The wages of love

Jared Wilson, writing about an encounter between Craig Gross (of XXXChurch.com) and some colleagues, some of the Westboro Baptist Church crew (of "God Hates Fags" fame), and the American Idol tour (the WBC folks had come to protest Adam Lambert; Gross and his friends were counter-protesting), asks a penetrating question: "What Happens When You Love Haters?" On the evidence, the answer is, "Not what you'd expect." Hate breeds more hate—but love can breed hate, too.

If you followed some of the Twitter brouhaha, you could see many Adam Lambert fans and supporters of gay rights causes cursing out Craig, telling him that God hated him, and saying plenty of things that make the Westboro crew sound downright genteel. They didn't know he didn't agree with the Westboro people; they just saw his proximity and saw him loving them. That was enough. They got confused and thought Craig was with Westboro.

Which says something really profound about a ministry of love. If you love everyone, no matter their brokenness and no matter their sin—prodigal or pharisaical—you're gonna get slammed by both sides.

On elites, ordinary barbarians, and the willingness to accept help

The Anchoress linked back the other day, in her Ted Kennedy retrospective, to a 2005 Peggy Noonan column (one of her best, I think) expressing her foreboding about America and its future:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination." . . .

I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding—the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.

But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.

Now, there's a lot I could say about this. If I wanted to analyze Noonan, I could talk about this being the seed of her infatuation with Barack Obama that would bloom three years later—that his general and amorphous promise of "hope" and "change" offered her a psychologically irresistible escape hatch from her worry that "things are broken and tough history is coming." Or I could look at it theologically and express my agreement with her, my belief that in fact, things are broken, and tough history is coming, that we have dark times looming ahead before the final return of Christ. Or I could consider her point from an historical perspective, with the reminder that many had a similar sense in the 1960s; one example would be Allan Drury, whose foreboding of the brokenness of American society caused the series of novels he began with Advise and Consent, a straightforward work of political wonkery, to evolve into something that can only be called political apocalyptic.

As it happens, though, I'm more interested in where Noonan went with this, with her analysis of the elite response to the situation she limns.

Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don't think that's our elites' problem.

This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it. . . .

That's what I think is going on with our elites. There are two groups. One has made a separate peace, and one is trying to keep the boat afloat. I suspect those in the latter group privately, in a place so private they don't even express it to themselves, wonder if they'll go down with the ship. Or into bad territory with the trolley.

I lack the advantages of Noonan's insider position, but I think she's right about what's going on; at least, that's certainly how things look from out here in the hinterlands. I do not think, however, that she's right about elitism being a problem. I think elitism is a problem for our elites; I think we saw it to some degree in their response to Harriet Miers, and I think we see it in a much larger way in their response to Sarah Palin—and I don't think you have to believe in the particular ability and fitness of either woman to see that. (In retrospect, I don't think they were wrong about Miers; but that doesn't mean they were right for the right reason.)

For those who have made their separate peace, whose unspoken motto is "I got mine, you get yours," this elitism is rooted in the simple, very human but very juvenile desire not to share. They believe they've earned what they have, and they don't want anyone pushing into their little club from outside. This is the attitude common to the worst of the aristocracy in every human civilization throughout history; we need not be surprised to find it in ours.

That said, it's the elitism of the second group that's more dangerous, for a reason very similar to what I called last week "the leaven of the Pharisees." It's their elitism that Noonan herself expresses, that is the root of her disdain for Gov. Palin, with her assertion that "Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us." The unspoken corollary to this is that it's only our elites who are supposed to do that, and how dare anybody else try to horn in? It's a big job, and at some level they're worried (most of them, anyway; I have the sense our president doesn't share this humility) that they aren't going to pull it off—but by jingo, it's their job, and they aren't going to share it.

Why? Because they know that whether they're up to the task or not, they're the best possible people to be doing it, and certainly nobody else could possibly be. They have all the proof they need for that complacent certainty in the fact that they are the ones who are rich and educated and accomplished and famous, and nobody else is; their worldly accolades are all the evidence they could require of their own superiority to the rest of the world.

The only problem with this attitude is, it's pure and utter bunk. The science-fiction novelist Elizabeth Moon explains this well in her book Against the Odds, where she has one of her characters observe,

Any system which does not give ample opportunity for talent to displace unearned rank will, in the end, come to grief. . . .

My point is that every time society has given it a chance, it's been shown that talent exists in previously despised populations. . . . Over and over again, it's been shown that an ordinary sampling of the population, including those considered inferior or hopeless, contains men and women of rare intelligence, wit, and ability. Just as ponds turn over their water yearly, revitalizing the pond's life, so a good stirring of the human pot brings new blood to the top, and we're all the better for it.

The reason for the elite opposition to Gov. Palin is that she's from "an ordinary sampling of the population"—not from an elite family, not from an elite school, not from an elite profession, but a journalism major from the University of Idaho (her fourth college, no less) who lived in a small town on the edge of civilization who actually worked (and killed things!) with her hands. She's an ordinary barbarian like most of us in this country. As such, they refuse to believe that she could possibly be a woman of "rare intelligence, wit, and ability"; the very idea creates severe cognitive dissonance for them.

This prejudice—for it's nothing less than that; in its extreme forms, we may fairly call it bigotry—is highly unfortunate, because it only worsens the difficulty of getting the trolley back on the rails. For one thing, it aggravates the distrust that already exists between us ordinary barbarians and the elites of this country; this makes us less likely to follow them when they have a bad idea, to be sure, but it also makes us less likely to follow them when they're right. It makes our politics more reactive and more divided, which inevitably makes them less productive.

And for another, whether our elites want to admit it or not, they're simply wrong in their belief that they and only they have the talent, skills, perspective and character to right the trolley. There are many ordinary barbarians in this country—on the right and on the left, both—who would have a great deal to contribute to the leading of this nation, if they only got the chance. Gov. Palin is in many ways their avatar, someone who has already created that chance for herself and demonstrated prodigious talent as a leader and politician, and who I hope will create opportunities for others to follow suit.

What America really needs (one thing, at least) is for others to rise up and follow her into leadership roles in this country, to turn over the water in the pond and bring "new blood to the top"—new blood with new ideas, new experiences, and a new perspective on our nation and its problems. Unfortunately, it's hard to see that happening on any major scale as long as the elites resist—and they will continue to resist, both out of their sense of their own superiority and out of their desire not to share their baubles. The latter is probably the easier to overcome; the former is harder, because it can be very, very difficult to admit that we need help, and especially to admit that we need help from those we've been accustomed to regarding as less capable than ourselves. As long as our elites can continue to see the rest of us that way, they're not going to be willing to make that admission.

Which means that the only way to improve our situation is a grassroots revolution; the levers of power and of media influence may be in the hands of our elites, but the levers of the ballot box are still, ultimately, in ours. If we, the people want to force a path for ordinary barbarians into the halls of the elites, we have the ability to do so, if we will band together and use it. But in the meantime, we need to support the ones we have—with Sarah Palin at the head of the list.

Now, if your political convictions are simply too different from Gov. Palin's for you to support her, then so be it; those matter, no question. In that event, though, I'd encourage you to look for ordinary barbarians who do agree with you, whom you can support. I firmly believe that the domination of our politics by one class of our society is, in its own way, as serious a political issue as any we face; and it's one which we need to address, and soon, if we want to keep the trolley from going clean off the rails. Our elites aren't up to the task by themselves, whether they're willing to admit the fact or not; they need our help, and we need to provide it. Wanted or otherwise.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

The future of Macintosh

This is fun. My thanks to Chris Forbes for posting it.

