Inconvenient truth? I think there are several very good reasons to reduce pollution, but the alleged scientific case for anthropogenic global warming still doesn't hold water.
On reflection, I think so. It was obvious from the beginning that Barack Obama was going to pick a woman to replace David Souter, which of course meant a liberal woman. While there were rumblings that he might name a non-judge such as Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm or Homeland Security Secretary (and former Arizona governor) Janet Napolitano to the vacancy, the smart betting seemed to have it going to one of three people: Solicitor General Elena Kagan (the former dean of Harvard Law School), Judge Sonia Sotomayor, and Judge Diane Wood. Of the three, the most talked-about leading up to the nomination was Judge Wood, which made perfect sense to me since she's the one who worried me the most; I don't really want any of these folks on the Court, but given the likely options, I was hoping vaguely for Solicitor General Kagan, who seems to me to be the most reasonable of them.
As for Judge Sotomayor, she's not only hard-left, she's also a comparative lightweight (not that she's not a very bright woman, just that she's not in the same ballpark as, say, Diane Wood, or Antonin Scalia) and so when she was announced as President Obama's pick, I was more than a little non-plussed; sure, she's qualified, but hardly the best-qualified nominee, even off that very short list. Her record at the 2nd Circuit Court is uninspiring, to say the least, as Ed Morrissey notes:
The current court, including Souter, has already heard oral arguments on [Ricci v. Destefano]. They should rule on this before the end of their current session, which will come next month. If they overturn Sotomayor, that will emphasize both her incorrect decision on the merits as well as a lack of intellectual curiosity, an issue raised by her colleague Judge Cabranes.
A reversal on Ricci will raise the issue of the several reversals Sotomayor has received over her 11 years on the 2nd Circuit (the Washington Times says she bats .400 at the Supreme Court—not a confidence builder). The Supreme Court has reversed her at least four times already, at least one of those a unanimous 8-0 reversal, which makes her look either more liberal than anyone currently on the court or less competent. One of the times the court upheld Sotomayor, the majority scolded her for misrepresenting the statute in her opinion.
So why did President Obama choose her? Part of it was no doubt the identity-politics aspect of naming the first Hispanic to the court, along with the third woman. Part of it may well have been that he thought she was a safer nominee. It will almost certainly take Democratic defections to sustain a filibuster, which isn't at all likely under normal conditions, but there's been the suggestion that Judge Wood's recent record on national-security issues was a red flag; the recent refusal by the Senate to support the closure of the Guantanamo detention center suggests that if Judge Wood's views on national security worried the Blue Dog Democrats enough, a successful filibuster might be possible. Judge Sotomayor might lack the sheer intellectual firepower of Judge Wood, but she'll be an equally reliable liberal vote and the identity politics works in her favor. Since the president will have a reasonable shot at filling three slots on the court over the course of this term, it appears he decided to take a safer and more politically appealing course for his first shot.
Now, this isn't to say that Judge Sotomayor has no baggage; she does, and particularly the following remarks:
All of the legal defense funds out there, they’re looking for people with Court of Appeals experience. Because it is—Court of Appeals is where policy is made. And I know, and I know, that this is on tape, and I should never say that. Because we don’t “make law,” I know. [audience laughter] Okay, I know. I know. I’m not promoting it, and I’m not advocating it. I’m, you know. [audience laughter] Having said that, the Court of Appeals is where, before the Supreme Court makes the final decision, the law is percolating. Its interpretation, its application.
That line came from a 2005 panel discussion at Duke; I think Michael Eden is right to say from this that “Sotomayor clearly acknowledges her view, even as she recognizes how radical and wrong it is, and therefore says the pro forma things to cover [herself].” The other much-quoted passage of her thought will likely be this one, from a 2001 speech at Berkeley:
I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that—it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. . . .
Our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor [Martha] Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
From this, one can see why some Republicans are talking filibuster; but barring the unforeseen, it won't work. They wouldn't keep Maine in the fold on filibustering Judge Sotomayor, and these sorts of issues aren't going to cause mass Senate defections. Aside from discovering that she's five years in arrears on her taxes, or something like that, Judge Sotomayor will be Justice Sotomayor as soon as the appointed time arrives.
And for that, I think the GOP should be grateful; if they did somehow manage to block her nomination, I believe they'd end up regretting it. As a matter of pure Realpolitik, Barack Obama is going to put a liberal in that seat and that's all there is to it; the only question is what kind of liberal he'll put there. Given that, I think the party and its leaders need to listen very carefully to Jonathan Turley's complaints about the nomination (video below):
You know, we are not selecting a house pet. We're selecting a Supreme Court justice and as an academic I have a certain bias. And that is does she have the intellectual throw weight to make a difference on the court? And I have to tell you the optics are better than the opinions in this case. I've read a couple of dozen of her opinions. They don't speak well to her being a nominee on the Supreme Court. . . . I think that a lot of academics are a little bit disappointed. I am in the sense that Diane Wood, Harold Koh, were not the ultimate people to prevail. These are people that are blazingly brilliant. They would have brought to the court intellects that would frame in the conceptual way. . . .
I've read roughly about 30 of these opinions. She has a much larger library of opinions. But they are notable in one thing and that it's a lack of depth. There's nothing particularly profound in her past decisions. She's been a judge a long time. That's opposed to people like Judge Wood on the 7th Circuit and she was viewed as a real intellectual powerhouse. You really can't read the opinions of this nominee and say, “Oh yeah, this person is a natural choice for the Supreme Court.” . . . I have to say that liberals obviously are enjoying rightfully a certain short term elation with this twofer, a woman and a Latina, being put on the court. But in terms of long term satisfaction she does not naturally suggest that she is going to be the equal of Scalia and I think that was the model for liberals. They wanted someone who would shape the intellectual foundations of the court. Her past opinions do not suggest that she is like that. . . .
Ultimately questions about empathy and temperament are less important than whether this person is going to have a profound impact to help shape the court and this nominee really doesn't have a history to suggest that.
