "the Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action," and I'll grant that there's some justice to his charge; as a practical matter, he provides the defense himself when he notes that "the movie deals with narrative housekeeping," setting up the new cast for sequels, but that doesn't change the fact that this movie has things happen which implicitly raise huge issues that are never addressed on-screen.  A bit more introspection along Roddenberry's lines, I think, would be a good thing, and I do hope we'll see some thoughtfulness as the sequels come along.

On the other hand, the movie is a cracking good adventure yarn, which has always been the core of Trek, and it does this a lot better in some ways than Roddenberry did, too.  For one thing, while the scripts Roddenberry oversaw "might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy," they never put anything really at risk; there were never any long-term negative consequences for any of the permanent cast.  (The one exception to that I can think of might be "The City on the Edge of Forever.")  The same cannot be said of the new Trek, which inflicts staggering losses on its version of the Federation; I admire Abrams' guts, because I don't think I would have had the nerve to have the Federation suffer that badly.

I'm no movie reviewer, but I enjoyed Abrams' Star Trek immensely; I won't call it great art, but for what it is, it's excellent—I think it's clearly the best version of Trek yet—and I look forward to seeing what the folks behind it have for us next.