Run to win

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control,
lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.

—1 Corinthians 9:24-27 (ESV)

I had a Sunday-school teacher one time who talked about Paul describing the life of faith as a race; and at some point during that class, he declared, “And Paul says, don’t run in order to win.” I argued with him (opinionated? Me? Whatever gave you that idea?), but he wouldn’t listen to me, and he wouldn’t look it up—he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, changed the subject, and went on with the class.

Now, there are some mistakes I understand, but that one made no sense to me. I’m sure differences in temperament played in to this, since I can be a pretty competitive sort, but why would you want the Scripture to say, “Run, but don’t try to win?” If you aren’t trying as hard as you can to win, why are you bothering to run? Especially when you consider that in the life of faith, if we win, that doesn’t mean that everyone else loses—we can all win together, and in fact, the better each of us runs our own race, the more help we are to all those around us as they run theirs.

I suspect Paul saw things much the same way, since he clearly likes athletic metaphors. I imagine, from this and other aspects of his writings, that he had a pretty strong competitive streak; sure, he was a saint, and a brilliant man, and God used him powerfully to do amazing things in and for the body of Christ, but he can’t have been easy to live with. As well, he clearly had considerable respect for how hard the athletes of his time worked and how completely they focused themselves in order to give themselves the best chance possible to win the prize at the Games; it's understandable why he saw them as a model for the Christian life.

The amazing thing, as he notes here, is that the prize for which those athletes competed was nothing more than a laurel wreath! Given a week or two, their prize would be no more. If they could work as hard as they did, if they could dedicate themselves as completely as they did, to win a prize they wouldn’t even be able to keep, shouldn’t we as Christians be at least as focused on the prize of eternal life which God has set before us? Shouldn’t we be running to win, rather than dawdling along by the side of the road, wandering off to explore the thistles?

Paul certainly thinks we should. Run the good race, he tells us; run well, run hard, run with all you have—run to win. Run to win, and stay focused on the prize before you; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called—it’s already yours, but you need to grab hold and live into it. Don’t let anything else sidetrack you or slow you down, but let everything you do be focused on running as well as you possibly can, to the glory of God and the accomplishment of his purposes.

(Adapted from “Run to Win”)

Social networking and online anonymity

According to Paul Mah on TechRepublic, they don't mix. If I understand him correctly, the problem is that sites like Facebook leak personal information through their ad networks, and also through third-party apps (the games and quizzes that proliferate). Combined with the use of tracking cookies, the results of this could be quite far-reaching:

The implications are sobering and call for a reexamination of how we interact with the Web. Since tracking cookies have been in use for years, it is entirely possible that aggregator sites with historical records could theoretically link our social networking profiles with all our past accesses in its database.

Which, again assuming I'm tracking him correctly, would result in the sort of thing we saw in the movie Minority Report, with full profiles of our activities, associations, interests, and (of course) purchases available online to anyone who cared to pay for them. Something to think about.

Remember: we don't speak for God

I guess this video has been bouncing around a bit, and has generated some opprobrium for the officer featured here. For my part, I'm troubled by the fact that this officer appears to be forcing this protestor to take down his sign with no justification but the threat of force—this is not how we want our police to behave—but in all honesty, I can't say I like the protestor's attitude much, either. I do, however, appreciate Alan W.'s reflections on this:

God has been doing a number on me with how many times what I want, believe, think and feel are simply reflections of the fall in Genesis 3 and trying to be "like God." . . .

I feel for Officer Cheeks much as I do about Joe the plumber. They are folks caught up in the moment and demonstrated the fact that they are humans. And Americans will make them pay the price for that too.

Here are two prophetic words for the Body of Christ. Treat people with GRACE and of course Matthew 7. I have a second word for the People of God, don't be a butt about things. If we don't like something fine but don't confuse what we like with what God likes.

Well put.

The joy of the Irish

My thanks to Jared Wilson for posting this. I love the Chieftains (and like the Corrs quite well too, for that matter), and this was just a lovely thing to see.

The Palin Revolution, one year on

One year ago today, I was going bonkers, and so was my blog traffic, as the whole political world was going mad at John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. After the truly awe-inspiring disinformation campaign Sen. McCain and his staffers ran to keep his pick a secret, and the wondrous overnight thread on Adam Brickley's site, with Drew (who turned out to be a staffer with the McCain campaign in Dayton) dropping hints that Gov. Palin would be the pick, to have the news come out and be confirmed was the greatest joy I've ever had in politics (not that there are many competitors for that particular honor).

One year later, I don't take any of that back. I'm sorry for the hammering Gov. Palin and her family have taken, much of which has sickened me; I'm sorry for the lies and smears she's had to deal with, and for what that says about the state of our political culture. But my respect for her, and my sense that she's the best leader this country has to put forward, haven't changed, even through a fairly bumpy year.

Some might say that's unreasonable of me; but in proper perspective, I don't believe it is. That perspective, I think, is supplied by a long article Stephen F. Hayward posted a couple days ago on NRO entitled, "The Reagan Revolution and Its Discontents." It's a good and thoughtful piece, and I commend it to your attention for a number of reasons. Hayward wrote it, by his own statement, to clear away some of the fogginess of nostalgia from the conservative memory of President Reagan and his accomplishments, and also to remind us, almost thirty years on, of the political reality the Great Communicator faced in his day; the piece succeeds quite nicely in both aims, in my judgment. I was particularly interested, though, in this section for its application to the current political situation:

Both [Reagan and FDR] had to battle not only with the other party, but also with their own. Both men by degrees successfully transformed their own parties, while at the same time frustrating and deflecting the course of the rival party for a time. This, I suggest, is the heart of the real and enduring Reagan Revolution (or Age of Reagan).

Liberal ideologues who despaired over the limits of the New Deal overlooked that FDR had to carry along a large number of Democrats who opposed the New Deal. Reagan’s experience was similar, as he had to carry along a number of Republicans who were opposed to or lukewarm about his conservative philosophy. This problem would dog Reagan for his entire presidency. Robert Novak observed in late 1987: “True believers in Reagan’s efforts to radically transform how America is governed were outnumbered by orthodox Republicans who would have been more at home serving Jerry Ford.” . . .

Reagan’s dramatic landslide election in 1980 posed two problems: Democrats had to figure out how to oppose Reagan; Republicans, how to contain him. . . .

The lesson of FDR and Reagan is that changing one’s own party can be more difficult than beating the opposition.

As Hayward says, understanding that lesson is critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of President Reagan, or for that matter of Gov. Reagan; and as has been pointed out here before, it's also critical to a reasonable and meaningful evaluation of Sarah Palin.

This is true in two ways. In the first place, of course, it's true of her career before last August 29; even more than President Reagan, her political rise was a rise against the establishment of her own party. If you're not familiar with the story, R. A. Mansour's post "Who Is Sarah Palin" offers an excellent sketch. Sarah Palin ran for mayor of Wasilla as a political insurgent against a good old boys' network that was running the town for its own benefit; once in office, she continued to show the guts to buck the town establishment.

Later, having been named as ethics commissioner and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission—her big break, and her first big payday—when she discovered that one of her fellow commissioners, Randy Ruedrich (who also happened to be the head of the Alaska Republican Party) was misusing his position, she blew the whistle, even though it meant resigning her job. Then she ran against the Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, who had appointed both her and Ruedrich; in retrospect, we can say "of course she won," but it was anything but an "of course" at the time.