Dr. Turley is unhappy because in his estimation, Justice Sotomayor is unlikely to be anything but a vote on the Court. She'll be a reliable leftist vote, to be sure, but she will probably have little effect on the votes of her colleagues—a point which is supported by how unpersuasive they've tended to find her reasoning as it's come to them in her opinions from the 2nd Circuit. President Obama had the chance to nominate a liberal who would not only be a vote, but would influence the overall direction of the court; as far as we can tell at this point (which is, admittedly, never as far as we think it is), Sonia Sotomayor will not be that kind of justice. For that, Republicans should be thankful—and should hope that somehow the political climate changes enough between now and the next Supreme Court vacancy that the president will have to nominate someone more moderate.
And in that hope, this nomination may well be useful. The concerns about Judge Sotomayor won't be enough to create Democratic opposition, but they may help the GOP make its case to the electorate, as Ed Morrissey argues:
The Republicans have an opportunity with Sotomayor that doesn’t involve knocking her off the court. They have an opportunity to use the hearings to show Sotomayor as a routine appellate jurist with a spotty record who got elevated to this position as an act of political hackery by a President who couldn’t care less about his responsibilities to find the best and brightest for the job. Like many of Obama’s other appointments, it demonstrates a lack of executive talent and intellectual curiosity on his part. This appointment makes an argument for more Republicans in the Senate after the midterms, if for no other reason than to force Obama to start putting a little effort in making his nominations.
Taken all in all, as a conservative, I don't like the pick, but I think it could and should have been a lot worse. Given that elections have consequences, and wipeouts have big consequences, that's practically the best-case scenario.
I think my little office refrigerator was turned a wee bit too cold . . . (Sorry for the low image quality—I was having trouble holding the shot perfectly still.)
One of the uncomfortable truths of the Christian life is that it’s often in our suffering that God is most glorified in our lives. John Piper captures this well in this full-throated assault on the so-called “prosperity gospel”:
God wants us to know, even in the moments of the deepest agony our hearts could ever conceive, that he is enough; that he is good, that he will take care of us, that he will get us through it—and to be able, even through our tears and our pain, to affirm that in faith. As Dr. Piper says, it is that more than anything else that makes God look glorious as God, “not as giver of cars or safety or health,” but as God, because that shows his real power in our lives. The gods of this world can give us prosperity, though they are hard and demanding and fickle and can take it away again just as quickly; what they cannot do is sustain us in times of pain. Only God can do that, and so it’s in our times of suffering that the world can actually see the reality of our faith. As Howard Vanderwell of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship put it in discussing 1 Peter 1:1-9, “God had in mind to use [our trials] as an exhibit of genuine faith. The exhibit of such genuine faith lifts others, defeats the schemes of Satan, and brings glory to Christ.”
This is a strange thought to us, that God would want to be glorified in our suffering; but I think it’s strange in part because of the ideas the world gives us about glory. For God to be glorified means that he is seen and recognized for who he is in his true nature and character; this is why the Bible talks of Christ being glorified on the cross, because on the cross he showed the depths of his love for us, and how far he was willing to go and how much he was willing to endure and bear for our sake. It’s in his death on the cross that we see most clearly the nature and character of our God.
Similarly, what is the greatest thing God does in our lives? What shows his power and character and love most clearly? It isn’t the good times, because most people have good times, and they come for a lot of different reasons. It isn’t the times that nothing bad happens, because we quickly grow accustomed to that—we think of that as “normal life,” and don’t see all the bad things that could happen that he prevents. We don’t see the times that we don’t get into a nasty traffic accident because that driver over there took a different route across town this morning, or maybe called in sick with a bad cold instead of trying to fight it off and go to work, and so we don’t give God credit for those times. It isn’t our successes, because we usually take them for our own—we may thank God for them, but most of the time we really believe that we made them happen ourselves, and so does everyone else (both of our successes and their own). In all these things and all these times, there is really nothing to distinguish the people of God from those who are not his people, for as the Scriptures tell us, the rain that gives life to the crops falls on the just and the unjust alike.
Where we are distinguished from those who do not walk with Christ, where we see the power of God and the work of his Holy Spirit in our lives most clearly, is in the hard times in our lives, in our times of loss and suffering and struggle, as we see him lift us up and support us. This is when we see his character most clearly, because we can see that his goodness to us goes beyond giving us things to caring for us when we’re in need, when we’re in pain, when we’re hurting and blaming it on him, when we’re angry at him for allowing us to suffer. We can see that God doesn’t return anger for anger and blame for blame, nor does he expect or even want us to lie to him and tell him things are fine when he knows as well as we do that they aren’t. Instead, he takes it all, and he loves us and cares for us and supports us—directly, by his Spirit, and indirectly, through his people—and he gives us hope that there is a better future coming, when all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, as Julian of Norwich wrote. He enables us to sing songs of praise at funerals, because we know by his faithfulness that pain and death and grief and loss do not have the last word, for there is a resurrection. He enables us to overcome, to find his victory in the midst of our circumstances, and to keep going, finding comfort in him as we journey through the valley of the shadow of death, trusting that we will emerge at last on the other side.
I hadn't gotten around to reading Beldar of late, so I missed his post on why moving the Gitmo detainees to the US would be a really bad idea—a post which raises a far scarier scenario than the one I considered:
The most serious risk is that the same type of terrorist organization that mounted a simultaneous four-plane multi-state flying bomb assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/01 would welcome the opportunity to assault any holding facility on American soil, or whatever community was closest thereto, in an attempt to force the captured terrorists' release. Simply put, friends and neighbors: Any holding facility for radical Islamic terrorists on American soil would be a target and a potential "rescue mission" for which al Qaeda or its like would delightedly create dozens or hundreds of new "martyrs" from among their own ranks.
Right now—as has been continuously true since the first prisoners were shipped there after we began operating against the Taliban in Afghanistan—these terrorists' would-be "rescuers" can't assault Gitmo without first getting to Cuba and then defeating the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps at sea, on land, and in the air. That's not the kind of fight they want; those aren't the kind of logistical hurdles they can ever overcome. Keeping all the captured terrorists at Gitmo, in other words, has played directly to our strongest suit as a nation—our superb, unparalleled, and highly professional military strength as continuously projected in a place of our choosing without risk of collateral casualties among American civilians.