Like Gov. Reagan, she was not the choice of the party establishment, but was launching a takeover from outside that establishment; as with President Reagan, her dramatic victory posed as big a problem to her own party, who saw her not as their leader but as someone they had to contain, as to the theoretical opposition. President Reagan never told the Congress "All of you here need some adult supervision!" as Gov. Palin did (earning herself the lasting enmity of the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green), but I'm sure he would have appreciated the line.

This is why she spent the first part of her term in Alaska working as much with the Democrats as with her (supposed) own party: she had to, in order to accomplish things like chopping up the backroom deal Gov. Murkowski had worked out with Big Oil to replace it with a workable new severance-tax law that would be good for Alaska, not just for Big Oil, or to put a bill together that would finally get a process moving to build a natural-gas pipeline from the Northern Slope to the Lower 48.

Now, of course, her opponents like to minimize her accomplishments and carp about this or that, but they're missing the point: given the fact that she was governing in the teeth of opposition from her own party, working to transform that party as much as to enact policy, it may well be possible to say of her as we can of President Reagan that Gov. Palin did less than she had hoped and less than people wanted—that doesn't change the fact that, as Gary McDowell said of the Gipper, she did "a **** of a lot more than people thought [she] would."

This is a point which is especially critical to bear in mind in considering this last calendar year for Gov. Palin. Where before, she was able to work with the Alaska Democrats to get legislation passed—after all, her initiatives were popular, and her war with her own party establishment only helped them in their efforts against Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young—her performance in the presidential campaign made her Public Enemy No. 1 for the national Democratic Party, meaning that the Alaska Democrats could no longer afford to do anything that would give her good publicity. (Given the close connections between prominent Democrats in Alaska and the Obama White House, there's no doubt in my mind that that imperative came all the way from the top.)

This, combined with the time- and energy-wasting barrage of ludicrous, transparently malicious ethics charges, combined to hamstring her administration. The #1 goal of the Left was to keep her from accomplishing anything (yes, I believe that was even ahead of bankrupting her through legal bills, which I figure was #2), so as to be able to portray her in future races as a lightweight who was overmatched by her office. Now, in a rational world, this wouldn't have worked, because by the numbers, the Republicans had sufficient votes in the legislature to pass her agenda into law; but as already noted, this isn't a rational world, and a large chunk of the Alaska GOP wasn't on her side, but rather sided with the Democrats against her. This is the sort of thing that can happen when you're faced with having to try to transform your own party.

To complicate matters, this struggle in Alaska has been mirrored on a national scale. The GOP is referred to as the party of Reagan, but it isn't in any meaningful sense; indeed, I think Heyman overstates the degree to which it ever really was. One can point to Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with America as evidence of a Reaganite legacy, but Rep. Gingrich himself was an insurgent in the party, and the conservative principles of the Contract didn't really last long; perhaps the most telling thing is that the party didn't nominate a conservative as its standard-bearer in 1998, but an old warhorse of the pre-Reagan Republican establishment, Bob Dole. Indeed, to this date, for all his success, Ronald Reagan remains sui generis among Republican presidential nominees.

As a result, the national Republican establishment reacted (and keeps reacting) to Gov. Palin in the same way they reacted to Gov. Reagan—belittling her intelligence, mocking her ideas, trying to deny her credit for her accomplishments, and generally trying to tear her down in any way they can, while still trying to make as much use as they can out of her popularity. This, combined with the hostility of the party's state organization in Alaska, left her with little structural support or cover against the attacks of the Left (an understatement, actually, given that some in the party actually piled on). Collectively, this put her in a very unusual position for an elected official: having her office become a hindrance to her effectiveness and ability to function rather than an advantage.

As such, Gov. Palin's utterly un-telegraphed resignation is one of those events that was shocking at the time but in retrospect seems almost obvious—we should have seen it coming. We would have, were it not the sort of thing that professional politicians never do. Your typical politician, after all, holds on to power with the awe-inspiring single-mindedness of the clinically obsessed; we knew Gov. Palin to be anything but a typical politician and a woman who could say, "Politically speaking, if I die, I die," but our expectations are too well shaped by the normal course of events to be truly able to predict that she would defy that norm as she did. Had we been able to join her in thinking outside the box (or perhaps I should say, the straitjacket) of those expectations, though, we would have seen what she saw: that the only way for her to carry on effectively with her mission was to step down from office and go to work as a private citizen.

Which, of course, she has, with verve and gusto and considerable effectiveness. (Google "Facebook 'Sarah Palin,'" and you'll get "about 9,520,000" hits.) As Gov. Reagan did, so Gov. Palin has found it necessary to go "into the wilderness"—which is to say, back into the real world outside a government position—in order to carry on with her efforts to shift the institutional GOP back toward its conservative base. The Juneau statehouse was too small, remote and encumbered a platform for her to be able to work effectively; she needed to create a better one for herself. In her use of Facebook, she's demonstrating her ability to do exactly that—yes, she'll need to go beyond Facebook as well, but it's proving a mighty fine place to start—and though she's dragging much of the GOP elite with her kicking, screaming, and complaining, she is dragging them nevertheless. No matter how much they might protest or wish it were otherwise, she is the one who has set the agenda for the party's opposition to Obamacare; she is the one who played the biggest part in stopping the administration's energy-tax agenda cold; and increasingly, she is recognized as the Republican whose leadership matters the most in this country, regardless of official position or lack thereof.

Of course, there are many people in both parties who have a vested interest in changing that reality—Democrats who oppose her, and Republicans who want to contain her—and so the resistance continues. As such, though Gov. Palin's resignation outflanked them, the efforts to use it against her continue as well. Most of those efforts are pointless and ineffective, since they rest on the assertion that Gov. Palin is finished in politics because she no longer holds office; that doesn't hold water, both because of their continued attacks and because the American people don't value being elected to office as highly as politicians do. There is one question, however, that does linger with many people: if she resigned from office once, how can we be sure she wouldn't do it again if she won the White House?

The answer to that is found in considering both halves of the problem she faced in Alaska. One, the state's executive-ethics law, does not exist on the national level; were she elected president, she would not be vulnerable to a barrage of bogus charges as she was as governor. The other, the absolute opposition she faced from a majority of her own party in Alaska, is as I said part and parcel of the work of transforming the GOP, and would be a problem for President Palin to some degree as it was for President Reagan. However, there are two good reasons to think that it would be a problem which would be far easier for President Palin to overcome than it was for Governor Palin.

One, if she does in fact end up running and winning in 2012 (or at any later date), she will by virtue of that simple fact have a demonstrated national support base of some 60 million voters. As Barack Obama has already shown, being able to remind people that you won gives you considerable political leverage. That's leverage far beyond what she had simply by virtue of winning a single gubernatorial election in a low-population state, because that's a vastly greater number of voters. (Had things played out differently in Alaska, had she had a couple of terms, her re-election and her ability to influence the re-election campaigns of other Alaskan politicians would have started to give her that sort of leverage on a state level, but that leverage would always have been affected by events on the national scene.) As such, she would have a lot more political capital to use to deal with recalcitrant members of her own party, as well as with more conservative members of the Democratic caucuses.

And two, Gov. Palin has a tremendous opportunity ahead of her in the 2009-10 elections. By campaigning for Republican candidates around the country, she has the chance to build a constituency for herself in the national party institution, in three ways. The first, most basic, and most important, is by working to get people elected who share her principles, and who thus will tend out of their own political beliefs and instincts to support the same things she supports. By campaigning, especially in House elections, for the election of true conservatives—and I hope she finds good opportunities to do so not just in the general election but in primaries, working to win nominations for conservatives over establishment types (as for example, dare I say, Marco Rubio in Florida?)—she has the chance to shape the congressional Republican caucuses into bodies which will be more likely to follow her lead, should she run and win in 2012.

The second way is dicier, but still essential: by campaigning for other Republican candidates and helping them win elections, she'll earn good will and put them in her debt. As the recent behavior of Saxby Chambliss shows, this isn't as reliable a way of building support as it should be—you just can't count on most politicians not to welch on a debt—but it's necessary all the same. You might not be able to count on them returning the favor if you help them, but you can surely count on them not helping you if you don't.

The third comes back to that whole question of leverage. As I said, if Gov. Palin becomes President Palin, she will have shown by that fact that she has a strong political base; but that will be much more impressive to folks on the Hill if she's already shown that her base won't just help her get elected, but also translates into downballot clout. If she flexes real political muscle during the mid-term elections, if she shows that her support is broad enough and strong enough to influence House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the country—if she makes it clear to everyone that being endorsed by Sarah Palin is a good thing for Republican politicians—then the GOP will get the idea that opposing her is not likely to be a good thing for Republican politicians. That will make the congressional GOP and the rest of the party establishment much more likely to follow her lead.

All of which is to say, the next key stage of the Palin Revolution, if it is to come fully to fruition, is the next election cycle; that will be the point at which her leadership will, I believe, really begin to take hold in the party in an institutional way, and the necessary groundwork for the future Palin administration for which we hope. It's been a hard year for Gov. Palin, but it's been a year which has produced many good things, too; and as startling and controversial as her resignation was, she has proven that it was not the beginning of the end of her political career, but rather the end of the beginning. The best, I believe, is yet to be; and for that, I am thankful.

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

Reflections on the case of Mark Sanford

Down in South Carolina, the calls continue to build for Gov. Mark Sanford to resign his office. It's a long fall for a man once considered a possible running mate for John McCain last year, and a serious presidential contender in 2012, and it doesn't seem to be getting any shorter—as much as anything, because Sanford just doesn't seem to be able to let go and accept the full consequences of his actions. There are those in South Carolina who would excuse him because they don't trust his lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer, and don't want to see Lt. Gov. Bauer succeed Gov. Sanford; but if Gov. Sanford is that concerned about Lt. Gov. Bauer, he should have thought of that before having an affair. He has dishonored himself and disqualified himself from office; honor demands that he step down, regardless of whether he finds his successor satisfactory or not.

The truth is, at this point, Mark Sanford reminds me of Pete Rose (if not as scummy). Mike Schmidt made a telling comment recently about Rose:

If it were me, and I had lived a lie for 14 years, and I went up to tell the commissioner that I was sincerely sorry for what I've done to my family, to the sport, etc., I probably would be back in baseball now and in the Hall of Fame—because I would have been a tremendously remorseful individual. And I would have felt the burden of that the rest of my life, in everything that I did. And I would have, in my travels, been a totally different person.

My lifestyle would have changed. I would have felt an obligation to change and to become someone that the baseball world would once again learn to love after forgiving me. I would have been that guy. And I don't think Pete has been.

So far, Gov. Sanford hasn't been that guy either. Had he been willing to confess, step down, take it like a man, and actually take the time to put his life back together to where it really was what he had always presented it to be, his political life would probably already be in the recovery phase; after all, that sort of behavior is so rare among prominent politicians, it would have impressed a lot of people. But instead, he's trying to hang onto everything he possibly can with both fists, and all he's doing is making matters worse for himself in the long term. As a result, in the long term, Mark Sanford will matter most in this country as a cautionary tale of how you just never know with politicians, and how they can always let you down.

That doesn't mean, though, that they always will; there are those who are honorable and faithful, people of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. The hard part is separating them out from the gifted liars who've internalized Groucho Marx's crack that sincerity is the key, and if you can fake that, you've got it made; and the only way to make that separation is to let time, exposure and opposition do their work. The great difference between Barack Obama and John McCain last November wasn't ideological, because Sen. McCain doesn't have an ideology; the great difference was that, for good or ill, we knew who Sen. McCain is, because over the years it's all been made very, very clear—but we really didn't have a clue about Sen. Obama. That's why there are such an astonishingly large number of people (for this early in his term) coming out and expressing regret for voting for the guy: he isn't who they let themselves believe him to be.

Now, take this truth, and on the first anniversary of Sarah Palin's elevation to the national stage, look back in the light of this truth at the battles she's had to fight this past year. Look back at the PDSers and the plague of anklebiters, the oppo researchers parachuted into Wasilla and the media misrepresentations, and ask: What have they really done? Have they destroyed her? No; they've managed to convince a lot of people who would never have voted for her anyway, and they've planted concerns in the minds of a lot of potential supporters, but they haven't done any damage she can't undo, given time and exposure. What they have managed to do, though, is to establish pretty clearly that even given the combined efforts of thousands of motivated people backed by all the money they need for all the digging they want to do, there's simply no real dirt to be dug up on Sarah Palin.

In other words, all they've managed by their efforts is to demonstrate that they can't bring Gov. Palin down with the truth, because they've had to resort to lies, invented stories, misrepresentations, and unjustified charges. I don't think most people who looked at her in an unbiased fashion had any doubts that she is who she presents herself to be, but at this point I think we can take that as proven—because if she weren't, we'd have heard about it by now. (And oh boy, would we have heard about it.) If she had had any real skeletons in her closet, they'd have been out of the closet and line dancing on the front lawn of the Juneau statehouse long since. In short, no one needs to worry that Gov. Palin is going to pull a Sanford on us, or that she's a fake, or that she will in any way prove to be not substantially what we thought she was, because the likes of Celtic Diva, Andree McLeod, David Axelrod and the ADN have done yeoman work for us in ruling out that possibility—not that that's what they intended to do, but it's what they've accomplished.

The intensity of Gov. Palin's exposure and of the opposition she's faced has made this clear in record time: she is, truly, one of the honorable and faithful people in our politics, one of those of true character who can be trusted to keep their word if they give it. For all the clouds she's had to endure, that's a remarkable silver lining.

(Adapted from a post on Conservatives4Palin)

Homosexuality and the roots of division

Jared Wilson makes a very important point—one on which I've been intending to comment for several days—on the decision by the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a seriously misnamed denomination) to allow self-affirmed practicing homosexuals to be ordained as pastors:

When concerned folks raise voices of protest and warning, when they say adamantly "This isn't right," they are accused of singling out the sin of homosexuality for special treatment, laser-focusing in on the homosexual as a sinner above all sinners, worse than the rest of us.

But I actually think it's sort of the other way around. It is the proponents of gay clergy who single out homosexuality. It is they who are pressing us to respond to this issue. Nobody is pushing for resolutions on the allowance of adulterous clergy, of gossipy clergy, of alcoholic clergy, of p()rn-addicted clergy, or what-have-you.

It is not those who protest who are singling out this sin. It is the proponents of the sin as normative—or at least, passable—who are singling it out. . . .

And it isn't those who believe the Bible when it says homosexual behavior is a sin that are being divisive; it is those who are introducing the idea that it isn't. If you push a decision on something that innovates on the Bible's testimony, you're creating the division. But, sure, many of us will oblige in parting ways with you. If pressed—as when votes like this go the way they did—we will cooperate in division.