But once the scene shifts to American soil, we lose virtually all of that combination of power and flexibility, and surrender back to the terrorists all the advantages upon which they regularly depend. Getting into the U.S., or using "sleepers" already here? In a fight against some local sheriffs or prison guards armed mostly with revolvers and tasers (perhaps supplemented with shotguns or even a few assault rifles, but no heavy weaponry at all)? With the fighting to take place in or even near any American population center? Can the Obama Administration possibly be so stupid as to forfeit all of our own advantages, and give all of the terrorists' advantages back to them?
(Emphasis in the original.) Read the whole thing, and you'll understand why such a move would amount to designating Target #1 for al'Qaeda's next attack.
Monday morning, May 25, a trial begins that will make history in Canada with reverberations for the worldwide Anglican Communion. Four Anglican congregations here in the Vancouver area have petitioned the Supreme Court of British Columbia to rule on who are and who aren’t the genuine trustees of their buildings and property.
Now, I'm not sure that this will really have that great a ripple effect on the Anglican Communion as a whole; while this is a new thing for Canada, it's been going on for a while in the US, where Episcopal congregations have been seceding left, right and sideways for years now. Still, it's a very big deal for Canada, indeed, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Why have they done so? They have done so because their bishop, Michael Ingham, has told them as clergy and as congregations that he wants them to obey him and the local synod or get out. Obey on what? Well, depending on whom you ask, that’s a matter that is either simple or complicated. You can read what the main dissenting church says about the matter here, and read what the diocesan authorities say here (about same-sex blessings, the precipitating factor) and here (on the court case).
The church Dr. Stackhouse references is St. John's Shaughnessy, which was the home church for a fair number of folks I knew during my time at Regent; it's a significant church as Vancouver churches go. It's also staunchly orthodox and (in my knowledge of it) gospel-centered, which is why so many folks I knew attended there, including Dr. J. I. Packer and at least one Presbyterian minister.
The headlines on this one will no doubt focus on homosexuality, but the issues run a lot broader and deeper. For one thing, the problems with Bishop Ingham's theology are far broader than one issue, as St. John's statement points out:
The core issue is a deeply profound theological difference in the understanding and interpretation of scripture and what it means to be “Anglican”. It is clear that the Diocesan leadership [i.e., the bishop and his minions] no longer believes, adheres to and or seeks to preserve the core doctrines of the Anglican Christian faith, such as the uniqueness of Jesus, the physical resurrection, and the authority of Scripture, or the accepted teachings of the Anglican Communion.
For another, this isn't just about Bishop Ingham's theology, but also about the bishop himself. As St. John's notes, the four churches that have gone to court have done so not on their own initiative but in defense against the rapacity of the diocese.
Over the last ten years, the leadership of St. John’s has been working through local, national and international processes to resolve this issue. There has been no resolution that would keep St. John’s in communion with the world wide Anglican Church for this generation and the next. We have sought mediated solutions but none has proved successful. In August 2008, after the Diocese of New Westminster sought to seize the property and replace the clergy and trustees at St. Matthew’s Abbotsford and St. Matthias & St. Luke, the trustees of these churches, along with St. John’s Shaughnessy and Church of the Good Shepherd, were forced to go to the courts for clarification. This decision, as with all the decisions related to this matter in the last 10 years, was done after much prayer and the reviewing of alternatives. It was not done in haste.
Anyone who's paid attention to the way in which Bishop Ingham runs the Diocese of New Westminster will be unsurprised by this. I had a number of friends at Regent who were trying to work their way through the Anglican ordination process, and the bishop was a problem for all of them—not just for reasons of differing theology, though that certainly didn't help, but also due to the way he treated people. He showed, let's just say, a very high sense of his own position and the dignities due him as a consequence; I also got the impression that he was a real micromanager and very controlling, though I can't say that with certainty. He is certainly not one to respond to disagreement with grace, as those who disagree with him have discovered.
The Devil hates it when we worship God. Any time the body of Christ gathers to worship God, to give him glory and hear the gospel preached, he loses; and so he’ll do anything in his power to prevent it. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come, but that doesn’t work on everyone; for all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and you should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship by turning our hearts away from our Lord and getting us to worship something other than Christ.
Tim Keller talked about this at the Gospel Coalition conference last month, that we all have our idols and our temptations to idolatry—our spouses; our kids; our reputations; our jobs; our possessions; anything of real value to us, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives, can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our lives. The church can become an idol—usually the local congregation, but I know folks for whom I’d say their denomination has become an idol—and so can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, of course, style of music is an idol; for some, the building becomes an idol. That was a problem in Colorado, for example. (It probably still is.)
These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families, we ought to love our churches, we ought to love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here, and certainly we ought to value the work he has given us to do. We ought to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some kinds to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God; it’s not that we need to love them less, but that we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them, and our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure, with our love for all those other people and things falling in order behind our love for him. Our worship needs to be directed to God and God alone, and we cannot afford to let anything else creep in.
Pete Hegseth, the head of Vets for Freedom, posted this on NRO’s The Corner yesterday; it’s an excellent evocation of what this observance means:
Memorial Day is about one thing: remembering the fallen on the battlefield and passing their collective story to the next generation. These stories, and the men who bear them, are the backbone of this American experiment and must never be forgotten. As John Stuart Mill once said, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.” The minute—excuse me, the second—we believe our freedoms inevitable and/or immutable, we cease to live in history, and have soured the soldier’s sacrifice. He died in the field, so we can enjoy this beautiful day (and weekend). Our freedoms—purchased on the battlefield—are indeed “worthy of war.”
And this day, with America still at war, it is also fitting that we remember the soldiers currently serving in harm’s way. Because, as any veteran can attest, just one moment, one explosion, or one bullet separates Veterans Day from Memorial Day. Soldiers currently in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting for our freedoms today, knowing it’s possible they may never see tomorrow. These troops—and their mission—deserve our support each day, and our prayers every night. May God watch over them—and their families; May He give them courage in the face of fear, and righteous-might in the face of evil.