Read his whole post, because he has more to say beyond what I'm highlighting here, reflecting on the nature and origin of the historic creeds (and, I would argue, the confessions as well); I want to focus, though, on this point, because it's an important one to understand. The division over the issue of homosexual behavior is the creation of those who want to change the church, and it has been created deliberately to accomplish that purpose; for them to blame that division and the fighting that goes with it on those who disagree with them, as if we should have just surrendered as soon as they made their first demand, is wildly unjust.

It's interesting, if you hang around in mainline circles, you're bound to hear folks on the left complaining that "they" (meaning the biblically orthodox) want to take "our" church away from "us." Which would make sense if the church had taught for 2000 years that homosexual sex is just fine with God, and the view that it isn't was the innovation. But that's not how it is; it is, in fact, the exact backwards of the truth (as Mike Callahan might say). If anyone is trying to "take the church away" from anybody, it would be those who are trying to change the established teaching of the church going all the way back through the history of Israel to the writing of the book of Genesis.

Now, I do not say that the singling-out of homogenital contact as a particularly awful sin is the creation of the contemporary Left; that singling-out is itself a sin, and there's no question that it didn't originate in the years following Stonewall. But then, that's not unique to homosexual activity, either; as G. K. Chesterton rightly protested in one of his Father Brown stories, the church has always tended to have fashionable sins, for which it makes excuses, and unfashionable ones, on which it comes down with excessive and graceless force; what they are changes with the times, but the tendency rolls on unabated. I do believe, though, that the way in which the Left has pursued its agenda on this point has served to exacerbate this problem among many on the Right, as counter-reaction pushes those unwilling to surrender biblical orthodoxy toward viewing homosexual activity as uniquely awful, and thus uniquely to be despised; and that does no one any good.

The gospel war in our hearts

The gospel of Christ’s painful death on our behalf has a way of breaking our pride and our sense of rightful demands and our frustration at not getting our way. It works lowliness into our souls. Then we treat each other with meekness flowing out of that lowliness. The battle is with our own proud, self-centered inner person. Fight that battle by faith, through the gospel, in prayer. Be stunned and broken and built up and made glad and humble because you are chosen, holy, loved.

—John Piper, This Momentary Marriage

I have nothing to add to that; I just want to lift up the truth of this this evening.

HT: Of First Importance

John Mackey, Mark Steyn, and the intolerance of “tolerance”

A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,

Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”

Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:

I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!

She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,

* Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
* He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
* He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
* He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
* He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
* He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms - not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
* He and his wife participate in yoga
* He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
* Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
* Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
* There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
* Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
* Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
* Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
* At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
* Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
* “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.

Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.

As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:

• Tolerance is the highest virtue.

• Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.

• Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.

• Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.

• Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.

• Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.

Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.

However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it's their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.

And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.

That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:

The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .

It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.

He’s right.

Is Rahmbo feeding a backlash?

There's a fascinating article up today on The Daily Beast by John Batchelor on "How Rahm Is Reviving the GOP"—one which is particularly fascinating because Batchelor is no GOP apologist. (Indeed, he makes such statements as "Suddenly the disgraced and demoralized Republican Congress has an unearned future," and "The still lifeless Republicans . . . have avoided any credible renovation or even contrition for their decades of swinishness," as well as quoting a "Republican partisan" as calling congressional Republicans "cowardly" and "brain-dead." I should note, I don't particularly disagree with any of this.) He describes "the superhuman clumsiness of a man who has made himself indispensable to the Obama administration and insufferable to the Democratic Congress," and goes on to write:

The GOP always knew that Emanuel was a problem that could not be solved and could only be endured while he served three tempestuous terms in the House. But now the beleaguered Democratic majority is learning painfully that Emanuel’s talents for bullying, whimsical favoritism, cheerful power-grabbing, and self-congratulatory earthiness have transformed the first hundred days of the Obama administration’s seamless accomplishment into a second hundred days of blame and gloom. . . .

A twist of fate is that as Emanuel’s authority and ambition grow, reaching for swift closure to foreign commitments, staging bipartisan fantasy cruises, then reaching to construct Democratic-only laws that turn the theory of checks and balances into an unlimited credit card on the Treasury, the polling points not only to a rising tide of facedown Republicans but also to a sinking approval rating for a president who entirely controls Emanuel’s fate. Is there a lesson in the detail that the French Revolution waited too long to turn on Robespierre’s ruthless genius, and by the time the guillotine fell, the ludicrously reactionary aristocracy had rallied throughout Europe and led a counterrevolution that swept liberty into the ditch for another lifetime?

In between those two paragraphs are the details, which really are fascinating—and more than a little disturbing. Read the whole thing, and you'll understand why Batchelor compares Emanuel to Robespierre.

Edward M. Kennedy, RIP

There is little on which I agreed with Sen. Ted Kennedy, and I've never been much impressed with the Kennedy mythos; what's more, I think his moral and physical cowardice at Chappaquiddick dishonored him. That said, it's inappropriate to ignore the good things about people, and especially to do so with regard to one's opponents; as such, I think it's important to point out that there truly were some things about Sen. Kennedy that any fair-minded person would find admirable.

I like, for instance, what John Fund had to say:

Ted Kennedy and I didn't occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.

In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer—my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they'd learned about treatment. "He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did," Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. "The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington."

He was a powerful, powerful advocate for the causes to which he committed himself—and his dedication was remarkable. As Bill Bennett writes,

Whatever one thought of him, there is no one in the Senate of his force, sheer power, and impact. If you think there is his equal in this, tell me who it is.

He fought hard, and sometimes viciously; but for all that, he seems to have earned a fair bit of sincere admiration and affection even from those on the other side of the aisle. Mitt Romney's statement captures some of this:

In 1994, I joined the long list of those who ran against Ted and came up short. But he was the kind of man you could like even if he was your adversary. I came to admire Ted enormously for his charm and sense of humor – qualities all the more impressive in a man who had known so much loss and sorrow. I will always remember his great personal kindness, and the fighting spirit he brought to every cause he served and every challenge he faced. I was proud to know Ted Kennedy as a friend, and today my family and I mourn the passing of this big-hearted, unforgettable man.

Requiescat in pace, Edward M. Kennedy.

The leaven of the Pharisees and the loaf of politics

I posted yesterday on this passage from Ray Ortlund's blog:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let's always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

As I was writing, I remembered a somewhat similar passage from C. S. Lewis:

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

We may rightly call Lewis' observation the political application of Dr. Ortlund's point. I didn't want to go that direction with my post, so I didn't reference Lewis at that time. Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi did, though, in a recent piece (HT: Shane Vander Hart), applying Lewis' point squarely to our president and his administration:

This week, President Barack Obama claimed his version of health care reform is "a core ethical and moral obligation," beseeching religious leaders to promote his government-run scheme. Questioning the patriotism of opponents, apparently, wasn't gaining the type of traction advocates of "reform" had hoped. . . .

On Team Righteous, we have those who meet their moral obligations; on the other squad, we must have the minions of Beelzebub—by which, of course, we mean profit-driven, child-killing, mob-inciting insurance companies.

Why wasn't this multidenominational group of pastors, rabbis and other religious leaders offended that a mere earthly servant was summoning the good Lord in an effort to pass legislation? Certainly, one of the most grating habits of the Bush administration was how it framed policy positions in moral absolutes.

As CBS News recently reported, Obama has thrown around the name of God even more often than George W. Bush. Then again, no group couches policy as a moral obligation more than the left. On nearly every question of legislation, there is a pious straw man tugging at the sleeves of the wicked.

The problem with this, as both Lewis and Dr. Ortlund point out, is that it's the ultimate version of "the end justifies the means"—if "we" are on God's side and "they" are enemies of the right, the good and the just, then "we" don't need to worry about any moral constraints, because the rightness of our cause automatically justifies anything we do in its service. This is the kind of thing that makes, at the extremes, a Torquemada, a Lenin, a Dzerzhinsky, a bin Laden—the people who will "torment us without end," and do so "with the approval of their own conscience" because they know it's for the best—indeed, because they're really only doing it for our own good.

This kind of thing doesn't make for good religion; it doesn't make for good politics, either. As I said yesterday, the only real antidote to this is humility, and for all the degrees and other qualifications on display in the current White House, humility appears to be one thing that's in short supply there. Fortunately, one good thing about democratic politics is that it's usually pretty good about humbling those politicians as need it.

May it come soon.

Reading a book second-hand

Now, there's really no such thing as second-hand reading; it's not like second-hand smoke, where you get to breathe the smoke that escaped someone else's lungs. But there are times when someone else is so involved in a book that you get some of the effect—they keep reading you sentences or paragraphs, it keeps coming up in their conversation, and the book seems to be everywhere present.

Such has been my experience with my lovely wife and N. D. Wilson's book Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World. She chose it to review as part of Thomas Nelson's "Book Review Bloggers" program, and her capsule review is now up—I think she gives it 6.5 stars out of 5—but I think I can safely say that that won't be the last thing she writes about it. Nor, I feel equally safe in saying, will this be the last thing I write about it. It's an amazing book in what's been a pretty good year so far for amazing books, full of godly wonder . . . which is a glorious thing.

If you want to know what's really happening in Afghanistan

read Michael Yon, who has established himself as the single most indispensable reporter from the Iraq-Afghanistan theater of operations. I’m realizing I’ve never linked to his site (that I’m remembering, anyway)—there’s always stuff I don't get to, that falls by the wayside for lack of time or energy; it’s to my discredit that I’ve never actually gotten as far as posting on his work, because what he’s been doing is profoundly important.

And it’s only getting more important. He's been embedded with the British forces there, but they just canceled his ticket because of his last dispatch; this on top of financial problems which have forced him to appeal for support, without which he'll have to give up his reporting and leave the country. If you care about what’s going on in Afghanistan, and are able to help support Yon’s work, it would truly be in your best interest (and the best interest of the nation) to do so.

This is a critical time for Afghanistan and Iraq both. As Yon testifies,

There is a crucial development and governance aspect to this war, and still a crucial smashing side. Sometimes you’ve got to swap hats for helmets. Mullah Omar is still alive, apparently in Pakistan, and he needs to be killed. Just on 20 August I heard a Taliban singing over a walkie talkie that Mullah Omar “Is our leader,” and they were celebrating shooting down a British helicopter only twelve hours before just some miles from here. . . .

The enemy often uses pressure cookers to make bombs, just as was done by the Maoists in Nepal. In Nepal, the government began confiscating pressure cookers (which angered many people), and the government often shut down cell service (angering many people) because the Maoists used cell phones. The Maoists won the war. We are operating far smarter in Afghanistan. Here it’s the enemy who actually shuts down cell towers—and this angers the people. Also, the enemy bombs around here are killing a lot of innocent people, and this also angers the people. Despite progress made by the Taliban, they alienate many people.

Meanwhile, Iraq is in a state of transition as the US is drawing down its presence there:

In the dangerous security vacuum that followed the demolition of Saddam’s regime, Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ignited a civil war by unleashing ferocious terror attacks against the country’s Shia community. Now that American soldiers have withdrawn from urban areas and created another partial security vacuum, the shattered remnants of AQI are trying to ramp up that effort again. It won’t be as easy for AQI now as it was last time. . . .

Terrorist attacks against Shias by AQI won’t likely reignite a full-blown sectarian war as long as the Sunnis continue to hold fast against the psychotics in their own community and Maliki’s government provides at least basic security on the streets.

Iraq’s Sunnis have as much incentive as its Shias to fight the AQI killers among them. They suffered terribly at AQI’s hands, after all. Out in Anbar Province, they violently turned against “their own” terrorist army even before the Shias turned against “theirs.” And Tariq Alhomayed points out in the Arabic-language daily Asharq al-Awsat that Maliki faces the same pressure to provide security on the streets, especially for his own Shia community, that any Western leader would face under similar circumstances—he wants to be re-elected.

The uptick in violence following America’s partial withdrawal shouldn’t shock anyone. If you scale back security on the streets, more violence and crime are inevitable. The same thing would happen in the United States if local police departments purged the better half of their officers. That does not mean, however, that Iraq is doomed to revert to war.

Last time I visited Iraq, Captain A.J. Boyes at Combat Outpost Ford on the outskirts of Sadr City warned me that we should expect this. “When we leave and transition all of what we do now to the Iraqi Security Forces, will there be a spike in [terrorist] activity?” he said. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.” He thinks Iraq will probably pull through just fine, even so. “It should be up to the media to portray this as something expected. There will be a spike in violence because the insurgents are going to test the Iraqi Security Forces, but I have complete faith that the resolve of the Iraqis will be there. Eventually, the bad guys will understand that the Iraqi Security Forces are here to stay. They are improved. They are vastly superior to anything we have seen in the past.” . . .

Before he was promoted to commander in Iraq, General Petraeus was known for his mantra “Tell me how this ends.” It was something everyone needed to think about, though no one could possibly know the answer to. Iraq makes a fool of almost everyone who tries to predict the course of events. How all this ends isn’t foreseeable. Nor is it inevitable. But the current spate of violence we’re seeing was.

As a country, we can’t afford to forget about Iraq and Afghanistan, as if nothing of any importance is happening there anymore just because they’re no longer useful to a media establishment that no longer wants to use them to bring down the president; what happens there matters a great deal, and we need to know what’s going on. For that, we need people like Michael Yon and Michael Totten, and we should be thankful for them.

Let it slide?

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 10
Q. Will God permit
such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not.
He is terribly angry
      about the sin we are born with
      as well as the sins we personally commit.

As a just judge
he punishes them now and in eternity.¹

He has declared:
      "Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do
      everything written in the Book of the Law."²

Note: mouseover footnote for Scripture references.

God will not let sin slide, because he cannot; it would be unjust, it would be against his nature, it would be wrong, and it would be inherently contradictory. At its core, sin is the assertion of our own self-will against God's will in a declaration of mistrust: it is the insistence that God neither knows nor truly cares what is best for us, and that we're better off going our own way. That is a defiant falsehood in the eye of the one who is Truth, a falsehood straight from the pit of Hell; he could not simply ignore it without ceasing to be true, nor would he be doing us anything but ill if he could. Nor, in truth, would his doing so be welcomed; having rebelled against God, why would we want him to come crawling to us to take him back?

The leaven of the Pharisees

I was reading back through Ray Ortlund's blog this afternoon, trying to remember where I'd read something, when I came across this post that I'd missed three weeks ago—I have no idea how, because it certainly grabbed my attention this time:

Moral fervor is our deepest evil. When we intend to serve God, but forget to crucify Self moment by moment, we are capable of acting cruelly while feeling virtuous about it.

Let's always beware that delicious feeling that we are the defenders of the holy. Christ is the only Defender of the holy. He defends us from persecutors. He defends us from becoming persecutors. We can take refuge in him. But that esteem of him also means we regard ourselves with suspicion, especially when judging another.