After the president tried (and failed, it appears) to one-up Dick Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post put together a useful video combining excerpts from both speeches.
What conclusions one draws from this will of course depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing; to my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney's serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama's language. Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as "violating our core values," as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don't see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore. I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn't seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.
Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons. That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:
U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . .
[President Obama's] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.
I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.
We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threatin this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons. The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who've been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who've carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al'Qaeda. It's hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.
I argued in a post last Wednesday that gas prices will be Barack Obama's Achilles heel, but that post was incomplete. I argued that speculation in oil futures (which played a major role in the surge in gas prices after Nancy Pelosi took the speaker's chair in the House of Representatives) will once again be a major factor, given that the Democratic Congress and administration have foreclosed the possibility of expanded domestic drilling, which was the most important element in driving the price of oil futures down. I left out a couple other reasons, though.
First, tied to this, one reason why the current administration and congressional leadership are opposed to energy development (aside from, as noted, wind, solar, and the like) is that they don't think higher gas prices are a bad thing. Ideologically, they're committed to reducing fossil-fuel consumption by whatever means they can find to hand, and they recognize that higher prices mean lower usage; therefore, while they've been chary about coming out and saying it where people can hear them, they're all in favor of gas prices going up. If they weren't, they wouldn't be pushing their "cap and trade" bill (that Rep. Henry Waxman, who's leading the charge on this, hasn't even read) so hard; after all, let's call a spade a spade here, what is this thing? It's an energy tax, and when it passes (it might take a while, but they'll figure out a way to get it through Congress), it's going toboost the price of gas even more.
Second, President Obama has allies in this effort to push gas prices up—allies with names like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chávez. It is very much in the interests of oil-producing states like Iran and Venezuela to see gas prices go back up so that they will have more money—which their tin-horn-tyrant rulers will then use, not to better the lives of their people, but to fuel their geopolitical ambitions (which is, not so incidentally, not in the interests of America). As such, they're going to do whatever they can to return oil prices to the highs they saw last summer. It's an effort in which they will no doubt be grateful for the help they get from the U.S. government; one wonders how long it will be before they start channeling Lenin and talking about "the useful idiots in the White House."
I have to say, I don't think she actually sang as well this time—her pitch was a bit wobbly starting off, I thought, and her phrasing could have stood some work—though part of that is likely the fact that I'm no great fact of the song she chose; but I'll admit, lyrically, it was a perfect fit for her this time (as was her previous choice; she does seem to have a knack for that). I have to say, while I admire the ease with which she just sails through the high passages, I think my favorite part of this clip is the opening, and the utterly different reception she gets this time as opposed to the beginning of her first appearance. Gone is the skepticism (along with some of the dowdiness); she's a star now, and she's greeted with eager and affectionate anticipation. It's really cool.
I’ve written a couple posts now on the dangers of what I’ve called“theologized politics,” which may be briefly defined as the appropriation of religion and religious believers by political parties as tools to be used to achieve political ends (chiefly, winning elections). A good illustration of this would be recent Democratic efforts to draw religious (primarily Christian) voters away from the Republican party. Most such efforts have been rooted in the work of George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California-Berkeley, and particularly his book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. In Dr. Lakoff’s view, the reason for the political success conservatives had been having through 2004 lay not in conservative ideas and policies but rather in conservative manipulation of language. As he put it,
Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing.
Dr. Lakoff’s response was to found a think tank of his own, the Rockridge Institute. The purpose of this think tank, as he described it, is “to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective,” by asking, “What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?”
Dr. Lakoff first published his book in 1997, but his ideas really began to catch on following the 2004 presidential election. Ellen Goodman’s column of November 7, 2004 in the Boston Globe, which explicitly cites his work, provides one example: “This is the time for the losers to go back to basics, to restate their views into a basic simple, straightforward language of values and morals. It’s the time to parse what we believe in. Especially right and wrong.”
The title of Goodman’s column, “Taking back ‘values’,” makes the point clear: following Dr. Lakoff, the issue wasn’t Democratic policies, but only the language in which they were presented. Explain to Republican voters that poverty is a moral-values issue, and raising taxes is a moral-values issue, and so on, and they’ll vote Democratic instead. This is the assumption on which the Democrats have been working ever since; thus for instance we have Howard Dean’s complaint that pollsters “have largely missed the story [in the 2008 primaries] because they’re using an outdated script, which leaves the impression that religion and faith matter only to Republicans . . . this bias . . . has in turn shaped news coverage, making it appear that one party has a monopoly on religion in this race.”
There is much that could be said in response to and assessment of this approach; for starters, Dean was certainly correct to point out that there are a lot of Christians in this country who vote Democrat, even if this fact does seem to elude most members of the American media. For present purposes, however, the most important point to note is that this is yet another instance of theologizing politics. Rather than subjecting political positions and platforms to theological scrutiny, this approach seeks to take existing positions and apply a veneer of religious language; rather than reflecting on them theologically and seeking to evaluate them accordingly, it assumes a positive evaluation and simply presents them as positions supported by Christian teaching.
Now, this should not be taken as a partisan criticism, for this is not something of which Democrats alone are guilty. Indeed, Dr. Lakoff has at least this much right: the Democratic Party came late to the game on this one. For all the biblical language used in Republican rhetoric, and for all the identification of American evangelicals with the Republican Party, there’s really very little in the way of meaningful theological engagement with much of the party platform. Some issues, certainly, are grounded in biblical and theological statements (most notably abortion), but the argument at these points tends to be issue-specific, not part of any coherent whole with the rest of the platform; on issues such as tax policy or immigration policy, there has been a strong tendency among evangelical Republicans to baptize conservative positions as the properly Christian thing to believe without really evaluating them.
This set the stage for the Obama backlash among a certain subset of self-identified evangelicals in the 2008 election. He didn’t actually gain many evangelical votes, but the ones he did attract tended to be very loud; he also managed to appear sufficiently unthreatening that many other evangelicals felt it safe to indulge their displeasure with John McCain and stay home instead of voting. Among both groups, there was the sense that the Republican Party has been happy in years past to pay lip service to evangelical concerns in order to raise money and turnout, but has done little or nothing to actually address those concerns in a meaningful way; party leaders haven’t taken voters’ faith seriously, but have only seen it as something to be used and manipulated to their own ends. This sense has been growing stronger for some time, and in 2006 and 2008, it manifested in voter defections that returned the Democratic Party to power.
In my view, that sense is entirely fair, and entirely unsurprising. The thing about theologized politics is that it essentially amounts to the subversion of faith for political ends, leaving the political platform—and party—in the dominant position; religious folk are welcomed at the fundraising counter and the volunteer meeting, but when it comes to the actual making of policy we’re expected to just shut up and soldier. This is what evangelicals found with the GOP—which is why so many of us are backing away from the party, even if we’re just as conservative as we ever were (or maybe especially so, since the party definitely isn’t)—and it’s what those who bought the rhetoric and voted for the candidate of Hopeychangeyness are now finding with the Democrats as well. It is, after all, in the nature of political parties to use whatever they can with as little return commitment as they can; anything freely offered will be freely taken, with no sense of reciprocal obligation.
As a matter both of faithful Christian discipleship and of intelligent political engagement, then—and make no mistake about it, the former requires the latter—the critical need at this time is for Christians in America to break out of this pattern and assert a new model for the interaction between faith and politics; and to do that, we must begin with ourselves. We must begin, as I wrote last time,
to break ourselves of the habit of using the language of Christian faith to support what we have already decided we believe, and to teach ourselves instead to use our faith to critique our politics, and ultimately to rebuild our political convictions on the ground of our faith.
And on that ground and no other we must assert ourselves in the political life of this nation, not as docile sheep to be shorn for the advancement of the agendas and ambitions of politicians and parties, but as independent agents for the glory of God and the advancement of the work of his kingdom.
Sara and I finally got the chance to go see the new Star Trek last night, thanks to a couple in the church who took our kids for the evening (and a wonderful time was had by all, too; we have some great folks in this congregation), and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. In reinventing Trek, J. J. Abrams and his writers managed to make it what it should have been; they did an amazing job of keeping the characters true to themselves while justifying the reinvention of the series through the story they told. In a way, the plot exists to explain and validate the creation of a whole new version of the same crew, and it succeeds fully in that. Of course, that's an ulterior purpose; The Phantom Menace succeeded in its ulterior purpose, too, but failed dismally as an actual movie. Star Trek, by contrast, is a smashing success.
I've read some complaints about the plot being full of holes and overly dependent on coincidence, but I don't agree; by and large, I'd say that the necessary coincidences arise logically out of the agency of the plot. The one ringing exception to that is the coincidence of Montgomery Scott's introduction into the movie, which is implausible to the point of indefensibility; I'm not sure it quite rises (or sinks, if you prefer) to the level of deus ex machina, but it's pretty close. For the rest, though—sure, there are coincidences, but they're reasonable consequences of past events, and as McAndrew would say, "The laws of probability not only permit coincidences, they insist on them."
I saw someone complain that what the old Spock tells Kirk doesn't square with what he tells young Spock, but it doesn't seem to me there's cause for criticism there; he explains that himself in admitting that he misled Kirk in order to assure that Kirk did not only what he wanted, but in the way that he wanted it, as a way of trying to repair the breach between the two. As for Eli's comment that "the villain’s method of attack is very creative, but basically requires that planetary defense systems are non-existent"—point taken, but that's Trek. As a fan of the military SF of folks like David Weber and John Ringo, the idea of an interstellar power without extensive planetary defenses sounds ludicrous to me, too, but Trek never has had them.
In other ways, though, Abrams and company have made Starfleet, and the crew of the Enterprise, a lot more believable. Everybody has a job that actually means something, and everybody gets to contribute. Sulu isn't just turning the wheel, and Uhura doesn't just answer the phone; in fact, the changes in the character of Nyota Uhura are the biggest improvement in the whole movie. Not only is she introduced as a genuinely impressive human being—a tough, intelligent, independent woman who needs that intelligence and independence to do her job—but her specialty, communications, is finally shown to be a real specialty of real and critical importance, one that needs a good xenolinguist (scholar in alien languages—which she is) if it's to be done well. They've set up the crew as a true ensemble in a way that the original never was.
Roger Ebert, in his review, complained that "the Gene Roddenberry years, when stories might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy, have been replaced by stories reduced to loud and colorful action," and I'll grant that there's some justice to his charge; as a practical matter, he provides the defense himself when he notes that "the movie deals with narrative housekeeping," setting up the new cast for sequels, but that doesn't change the fact that this movie has things happen which implicitly raise huge issues that are never addressed on-screen. A bit more introspection along Roddenberry's lines, I think, would be a good thing, and I do hope we'll see some thoughtfulness as the sequels come along.
On the other hand, the movie is a cracking good adventure yarn, which has always been the core of Trek, and it does this a lot better in some ways than Roddenberry did, too. For one thing, while the scripts Roddenberry oversaw "might play with questions of science, ideals or philosophy," they never put anything really at risk; there were never any long-term negative consequences for any of the permanent cast. (The one exception to that I can think of might be "The City on the Edge of Forever.") The same cannot be said of the new Trek, which inflicts staggering losses on its version of the Federation; I admire Abrams' guts, because I don't think I would have had the nerve to have the Federation suffer that badly.
I'm no movie reviewer, but I enjoyed Abrams' Star Trek immensely; I won't call it great art, but for what it is, it's excellent—I think it's clearly the best version of Trek yet—and I look forward to seeing what the folks behind it have for us next.
You may not have known this, but Thomas Nelson [corrected; why I put Zondervan initially, I don't know] recently produced something called The American Patriot's Bible: The Word of God and the Shaping of America. I wouldn't have known it, except my wife recently signed up as a book-review blogger with Zondervan and ended up reviewing it. This appears to be a product much akin to the recent Green Bible from HarperCollins, except that where the Green Bible pushes environmental dogma, the APB pushes a politically conservative form of what Christian Smith dubbed "moralistic therapeutic deism." As my wife wrote,
There is plenty to encourage the idea that what God wants from us is to work harder. There is nothing here for the broken, repentant sinner, aware of his own inadequacy, whose desperate hope is to fall at the foot of the cross and find grace.