He's dead right. I'd actually go a little further and say that what he's talking about is a combination of moral fervor and spiritual pride—that moral fervor combined with deep humility (as in a man like William Wilberforce) is a very different matter, because that's a fervor which is rooted in our understanding of our own sin and our own need for grace, and thus is ultimately focused on Jesus Christ; spiritual pride, however, is focused on ourselves, it is self-exalting, and thus when combined with moral fervor puts us in a position which rightly only belongs to God—that of being the defender (which ultimately means the arbiter and the dictator) of the holy. Spiritual pride tells us that we're already good enough to please God, and that therefore God is on our side as we judge all those people down there who aren't; when combined with moral fervor, this makes the tyrant and the Inquisitor.

I agree with Dr. Ortlund that moral fervor, if not absolutely directed toward God, if not combined with deep humility and the dedication to "put to death the deeds of the flesh by the Spirit" (as Paul says), is our deepest evil; and that illustrates why, as I'm becoming increasingly convinced, spiritual pride is our most invidious evil, because the subtlest and the most corrupting. It is spiritual pride which turns the greatest desire for holiness into the greatest deeds of darkness, which warps and blights every aspiration of the soul toward sainthood and twists them toward corruption; spiritual pride produces ungodly people who think themselves godly, and there is not much worse than that.

Further links on Obamacare

For those who doubt that the purpose of the Democratic health care “reform” is a government takeover of our health-care system—and that the only unsettled issue in their minds is the best way to get there as quickly as possible—watch this:

Those opposed to the expansion of the abortion industry should consider these videos:

As Ed Morrissey says,

On the campaign trail, Obama told Planned Parenthood that the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate state restrictions on abortion and repeal the Hyde Amendment ban on federal funding for it, would be his first legislative priority. ObamaCare allows him to pass FOCA without the head-on fight. If the public option remains in the bill and it covers abortion, that will have the de facto effect of repealing the Hyde Amendment. The interstate nature of ObamaCare and the public plan may also allow the Department of Justice to fight state abortion restrictions, such as parental notification, on the grounds that the regulations interfere with interstate commerce. It’s FOCA by other means.

For those still dubious about Sarah Palin’s invocation of “death panels,” consider this from Nat Hentoff (no fundamentalist Republican):

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama’s desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model)—as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill—decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law. . . .

No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama’s eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a “very difficult democratic conversation” about how “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care” costs.

And if anyone is wondering why all the fuss—is this really that big a deal?—consider Andy McCarthy's observation:

These last seven months ought to tell us that the usual political rules don’t apply when predicting this president’s behavior. His purpose is revolutionary change in an American society he grew up understanding to be fundamentally unjust, racist, materialist, imperialist, and the agent of global misery. He is in Washington to transform the nation from the top down. Nationalized health care is key for him. If he gets it, sovereignty shifts from the citizen to the state. By law, government will be empowered to manage minute details of our lives. Over time—when, as the American Thinker’s Joseph Ashby observes, a “1,000-page health-care law explodes into many thousands of pages of regulatory codes”—that is precisely what government will do.

Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision. For my money (if I have any left), achieving it is more important to him than is getting reelected. His poll numbers and those of congressional Democrats may keep plunging (for the latter, there must come a point where that is statistically impossible), but they have the votes to Rahm this thing through.

And if it comes to that, they will most certainly try, unless enough Democrats in Congress get cold feet. Sure, that wouldn’t be what the president promised to get elected, but so far, that hasn’t stopped him yet:

Initial returns on Obamanomics

Mark Steyn has a good piece up on “Why the Stimulus Flopped” which dissects the president’s economic approach with his usual panache (Steyn’s, that is; the president’s not bad on panache himself, but he’s no match for Mark Steyn):

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several “stimulus” projects—every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said “PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK” with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a “PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT.” There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned, scarified pavement, followed by an “END OF ROAD WORKS” sign, until the next “stimulus” project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop. . . .

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan, and much of continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn’t afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world’s biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain, and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can’t compete with Obama’s $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say “to less effect,” that’s not strictly true: Thanks to Obama, one of the least indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted—and getting ever more so. We’ve become the third most debt-ridden country after Japan and Italy. According to last month’s IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

As Steyn sums it up,

The “stimulus” . . . didn’t just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats’ political priorities overrode everything else. If you’re a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap’n’trade is promising increased regulatory costs and health “reform” wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama’s leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he’s spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust’s settled and you get a better sense of just how broke he’s going to make you. For this level of “community organization,” there aren’t enough of “the rich” to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democratic terms. It’s no surprise that the president can’t make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare, because that’s not what it’s about—and for all his cool, he can’t quite disguise that.

Read the whole thing—it’s vintage Steyn. The only point he doesn’t make is that we shouldn’t have expected the “stimulus” to work, because we had immediate prior evidence that it wouldn’t: namely, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out a while back, the effect of similar political and economic approaches in New York, New Jersey, and California.

A decade ago all three states were among America's most prosperous. California was the unrivaled technology center of the globe. New York was its financial capital. New Jersey is the third wealthiest state in the nation after Connecticut and Massachusetts. All three are now suffering from devastating budget deficits as the bills for years of tax-and-spend governance come due.

If “high tax rates on the rich, lots of government ‘investments,’ heavy unionization and a large government role in health care” haven’t worked for these states, why would we expect them to work for the country as a whole?

A dissenting view on health-care spending

There is general agreement that our country spends too much on health care. I'm not so sure that's actually true.

Why? The key here is recognizing the truth of David Goldhill's distinction: "Health insurance isn't health care." This points us to another distinction, that of spending on care vs. spending on insurance. We tend to run them together, and I would certainly agree that we spend too much on these two things in combination; but we need to understand that in fact they're two very different things—and I would argue that we should view spending money on them very, very differently.

Money spent on health care proper is money that goes to local businesses, perhaps a local non-profit organization (that would be, perhaps, your local hospital), and to other businesses that employ people to make things and to design new things to make. Money spent on health insurance is spent on bureaucrats who generate paper; indirectly, it also goes to subsidize trial lawyers and their campaign contributions to Democratic politicians. A good chunk of what you pay for health care also goes to this purpose, of course, in the percentage of your bill that is used to defray insurance costs for your doctor, your hospital, and so on.

Do we spend too much money on health care? No, what we spend too much money on—far too much money—is bureaucrats and trial lawyers. This is what needs to change most of all if we're going to bring down the combined cost of health care and health insurance; and if we focus instead on reducing the cost of health care, we're going to reduce the quality of our care without ever addressing the real problem and the real inefficiency of the current system.

This is, I think, what has happened to health care in Britain under the National Health Service. British cyberfriend David Riddick defends the NHS, in part, on the grounds that the UK spends less on health care than the US, and certainly the share of GDP spent on the combination of health care and health insurance is lower there; but given that they spend a higher percentage of that on bureaucrats, I don't think that's actually a good thing. That doesn't drive good care, because the money isn't being spent on care, and it doesn't help the British economy any, either. Bureaucrats aren't productive for the economy—they don't create wealth, they don't create jobs, they don't create innovation; they just create red tape and paperwork.