When Jared Wilson writes about "the weird modern desire for legalism," well, this appears to be the Bible to support that desire. Thomas Nelson has not blessed the American church by producing it.
According to a recent CNN poll, the number of Americans with a favorable opinion of Dick Cheney has risen eight percent since he left office; his ratings are still lower than NBC's, but they have at least improved significantly. The obvious explanation for this is his media tour; now that he, freed from the Bush administration's shackles, has begun publicly defending himself and the administration and pleading the case for its policies and actions (as in the speech he gave this week at the American Enterprise Institute), people are listening. Now that someone is actually presenting the defense for the Bush administration—something President Bush never did, and doesn't seem to have wanted anyone else to do—it's having an effect. In particular, I suspect he's giving people reason to see the distinction between himself (and President Bush) and Barack Obama in a different light.
Of course, the media don't want to admit this. CNN polling director Keating Holland said (and you can almost hear the sniff),
Is Cheney's uptick due to his visibility as one of the most outspoken critics of the Obama administration? Almost certainly not. Former President George W. Bush's favorable rating rose 6 points in that same time period, and Bush has not given a single public speech since he left office.
As a response, this is, quite frankly, pathetic. If Vice President Cheney were defending himself to the exclusion of President Bush, this would be logical; as it is, it doesn't pass the smell test. A far likelier explanation is that the vice president's media tour is the cause of the rise in both their favorable ratings, because he's addressing a major cause for the negative view of both of them.
I ran across, courtesy of Chris Forbes, an interesting site called brand tags, which describes itself as "A collective experiment in brand perception. . . . The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is." The mechanism is simple: the site displays a logo, and you enter the first word or phrase that comes to mind. It then adds that tag to the tag cloud on that logo. Once you've tagged enough brands, you can look at the tag clouds and see what people associate with various logos and brands.
One that I found particularly interesting was the tag cloud on the New York Times. Among the largest ones, representing those most often entered, were some obvious ones like "newspaper," and some positive ones like "authoritative," "intelligent," "reliable," and "serious"; one of the largest was "crossword," which probably shouldn't have surprised me. Along with "paper" and "newspaper," though, the largest single one was "liberal," and there were a number of other prominent ones associating liberal bias with the Grey Lady. This isn't surprising, but I did think it was interesting, and I don't imagine it's anything the folks at the NYT are happy about. Click the link and see for yourself.
Sarah Palin wasn't able to return home from the campaign. The campaign continues, and she is forced to fight a war on two fronts—the local and the national. As long as the campaign continues, we'll be here to watch her back.
This continues to be true; and the most frustrating part is that each of these fronts in turn has two fronts, as she is assailed both by liberals, from whom one would expect no better, and also by other conservatives. I have to think that Reagan would be infuriated by the way in which his Eleventh Commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican") is routinely ignored when it comes to Gov. Palin; I also think that he would have no trouble diagnosing the reason. President Reagan famously had a plaque on his desk that read, "There is no limit to what you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit"; these people who are attacking her, and cloaking their attacks in the language of conservatism, aren't doing so for reasons of principle, but because they care who gets the credit. They care very much, and they don't want it to be her.
What they fail to understand is that when you care who gets the credit, that sharply limits what you can accomplish—and the more you care, the more limited you are. Hurting Gov. Palin may well increase the chance that Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush or Tim Pawlenty wins the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, but even more, it increases the chance that Barack Obama wins the 2012 general election. The only politicians who profit from attacks on Sarah Palin are Democrats, and the only party that is helped is the Democratic Party. Republicans of influence, be they in office or in the conservative media, need to grow up, shut up, and stop trying to run down Gov. Palin, because not only is it wrong, it's only going to hurt them and their preferred causes, not help them; the knife they plant in her back is the knife in their own. Republicans acting like Democrats only profits Democrats.
I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won't be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney's fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can't be held to the same standard as other presidents. It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor's VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don't think people will buy it; we're too accustomed to the Harry S Truman ("The buck stops here") approach for many people to swallow "It's not my fault" coming from our president. We'll take a lot of things, but I don't believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them. However, let's suppose for a moment that I'm wrong. Let's suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it's all Dick Cheney's fault. Let's suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs. Let's suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it's just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.
There's still one thing that the president won't be able to duck, and it's something no one seems to be thinking about: gas prices. For whatever reason, all the prognostications I've seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they'll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won't. Indeed, they already haven't. Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they're sitting at $2.459, and they're only going to keep going up. It won't be long before they're back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.
Why? Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress' action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire. The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas. That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly "green." That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they're already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity. With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we'll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.
And if I'm right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say "I told you so." It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.
This is Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, candidate for the Republican nomination for U. S. Senate from Florida, giving his farewell address to the Florida House of Representatives. It's a powerful evocation of why the United States is a great country, combined with a remarkable mini-sermon on the love and grace of God. If he ever wants to leave politics, this man could make a real contribution preaching the gospel.
Wouldn't it be great if no one ever got offended? Wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind? I have always said all the rules are made for bending; And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?
I wanna be consequence-free; I wanna be where nothing needs to matter. I wanna be consequence-free, Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.
I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience, 'Cause I'm getting sick of feeling guilty all the time. I won't abuse it, yeah, I've got the best intentions For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.
Chorus
I couldn't sleep at all last night 'Cause I had so much on my mind. I'd like to leave it all behind, But you know it's not that easy
Chorus
Wouldn't it be great if the band just never ended? We could stay out late and we would never hear last call. We wouldn't need to worry about approval or permission; We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.
Chorus
It's a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you're interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do. It's also, as I've said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I've ever run across. What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free? When our actions have no consequences, we say they're inconsequential; that means they don't matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant. If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn't matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless. As I wrote last fall,
The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.
Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it's profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.