The same is not true of much of the rest of the health care sector in modern economies. To take one example, the community where I live is the home of a cluster of orthopedics-products companies that make artificial joints, spinal hardware, and the like—products that relieve people (mainly, but not only, older people) of a great deal of pain and greatly improve their quality of life. These companies employ a lot of people, offering good manufacturing jobs as well as a lot of design and engineering work, and they drive research, as they're always working on developing new and better products. So far, they've weathered the financial storm quite well; people will put off luxuries and elective purchases in tough economic times, but if you're in pain and you can't walk right, you're not going to put off getting a new knee or a new hip if that will solve the problem.

Right now, though, they're deeply worried about the push to nationalize our health care system, because it's going to devastate their business. That artificial hip that the president keeps talking about, the one that he thinks might have been a waste to put in his grandmother, didn't come from nowhere; it probably came from Warsaw, and it employed a number of people. His idea of how to cut health-care costs isn't going to reduce the amount of money that goes to bureaucrats—it's going to increase that spending, because we'll need a lot more bureaucrats to run his program and decide which people are allowed to get new hips and knees. Instead, it's going to reduce the amount of money that goes to companies like Zimmer and Biomet, which means it's going to reduce the number of people they employ to design and build their products.

Health care "reform" as envisioned by the Democrats will take money out of their pockets to pay even more bureaucrats; it will shift money from a profitable sector of our economy, one that creates jobs that pay good wages and new products that improve people's lives, to an unprofitable sector (the government)—and all in the name of spending less money. The contrast with the "stimulus" package is ironic. There we were told, "Spending money is good—increasing spending is good for the economy." When it comes to health care, though, the government is telling us that spending money is bad, and so we need to hire lots and lots more bureaucrats so that we can cut down on the money we spend on actual health care. In the spirit of the "stimulus" package, wouldn't it make more sense to increase the amount of money going to companies like Biomet and Zimmer so that they can hire more people and help the economy?

We tend to talk about the cost of health care as if cost were the only side of the coin, and it just isn't; the money we spend doesn't just vanish into thin air. Instead, that money goes to actual people, and much of it drives good things in our economy. Health care spending creates economic growth; it's good for our country. We don't need to spend less money on care; we need to spend less on bureaucrats and trial lawyers. Unfortunately, the president's plan gets this backwards; we need to put it right way 'round.

Morning prayer

Take, O take me as I am; summon out what I shall be;
set your seal upon my heart and live in me.

—John Bell

This is a simple little musical prayer written by the Iona Community's John Bell, with a reflective melody that ends on an unresolved chord (the melody ends on re); I've seen it used most often as a congregational response, either to Scripture readings or during a time of prayer. For whatever reason, it floated into my mind this past hour, and has been flowing through it ever since. I guess this is the prayer of my heart this morning, for myself and for our congregation.

Reflections on John Piper and the tornado

In case you somehow missed it, there was a tornado in Minneapolis earlier this week—or perhaps we might say, there were two tornadoes in Minneapolis, one of winds and one of words; the original storm inspired a blog post from John Piper, “The Tornado, the Lutherans, and Homosexuality,” which caused quite a storm of its own.

Piper’s post begins with this description of the circumstances:

A friend who drove down to see the damage wrote,

On a day when no severe weather was predicted or expected . . . a tornado forms, baffling the weather experts—most saying they’ve never seen anything like it. It happens right in the city. The city: Minneapolis.

The tornado happens on a Wednesday . . . during the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America's national convention in the Minneapolis Convention Center. The convention is using Central Lutheran across the street as its church. The church has set up tents around its building for this purpose.

According to the ELCA’s printed convention schedule, at 2 PM on Wednesday, August 19, the 5th session of the convention was to begin. The main item of the session: “Consideration: Proposed Social Statement on Human Sexuality.” The issue is whether practicing homosexuality is a behavior that should disqualify a person from the pastoral ministry.

The eyewitness of the damage continues:

This curious tornado touches down just south of downtown and follows 35W straight towards the city center. It crosses I94. It is now downtown.

The time: 2PM.

The first buildings on the downtown side of I94 are the Minneapolis Convention Center and Central Lutheran. The tornado severely damages the convention center roof, shreds the tents, breaks off the steeple of Central Lutheran, splits what’s left of the steeple in two . . . and then lifts.

He then proceeds to lay out an argument from Scripture—I won’t quote it all here; you can follow the link—leading to this conclusion:

The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners.

Now, as you can probably imagine, a lot of people aren’t very happy with that last paragraph—and not all of them are liberals, by any means. Scot McKnight, in a comment on this post, asked,

The text points us away from the specific sins of some persons or some group and to the fact that we are all sinners. Piper points to the specific sins of the ELCA and only then generalizes. Don't you see the tension of these two approaches?

My wife, for her part, had a similar reaction, arguing that the concluding paragraph quoted above doesn’t really follow from the preceding five points.

From where I sit, I’m not sure Dr. McKnight is reading Dr. Piper’s post quite correctly, but I do agree with David Sessions that the certainty of Dr. Piper’s final paragraph is overreaching. I’ve pointed out elsewhere (not sure if it’s up on the blog or not) that biblically, whenever God sends a disaster as judgment, he always sends a prophet first so that you don’t have to waste time wondering if the disaster is judgment from God—he’s already told you it is. As far as I’m aware, nobody predicted this; it just happened, which makes me very dubious about efforts to put any sort of specific interpretation on this tornado.

And yet, as uncomfortable as I am with Dr. Piper’s conclusion (and particularly the absolute way in which he presents it), I think his argument has more force than his critics (including my wife) want to admit. If we believe in the sovereignty and the providence of God, then we have to conclude that that tornado did exactly what God wanted it to do—and it couldn’t have been more precisely targeted on the ELCA’s national assembly, and in particular their consideration of that study paper (which they subsequently approved), if it had been a Tomahawk cruise missile. It appeared where no tornado was expected, took a perfectly precise route, hit the target, doing noticeable but (as far as I can tell) superficial damage, and then lifted. Short of actually forming right above Central Lutheran and just yo-yoing down and back up again, I’m not sure how its behavior could possibly have been more suggestive.

But suggestive of what? I think it’s going a step too far to try to answer that question as outsiders. Certainly the passage Dr. Piper quotes from Luke 13 is apt, as the call to repentance is always apt; but I also think Dr. McKnight’s point here is well-taken, if not quite correct: Jesus’ words in that passage point us, not to the fact that we are all sinners, but to the fact that we ourselves are sinners, and that the deaths of those on whom the tower fell should inspire each of us to get right with God. Certainly the Minneapolis tornado, with its reminder that in God’s hands, even the weather is a precision weapon, should similarly inspire us.

Anything more than that, though—anything specific to the ELCA and why God might have hit them, at that particular point in their deliberations, with a tornado—is, it seems to me, between God and the ELCA. He didn’t see fit to tell us what to think in advance, nor does anything in Scripture give us warrant to make any judgments about them from the fact that they were hit with a tornado. There may well be a specific message to the leaders of that denomination in the behavior of this tornado, but if so, it’s for them, not for us. Jesus doesn’t talk to us about others and what they need to do—as Aslan tells Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, that’s not part of our story; instead, he talks to us about ourselves and what we need to do.

I agree with Dr. Piper that approval of homosexual behavior by the church is contrary to Scripture and the revealed will of God; but I also note very carefully that in Luke 13, when Jesus referenced those who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them, he said, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No.” This is where I think my wife was right, because if we really consider this tornado in the light of those words, what we would have to say is this: no matter how bad we might think the ELCA is, no matter how bad we might think it was for them to take the step they did, Jesus says to us, “Do you think that they were worse offenders than anyone else—including you? No; you too must repent.”