Now, it's hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they're so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it's taking them to new and surprising depths of folly. We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they're so deep in his pocket, they're nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences: if anything bad happens, it's all that evil Bush's fault, or that evil Cheney's fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican. The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,
No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.
In other words, it doesn't matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven't done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it's Dick Cheney's fault.
Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this: it preserves the "blame everything on the GOP" strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys. What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration. What she's essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can't be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world. He can't be held responsible if al'Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can't possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can't be; there has to be someone else to blame. The buck doesn't stop at his desk; that's above his pay grade, or something.
I'm sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that's just pathetic. But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys:
About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”
—Ephesians 19:23-27 (ESV)
Recent polling on American opinions on abortion has shown some interesting results. According to American Thinker,
In [August] 2008, overall support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, was at 54%, a clear majority. This year, however, Pew polling found that support for legal abortion is down to 46%, while support for making the procedure illegal in most or all cases rose from 41% to 44%. . . .
Support for keeping abortion legal in most or all cases among the 18-29 year olds has fallen a full 5% since last August. In August 2008, legal abortion support among 18-29 year olds stood at 52%; this April it's down to 47%. Support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases has risen 3% and is now at 48%. . . .
The most notable decline in the support for legal abortion has been among those highly-cherished, sought after Independent voters. As Pew notes:
There has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today. In addition, the proportion of moderate and liberal Republicans saying abortion should be legal declined between August and late October (from 67% to 57%). In the current survey, just 43% of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should legal in most or all cases.
A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.
The new results, obtained from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.
The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.
Americans' recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question. . . .
The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Clearly, there has been a significant shift in the electorate on this issue—not overwhelming, but significant—since last August. R. A. Mansour offers, I believe, the key explanation for this shift:
A sharp decline since last August? Hmmm, what happened last August?
It seems to me that the pro-abortion lobby depends for its success on people not looking too closely at abortion or thinking about it too deeply; that's why they fight tooth and nail any effort to require doctors to give women considering abortion any information about what will be done to them (beyond of course the minimum: “You will no longer be pregnant at the end of it”). With any other surgical procedure, the law requires that patients be fully informed so as to be able to give appropriate consent—but not with abortion, because giving women more information might cause them to change their mind and choose not to have one after all. The pro-abortion lobby doesn't want them to make that choice, and so it seeks to keep them uninformed.
Gov. Palin's abrupt appearance on the national scene, however, got a lot of people thinking about abortion in a way they hadn't before; Pew and Gallup are now showing us the consequences of that fact. It's no surprise, then, that the likes of Demetrius in our own day are stirring up a riot; you can almost hear them talking amongst themselves:
“Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Alaska but across America this Palin has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that Abortion is not really good. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Abortion may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Hollywood and the world worship.”
For all their sneers and smears, it's really Gov. Palin's opponents who are on the side of ignorance, because they're the ones who profit from it.
Read this—it's beyond belief. I don't know what part of the president's economic policy is supposed to justify the illegal seizure of a man's business, or to excuse forcing him into bankruptcy and rendering his 50+ employees abruptly unemployed, but this is completely infuriating. This goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.
2 Chronicles 20 records a crisis in the life of Judah during the time of King Jehoshaphat. The nation of Judah, the southern kingdom of the Israelites, had been invaded by armies from an alliance of three of their longstanding enemies—Moab, Ammon, and the people of Mt. Seir, the Meunites—and by the time the king got word, those armies had already overcome Israel’s frontier defenses and advanced as far as En-Gedi. This was important because En-Gedi was a major oasis west of the Dead Sea, and probably fortified, to boot—it certainly was later on; capturing En-Gedi meant that the allied armies had a source of fresh water and a base from which to support themselves as they pushed on into Judah. This was a big, big piece of very bad news.
In response, Jehoshaphat called a fast throughout the country, asking everyone to set aside food and all their normal activities to pray to God for help. Those who could do so came to Jerusalem, and they had a big prayer service, and the king stood up and prayed. His prayer expresses his faith that God can and will deliver his people if we cry out to him, founded in this assertion: “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not the God who is in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in your hand, and no one can withstand you.”
God is the God of everything, and he rules over everything, and everything is under his control—including the global economic system, including the government of this country, including the governments of nations like Iran and North Korea, including the leaders of al’Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including those in this country who want to criminalize certain biblical opinions (as they’ve already succeeded in doing in Canada). In all of it, in every part of it, God is in control, and nothing happens except he allows it. As such, when hard times come, we can cry out to him in full confidence that what we ask, he can do.
So King Jehoshaphat prays, and all his people pray, and then God’s Spirit inspires one of the Levites, a member of the priestly tribe, and he begins to prophesy. And notice what he says: “Don’t be afraid or discouraged because of this vast army. For the battle is not yours, but God’s. . . . Go out to face them tomorrow, and the LORD will be with you.”
The battle is not yours, but God’s. There are all sorts of examples across the books of the Old Testament of Israel and Judah being attacked, being invaded, coming under threat, and of their rulers praying, seeking God, sometimes meeting God’s prophets when they’re trying to avoid seeking God; some of these rulers were godly and faithful people, as much as you can expect, and some of them were rather less so. Some get happy messages, like Jehoshaphat did here—he was one of the good ones—and some don’t. As we saw in looking at Isaiah, Judah would ultimately be conquered and its people taken off into exile as a judgment on them for their sins. Military victory isn’t always in the cards for them, because their agenda and God’s don’t always line up. But the fundamental message is always the same to these rulers: the battle is not yours, but God’s.
This gets said a dozen different ways by a dozen different prophets to a dozen different kings. God is in control here, and he’s going to accomplish his purposes. It’s not up to you in your own strength, by your own little schemes and plans and methods, to make this happen—God’s going to do that. Sometimes that means his judgment is coming, and you’re not going to be able to turn it aside; sometimes—more often, really—it means that his deliverance is coming, and you can be free of the fear of screwing it up, or being inadequate to the task. Always it means that God is supreme, and that it’s only by his power that the battle will be won; not that we’re free to do nothing, because he still calls us to do our part, but that we need to let go the idea that it depends on us and our efforts.
Thus the prophet tells Jehoshaphat, “The battle is not yours, but God’s,” but he doesn’t tell the king to stay home and get on with other things. Instead, he tells them to march out of the city and take up defensive positions against the enemy—to go out to the battle, and then let God fight it. And so what do they do? They go out to the desert and take up their defensive positions, and then they take up their weapon: they sing songs of praise to God for the deliverance that hasn’t happened yet. And as they begin to sing—not before, but only as they act in faith and declare through their praise their certainty that God will be faithful to do as he has promised—it is then that God ambushes the enemy armies, turning them against each other and destroying them. He gives them the victory, through their faith; and he does the same for us.
I have not yet gotten the chance to see the new Star Trek—this week has just been too crazy—but I'm hoping my wife and I will be able to go sometime next week. In the meantime, I've been interested to read the various reviews and comments (including, of course, the brilliant spoof The Onion came up with—see below), which have left me looking forward to the movie. I'd rather see a sequel to Serenity (preferably involving a couple resurrections), but good Trek is a solid second-best. Of everything I've read, I might be biased, but I've appreciated my friend Eli Evans' analysis the most—especially this, which I think is quite insightful:
Trek presents us a vision of a future that, frankly, I wouldn’t want to live in. It seems like the most ponderous, politically correct, and (quick! think of another word that begins with “p” . . . yes!) and perfect place. Too perfect. . . .
It’s as if the UN were running the world—no, the galaxy—and (get this) they’re doing a bang-up job. Suspension of disbelief, indeed.
James Tiberius Kirk always rubbed against the grain of that society. Why? Because he refused to evolve beyond his petty human ego. He realized that human nature has no history. People are people, no matter where (or when) you go. Kirk is an un-reconstituted man in a world that is entirely reconstituted, right down to the replicated coffee and doughnuts. (Wait, no. Starfleet personnel definitely do not eat doughnuts. Unless they were square and made of a substance resembling balsa wood.)
Much of the dramatic tension in the 60’s TV show came from the conflict between the adventurer Kirk and his bureaucratic surroundings. Starfleet Command is chirping on the subspace frequency? Don’t answer it, Lt. Uhura. We have aliens to fry.
Now, I like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and I have a lot of respect for Patrick Stewart as an actor. But then and there, the Trek producers pretty much de-fanged the franchise. Picard is a man settled into his society. Yes, he pops out of gear now and then, but for the most part, he’s a cog in the Starfleet machine.
This from Andy McCarthy on the current state of the argument over releasing more photos from Abu Ghraib. The Obama administration is claiming to have come up with a new argument against the release, when in fact (as they surely know full well) they're advancing the same argument made by the Bush administration:
As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals' decision last September in ACLU v. Dep't of Defense relates, back in 2005, the Bush Justice Department first argued, in the district court, that the release of the photos "could reasonably be expected to endanger the physical safety of United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan." The judge rejected this argument—incorrectly in my view, for what that may be worth—despite acknowledging the "risk that the enemy will seize upon the publicity of the photographs and seek to use such publicity as a pretext for enlistments and violent acts." (Opinion at pp. 4-5). Then, as the three-judge Second Circuit panel noted, this national security argument became the Bush Justice Department's "lead argument on this appeal." (Id., pp. 8 & ff.) It's simply false for Gibbs to contend otherwise.
Why all the legerdemain? Because, as I said in the lead argument made in Tuesday's column (and on which I will elaborate in a new article later today): Obama is using this litigation as a smokescreen. He's now getting plaudits for reversing himself and his Justice Department (which, in contrast to the Bush Justice Department, didn't want to fight this case at all—just wanted to release the photos). But he is still trying to get away with voting present—which is to say, he is hiding behind the judges.
McCarthy explains by saying,
It is in Obama's power, right this minute, to end this debacle by issuing an executive order suppressing disclosure of the photos due to national security and foreign policy concerns. As I've noted, there's no need to get into a Bush-era debate over the limits of executive power here. In the Freedom of Information Act, indeed, in FOIA's very first exemption, Congress expressly vests him with that authority. See Title 5, U.S. Code, Section 552(b)(1)(A) (FOIA disclosure mandate “does not apply to matters that are …specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and . . . are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order”).
Besides being simple, issuing such an order would be a strong position and the screamingly obvious right thing to do. But it would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and that's why President Obama is avoiding it. He realizes—especially after he surrendered details of our interrogation methods to the enemy—that he can't afford to undermine the war effort again so quickly and so blatantly; but his heart is with the Left on this—that's why he agreed to the release of the photos in the first place and why he is trying to prevent mutiny within his base. So here's the game: Obama tells those of us who care about national security that he is taking measures to protect the troops and the American people, but he also tells the Left that he hasn't made any final decisions about the photos and that the question is really for the courts to decide. That's why he carefully couched yesterday's reversal as a "delay" in the release of the photos.
Alternatively, of course, if the president really believes that releasing the photos is the "screamingly obvious right thing to do," he could just go ahead and order it done; but that would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and so would not answer his core objective. McCarthy goes on to note that the administration has not elected to invoke the executive-order provision in its FOIA defense, but rather "a section relating to the withholding of records 'compiled for law enforcement purposes,'" presumably leading with a weaker argument to increase the odds that the court will order the release of the photos. That way President Obama can get what he wants without actually having to do it himself and thus take responsibility for it.
Of course, all this involves trying to manipulate the court, and as McCarthy notes, that may not go over well:
I can assure you that federal judges don't like to be toyed with. Supreme Court justices may not mind if the administration treats the media like a lap-dog and the public like we're a bunch of rubes; but, regardless of their political leanings, the justices have goo-gobs of self-esteem, and they will not take kindly to being treated like pawns in the Obamaestro's game. The Solicitor General should expect some very tough questions about why the busy justices should waste their valuable time grappling with a tough, life-and-death legal issue when Obama could simply issue an order—regardless of how the Court rules—suppressing the photos. This, of course, is the question the media should be asking. Unlike the White House press corps, the justices will take the time to understand what's happening and they will not roll over.
